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From: friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Actually *defending* Portal's abuse of the net???
Message-ID: <700@vsi.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jun 88 13:17:51 GMT
References: <6040@cup.portal.com> <23.UUL1.3#935@aocgl.UUCP> <534@blblbl.UUCP>
Organization: V-Systems, Inc. -- Santa Ana, CA
Lines: 33

In article <534@blblbl.UUCP>, henrik@blblbl.UUCP (Larry DeLuca) writes:
> In article <23.UUL1.3#935@aocgl.UUCP>, tmanos@aocgl.UUCP (Theodore W. Manos) writes:
> # In article <6040@cup.portal.com>  thad@cup.portal.com writes:
> # >
> # > I'm with a multi-million $$$ a year company, and we CANNOT afford our
> # > own Usenet "node", and I and thousands of others NEED the communication
> # > facilities provided to us at a fair price by PORTAL.
> # 
> # Awww...isn't that just *too* bad?  The poor little "multi-million $$$" a
> # year company just "CANNOT afford" the *extremely expensive* hardware,
> 
> I don't think you're being quite fair here.  A number of companies won't let
> themselves be convinced of the benefits of having a USENET connection.

I don't think so either.  Please keep in mind that for many
sites, the "visible" costs of Usenet are the smallest portion of
the entire cost.   Staff productivity lost (on trash like this)
can be very, expensive, not necessarily gained back by the
information learned.  I enjoy Usenet as much as the next guy, but
taking an hour or two *every day* is expensive when every staff
person does it.  We charge for our time, and "billable hour" is a
key term here: customers don't pay for me to read news.  We tried
to say "no news during work time" but it just didn't work.  We
recently cut groups out of comp.* and news.* for this reason.

Not everybody is in college with lots of free time, disk space,
and net access.  There are more costs than you can see.

-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442      3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl@vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl

Nancy Reagan on ptr args with a prototype in scope: "Just say NULL"