🚀 go-pugleaf

zeke@fasttech.com (Bohdan Tashchuk) writes:

>In <1gofc3INNdb@milk.Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:

>>Competition is really going to drive netnews software into the 21st
>>century.

>But I think it's whimsical thinking that Cnews, INN, <??????>, will be
>working furiously to outdo each other.

I'm a real fan of Cnews.  3 years ago, I replaced B news with C news.
It went in easily and ran so fast on my little 386 that I thought it was
broken --- I thought it was dropping articles into /dev/null instead of
actually writing them out.

But I'm also a <big> fan of competition, even competition among public
domain programs.  Why?  Because a lot of times the answer to "why don't
you do it this way?" is "We do it our way.  You want it that way, do it
yourself."  And I think that's a valid answer.  And as we all know, most
of us will "suffer" with existing tools rather than write something new.
But sometimes "this way" is better than the existing way.

If INN has better ideas in some areas than Cnews, I'm willing to bet 
that G&H will steal them.  But only after it's been subjected to the
kind of torture testing that Cnews has gone through.  So "competition"
is more demonstration of ideas.  Isn't Usenet a marketplace of ideas?
If you don't like this idea, wander down the .newsrc and pick something
else.  What could be more appropriate for Usenet than competition among 
the transports?  Look at the feeping creaturism in the readers ...

It's 3 years later and I'm running the Peformance Release.  I've got
three times as many groups as I did then, and I'd bet the volume in each
group is close to triple that of 3 years ago.  expire runs pretty nicely,
but every so often I have to run "mkhistory" and that's a nightmare.  
INN's "makehistory" runs about 8 times faster.  INN integrates the
functionality of NNTP and Cnews and I'd much rather deal with a set of
programs from one author or pair of authors than two separate programs.
So I'm glad to hear that they might poke around with NNTP.  

>If G&H never released another line of code I'd be happy. I'm not waiting
>for them to help "drive netnews into the 21st century". They probably have
>real jobs.

I'm convinced that aliens "walk" among us.  Nobody could have real jobs,
plus write the kind of code that Geoff does or post as many well-written 
messages as Henry does ...

I'm really interested in how the NOV database will take off.  I would
gladly pay a 10% (or larger) premium over "optimum" database size if 
the database would be usable by multiple newsreaders.  

And the next release is probably going to be "the Toll Release".  A 
penny a message sent via Electronic Funds Transfer to their Swiss bank 
account ...

--
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