Again ... What is it going to COST?????

[Henry Spencer]

> Henry, being part of the backbone is a nice status deal...

It's overrated.  That and fifty cents will buy me a can of Sprite. :-(

> ... I write the checks every month.
> I forward the news to the local university free of charge as a service.
> I KNOW what it costs, you don't have a monopoly on that or the right to
> judge those who don't pay as free loaders...

My apologies for misjudging your participation; your original article
sure sounded like you thought the net was "free".  I think if you read
my article again, you'll find that the people I judge as freeloaders are
the ones who not only don't pay, but don't want to pay and feel free to
orate about how the net is a right, not a privilege.

> The backbone ONLY SEES A FRACTION OF THE TOLL CHARGES. They have little
> right to assume authority of the cost of the net ...

Nobody ever said we did.  If you dislike what the backbone does (e.g. the
renaming of newsgroups, another decision reached by a sinister cabal with
minimal public input... deliberately, or we'd still be discussing it in
the year 2000), form your own backbone.  There is nothing special about
most of the backbone sites except good equipment and the willingness to
grit their teeth extra-hard when the bills come in.  Nobody will argue if
you assume as much load as you see fit, and decide for yourself how much
that is.  Just grant us the same privilege, please.

> Heck, I doubt most news administrators on the backbone have seen any
> of the phone bills during the last year or know to the even dollar what
> the totals are or what each link costs...

I haven't asked all of them, but I believe you're badly mistaken.  The
costs are all too visible.  No, we do not have magic ways of hiding them.

> > I would assume that Stargate would permit local rebroadcasting...
> 
> THINK -- DON'T ASSUME ANYTHING...

Sorry, I know some of the people involved, and refuse to believe that
they are stupid or venal.  That assumption is on pretty solid grounds.

> If they continue to hide behind closed doors with popular support,
> then the community will get what they get .... I'd rather have a choice.

You will have one, as will we all:  the choice of whether we wish to get
involved with Stargate or not.  If Stargate flops, or doesn't successfully
replace the existing Usenet, because it is poorly put together, I fail to
see how that interferes with the pursuit of other approaches to the problem.
Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and demanding you buy Stargate.

> ...Stargate WILL cost more than the current
> near free for most sites, and given any choice they will not likely join
> Stargate if the same data remains available over uucp based usenet.

The intent of Stargate is to offer better quality (i.e. more signal, less
noise), not just more of the same.  As Lauren has repeatedly pointed out,
the transmission medium for Stargate has finite bandwidth that will have
to be managed consciously, quite apart from the legal issues (and the human
ones of *wanting* to provide better quality).

> ... "They *know* that" ... I ask what are they planning to do
> about it?????

You seem to assume that the answer is "something vague and sinister that
we won't like but will have to accept".  Please justify this.

> This and most of the other questions are so basic that
> they demand discussion prior to settling with a proposed vendor...

They will certainly have to be discussed before we settle with Stargate
about any participation we undertake.  I see no reason why they have to
be discussed before that is a serious prospect, though.  I know, you meant
that they should be discussed before Stargate's plans get settled.  What
I ask is, why?  Stargate isn't spending my money, or yours.

> How is the vendor going to act if everyone bitches at the last minute???

Any vendor with an ounce of brains will be aware that he's taking a chance
on this to some extent.

> > ... Usenet *won't* stay intact as a cost free competitor...
> 
> Ahhh .... but the net MUST stay intact to carry items to Stargate via uucp
> mail. Also one of the biggest benifits of the current uucp based usenet is
> that uucp mail service goes most places. If the current net dries up,
> what will happen to mail service???

Uucpnet (mail) and Usenet (news) are not the same.  One isn't even a subset
of the other.  Uucpnet will presumably stay intact, since there is no reason
why it shouldn't and every reason why it should.

> ... News itself is the problem, the data accesses per article
> are only a few percent of the disk traffic ... very inefficent. Notes is
> much better in some ways. A new dbms type system needs to be written that
> doesn't use one file per message and can directly batch/unbatch streams
> with a single fork/exec.

The fork/exec problem is already being attacked by C news, which is almost
ready for release.  It doesn't change the form of the database, partly
because its authors believe that the existing database format is perfectly
adequate for any reasonable volume of traffic.  The problem is that the
volumes of traffic are rapidly becoming unreasonable.  Even the popular
technical groups are approaching the point where the investment needed to
read them is not worthwhile.  The authors of C news believe that the right
way to attack that problem is at the source:  the traffic volume.

> > Again, are you volunteering to do it? ...
> 
> Don't be so stupid to start discounting suggestions if the suggestor isn't
> able to implement it by themselves ... hell stargate wouldn't have
> gotten off the ground if Lauren was the only person involved.

For a long time he *was* nearly the only person involved.  Ideas are not
enough; we need implementors too.  Lauren not only had a good idea, he's
worked hard to make it fly.

I don't discount a suggestion just because the suggestor isn't able to
implement it by themselves, but I'm afraid we *must* discount suggestions
which don't have implementors at all.  The Usenix call for proposals was
most explicit about wanting to know "who" as well as "what".

> Good ideals and goals are much cheaper than false starts.

We cannot run ideas and goals on our machines, however.

> > In case you didn't hear about it, Usenix solicited proposals of precisely
> > this kind recently.  I believe they got, essentially, none.
> 
> I and many others in usenet are not Usenix members. I don't remember the
> USENIX posting requesting alternative proposals ... I certainly would have
> responded.

It was <2550 at hcradm.UUCP>, posted on April 7th to net.news and net.usenix.
There was a bit of further discussion in net.usenix.  Perhaps you have a
feed problem?

Out of curiosity, why aren't you a Usenix member?
-- 
EDEC:  Stupidly non-standard
brain-damaged incompatible	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
proprietary protocol used.	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry