🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C182FK.GJ9@visix.com>, abstine@toy4x4.visix.com (Art Stine) writes:
> I don't see any diff to getting them on
> tape or over the net, except that: 1) it costs DEC less to distribute over
> the net 2) we can get it alot quicker...

This is a gratuitous statement. A small 300ft tape holds a couple dozen
megabytes of data, uncompressed. The post office will (in Europe) deliver
overnight for 3 to 10 dollars, and there are private carriers which can do
better and/or cheaper, especially in large urban areas and if you mail a lot of
tapes from the same place every day.

Now look at your "cheap and fast" Internet solution. Every day there are
hundreds to thousands of customers requesting a patch for one product or
another. Nowadays small self-documented source patches are a rarity, the normal
patch replaces a number of object modules and includes instructions and
installation procedures. If you want all these customers to be able to retrieve
this data during working hours (if they do it overnight you won't be faster
than the post office) and at a reasonable speed (say, 10 kilobytes per second,
and that's already a looooooooong FTP for my little 300ft tape), you have to
have a hell of a fast Internet connection, which you have to hire people to
take care of. Then you still have to keep a backup delivery mechanism
operational in case the Internet is down and your customers can't wait. And
when all that is ready, you'll find out many segments of the Internet aren't
quite big enough to provide decent service to your customers, and who do you
think they will complain to?

  Eric