[272] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: pointless bickering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eliot)
Mon Mar 4 17:55:23 1991
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 91 14:31:28 -0800
From: lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot)
To: jsq@tic.com
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
Jsq writes, in response to Barry:
>>you don't know how annoying it is to have someone on a mailing list
>>say "don't talk about quipu here, that's for the quipu list" and to
>>realize that you don't get the quipu list and don't know how to get it.
>That's a good example of what LISTSERV does that Internet mailing
>lists don't. LISTSERV also allows people to subscribe and
>unsubscribe automatically, does automatic archiving and retrieval by
>mail, and distributes itself among several servers that keep
>themselves in synch.
Jeez, John. I subscribe and unsubscribe to netnews groups all the time
without additional intervention. Netnews can be used for small
distributed discussions, and it happens all the time. On the other
hand, I wouldn't argue that LISTSERV has NO benefits over netnews;
just that no one has seen fit to take the effort to write a LISTSERV
because of those benefits. I would be the first to agree that there
are some tools that USENET could use, that are either not widely
available or not in existence. A lot of them are somewhat little
hacks, never seeing wide release. Ferinstance, a while ago, I wrote a
small tool to archive rec.humor.funny, compress it, and make it
available for anonymous FTP.
It's not very fleshed out, so I haven't released it. I guess it would
help if I were funded to spend my time on such things, but I'm not.
Perhaps NREN should put some money into these software issues.
--
Eliot Lear
[lear@turbo.bio.net]
