pwd@pid.UUCP (Philip W. Dalrymple) (09/07/85)
*** There has been a lot of talk on the net about how it is about to die including some numbers which seem to be just cause for worry. As I see it there are four problem which are showing up. Phone time to transmit the news, storage space for the news, improper use of the news system and too many new groups. I do not understand all of the problems with the number of new groups therefor I will not comment on them. The problem with people is a matter which I will never understand (I am an engineer not a doctor :-) ). First the problem of Phone time right now I think that most of the news links are run at 1200 baud which gives about a 5 hour total news feed. If a link is run at 9600 baud the time it takes to run a news feed drops to the time it took when there was less than 0.5 meg of news feed. This is the least I will be using when we set up our first long distance link in January. In the long run it seems that the modem manufactures will keep ahead of the net's need for commumaction speed for at least a few years. The harder problem at least to my mind is the problem of storage space. (I have expire set to 4 days for this very reason) There has been one sugestion on the net that low readership groups be made mailing lists with the news software expanded to allow the transmition by either the current method or a newslist system. This idea seams to be a good one but will take a long time to put into place and will still have to be installed on system as a new version of the software. Another thing that could be done is to allow the sa at a site to know what newsgroups are being read and expire all of those groups not on anyones list at once. This would have the advantage of being a program which can stand by itself without a new relase of the news software. I may just have talked myself into a job. -- Philip Dalrymple akgua!pid!pwd 404/429-8266 (voice)