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.
 
  Eric