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