On Wed, 15 Feb 1995 08:13:52 CST Patrick Douglas Crispen said: >Alright, I'll bite ... > >I'd really like to know the reasons behind Penn State's and Georgia Tech's >recent decision to turn off (or at least severely curtail) their sites >mail distribution lists. I just can not understand why any site would do this. > Try COST. At usc, we axed the non-USC staff/faculty owned lists (i.e. external lists), and generally reject non-academic interest lists. We did this because listserv traffic (mailer, smtp, rscs, vmnet) was consuming 1/3 of our cpu, especially during prime shift. All this, without contributing a dime. This was because of the high volume of data. (If you care to donate, say $50k or so, I am sure my manager will reconsider). Have you ever tried to explain that the professors research job is running slow because of an application that isnt doing a thing for the university? >It seems to this newbie (who does not know the whole story) that these sites >are taking the "scorched earth" approach to this problem ("We only have >24 modem lines, the lines are always busy, and the people are complaining? why dont you personally pay for more? >Hell, I have a solution : unplug the mainframe from the wall. That will We did. We axed MVS about a year and a half ago. Our VM system will most likely go the same way, in about another year or so. Why? Cost! jr (john riehl) (There still is no free lunch)