adams@arwen.i.intel.com.ogc.edu (12/09/88)
bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes: | There's another thing that would help a lot. If the leaves only take groups | that people actually read then that amount of traffic is eliminated... | | My newsfeed has awarded "the most obfuscated sys line" prize... | | ...If we started at the leaves (ssbn is | really a leaf even though we feed a couple of sites) and made up the | "obfuscated sys line" and sent it up, then our feeds could consolidate them | and cut out the groups they don't need to carry. An idea that crossed my mind was to have an ihave/sendme protocol that not only sents the messageID of articles but also the newsgroup. Then the receiving machine could decide if it wanted the article by whether it already had it (check messageID) or whether it wanted that newsgroup. The checking for the newsgroup could be just checking the sys file for what group to read or could be calculated from subscribing information (gathered 'arbitron' fashion, I guess). Possibly the subscribing infomation could be derived from whether downstream machines were asking for that newsgroup. You could also send down the size of the article so that receiving machine could decide whether to receive this article in this newsgroup based on available disk space. -- Robert Adams ...!tektronix!reed!littlei!adams | adams@littlei.hf.intel.com ...!uunet!littlei!adams | adams@littlei.uu.net
brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (12/10/88)
When I designed K news 6 years ago, the solution to this problem seemed evident. Use the same subscription mechanism for sites that exists for readers. (It B news, that's the newsrc file, in K news, it is a file containing the "article selection language.") The batching program should just be a variant of the newsreading program. It finds all the articles that have not been read in the subscribed groups, spews them out into the batch, and marks them read in the .newsrc. Sites would have the option of giving write perms on .newsrc files to the sites that they feed. Or they could change them on their own, as they do today. The K news article selection language would be a better step, but for this purpose and newsreaders, since it let you say things like: news.misc & !talk.bizarre & #lines < 200 !( user=richmond && site=athena.mit.edu ) etc. etc. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
starr@shuxd.UUCP (Michael L. Starr) (12/12/88)
In article <2478@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >... >The K news article selection language would be a better step, but for >this purpose and newsreaders, since it let you say things like: > >news.misc & !talk.bizarre & #lines < 200 >!( user=richmond && site=athena.mit.edu ) > >-- >Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473 I know I'm going to regret getting involved in this, but this issue is not going to die soon. Both JR and BT need lessons in interpersonal relations. JR, while exercising his right to speak on behalf of his beliefs, should not have tried (and succeeded) to impose CENSORSHIP on the rest of the world. BT should have showed some compassion for a man obviously upset, instead he showed a lack of judgement by posting the now infamous joke. Brad & others, please don't lower yourselves in the fight against censorship by promoting censorship against JR. It would be like saying: "I'm totally against capital punishment, and anyone who is for it should be executed!" -- __/\__ ******************** __/\__ | starr@shuxd.att.com \ / * Michael L. Starr * \ / | att!shuxd!starr |/\| ******************** |/\| | starr%shuxd@att.arpa