response 25 of 124:

Feb 5 23:55 UTC 1995

[The history cf has a history of being anti-military, although
I believe that rule was relaxed recently.  I imagine the Civil War
could take up a whole conference...but if the history cf doesn't mind
having Civil War items, that's probably the place to start and see
how much interest there is.]

response 27 of 124:

Feb 6 04:17 UTC 1995

Ah, meta-drift...interesting

response 29 of 124:

Feb 6 05:20 UTC 1995

In a vain attempt to drag the discussion back to the original
topic, I'll point out that ANY user of Grex may post to
Usenet right now, right this very minute, by using the
Usenet re-mailer at decwrl.dec.com.  I would put instructions
here, but I've put them several other places in the
conferences, and nobody seems to pay attention.  >8(

response 31 of 124:

Feb 6 16:09 UTC 1995

   Unforunately, whatever we do for news, we have to plan on being
able to upgrade it.  Everything about news is increasing.  And the
net is expanding at a rate far faster than our modei are.  Even so
we need to make sure that whever we do, we can upgrade it with a
minimum of fuss.

response 33 of 124:

Feb 8 02:52 UTC 1995

That *may* happen.  Or fewer people will be motivated, because it will
likely mean Grex will be slower, have more busy signals, more maxxed
telnet sessions, and more complexity- and load-related system problems,
so Grex will seem like a lousier service to some.  Who knows!  :)

response 35 of 124:

Feb 8 21:18 UTC 1995

That would be pretty neat... maybe not necessarily as educational as 
USENet, but neat, nevertheless....

response 37 of 124:

Feb 10 04:04 UTC 1995

so if tin is such a hog, don't make it availble, that's for one.
for two, if you can get an IPI card, I have a couple of 1+ Gig
disks for it (Sabre V).
  
I was quite happy with rn myself, and now, using trn, it's better
but not +all+ that much slicker, imo.
  
Grex already decided not to carry sex.binaries and stuff like
that, so we could only be carrying grooups taht were specifically
requested - witha list avaialble of what's avaialble.
  
Grex without Usenet is provincial.
.

response 39 of 124:

Feb 10 07:23 UTC 1995

I think TS meant the HD's would be of use for news storage, not TIN
speedups :).  Dare I ask what an "IPI card" is?  The "provinciality"
doesn't bother me; there are lots of sources for usenet, but only one
Grex.  Though that's not to say I wouldn't *like* usenet on here!

response 41 of 124:

Feb 10 14:40 UTC 1995

   IPI is another company with its own interface for disks, I believe.
The problem with IPI or SMD disks, is that in these days of constantly
decreasing SCSI disk costs, the old watt-sucking disks of old become
harder and harder to justify.

   As as examble, our Eagle disk that we have sitting over at the
Dungeon formats to roughly 408M.  It eats 470w every hour.  At 11 cents
per kW/Hr, that comes to a $37.22 food bill for a 30 day month.  At
that price, in less than five months of operating it, we could buy a
medium-performance 330M SCSI disk.  In a year the food bill for that one
disk would buy a one gig drive.

   But the cost doesn't stop there.  If we install an Eagle in the
Dungeon we're going to have to deal with the extra expense of increasing
our airflow to cover that alomst-half-kW space heater.  The Dungeon is
nice right now in the cold winter, but I think we're going to have to
increase air flow by summer time, and we're definately going to have to
do this if we get one of those monsters on Grex again.

   Lastly, all these older drives are of questionable quality, really.
Since we don't have the specialized hardware needed to really test these
creatures, we can't say how much longer they'll last.  The reliablility
of SCSI disks is just incredible compared to the earlier generation of
SMD and other disks.

response 43 of 124:

Feb 10 15:09 UTC 1995

Yeah, imagine that, a European hierarchy which is only valid
one day of the year, and a Sunday at that.  >8)

response 45 of 124:

Feb 10 15:54 UTC 1995

I don't think it's totally a matter of how much disk we have, but also
of the ability of our Internet link to transfer the hundreds of
megabytes of news that come through every day.  If we had a T1 link
we'd be a lot better off, no doubt, but there are still some groups
that we wouldn't get because of their copyright-infringing content
(mainly the alt.binaries.pictures.* groups, I think).  So, unless the
Usenet group subscription policy changes, no, we still wouldn't get
all the groups even if we could.

response 47 of 124:

Feb 10 19:24 UTC 1995

rec.sex.fetish.ketchup?

response 49 of 124:

Feb 10 20:50 UTC 1995

        It facinates me that a system, which is giving me such a hard time
even considering me setting up Sympathy, has little compunction in
censoring newsgroups because they find "nudie-pictures" offensive.
<sidhe smiles sordonically>