Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!oberon!sdcrdcf!trwrb!cadovax!gryphon!richard From: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Me and Peter on the binaries on the net Keywords: The NET Message-ID: <4571@gryphon.CTS.COM> Date: 22 Jun 88 00:24:39 GMT Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, Ca. Lines: 116 This is to respond to the ``Binaries on the net'' thread that has Peter's knickers in such a twist. First of all, the reason I've been so vehement about my opinions on this matter is Peter is guilty of overreacting. Mere suggestions from the news.* groups (which are for discussion about the NET and news software) Peter has taken as inevitablities. This is not borne out by fact or experience. To wit: 1) Binaries on the net. This is one of those great philosophical questions like ``is there a god''. There have always been binaries on the NET. There will always be binaries on the NET. This subject comes up every now and again, and came up this time because of two things: a) the binaries group for the IBM-PC was made unmoderated. This was a very bad thing. First because taste and decorum went out the door - somebody posted a 770K COMMERCIAL DEMO called ``PSPICE''. It wasnt usefull to a lot of people but my oh my did people notice. Much discussion ensued. (About 771K worth by my reckoning :-) Secondly, people started posting IBM-PC binaries, lots of them, whatever they could get their hands on. It's fine to post a binary of a program you wrote yourself but to just post everything you find on your local BBS is just plain idiocy. b) Somebody else asked for a newsgroup to post Compu$erve ``GIF'' pictures to. Increadably bad idea. First of all, Compu$erve seems to impose is usual draconian rules and limitiations as to what you can do with the pictures (whether or not they are legally binding), and secondly, the information content per byte of picture is about 10X lower than text. The result of this would be lots and lots and lots of pictures of big breasted women being posted. Let's not kid ourselves. The really annoying thing about this proposal is the proposer of the group claimed there were already .GIF pictures being posted in the IBM, Atari, MAC and Amiga groups. Hey hey, is it just me, or did I miss all the Amiga .GIF pictures ? The traffic in the IBM-PC group was four times the volume of the next most volumous group. So, at this point the collective intelligence of the news.* folks was raised into a ``anti-binary'' mindset. Currently there is a proposal underway to move all binaries into their own heirarchy, so we will have comp.*, sci.* rec.*, talk.*, and bin.*. This is a proposal made by one person, and supported by three others. It is very doubtfull this will ever happen. If a USENET site can't handle the traffic from a binary group, it should drop that group, or buy itself some more bandwith in the form of a faster modem (Telebit) or more disk space or a faster CPU. It's as simple as that. The Amiga binary group is about as tastefull as you can get. 2) Death of the micro groups. Another fallacy. I can sort of understand why Peter would feel this way. He only brings in comp.* (and I assume news.*) to his site. When he sees a note saying ``The net cannot survive with ALL THIS TRAFFIC - the micro groups have to go''. Yeah right. Two observations here: A) This happens every now and again when some site runs out of something - modem time (usually because of a 1200 baud modem) or disk space or CPU cycles. The less thinking of sys_admin's then scream in news.admin: ``My site can't handle the volume, talk.bizarre HAS TO GO''. You never see the obvious response: ``Look twit, if talk.* takes up too much space on your system, dont carry it'' because the knowledgeable people who say this do it in private email, like they are supposed to. B) In reality the net at large has more unused bamdwidth than anyone suspects, but even if this were not so, one cannont lose sight of the fact that the NET is a growing entity, and will continue to grow. In other words, if you want to remain a part of the NET, you have to be prepared to grow with it. Life, like the net is not static. 3) The NET is for UNIX, dammit! USENET may have been invented by and for UNIX, but that is no longer the case. It runs on PC's, IBM mainframes, Amiga's, all sorts of bizarre hardware, and while the underlying theme is UNIX, it is, the medium, not the message, anymore. If the entire backbone decided that only the comp.* groups would be passed by them (something they are not about to do, BTW) there would still exists all thise other groups. Out of 9000 systems on this NET, there exists a large number of people who care bout the net and have the resources to continue propogating the non-UNIX groups just as sharks teeth - when one is knocked out, another replaces it, almost immediately. So relax. USENET as you know it is not about to undergo any drastic changes overnight. Technology in the form of disks, memory, cpu's and modems improving will see to this. Oh, and since I can't resist a good flame when the oppertunity arises, Matt Dillon: Where in hell do you get off requesting a discussion between two people go to email in a POST ? Do you know the cost ? Hundreds if not thousands of dollars. I checked the Berkely Netiquette manual and it specifically states, P14, section 4, Para 2: ``Requests for heated discussions to be moved to Email will not be posted, they will be emailed to eliminate the massive cost waste you are complaining about''. -- "Shrimp Ahoy" richard@gryphon.CTS.COM {backbone}!gryphon!richard