hansel@amy.UUCP (Steve Hansel) (02/01/88)
In article <595@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> Peter Schachte writes: > UUPC or an original Amiga uucp seems like a great thing to have. But > all this is useless if one can't get a news feed. I don't think too > many corporations or benevolent enough to feed a lowly single-person PC > without getting something for their trouble. Are there? I had no trouble getting connections to USC and gryphon. All I did was ask. I've also helped set up an Amiga usenet sights in Madison, WI (honce) and Minneapolis, MN (milkcow). Out of 5 usenet sight managers called, only one refused to set up a feed for an Amiga. I'll admit that I lucked out when I got a mail feed from USC without being a student or facility, but most small buisnesses will be happy to feed you. So far I've only set up one Amiga that gets a news feed. Maybe news feeds are harder to come by, but I don't see why they would be. Remember, The only reason most of these sights are on the net is because someone else is willing to feed them. Of course, if Amiga users start abusing the network, it will become harder to find a feed. This worries me! Here are 'common sense' rules for home usenet sights: 1) Call your feed regularily. Don't let your mail and news fill up their disk. 2) Don't send large files through high cost paths. 3) Only ask for the news groups that you need. I only receive comp.sys.amiga, comp.sources.amiga, and comp.binaries.amiga. This amounts to about 20 minutes of connect time per night at 2400 baud. (unless you people get carried away with the shareware argument, then it gets longer) A complete news feed is Megs of information per day. My floppies couldn't handle it. > I had an idea a while ago about how to run a *free* mail network. > Every phone exchange has a certain set of exchanges it can call for > free. But some of those exchanges can call *different* exchanges. So > it should be possible to cover great distances with only local calls, > if you have enough people participating. In areas with densely > packed Amiga users mightn't it be possible to set up such a network? That's the whole idea of usenet. Add in some sights that have special ways of sending long distance communications like leased lines, ARPA net, etc), and you get a network that you can send a letter across the country in 20 minutes for very little cost. > Then you'd only need one gateway to the rest of the networld, and you'd > have a better argument to make to Joe Corporate that he'd be doing a > great thing for the wider computing community. I don't know if there will ever be a national network of just Amigas but I can see one Amiga feeding news to four or five others. That would reduce the burden on Joe Corporate's computer. > I love the idea of my Amiga collecting all sorts of interesting info > while I'm at work, or sleeping. Modems are pretty cheap these days. > I'd certainly buy one if I could get usenet access for free (no long > distance charges). I'll bet lots of people would. > Or is this what everyone's been assuming all along, and I'm just asleep > at the switch? That's the idea behind all this work I and others have been putting into these programs. By the way, the response to my HELP WANTED on UUCP for the Amiga article was great. I'm now trying to get organized and figure out who's going to to what programs. Hang in there. Steve oberon.usc.edu!amy!hansel gryphon.cts.com!amy!hansel