On 8/16/02 10:06 PM, "Tom Neff" <tneff@grassyhill.net> 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
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/
The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet:
And they all died happily ever after
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