response 25 of 61:

Oct 3 21:04 UTC 1995

   HP is one of the better companies around, for disks and just about
all other electronics.  $395 for 2G is a good deal.  So even if we wanted
to have 4G on the news system it would only be $790.
   I'm looking for both kinds of 32M cards.  I haven't found any of
the more useful variety yet.

response 27 of 61:

Nov 8 06:01 UTC 1995

  A brief update on the Pagesat satellite Usenet newfeed system:
They shifted the user end of the business to another company.  No
interruption in service though.  They recently switched satellites,
and are currently phasing in a new higher-speed system - broadcasting
to both systems for a year, while people upgrade one of the pieces
of hardware.  The satellite dish and other equipment costs $800, the
data feed costs $480/year, and many systems need a new serial port
that can handle 115.2kbps.  Currently they're transmitting around
400 megs a day, and the system maxxes out at 1.2GB per day.  (I'm not
sure, but I think that's compressed data - it would expand to a larger
figure).  When Usenet outgrows that capacity, they put big binary
posts in a non-priority queue.

response 29 of 61:

Nov 18 02:51 UTC 1995

Warning! You are standing in danger! Go to General Quarters!

response 31 of 61:

Nov 19 14:43 UTC 1995

  <ignore the following if you're a computer nerd, and don't nit-pick :->
 
  Re 28, you can pick up computer jargon reading computer mags, intro
books, or talking with friendly computer geeks, among other ways.
 
  A couple terms to help understand the above discussion: "bps" means "bits
per second," a measure of how quickly data is transmitted.  (For example,
a 2400 bps modem transmits data at a certain speed).  Kbps (kilo-bps) is
thousands of bps, and Mbps (mega-bps) is millions of bps.  You'll hear
talk of 28.8 Kbps modems, which transmit data twice as fast as a 14.4
Kbps modem, and ten times as fast as a 2400 bps modem.  The 115 Kbps speed
discussed above is for a high speed satellite data link (a satellite dish
passes info to a decoder which sends it to a computer).  Local area networks
(LANs) commonly transmit data at 10 Mbps, much faster than is possible over
ordinary phone lines.
 
  The MB and GB terms are more common; Megabyte and Gigabyte are millions
and trillions of bytes, respectively - a common measure of data storage.
Often "megs" and "gigs" are used for short (8 megs of RAM, two gig hard
drive).   Incidentally, a byte of data is the same as 8 bits of data, so
a 28,800 bps modem can transmit 28,800 divided by 8, or 3,600 bytes, per
second.
 
  Usenet, a big Internet discussion area, has 400 "megs" of data that people
enter in its main discussion groups every day.  The entire 400 megs is
copied to thousands of computers daily.  Part of the challenge of providing
usenet access on Grex is how to get that much data onto Grex's hard disks.
 
 
 
  <stop ignoring if you're a computer nerd, if you want>
 
  Re 30, someone in Pagesat's newsgroup was complaining of the unavailability
of high speed VME-bus serial ports.  If true, that could be an inconvenience
if the usenet feed goes to the Sun 3.  Probably an external serial-to-
ethernet device would be needed?

response 33 of 61:

Nov 19 15:25 UTC 1995

1.) The usenet feed wouldn't go into a serial port on the sun-3, it would
go into a serial port on gryphs, and then over the ethernet to the sun-3..

I'll nit-pick it I want to:
2.) Modems send data asynchronously using a protocol that pads every byte
    of data with a single START bit, and a single STOP bit. Therefore, a
    28.8K modem sends 2880 bytes of data per second, not 3600.

This has produced the long standing confusion over the terms bit-rate and
baud-rate(which in itself is a misnomer. "baud" implies "rate"). "Bit-rate"
means the rate of transfer of user data bits, "baud" means the rate of
transfer of all raw bits including control bits. So, a 28.8Kbaud modem
has a raw transfer rate of 28800 total bits per second, which produces
a byte-rate of 2880 and an effective bit-rate of 23040.

response 35 of 61:

Nov 19 17:13 UTC 1995

But sometimes simplification leads to people obtaining knowledge that they
just *know* is correct, "an expert I know told me so", but in the end they
interpret litterally what was simply meant to be an example or hypothetical
case. Therefore, I strive for accuracy all the time. In the short term it
makes things harder, but I think in the long term I come out ahead.

response 37 of 61:

Nov 19 18:56 UTC 1995

This, truly, is scary stuff!

What is more scary is the noise to signal ratio.
Less than 40,000 characters per day of that usenet data is actually useful,
and not just someone flaming, nitpicking, spamming, defending an earlier
post against a flame or nitpick, or just plain off-topic.

I made up the number of course, but I may be close.

response 39 of 61:

Nov 19 23:36 UTC 1995

The trick is, how do you define "useful", and then, whose definition do
you use?

response 41 of 61:

Nov 20 06:59 UTC 1995

I think Chinet is using the Pagesat system.  We might want to talk to somebody
there about it.

response 43 of 61:

Nov 27 04:08 UTC 1995

Also Re #31:  Actually, a gig is a BILLION bytes, not a trillion.  Ant that's
an AMERICAN billion; to someone in Britain, a gig is a thousand million, and
a thousand gigs is a billion.  :-)

Everything you always wanted to know about big numbers, but were afraid to
ask.

response 45 of 61:

Nov 30 02:46 UTC 1995

A trillion bytes is a terabyte, in case anyone cares.

I saw an internal new SCSI 1GB drive for $269 this week. (Quantum 3.5")

response 47 of 61:

Dec 1 14:36 UTC 1995

It'll be interesting to see if words like terabyte, petabyte, and exabyte one
day become as familiar as megabyte and gigabyte are today.  At the rate
computer stuff has been increasing in size, the day probably isn't all that
far away.

response 49 of 61:

Dec 1 17:56 UTC 1995

What would be an overbyte?