On 19/12/2005 11:27 AM, Upscale wrote:

Assuming your figures are correct, then it would have been a classy act for
them to continue the providing of usenet access for those old-timers who use
it. Also assuming your figures are correct, the small percentage of users
who use it would be consuming negligible bandwidth. Rogers could have
capitalized on it as a "reward" for the continued support of their
customers.

I don't speak for Rogers, but at my place the issue is not one of
bandwidth, and hasn't been one for quite some time. Hell, we've got 1.3
Gigabits/sec of that. The issue is maintenance of the news servers,
keeping the software up-to-date, patched, etc., redundancy of server
hardware and network connections, what to do about the alt.* crud and
the binary news groups, staff who actually understand the whole thing,
and on and on. I know there are tons of geeks out there who will say,
"hell, it's trivial to run an NNTP server". Anything is trivial if you
know how, but providing a robust production service is never trivial, no
matter what the underlying technology is. It all comes at a cost, and
our arguments here about removing old services are always based on that.

I'd still wager that a very significant proportion of Rogers' customers
don't have a clue what Usenet is.

I dare say that if you put Lee Valley Tools in place of Rogers,
usenet access would have continued unabated.

Hey, why don't you ask Robin if *he* wants to take it on? I suspect I
know what his answer will be. I was in the London store on Saturday,
losing cash like it was pocket lint. It was packed. I bet that if I'd
asked who there knew what Usenet was, there wouldn't have been more than
one or two, if that. Hell, some of 'em looked at the in-store computer
systems like they were an incarnation of the devil. I overheard a couple
of 'em say they'd never use them. (Aside to LV, great job on those by
the way).