On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Leo Mauler [email protected] wrote:
I'm just pointing out that it is a better way for Joe Average to download binaries than bittorrent, for lots of reasons all beneficial to Joe Average, be he the uploader or the downloader.
And I'm pointing out that it's wasteful, and poorly designed for today's modern 24/7 Internet.
I don't care if it's more useful for you, it's not good for the ISPs. You seem to forget that this stuff costs money, and a service has to be good for both the servers as well as the clients. Netnews is not, and that's why it's slowly going away. This is a good thing.
Instead of spending so much energy bitching about it, you ought to be working on a replacement, if, as you say, the alternatives are so deficient.
There's a difference between supporting something and just admiring its technological advantages to the end user. I support NetNews' text-only groups, but I merely admire the system of binary distribution through NetNews. I'd still want text-only NetNews to stick around, and if the price is binary NetNews vanishing, then so be it, despite its technological advantages to end users in the sharing of binary files.
You've obviously never run a production INN server. There is NOTHING admirable about how it works. It doesn't work well and it's a total bitch to manage. Perhaps someone completely rewrote it since I last managed one (doubt it), but it was a hoary beast back then, very hackish and unable to support many common situations well (like multiple volumes).
You only see the client side. I've run the server. Your client may be pretty and you may like the side you see, but the server side is ugly, wasteful, and stupid. It's bad technology now. It needs taken out back and shot.
Amiga technology made really great computers, but IBM PC technology ended up working better for me. I can admire Amiga without desiring that it return and replace something I really do want.
Okay, let's use your analogy. What you're asking for is like asking Time Warner Cable to _support Amigas_. Netnews and Amigas were super cool in their day, but now they're just items for the computer museums. Let them retire.
Regardless, I'm going to call "Hitler" on this one. It's pretty clear this won't go anywhere, and I doubt everyone else wants to listen to it much more. Feel free to get the last word.
J.