wildbill@ucbvax.UUCP (William J. Laubenheimer) (05/30/84)
<Enter heavy sarcasm mode>
Great idea..."The Central Committee of the Usenet is now in session. Comrade
Nokitoff will begin with his report on net.wobegon and net.music.gdead.
Comrade Flamovitch will then lead a discussion of the 5-year plan for
installing automatic flame generators for contributions to net.politics
and why this plan has fallen further behind schedule. Measures for suppression
of subversives will be initiated; possible candidates include nsc!chuqui,
rabbit!jj, and watmath!saquigley. All power to the State."
<Exit heavy sarcasm mode>
Granting powers to any person or group invites use of that power, which
in turn invites misuse of that power. In the current state of affairs,
nobody has enough power to make its misuse affect more than his little
corner of the Net. I don't think it's a good idea to create something
that has a good chance of establishing what might as well be called the
USSRNET as anything else.
____ Bill Laubenheimer
___ / \ ___ UC-Berkeley Computer Science
/ \ | o o | / \ ucbvax!wildbill
------+++----------()----------+++------
...Killjoy was here!werner@ut-ngp.UUCP (06/03/84)
<don't feed it> Mark's gracious way of commenting on the committee-proposal has removed my inhibitions to comment on the topic; any thank you notes to Mark, please (-: I have a horror of committee work, call it bad experience, maybe: In terms of preferred ways of running things, committees rank a distant 4th after such ways as: a) a working anarchy, based on respect for rights, needs, and feelings of others. If people tread others with the respect they desire for themselves and are able to overcome both inferiority and superiority complex, we'd have it made. b) a grass-roots democracy, where everyone gets to vote on a topic themselves, or can delegate his vote to another person of his choice for a given question, or a topic in general, with the ability to withdraw that support and vote at any time. c) a benevolent dictator, who can delegate work and decision-making until a palace-revolution or popular uprising removes him. Maybe he should have the ability to put a question up to a popular vote, whenever he fears a riot, no matter which way he decides. d) and, running a distant fourth, the committees. Anyone got some popular suggestions how committee members are determined and how they can avoid spending too much of their time in discussions and justifications of decisions? Before I'm willing to sign away any voting power (???) I have to some obscure committee, I'd rather see some improvements to the software which allows a) and b) to work. But I do support the creation of "expert committees", consisting of respected volunteer experts who will kick around a topic and enlighten the general public with their conclusions in a brief statement before taking a vote. That would certainly be preferable to seeing the net overloaded with more free-for-all discussions. Then we elect/appoint/condemn someone to the ceremonial position of "King of the Net" to whom all petitions are directed, who either distributes prior accumulated wisdom or invokes a committe-brainstorming. If the petitioner doesn't like the answers, he can still bring up the topic for general net-reactions or to incite a palace-revolution (no guns, please). Now to proceed with my witty, but meaningful remarks, do I hear any "Aye"s to reconfirm Mark as "Emperor of the Net", not to be bothered with trivial topics, punishment being to have your petitions acknowledged but otherwise ignored ? Werner, "voting for the loser absolves me from most responsibility for later screw-ups by the winner, but does not protect me from suffering the damages"
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (06/03/84)
> I'd rather see some improvements to the software
Werner:
Laudible thought. Do I hear you volunteering for this? What do we do while
you are writing and debugging this wonderful code? What will your employer
say while you spend this time doing usenet work instead of real work? When
it is all said and done, how in the HELL are you going to get every site to
use the damn stuff? Are you going to make the same wonderful improvements
to notes and turn them into reasonable systems?
Let us PLEASE look at reality for once:
a> If we KNEW what improvements to the software would make it work
right, we could skip this step. Unfortunately, we don't. We need to
figure out what we need to write. Ok, lets appoint a committee of
people to define the next evolution of usenet software. Aha, 2
months later we are still arguing about the committee. The
committee spends 2 months arguing about software and posts its
results. The net argues about the results for 2 months and 93
revisions. Everyone gets mad at everyone else. We are now in
January 1985.
b> We now get to write the code. Assuming it is relatively trivial
(say a total of 6-8 man-months) working weekends and evenings a
small group of people can get it running in 3 or 4 months. It then
goes to one person for integration. Another month working out
inconsistencies. Beta test at one site, one or two months. Beta
test on a few sites, one or two months, maybe less. Let's be
optimistic: May 1985.
c> Distribution: We ship. Everyone stands up and cheers. The truly
courageous sites install. Bugs show up. they are posted, fixed.
More bugs. More sites, more bugs. more fixes. Many sites won't
touch a new release for a month, for six months, for a year. There
are still an enormous number of sites running 2.9 and A news, for
Gawds sake. Ok, lets say in 6 months 'most' sites have converted
and the software is stable. We are now in November of 1985 and the
wonderful Usenet upgrade project is a wonderful success. Or is it?
The best we could hope for (absolute) is about 80% penetration by the new
software. This assumes that EVERY usenet site converts. This is because
there is no provision in this for notes. Now, we KNOW that there are sites
that for various reasons won't even go to 2.10 or 2.10.1 regardless of the
wonders involved there. Why should the upgrade further? And for all this
wonderful new software we wrote, if there are even a few sites out there
that don't use it the system breaks down because it takes only ONE of those
sites to screw up the software.
Look. We have to face the fact that the inertia on the net is such that
software solutions simply can't work at this point in time. Even if we
COULD wait until we got the software it doesn't solve the problem of sites
that won't use it. We need to figure out some way to make the status quo
work more efficiently (or in the view of some, at all) before it crashes
down on top of us. Once we get the current system under control we can look
for ways of improving. I agree that usenet without a committee is the best
of all possible worlds, but I don't think it is an alternative right now.
The alternatives are a usenet with some group guiding it or a usenet that
breaks and stops working. The network has grown much too fast for its own
good, and we need to get it back under control somehow.
chuq
--
From the closet of anxieties of: Chuq Von Rospach
{amd70,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui (408) 733-2600 x242
I'm sure I have my death ray in here somewhere...werner@ut-ngp.UUCP (06/05/84)
while I agree with most of Chuq's observations and analysis of the situation, I do see things a little more optimistic. a) just because sites are sticking with 2.9 and refuse to upgrade, for whatever reason, that should / did not keep anyone from going to 2.10+, so let's stay optimistic and plan for 2.11, 3.0, whatever. b) if we can't get everyone to upgrade and expect problems because of that, let's develop ideas how we can minimize those problems, without being inconsiderate to small or conservative sites, of course. Unfortunately, I am not from this "UN*X" world and cannot be of much help in implementing new ideas, but I feel right at home in this net-community and would like to participate in discussions of ideas for improvements. A good thing is worth the time spent trying to improve it. No, I'm not one only willing to spend time with "talk-talk", but you would not want to wait for me to write UN*X code, (-:. When volunteers are needed for some work for which I feel qualified, consider me a volunteer, and not during "office hours". Any need to translate public domain software into a foreign language? werner @ ut-ngp