JANET and cam.ac.uk cutting Usenet News feed from July
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From: J. J. Lodder on 11 Apr 2010 15:55 Chris Ridd <chrisridd(a)mac.com> wrote: > On 2010-04-10 11:41:20 +0100, James Jolley said: > > > On 2010-04-10 08:53:49 +0100, {$PW$}@womar.co.uk (Paul Womar) said: > > > >> James Jolley <jrjolley(a)me.com> wrote: > >> > >>> On 2010-04-09 19:34:55 +0100, > >>> real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid (Rowland McDonnell) said: > >>>> > >>>> And you should post this, why? > >>> > >>> Because it's hardly relevant to most people is it? Him in his little > >>> backwater uni? > >> > >> I don't think that's a valid reason against posting here, particularly > >> when this group is dedicated to a minority computing platform. The > >> article actually seems to say that JANET is discontinuing it's feed > >> which is where most/all Uni's would take their feed from. > > > > Fair enough. Usenet isn't an essential service any longer, much as we'd > > like to hope it was. I didn't expect that the servers for it would be > > all that hard to maintain though. > > News servers use a large amount of disk space. Actually they might not > compared with modern disk sizes, but it is significantly more than zero. Nonsense. Disk size has grown much faster than posting volumes. (which may even have decreased) Disk price/gigabit has also dropped fast. (hitting 5c/GB now) So the cost of maintaining a (text only) newsserver has dropped too. It's just another excuse, Jan
From: Rowland McDonnell on 11 Apr 2010 18:10 Jim <jim(a)magrathea.plus.com> wrote: > Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk> wrote: > > > > It adds up. It adds up a *lot*. > > > > Pah, peanuts compared to webforums. Allocating 6TB of SAN to web fora > > *for a single site* is far from uncommon. > > Wow. Isn't the retention period on web fora much longer though? Usenet > tends towards the week/month period. Google groups retains `forever'. Each normal news server has its own policy on retention; sometimes on a `how much' basis; I've seen news servers delivering months-old news articles from me, on those occasions when I've trashed my prefs and news spool files or started up with a fresh news server. 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 11 Apr 2010 18:10 Jim <jim(a)magrathea.plus.com> wrote: > James Jolley <jrjolley(a)me.com> wrote: > > > > News servers use a large amount of disk space. Actually they might not > > > compared with modern disk sizes, but it is significantly more than zero. > > > > Again, fair. You keep hearing disk space is cheap so bloody often you > > start to equate it to any disk activity at all. Shouldn't I know, but > > there we go. > > Just imagine subscribing to _every_ group there is. Even the ones to do > with knitting and making your own crisps. Then have an article expiry > time of, say, a month. > > It adds up. It adds up a *lot*. > > And that's before you factor in binary groups. If you factor binary groups out, it adds up to not all that much. Back in the early 1990s when I was doing my teacher training, my college's news server carried the alt hierarchy, binaries an' all. This place specialised in teacher training and the local news server carried alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.<seemingly all of 'em>. Oh yeah, and had a `no pr0n on the college computers' rule, too. I never quite got my head round all that... But they paid for supplying all that. The cost must have been low. Thing is, if you do cut out the binary groups and the alt hierarchy, you've got norra lorra data to worry about storing and shifting, compared to what you used to store and shift Sticking with `no alt groups, no binaries' - well, that much once used to be a lot of traffic, but it's nothing these days compared to streamed video. 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 11 Apr 2010 19:08 Dorian Gray <D.Gray(a)picture.invalid> wrote: > {$PW$}@womar.co.uk (Paul Womar) wrote: > > > The > > article actually seems to say that JANET is discontinuing it's feed > > which is where most/all Uni's would take their feed from. > > Right, as I posted. The subject gives it away... > > I didn't see the other two follow-ups before you posted, those two are > in my killfile (and their follow-ups didn't give me any reason to change > that ;). But I find it amazing that anyone would question the posting > here of *big* news that the Usenet News feed is being turned off to > most/all UK Universities (including cam.ac.uk). I see a lot of threads > about various Usenet News servers and their > reliability/cost/features/groups, and the headers they support, and very > little if any of that has nothing to do with Macs, yet are never marked > OT. It seems to be consensus that such discussions are on-topic here. The charter - the foundation document of this newsgroup, which permitted it to be created - states this (in sternly abridged form): <http://www.usenet.org.uk/uk.comp.sys.mac.html#uk.comp.sys.mac> "uk.comp.sys.mac is for the discussion of issues relating to Apple's Macintosh computers (Macs) in the UK. [snip] Announcements that are of direct and specific relevance to UK Mac users are welcome provided that they are specific to the UK but not specific to one ISP, and are likely to be helpful to other UK Mac users. Routine commercial announcements are unwelcome. [snip]" Seems to me that JANET cutting its news feed is information not specific to one ISP (since it affects all downstream institutions, which each is an ISP) and also likely to be helpful to other Mac users. Therefore, the charter unequivocally defines the post at the start of this thread as on-topic. Complaining about an on-topic post just because it's not of interest to you personally is not on-topic. 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: chris on 12 Apr 2010 04:20
On 10/04/10 19:48, eastender wrote: > In article<D.Gray-3DE255.16355310042010(a)nntp-serv.cam.ac.uk>, > Dorian Gray<D.Gray(a)picture.invalid> wrote: > >> But I find it amazing that anyone would question the posting >> here of *big* news that the Usenet News feed is being turned off to >> most/all UK Universities (including cam.ac.uk). > > Indeed. Thanks for posting this. I imagine also many people won't know > the historical context of Unix in the early 1980s and networking, and > the community of systems it's spawned, including of course, OS X. Ditto. I've noticed here at Dundee Uni that the newsfeed was increasingly unreliable a couple of years ago. I switched to Eternal-September about then. It isn't a big deal and I'm not surprised, but it is worth mourning its passing... |