Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!isishq!doug From: doug@isishq.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Finding a needle in a haystack (was: future public nets) Message-ID: <1104.23C14EFF@isishq.FIDONET.ORG> Date: 4 Jan 89 03:08:23 GMT Organization: International Student Information Service -- Headquarters Lines: 97 SG>From: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) SG>Actually, it seems to me that Usenet is really archaic as it exists now. SG>Netnews has many aspects of a hypertext system, but it's not quite there. SG>Why not scrap all the news software and start anew? It should be possible SG>to retain all of the old functionality, but in a new context. Reason 1: just try to get 15,000 system administrators to do the same software mod on the same day with their 15 different varieties of hardware. Listen, you write the software, port it to all 15 hardware environments, debug it, and give it to all of us, and hey, sure! SG> For instance, SG>quoting part of an article and commenting on it is VERY hypertextish -- SG>but why retransmit most of the original article every time it's quoted? SG>How about saying "this part of my message is a response to bytes 150 through SG>402 of message 108832@foo.bar?" The news software could optionally insert SG>the proper part of the original, thus mimicing the behavior of the news SG>system we have now; or it could allow the reader to jump around the links SG>between messages. (Readers of this newsgroup/mailing list should already SG>be familiar with the other aspects of hypertext; it should be apparent that SG>reading messages organized in this way would make it much easier to get SG>at the information you want.) SG> SG>As well as making news a lot easier (and more fun) to peruse, this scheme SG>could dramatically reduce the bandwidth eaten by net messages. SG> I haven't seen any hard numbers on this, but I imagine that a good 25% SG>of the text SG>that gets sent around is in the form of quotes from older articles. Yeah. We could reduce the data transmitted this way, and that would be good. But, we would run into some immediate other problems. In some of the high traffic newgroups I maintain a two-day expire. Anything more than 48 hours old just isn't there anymore. Reason? There are higher priority demands on finite disk space. So, your suggestion would require that I keep those messages longer (a lot longer) or dump the newsgroup. Which is to say that the current set-up balances out the costs of moving data against the cost of storing data in a fashion that allows a lot of flexibility. While your solution would be great for those systems that have unlimited disk space but don't like phone bills, those of us who can cope with phone bills but are squeezed for disk space would be out of luck. Of course the reason that we can cope with the phone bills is that usenet is a local call, and costs no cash at all. Then there is cpu time to go looking for those 150 lines from a two-week old article. Combined with the fact that conversation threads often last for *months* with quotes within quotes within quotes, I think I should have to increase my disk allocation for net news by a factor of five or ten in order to avoid the situation where a user sees: "sorry, referenced article does not exist". Then there are the unreliabilities which periodically leave us viewing quotes from messages we have never seen because they never made it to this site. While optimizing transmission by a factor of 25%, I think you'd lose a lot elsewhere. In the past two years usenet has largely shifted from 2400 BAUD telephone connections to 9600 BAUD connections. That has resulted in a reduction in connect time (read cost) to 1/5th of what it was. ISDN promises 64 Kbaud transfer rates in the forseeable future. I think there is more to be gained in pumping faster than there is to be gained by pumping less, for now. Anyway, if you want to write the software and give it away, I'll be happy to install it and tell you about all its bugs :-) Don't take this as discouragement. I'd really *like* it if you would write the software! Just make sure it includes some (highly portable) device drivers to make a 60 Mb hard disk store 300 Mb of data :-). =Doug -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fido 1:221/162 -- 1:221/0 280 Phillip St., UUCP: !watmath!isishq!doug Unit B-4-11 DAS: [DEZCDT]doug Waterloo, Ontario Bitnet: fido@water Canada N2L 3X1 Internet: doug@isishq.math.fidonet.org (519) 746-5022 ------------------------------------------------------------------------