From: davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs
Subject: Re: Sad to say...
Date: 13 Sep 92 23:14:16 GMT
Organization: Aegis Society, Kyoto Japan

elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us (Edward J. Branley) writes:

>davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane) writes:

>> >You're on the right track.  The biggest problem for all of the fido-technolo
>> >nets is the costs involved.  All of the fido sites are dialup lines, no T1
...
>> On the other hand, it means that sysops willing to spend money can
>> control the flow of traffic, something I call "economic copyrighting" :-)

>This is *exactly* what has happened with the Fidonet echomail backbone.  Those
>who are in positions of authority are the ones who have the bucks.  If they
>don't want something to be transmitted, they don't have to allow it.  The
>reason they got into co-ordinator positions in the first place is because they
>had the only fast modem in their area, or a hard drive big enough to pull in a
>full feed.

I can understand the position they found themselves in. And given the
Fido penchant for wanting things free/low-cost to the user, I can
understand how it happened. It's one thing to provide stuff free to
others when most of the cost is your time, but ... 

In my case, give people choices: if they want it to be free, then
they have to incur the time=money cost of putting up what others
want to read. If they want to have somebody else provide them with
stuff to read, they have to incur the yen=money to cover their 
out-of-pocket costs.

...

>> Do you have any information on the volume in k-bytes for Fido?
>hmmm...well, it's been about eight months since I took a fidonet feed into this
>system, so bear in mind that these numbers are that old, but I was taking in
>somewhere around 1-2 meg of .ZIPped echomail packets a day.  That unzips out to
>around 2-4 meg.  

Well, hmmm, occording to the last two posts I just replied to that's
pretty low: one person was doing 15-30 MB/day. So there is Fidonet traffic
and there is Fidonet traffic :-)

> What you have to remember is that fidonet-technology nets
>handle transfer of binary files quite differently than Usenet.  Here we encode
>a file and post its components as news articles.  Fido-technology mailers
>handle direct binary transfer, so that could add several meg/day to a feed if
>one was in several of the file distribution nets.  File transfer is one area
>where the fact that fidonet is more homogenous in terms of machine type is an
>asset.  Rarely are source files transmitted (except in programing-related
>areas) because PC binaries are really all that is necessary.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'encode a file' as in encrypt? I think
not.  As in uuencode? I think not. As in compress? If so, then there
isn't all that much difference between USENET news which goes as
batched/compressed archives of 60-100K. *Mail* ususally goes unbatched
and uncompressed unless you have something like uubatch installed (which
Aegis uses for it's link to the U.S.).

Could you explain what you mean a bit more? BTW, this isn't just
idle curiousity: there are some people here talking about an FTN
over which stuff would be ported to local machines. While I myself
think that UUCP links are "easier" (because I understand them :-)
other people think FT is easier so I'd really like to know.

>It's also easier to discriminate in terms of what you want and don't want to
>carry in fidonet.  For example, my news feed only has 256 bytes for a feeds
>entry for my site.  As a result, it's much easier for them if I just take full
>heirarchies rather than trying to select individual groups.  This means I'm
>taking in more than I really need to.  No biggie, it's a free feed and a free
>call.  In fidonet, however, there are several good control programs that a
>sysop could use to handle additions/deletions of echos from their feeds.  Thus,
>it's easy for a sysop to only take the echos he/she's interested in, keeping
>the overall phone bill down as much as possible.  Also, most fidonet sites now
>use ZIP compression, which does a much better job than compress.

Are you saying individual sysops can control their feeds from the
receiving side? If so, this sound really great. I'd like to be able
to do that with USENET. 

As for the different rates for compression, my tests say there is no
clear winner with zip, lharc or compress. It all depends on what the
data is. USENET typically runs compress as zip/lharc are slower under
UNIX (they have run faster under DOS as they have been optimized for it).

>As to overseas stuff, Randy would be the better person to ask, as he does a lot
>of that.  I used to have several sysops who would call my system from Europe to
>get Novell stuff that I would get off of Compu$pend, but that was because the
>Compu$pend charges in Europe were actually more expensive than calling me.

I'm curious: how much stuff were they typically getting on a daily
basis?  How much were they paying in telco charges? And who was
paying, exactly, the sysop of the users, both?

Thanks for all the information, it's making the picture a lot clearer!

Dave

--
Dave McLane 
JUNET: davidg@aegis.or.jp (ONLY within Japan: post otherwise)
Nagaokakyoshi, Kyoto Japan Tel: +81-75-951-1168 Fax: +81-75-957-1087



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