🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <EMV.91Jun17014339@bronte.aa.ox.com> emv@msen.com 
(Ed Vielmetti) writes:

>That would be Mark Moraes, please make sure you give him proper credit!

Whoops! Yes, the files say Mark, and your message accompanying them said
Mark, I guess there is no special reason I should continue calling him
Tony :-) 

I will also take your earlier advice to get in touch with him.

>   Further substantial reductions in traffic could be achieved by
>   providing larger capacity cache and mirror sites and locating them
>   more at national and regional gateways that have expensive links to
>   the rest of the internet.
>
>Well, that's a nice thought, but I don't believe that you're going to
>get any substantial amount of funding for that purpose any time soon,
>at least not from public sources.  They seem to be more interested in
>subsidizing bandwidth, not building applications which would add value
>to the network and help people use it.  On this side of the Pacific
>we're starting to hear the T3! T3! T3! chants, as if simply
>transporting more bits around would make the network better.  Compare
>the cost of T3 lines with the meager resources being thrown at (or not
>thrown at) archivist work and other projects designed to add
>organization to the net, and it's rather discouraging.

I got a note from an AARNET coordinator saying they were planning some
high capacity cache sites (and might be interested in the software),
so the situation isn't all that bleak. (Though reducing traffic is
closer to increasing bandwidth than it is to adding value etc.)

Still, I agree with your general theme. The benefits from funds
diverted to archiving would greatly exceed those from further 
increases in bandwidth etc. I suspect it is partly a problem of
the bandwidth returns being easier to quantify or just that installing
bandwidth is more straight forward (and does not involve so much in
the way of policy complications about whose needs get priority etc).

Another aspect is the usual problem of funding "public goods", with
the not unusual result of "private affluence and public squalor".

The recent news on WAIS and PROSPERO looks very promising as regards
solutions to most of the technical barriers to accessing network
resources. But no amount of automatic searching can fully substitute
for proper cataloging. We still need simple things like keeping
track of version numbers and patches etc to save people a lot of time.

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