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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Removing Macintosh related groups from the net.
Message-ID: <6119@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 5-Nov-85 11:49:47 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6119
Posted: Tue Nov  5 11:49:47 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Nov-85 11:49:47 EST
References: <226@mplvax.UUCP> <6100@utzoo.UUCP>, <15275@styx.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 41

> The net works because we cooperate in serving the needs of other
> sites, Henry, even if they don't precisely match our own.

The problem is that said cooperation is becoming very expensive.

> Why should
> our site pay for the exchange of technical information for hardware we
> don't have (AT&T, IBM, etc.)? Because we expect in return that other
> sites will support connectivity for articles about things that we DO have,
> like VAXen and Macintoshes. It works both ways.

Yes and no.  Much of the non-Mac traffic is not particularly machine-
specific.  One of the things that deeply irks a lot of people is that
net.sources.mac does *not* deal in sources, from which non-Mac people
might actually learn something.  Virtually all its traffic is Mac binaries,
which are utterly useless to anyone else.  In essence what we have is
a subnet of Macintosh users, doing little that is of interest to anyone
else, at our expense.

Yes, we pay for the exchange of technical information about hardware we
don't have, but much of it is at least marginally relevant to a system
we do have:  Unix.

> So: have you considered using U.S./Canadian mail as an alternative to
> net.{micro.att,micro.ibm-pc, etc.} yet? :-)  It's cheaper than the
> net, too.

I would be eyeing net.micro.ibm-pc just as dubiously if it were the top
newsgroup, costing us alone over $1000/year in phone bills.  Especially
if most of its traffic consisted of (effectively) encrypted data that
could be decoded only on an IBM PC running MSDOS.


Actually, there is a strong possibility that if we cut net.sources.mac,
somebody else hereabouts will set up an alternate feed; several people
have mentioned this to me.  This would be fine by me.  I have no real
objection to the existence of net.sources.mac, I'd just prefer to see
its users paying more of its bills.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry