Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!oliveb!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..."
Message-ID: <2293@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 11 Jul 88 16:46:24 GMT
References:  <2263@epimass.EPI.COM> 
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 64

In article  webber@aramis.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes:
>Mail is very reliable these days.   If you send out a message and it doesn't
>make it and then you resend it, it won't make it again.  What could be more
>reliable?  What the net is in desperate need of is a list of ``dumb'' mail
>sites that are willing to send messages where the sender asks rather
>than play their own silly games.

Most sites running routing mailers have them configured not to
reroute all-bang paths.  Unfortunately, you're at Rutgers, so it's
impossible for you to specify exactly where mail should go, since
Rutgers does such aggressive rerouting.  That is, even if I told you
a working path, your local mailers might decide to rewrite it for
you.  I can avoid mailing through Rutgers; you can't.  Sorry.

>If I add a fixed-cost leased line to site X, I have added just one
>such connection to the overall cost-flow of the net.  If I add myself
>to something like nsfnet, it is equivalent to setting up hundreds of
>direct connect fixed-cost leased lines simultaneously.  The difference
>is orders of magnitude.

Yep.  Ain't it great?  Of course there are a lot of things that are
still variable-cost: CPU cycles, disk space.

>< <   3) It has increased the centralization of the backbone.
>< This is flat-out wrong.  It LESSENS the clout of the backbone.  ...
>
>This is FLAT-OUT WRONG.  The problem has NEVER been that the backbone
>had any REAL clout as far as being ``needed'' for the net.  The problem
>is that sites run by administrative types orient themselves behind authority
>figures and invest anyone claiming to be responsible leadership with
>de facto control.

Oh, give me a break.  Do you mean that a lot of sys admins take Gene
Spafford's list as the official one?  This was true before NNTP came
around.  Are you claiming sys admins are more willing to accept the
concept of the "backbone veto?"  Not the ones I talk to, quite the
contrary.  A lot of us are rather pissed off by some of the recent
assertions of backbone power.

>  NNTP traffic increases the number of such sites controlling
>communications of the net.  Just at a time when individual home users could
>afford to be news and mail trafficers, you have all these major institutions
>saying ``Don't bother, we can use arpanet or nsfnet or what have you and
>ship it all around cheaper and faster than you could ever hope to.''  

There are quite a few individual or small users shipping lots of news
and mail around, especially in the SF Bay Area.  And no backbone site
can stop me from setting up a news feed.  The net isn't run by "major
institutions" anyway; connections are set up and maintained by
individuals, using resources of these institutions.

>[ see .signature below ]
>Who cares that it was Tom Robbins who said it?  I WANT A FULL CITATION!

It's from "Jitterbug Perfume", a book with enough pithy .signature
quotes to keep me going for quite a while.  You'll have to locate the
page number yourself.


-- 
- Joe Buck  {uunet,ucbvax,pyramid,}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
jbuck@epimass.epi.com	Old Arpa mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net
	If you leave your fate in the hands of the gods, don't be 
	surprised if they have a few grins at your expense.	- Tom Robbins