Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: A Thought Experiment about News.Groups
Message-ID: <3407@looking.on.ca>
Date: 31 May 89 03:47:04 GMT
References: <371@odi.ODI.COM> <3400@looking.on.ca> <3254@epimass.EPI.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 37

Stargate was expensive, and perhaps too expensive.  Emerging technologies
usually are.

But the principle was sound.  Usenet is essentially broadcast.  A satellite
that can send from one point to every single place on the continent is
clearly far more efficient than any other route.

The only thing that's wrong with it is requiring everybody to have a dish
(something Stargate didn't do.)  But it makes perfect sense to have one
person in each local calling region have a dish and feed out to the rest
using cheap local lines.   5 years ago, you couldn't do that without
sharing the cost of the dish, receiver and uplink time.  Today uplink time
is cheap, dishes are cheap, receivers are cheap, so you can do it.

I was just pointing out that it was sad that an idea that did make sense
at the time was stifled not just for technical reasons but for odd political
reasons as well.

Satellite is still clearly the cheapest method for a net like usenet, even
today.  Everybody who does any kind of large volume multi-point broadcast
is going satellite, unless they are completely security conscious or too
small.

And no, I don't want to turn Usenet into CompuServe!  Hardly.  I like
anarchy (which includes the commercial and the non-commercial.)  There are
some things usenet does best -- far better than the CompuServes and Genies
of the world.  There are things that usenet doesn't do as well as
those services that could be improved on usenet.   Finally there are things
that usenet can't do at all, some for technical reasons (live chat,
database lookup etc.) and some for political reasons (electronic publishing).

I do wish to see things like the latter work in *addition* to usenet, rather
than instead of it, and I have been working on that recently.  Stay tuned for
an impending announcement.

-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473