JANET and cam.ac.uk cutting Usenet News feed from July
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From: Rowland McDonnell on 14 Apr 2010 00:25 Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie(a)sometimes.sessile.org> wrote: > <Graeme.Wood(a)ed.ac.uk.nospam> wrote: [snip] > >It has nothing to do with storage costs or costs of servers. It has to > >do with very few universities using it and the cost for provision of the > >feeds being not worth the expenditure. Newsfeeds are not free. > > Ah - charges rather than costs. Right. I'm obviously taking my current > job (software projects manager) too closely to heart. If so, and since he's at a university, he should be able to tell us the details. I shouldn't think that the charges levied to downstream users in this setup were/are anything more than paying for the bandwidth. Which is slight. What does the contract say? Rowland. -- Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell(a)dog.physics.org Sorry - the spam got to me http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking
From: Rowland McDonnell on 14 Apr 2010 00:32 James Jolley <jrjolley(a)me.com> wrote: > real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid (Rowland McDonnell) said: > > > Graeme Wood <Graeme.Wood(a)ed.ac.uk.nospam> wrote: > > > >> Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote: > > [snip] > > > >>> But support queries could be of any volume. I can't even throw an > >>> estimate at that. The easy thing to do is make it an unsupported > >>> service, but from hazy memory I think JANET doesn't like doing that. > >>> > >>> Cheers - Jaimie > >> > >> It has nothing to do with storage costs or costs of servers. It has to > >> do with very few universities using it and the cost for provision of the > >> feeds being not worth the expenditure. Newsfeeds are not free. > > > > news.individual.net peers with over 200 other news servers, according to > > them. Seems to me that means those peers provide free access. > > > > If so, all that you need to pay for is the purchase price and `normal > > local running costs' (electricity, floor space, manpower to maintain it, > > etc) for your server and the consumed bandwidth - which has already been > > shown to be a trivial amount of both server and bandwidth resources when > > put against that used by any university overall. > > > > Seems to me that these costs add up to something so small as to be > > nearly irrelevant when looked at in the context of any university > > computer services budget. > > > > Rowland. > > I wonder. Perhaps there are higher costs these days because everyone > wants on to the network? Bandwidth is much cheaper per bit than ever before. News server load is a lower fraction of university bandwidth than ever before. The costs in terms of pennies for the news server are lower than previously. The costs in terms of percentage of your computer services budget are so tiny as to hardly show up. The issue is that modern idiots running university computer services departments are mostly `Web based Windoze prunes' and if it's not modern, Windoze, Webby, and so on, they want it to get gone. [snip] Harsh? Well, my wife's uni lost most of its network computing services recently. Everything died on site in a fashion which also managed to cut out their off-site emergency backup machinery. Yep, the computer services people were spending huge amounts of money maintaining an off-site hardware backup facility so as to have servers ready to take over from live running backups, all powered by a totally separate power supply in a different part of town with backup generators and all that. And it turned out that when it was needed, it was so badly implemented that the dying of the main servers took out the backup facility! Took 'em days to sort it out fully. (must've been something to do with the running backup data feeds failing to keep the off-site facility in a valid state, or similar) They're prunes. Rowland. -- Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell(a)dog.physics.org Sorry - the spam got to me http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking
From: Jim on 14 Apr 2010 02:04 Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: > The costs in terms of percentage of your computer services budget are so > tiny as to hardly show up. But they're not zero, and when you have to cut budgets then you start looking for things that aren't important. Let's face it, usenet has been dying for years because to a lot of the younger generation (and Gods I hate that term) usenet doesn't exist - it's all Facebook, Twitter, the Web in general. Rightly or wrongly usenet is going the way of gopher. FWIW Individual.net say that it's the administrative overhead that eats up most of their time - dealing with support requests, abuse reports etc. Jim -- http://www.ursaMinorBeta.co.uk http://twitter.com/GreyAreaUK Please help save Bletchley Park - sign the petition for Government funding at: (open to UK residents and ex.pats) http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/ Thank you.
From: The Older Gentleman on 14 Apr 2010 02:13 Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: > > Just killfile me, James - I'm sick of being on the receiving end of this > sort of routine villification. Just killfile me, ignore me, stop > insulting me. It's a radical thought, I know, but why don't *you* killfile *him*? And then your witterings would stop also. -- BMW K1100LT Ducati 750SS Honda CB400F Triumph Street Triple Suzuki TS250ER GN250 Damn, back to six bikes! Try Googling before asking a damn silly question. chateau dot murray at idnet dot com
From: Graeme Wood on 14 Apr 2010 02:22
On 13/04/2010 18:58, Rowland McDonnell wrote: > Graeme Wood<Graeme.Wood(a)ed.ac.uk.nospam> wrote: > >> Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote: > [snip] > >>> But support queries could be of any volume. I can't even throw an >>> estimate at that. The easy thing to do is make it an unsupported >>> service, but from hazy memory I think JANET doesn't like doing that. >>> >>> Cheers - Jaimie >> >> It has nothing to do with storage costs or costs of servers. It has to >> do with very few universities using it and the cost for provision of the >> feeds being not worth the expenditure. Newsfeeds are not free. > > news.individual.net peers with over 200 other news servers, according to > them. Seems to me that means those peers provide free access. Well you are wrong. |