Subject: Re: Could CDR-coding be on the way back? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 12 Dec 2000 21:01:17 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.arch Message-ID: <3185643677174540@naggum.net> * Paul Wallich | I expect that doesn't make it impossible; instead, if anything, it | makes it likely that Usenet-N will be some kind of horrific distributed | database that absolutely requires a flat address space to work... I expect that only some headers will be passed around very shortly, with really clever cache propagation protocols that makes clients retrieve an article by message-id on demand, ultimately from the originating server, cutting traffic and disk requirements down to what is actually used, and killing half the stupid spam problem, too. News traffic will follow the readers, not always flood the whole Net. And since we're all fully connected (in N months, anyway), the off-line generation of news readers and the desire to keep a full copy of today's cache/catch of USENET locally will simply go away. Nobody in their right mind has a desire to keep a "local copy" of the whole World Wide Web just to read an infinitesimally small fragment of it, yet that is what people do with USENET because getting out of how it has been done up to now is hard to get away from, but it really is no worse than some large ISP doing it the right way. The bonus of such a design is that most originating servers would be able to hold on to an article _much_ longer than the receiving servers of today are, and that, too, would relieve most people of the need to keep local copies of everything. #:Erik -- "When you are having a bad day and it seems like everybody is trying to piss you off, remember that it takes 42 muscles to produce a frown, but only 4 muscles to work the trigger of a good sniper rifle." -- Unknown