chris@mddc.UUCP (Chris Maloney) (12/28/83)
I second Phil Ngai's suggestion. I would like to see two logical "nets", a technical and a non-technical net. These would really help sites trying to join the net convince the management. These sites could subscribe to the "tech net" first, and hopefully later the "non-tech net". The phone bills can be hard to justified in the beginning but a little useful information (bug reports, rumors...) from the net, can be a great time saver. How about: use.xxx "Useful" technical groups net.xxx anything else - or - tech.xxx net.xxx Chris Maloney Management Decisions Development Corp. ...{ucbvax,decvax,inhp4,mhuxi}!cbosgd!qusavx!mddc!chris (uucp)
smb@ulysses.UUCP (Steven Bellovin) (12/28/83)
The suggestion was made -- and rejected -- a few years ago. First, setting up new top-level groups is *very* difficult. Second, there's no clear consensus on what's technical and what's not. Tell me, how would you classify net.micro? How do you think Microsoft classifies it? Net.religion, maybe? Well, we already have In Touch Ministries on the net; even if net.religion isn't "technical" for them, it's close to the "competition" notes posted on internal BTL groups by the Library here. Etc. --Steve
chuqui@cae780.UUCP (12/29/83)
The only problem I see in logically splitting the two groups is that it would give corporations a great excuse to remove the non-technical areas of the net, and I think that doing so would significantly reduce the utilty of the net in general because many current users would stop bothering (reducing the usefulness of the technical end as well)
fair@dual.UUCP (12/29/83)
I disagree. It is (at the moment) perfectly easy to cut down traffic to those parts of the net which are technical in nature. The 2.10 news system lets you send/receive any subset of groups you want. A split like that would make it very easy for `management' (what a nebulous term!) to cut out those groups which add spice to readnews (or `notes' for the pagans...). Besides, we'd have to have yet another *.news.group, and I don't think I could take reading not only about what to call a group and whether it should exist, but ALSO which net it should belong to! Tactics like this look suspiciously like divide & conquer. Phil, has the `management' of AMD gotten to you? :-) a news admin for the status quo (quid quo pro & caveat emptor), (also getting fat while being fed by AMD), Erik E. Fair {ucbvax,amd70,zehntel,unisoft,onyx,its}!dual!fair Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, California