On Sat, 25 Feb 1995 00:40:47 +0100 Eric Thomas said:
>On     Fri,    24     Feb    1995     18:35:18    GMT     John    Stewart
><[log in to unmask]> said:
>
>>Newsgroups are far  less of a hassle to support  and make more efficient
>>use of network bandwidth and machine resources.
>
>This is  a popular  myth, but  the hard reality  is that  it is  just the
>opposite. If you have a list with 200 subscribers, at most 200 copies are
>sent (actually with DISTRIBUTE a lot of bandwidth can be saved where it's
>most expensive,  but even  with direct  deliveries it  would be  only 200
>copies). With usenet there will be tens of thousands of copies of which a
>very tiny fraction  will ever actually get read. The  usenet model wastes
>both bandwidth  and cycles by  propagating enormous amounts of  copies of
>the messages  that noone actually  ever reads.  The same applies  to disk
>space. The  bytes taken  up by the  message on the  tens of  thousands of
>machines where  it will  not actually get  read are a  lot more  than the
>mailbox space the list would use up.  Replace 200 with 2000 or even 20000
>and  the equation  still  holds.  In reality  usenet  and  lists are  two
>different and complementary offerings.
 
Actually a merger of the two would be the ideal solution.  If usenet news
servers kept track of which lists were actually "subscribed" to, or Listserv
supported NNTP to/from it's archives, we would free up a lot of network
bandwidth.
 
[\] Jeff Kell, [log in to unmask]