On 8/16/02 10:06 PM, "Tom Neff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> That's exactly what germinated this idea. USENET fails to scale because it >> sends every byte every where in case anyone anywhere might want it. > > Actually, Usenet (I still remember the capswars on that one) scales well > because as long as Google Groups grabs the posting, Google Groups isn't USENET. It's a USENET archive, which is a much different beast. Now, if the entire universe used Google to read and post, you'd be right, but then it wouldn't be USENET any more. It'd be yahoogroups, only much bigger and designed right. > there forever. In the here and now, Usenet's biggest problem is that > specialty groups lack distribution, i.e., it DOESN'T send every byte > everywhere in general, it only sends what servers are configured to get. That's because those specialty groups are in many cases (and the number of cases are growing) not intended to be distributed -- we have to remember that USENET uses NNTP, but not everything that uses NNTP is USENET or wants to be. I think NNTP in non-propogating servers is a great hack. The biggest problem they have these days are suck feeds that propogate stuff incorrectly and muddle the boundaries. > I think that I would be as terrified of entrusting a list's long-term > archive to MySQL as any other possible software choice. Plain text would > rule for me. And how do you build a search engine? With grep? My lists.apple.com archive is heading towards 600,000 messages. Do you know how much fun it is to try to keep that sucker straight, much less browsable, indexed and searchable? Plain text works for small sets of data, and scales horribly. USENET even figured that out eventually and finally rebuilt the spool structures into something from this century... -- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.chuqui.com/ The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet: And they all died happily ever after
