response 1 of 75:

Mar 12 07:30 UTC 1996

Personally, I don't think we should.

This is the kind of service people should look to ISPs and freenets for.
I'd prefer to see Grex evolving away from that and more toward being
primarily a virtual community.  I think this consumes too many resources
for something that is so peripheral to what I see as our main mission.

response 3 of 75:

Mar 12 12:26 UTC 1996

In the early days of Grex, usenet news was a big selling point
for grex. But grex and the rest of the online world have changed
radically since then. I find myself leaning toward Jan's way of
thinking.

response 5 of 75:

Mar 12 13:54 UTC 1996

I first came to grex because of the news feed.  It went down literaly days
later.  I stayed away froa while as a result, but then I discovered party,
and finally I ended up here.  I would really like to follow a couple usenet
groups, but I don't think I want them from grex so bad.  It would be quite
a drain on grex to follow all that stuff on the *new* wire.  If I decide I
just can't live without the asm.x86 group any longer, I'll find some other
way to get it.  Oops, ^^^^  up there a bit should be 'for a' not froa. 
Sheesh.  

response 7 of 75:

Mar 12 16:29 UTC 1996

It's hard for me to decide on this one, since on the one hand, the
people who are currently here have little interest in Usenet.
On the other hand, that's probably because anyone who came here
with Usenet in mind is long gone, and the only users left are the
ones who either don't want Usenet, or have found other places to
get it.  (I fall into the latter category, I'm sure there are others.)

On the other hand, the reason I personally got involved with Grex
was the Usenet feed.  If that hadn't been here, I might still be
on M-Net instead.  And I hope people think I've contributed
something to the Grex community.  >8)  I still think it's a good way
to get people involved in Grex who normally might not.

The main problem, of course, is the extra bandwidth this would
require, and the Sun 3 which would better serve us as a mail machine.

I`m torn on this one.

response 9 of 75:

Mar 12 17:33 UTC 1996

   I most strongly support the idea of getting news back here.

   Grex is a *conferencing* system.  Usenet is the greatest conferencing
system the world has, todate.

   As I see it, there are two models for conferencing: local and global.
The local model we're all familiar with, that of the PicoSpan/Confer
style of information transfer.  It works well for groups of up to a
couple of thousand, but then breaks down.

   The other style, global is best shown by usenet.  It has the
ability to handle a much larger group of people, by at least 5
orders of magnitude.  I can't get enough local people to talk about
some of the things that I'd love to talk about here on Grex.  Oh,
I can get some, but not the *vast* audience that the Usetnet model
provides.

   Grex needs to be a part of that.  It's pretty embarressing that
we aren't, really.

   Speaking as one who has used usenet since 1982, the net has always
been full of A) noise, B) "useless" people and comments, C) Flames,
D) general worthlessness, E) people decrying for the "old days" when
"the net was better", F) People saying that the net can't possibly
continue.

   But Usenet has also always had A) wonderful people contributing
marvelous conversations to things, B) provided an unbelieveable
resource for technical questions, C) information about things/interests
that I've never seen anywhere else, and D) a sense of gobal community
that Grex can't possibly equal, because it is different.

   Does it take resources to run Usenet?  Certainly.  Will it attract
prople?  Absolutely.  Way back when we had usenet we had people
joining us for net access--that will still be true today.  And I
don't see that as bad, at all.  It's conferencing, pure and simple.

   I have always thought that we were going to get news back, starting
from the day that we pulled the plug on the Eagle disk when the Sun-3
first had disk problems with the 2G disk.  I will be more than disappointed
if Grex comes to a collective decision that getting back on the net
isn't worth it.  I think others will be, too.

response 11 of 75:

Mar 12 20:40 UTC 1996

Does anyone know where HVCN stands on this?  In my mind, this is really the
sort of service freenets should be in...giving network access to people.  We
do have one foot in that business (eg, with email), and I don't think we
should get entirely out of it, but I'm not enthusiastic about expanding our
presence there.

response 13 of 75:

Mar 12 21:32 UTC 1996

  Anybody can telnet from grex to nether.net, run newuser and tin and
be reading usenet within minutes.  If any newfeed grex gets is really
slow, it wouldnt be worth it.  But if its decent, like nether's most of
the time, it could complement some of the topical conferences and
be used as a means of bringing new people to grex.  For instance, if
if someone is reading alt.books on usenet and happens to mention that
grex has a terrific little books conf thats freely accesible, people
might be lured here.  

I see usenet and e-mail as same-kind services, offering people access
to communicate on the 'net.  So I dont see the rationale in saying its
okay to offer one for free and not the other.  So I think both should
be offered (providing its a decent newfeed), and either both should be
open to everyone or both should be member perks.

response 15 of 75:

Mar 12 23:12 UTC 1996

Re 13 - Does nether.net have open newuser registration?  Last
time I checked, they didn't.

response 17 of 75:

Mar 13 00:57 UTC 1996

HVCN has tossed around the idea of providing Usenet, and to be honest, I
don't remember where we left it. When HVCN and Grex were considering
cooperating to establish joint infrastructure (WIN), usenet was part of 
the shared part. 

response 19 of 75:

Mar 13 01:56 UTC 1996

  I don't think comparisons to Nether are particularly useful, but
last I heard, Nether had no dial-in lines, free rent, a free Ethernet
link to the Internet, a tremendously faster computer than Grex has,
and fewer simultaneous users.  So while its "budget" may be smaller,
that's not an accurate reflection of what Grex would have to pay
to achieve the same thing.
 
  I think a one week spool of a "full" Usenet feed requires around
20 gigabytes of disk space.  While Grex is planning on not offering
many of the largest groups, it will still take a lot of space.
Also, the newsreader "tin" takes a lot of memory to run, and a lot
of people would read news longer than they'd read e-mail (Grex
staffers excepted, of course!!)
 
  While mail also takes a huge amount of resources (CPU usage,
bandwidth, and staff time), just because we offer it does not mean
that we should offer similarly resource-draining services.  Grex's
resources are limited.

response 21 of 75:

Mar 13 03:23 UTC 1996

   Charles, it might be possible to get a Sun-4 to do both news
(running inn) and mail processing.  If we do anything like this,
we want to get another Sun-4 CPU card.  Not only are they cheaper
than before (I've seen $175 now for a 4/200), but both machines
would be running on the same architecture.

   We don't need 20G of disk for a partial feed.  Just about
everyone gets a partial feed these days.  If we eliminate the
binaries / pictures groups as we did before, that will cut
the size down *a lot*.

  I have to disagree about substancial amounts of time for
running a feed; inn is *wonderful*.  It is simply the best
news processing system that has come along.  This is not to
say that there aren't maintenance issues involved, because
there are.  But we've grown out staff levels, and there is
nothing to say that we can't get a news person on board.

response 23 of 75:

Mar 13 06:45 UTC 1996

        A seven day more-or-less-complete feed, including the binaries groups,
but not the clari groups (since those are paid for from ClariNet) is around
ten gigabytes and about one and a half million inodes these days, give or
take a little depending on the expires and such.  'Sat's a lot of resources,
easily a thousand dollars' worth of hardware and maintenance.  That might have
an impact on whether or not it is a commercially viable community service.