SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (08/05/87)
In spite of the occassional "vote" to post the Chameleon, I'm not about to. I AM trying to sweet-talk a LISTSERV manager into letting us have a couple of Mbytes of space on his server. Patience; he'll consider it - his site is adding new disk storage (scheduled for later this month or early September) at which point he'll be (temporarily) flush with space, AND we probably will get something if we don't cause a lot of needless aggrevation in the meantime. LISTSERV's have the beauty of responding to mailer messages with SENDME fn ft as the first line (that is IF your mailer puts together a return path that actually works - the latest "punishment" for computer science students who are bad is to require them to figure out how to address mail to UUCP hosts! -- sorry, USENET is better than NONET, huh?). In the meantime, those of you posting 300 line messages should consider that there are many recipients of this list who haven't a lot of Kbytes (much less Mbytes) to hold incoming mail. I'm fortunate enough not to lose anything when 116 messages arrive in a half-hour (it happened yesterday, and some were beaucoup Kbytes too), but even on bitnet we have VAX sites that just start bouncing the overflow back. I think Don Elton's recommended limit of only 3K too confining, but 80K clearly is too much. So what's reasonable? I think maybe 10K or so is about the point at which you've gotta start saying "who wants this? Email me and I'll send it to you." As one who has done it, let me point out a problem with the "I'll email it to you" strategy (can't you guess -- who's been making LOTS of noise about addresses). Even if the mailer-deamons send nothing at all back, sending out a lot of individual replies takes time. If paths prove difficult, then it depends on the extent to which a sender is willing to amuse him(her?)self finding an address that doesn't return with "host unknown." I recommend you give SERIOUS thought to how widely needed a program is before you post it. I'm like most everyone else; I hate to know there's a program out there that perhaps (just possibly) I'll need some day. However REALLY, do you need a program that copies files from CP/M to ProDOS (if you have a Z80 card, OK you can use it, otherwise???)? Even for a program will be widely useful (TIC 1.18 comes to mind), posting a big file can cause more aggrevation than it's worth. I'm at a site that thinks in gigabytes, so it's not a bother here, but come on, have a care for the best interests of all. Don't most of you belong to a local user group (FIND a club near you, they are VERY handy)? My local club has TIC 1.18 and much of the other stuff that's been posted (it's also where I got Chameleon) and there are other sources (try a nearby Apple BBS, even if you download TIC long distance it won't be THAT much). Frankly, I prefer not losing the participation of Don Elton and others due to their inability to deal with large (and for them superfluous) files cluttering their mail boxes. I did appreciate getting the modified version of EXECUTIONER (I've tested it and it works fine). It wasn't too large, and it should prove generally useful on the net. But, BAD news: there appear to be a few "printable" characters that don't travel well throughout the net. Morgan Davis attempted to send me a modified EXECUTIONER last week and it got corrupted by the ASCII/EBCDIC translation at whatever node it crossed to BITNET from (ucbvax? Sorry, I forgot) and apparently some characters got corrupted again on the way back through psuvax1. IBM terminals don't have ^ (caret) or ~ (tilde) and they translate some of the bracket characters funny. As I understand it only a handful of characters are involved, but if they aren't avoided, some of you are going to get EXECUTIONER 6byte files that won't EXEC properly. I've been using the EXECUTIONER 4byte (better than just hex) and haven't had anyone say they've not been able to recover the Chameleon. Anyone know which characters need to be avoided? Can the EXECUTIONER be modified to not use them? --------------------- ARPA: sewall%uconnvm.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu Murphy A. Sewall BITNET: SEWALL@UCONNVM School of Business Admin. UUCP: ihnp4!psuvax1!UCONNVM.BITNET!SEWALL University of Connecticut
lwv@n8emr.UUCP (Larry W. Virden) (08/07/87)
I wonder if it would be possible for folks who have space problems to look at the size of the article before downloading it and perhaps only download a portion of the article (first 20 lines or so) if it was over a certain size. I personally believe that a) if we try to keep source and binary lists off this list we will never have a comp.sources and comp.binaries group, b) that 10k is much to small for programs of any great utility (such as arc, compress, emacs, kermit, dcom, etc), and c) that there are many folks who have the 'potential' of reading this group who have no space problems at all. If we try to go to the lowest common denominator, then what do we use- 5.25" drives which are 75% full? A source code listing of any size, even 10k may be too large if there is any mail being downloaded at the same time. Or perhaps the max size of a GS ram disk using the new roms? That would be 8 meg! -- Larry W. Virden 75046,606 (CIS) 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068 (614) 864-8817 cbosgd!n8emr!lwv HAM/SWL BBS (HBBS) 614-457-4227.. 300/1200 bps We haven't inherited the world from our parents, but borrowed it from our children.
iadt3tb@pyr.gatech.EDU (T. Terrell Banks) (01/18/88)
In article <2596@dasys1.UUCP][ patth@dasys1.UUCP (Patt Haring) writes: ][In article <419@n8emr.UUCP][, lwv@n8emr.UUCP (Larry W. Virden) writes: ][][ ][][ Since readers of this group decided that they didnt want comp.binaries.apple2, ][][ do you suppose that you could post Z-Link to this group for the benefit of the ][][ uucp folks who cannot get thru to the Apple2-L file server? Thanks! Oh, boy; a fight, a fight! :-) For my un-requested 2 cents worth, If you have a program that you want to post (and you can't get it to apple2-l) then post it here! I see this action (when repeated sufficiently) doing two things. One: It gives all of us the benifit of receiving programs from some of the more valuable contributors to this newsgroup. Two: It would eventually tip the scales in favour of creating a binaries newsgroup for apple. Remember, no one says that the vote can not be taken again at a later date. -- T. Terrell Banks uucp: ...!{akgua,ihnp4,hplabs,seismo}!gatech!gitpyr!iadt3tb Georgia Insitute of Technology Internet: iadt3tb@pyr.gatech.edu Information Systems and Applications Bitnet : iadt3tb.gitvm1 190 Third Street NW Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0185
leganza@ssc-vax.UUCP (Mark D. Leganza) (01/30/88)
I didn't vote the first time to create the binaries group.... *BUT* I agree it's a good idea.... ml -- Mark Leganza uw-beaver!ssc-vax!ssc-bee!leganza generic disclaimer.