Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>]

On 8/28/18 1:48 PM, Michael Stone wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 05:02:08PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
> > Lots of people download files from FTP servers but that's a wholly 
> > different
> > culture and use case than Usenet provided for in practice. And who 
> > said that
> > binaries (whether legal or illegal) was not a big part of Usenet at 
> > its height?
>
> Anyone who argues that NNTP is the most efficient thing around? I 
> guarantee that for large files FTP is more efficient, and that when 
> one person is sending a file to a small number of other peopl, FTP is 
> dramatically more efficient. I guess NNTP binary distribution is more 
> efficient in some theoretical world where exactly the right 
> subscriptions are distributed to exactly the right people via local 
> transit servers, with no reposts. We can probably just write the 
> volume of such transfers off as noise in the real world.

NNTP is exceptionally efficient for large scale message distribution - 
when compared to, say, a mailing list server that sends a message per 
subscriber.

For binary files, something like bit torrent is clearly more efficient.  
Though, a while back, somebody implemented a rather efficient mechanism 
that used NNTP for distributing header information, and a distributed 
hash table for the files themselves. Saved a lot of bandwidth.

Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra