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]