From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.future
Subject: Re: Newsreader supporting MIME
Date: 10 Nov 92 06:15:31 GMT
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada

In article <1992Nov9.132448.26542@rdg.dec.com> kostis@frsmic.enet.dec.com (Kosta Kostis) writes:
|
|In article <3949@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca>, clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes...
|>In article <1992Nov6.171225.4595@rdg.dec.com> kostis@frsmic.enet.dec.com (Kosta Kostis) writes:
|>>>minor benefit of being 8-bit clean.

|>>It may be a minor benefit for you, but it's not minor for people outside
|>>the english speaking community - and that's the majority in the world.

|>This may well be true, but irrelevant - something like 80% of the people
|>on the net are in the USA.

|Irrelevant? I'd call that ignorance! There are much less US citizens in
|the world than let's say european. Did you ever notice that?  8-)
|And the Internet, especially in europe is growing real fast - I'd guess
|faster than the US part of it. Maybe it won't take much time and less
|than 50% of the people on the net reside in the USA.  ;-)
|Nah, it *will* take some time - but we're coming...  8-)

I call it ignorance too.  I'm merely pointing out the reality that the vast
majority of the *current* sites are American, and that change, while it
will come, will be slow.  Because it makes little difference to the
Americans.

|>>Poor maintenance is no excuse. If all things would go that slow, imagine
|>>the impact on science and todays life. Well, I just think we should move
|>>our lazy b*s and do something about it.

|>All things *do* go that slow.  Or slower.  How long was it before the
|>Wright brother's invention was widely used?

|If you don't push things (again and again), *nothing* ever moves.
|Should "all things go that slow" be the US mentality nowadays, I doubt
|your new president will be successful in any way... Come on!
|I can't believe that. Are you already that tired over there?  :-)
|Hey, wasn't it the USA who brought the first man to the moon some
|time ago?

*My* president?  We don't have a president.  Oh, you think *I'm* American.
Oh my.  That's a good one.  Didn't you notice my email address?  My
Organization line?  While we didn't send anybody to the moon, we did
just win the World Series ;-)

|>BNews hasn't been supported in depth for at least four years.  The last patch
|>to it was about three years ago.  The author of Bnews hasn't been running
|>it for at least two.  Bnews at the very latest patch level has a number of
|>identified bugs.  And some of them cause grief to many sites when tripped
|>over.
|
|Well, OK. It's *not* maintained anymore, but still distributed, it's close
|to collapse, so replace it.

No, it's not "distributed" any more.  You can find it if you want, but
nobody is actively pushing it.  It's not close to collapse.  It works
just fine in many cases.  Why fix something that ain't busted?

Yes it is a dog.  A *real* dog.  And I'm still running it on my own
machine because I don't have the space for anything else at the moment.
On the other hand, as part of my job, I install news systems - I certainly
ain't installing B news.

|>The fact of the matter is that there are many sites running software even
|>older than 5 years.  Rick's latest survey turned up a number of 2.9 Bnews
|>sites, and that was several revs before even moderated groups were supported!
|>And on UNIX, Bnews, at revisions 4 years or older, still makes up nearly
|>half of the installed base.

|What do you call "a number"?

Several hundred sites predating B2.11.

|How "important" were those sites (in terms of affected news article flow)?
|Are you sure one can't convince the system administrators to get and install
|new software?

Quite.

|Has anyone bothered to try that? And again, and again?

That's not very nice.

|>Railing about poor maintenance is simply not going to do any good.  To
|>be used, 8bit penetration must be near 100%.  Maybe in a couple of years
|>it will be practical to ship 8 bit when INN and C news cover the vast
|>majority.  Then it's just the big non-UNIX crowd with some software even
|>more primitive than B.2.9 to worry about.

|If you don't start to go into the "right" direction, you will never get to
|where you want to go.

Of course not.  I'm not installing any more B news installations are I?

|All I'm asking for, is that those who need 8 Bits to encode theirs mails
|and articles should be given the chance to do that. The transport mechanisms
|have allways been 8 Bit channels - just RFC 821/822 invented the cripeling.

No.  An ASCII mindset is what led to such botches as vi's &0x7f.

|I think I better worry about people that are convinced there's no way to
|change things (in a chaotic network)... =;^)

I think you should.  Go find one convinced of that and I'll lend you
a hammer to hit him with.
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
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