On 2/05/2006, at 11:04 PM, Richard Stevenson wrote:
On Tue, 2 May 2006, Mark Foster wrote:
I am interested to see whether there is an opinion that regardless of the 'how' this was done by Xtra, that this may infact have been a 'smart' idea (from a business POV). One assumes you take into account the business overheads of running a usenet server in the first place, and that there is a noticable benefit to the company by cancelling the service...
I'm not overly happy, but I certainly understand their point of view. The overheads are probably huge - certainly when I was in a position to know, the news server was one big-ass box, probably the biggest single box in the entire environment. The monthly support costs (power, cooling, rent of rack space, support agreements) alone would be fairly crippling, and noises were being made back then about the volume of incoming international traffic required to feed the thing. I'm only mildly annoyed about them cutting it off because I never get time to read Usenet any more anyway. I barely get time to read the things I'm really interested in, like this list.
Side note: anyone ever had to find decent connectivity in the area between Hamilton and Cambridge? It's nasty.
Cheers
Richard
I used to run FidoNet nodes and then NNTP servers in the 90s. The quality of the groups were good, and traffic volumes were do-able. Today its not financially lucrative to run a NNTP server, let alone the possible implications in "hosting gigs of porn and warez". If one were to carry all or most of the groups with a day or so of messages, a cyclic filesystem would loop around in hours on a decent storage device. RSS / IMAP / and websites can fully replace the functionality of NNTP for a fraction of the cost and do it with more reliability and efficiency. The death of NNTP is eminent and I think this latest status from Xtra is evidence. Technology aside, the web/Internet is too big to organize into structural folders and hierarchies. Let's let NNTP die like Archie, Veronica, and Gopher, while building some cool services that are "use"ful. Cheers, Truman