nsb+@andrew.cmu.edu (Nathaniel Borenstein) (02/12/89)
Apparently I inadevertently violated the standard protocol for newsgroup creation. I am sincerely sorry about this -- my only excuse is that it has been years since I have had the time to actually subscribe to news.groups, and I was remembering incorrectly. What I left out, of course, was the two week discussion period prior to a vote. I'd like to formally ask that such discussion begin now. In two weeks, if necessary, I will take a new vote. Frankly, I don't really think a new vote should be necessary, but that is a valid topic for the two weeks of discussion. The reason I don't think that a new vote is really necessary is that the new newsgroup seems to be quite noncontroversial. After two days, the vote is running 75 for and 3 against. The 3 "against" votes had three different reasons, each of which is easily answered here: 1. I violated "netiquette" by not having a discussion period. As I said, I apologize for that, and am trying to rectify it now. 2. We should try a mailing list first. Answer: we have already done so, it has hundreds of people on it, and many of them have been asking for a newsgroup. 3. Andrew is so little-discussed on comp.windows.x that there is obviously little interest in it. This is misleading because the active Andrew discussion goes on in other forums -- there are distribution lists for general Andrew information, information about the Andrew Message System, Andrew demos, and so on. As it turns out, there is definitely LOTS of interest in Andrew. Sevral vendors are interested in basing products on Andrew; the latest person to fly to Pittsburgh to learn more about Andrew was Steve Jobs, the day before yesterday... Some other questions that have come up deserve answering: > *Excerpts from ext.nn.news.groups: 10-Feb-89 Re: Newsgroup vote: comp.an.. Ed* > *Vielmetti@a.cc.umich. (366)* > For point of reference, it's usual to put new newsgroups into an existing > place in the hierarchy. Reasonable groups might be comp.windows.andrew > (andrew tool kit) & comp.protocols.afs (andrew file system, by analogy > with comp.protocols.nfs). The problem with this idea is that Andrew was designed as an integrated system. The Andrew Message System, in particular, spans several of these groups (yes, we could have comp.mail.andrew, too), as do other likely future Andrew applications. Moreover, although the volume of interest in Andrew is, I believe, currently enough to justify one newsgroup, I'm not sure it is ready for several. Eventually, I would think it reasonable that one might have subgroups of comp.andrew. One thing that is probably not well-understood is that the whole point of the Andrew project is integration. The complete Andrew environment, as running at CMU and a few other sites (most sites only run parts of Andrew), integrates lots of different machine types, from UNIX workstations to PC's and Macintoshes, on a single nationwide file system and a vast set of shared bulletin boards, etc. The reason you don't see a lot about them on netnews is, frankly, that we have better tools available for such discussions. However, as more and more poorly-connected sites run partial versions of Andrew, a newsgroup is coming to seem more desirable. Anyway, since integration is the whole point of Andrew, breaking it up into lots of newsgroups at different points in the tree, as Ed suggests, is not really appropriate. I'd really hate to see it go this way, as there would be a lot of things that fell through the cracks. > *Excerpts from ext.nn.news.groups: 10-Feb-89 Re: Addendum on andrew news..* > *Bill Janssen@titan.sw.mc (238)* > Hey! We want multi-media in the newsgroup! Several other Andrew users besides Bill have asked me about this. In fact, I had a nice set of discussions on this topic with Eric Fair, Mark Horton, and others at the Dallas USENIX in 1988. It turns out that it really wouldn't be very hard to have a gradual transition to make multimedia netnews a reality for those sites that support it. (Sites running the older netnews software would get the "A picture appeared here" blurbs like you see in my signature file on this post.) However, there is not currently anyone working on integrating Andrew-style multimedia messages into standard netnews software. A good place to discuss exactly how this could be done, I believe, would be on the proposed comp.andrew newsgroup. I hope this has cleared some things up. I look forward to the discussion on the creation of comp.andrew, and if there is a serious need to do so, I will conduct another vote in two weeks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb+@andrew.cmu.edu> Manager, Andrew Applications Group Information Technology Center Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 [An Andrew ToolKit view (a raster image) was included here, but could not be displayed.][An Andrew ToolKit view (an animated drawing) was included here, but could not be displayed.]