"Doug Payne" wrote in message
...
snip

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).

Hi -

You pegged it... Ted can keep his day job.... I ain't going for it....

Glad you like the store stations.... just like to give people options, is
all....

Next step is integrate web access with store inventory, and express
pick-up.... you can order on the web, pick-up in the store.... order in the
store, have it shipped to your house.... order in the store, have it shipped
to another store.... well - there's a lot of permutations...

We just want more lint...

Cheers -

Rob

On 19/12/2005 3:39 PM, Robin Lee wrote:

Next step is integrate web access with store inventory, and express
pick-up.... you can order on the web, pick-up in the store.... order in the
store, have it shipped to your house.... order in the store, have it shipped
to another store.... well - there's a lot of permutations...

Yeah, I noticed the express pickup door. That was the last parking spot
available when I got there :-)

I can see it now, ordering from the Blackberry while driving to the
store, and having the elves throw it in the back of the truck as I drive
by... What's next, a drivethrough Tim's?

We just want more lint...

Sorry, I'm all out until January payday. Good thing I still have those
Bessey clamps coming to keep my postal person gainfully employed and
also ensure that I receive something new that month!

"Doug Payne" wrote in message

my previous posting about staffing, etc. It's really not so much the
purchase costs as it is the ongoing stuff. Servers are relatively cheap,
staffing is not, 24x7x365 reliability and redundancy, and maintaining
currency are not.

I think the biggest thing about Rogers that aggravates me is the fact that
they discontinued it without reducing their monthly cost to the customer.
Hell, I'd have been less angry if they said that it's a costly service and
they plan to charge an additional service fee for those customers that still
wanted it. Increasing costs and stuff, that I can understand, but not just
to dump it forcing those that still wanted it to have to go search out other
sources. It's just one new minor aggravation to pile on top of the others
when I feel they could have handled the whole situation much better. The
idea behind customer service is to make it easier for the customer to do
business with them. All they've done in my opinion is earn the enmity of a
group of their customers.

Doug Payne wrote:

On 19/12/2005 12:30 PM, Larry Blanchard wrote:

Doug, could you provide some figures on costs of continuing the
Usenet feed?

It's really not so much
the purchase costs as it is the ongoing stuff. Servers are relatively
cheap, staffing is not, 24x7x365 reliability and redundancy, and
maintaining currency are not.

OK, that makes sense. Thanks for the info.


Let's face it, the Web is where it's at today. I see a lot of other
forums (fora?) moving from Usenet to Web-based things.

That's undoubtedly true. But I can get more info quicker with a
newsreader than I ever could from web-based news service.

And I belong to quite a few Yahoo mailing lists, but I get the stuff as
individual emails - I never go read them on the Yahoo site. Same
principle.


--
It's turtles, all the way down

Doug Payne wrote:
On 19/12/2005 3:39 PM, Robin Lee wrote:

Next step is integrate web access with store inventory, and express
pick-up.... you can order on the web, pick-up in the store.... order
in the
store, have it shipped to your house.... order in the store, have it
shipped
to another store.... well - there's a lot of permutations...


Yeah, I noticed the express pickup door. That was the last parking spot
available when I got there :-)

I can see it now, ordering from the Blackberry while driving to the
store, and having the elves throw it in the back of the truck as I drive
by...


What's next, a drivethrough Tim's?

Lots of them around -- so in answer to your other questions -- yeah
maybe why not... :=_



We just want more lint...


Sorry, I'm all out until January payday. Good thing I still have those
Bessey clamps coming to keep my postal person gainfully employed and
also ensure that I receive something new that month!


--
Will R.
Jewel Boxes and Wood Art
http://woodwork.pmccl.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.” George Bernard Shaw

Robin Lee wrote:
"Doug Payne" wrote in message
...
snip

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).


Hi -

You pegged it... Ted can keep his day job.... I ain't going for it....

Glad you like the store stations.... just like to give people options, is
all....

Next step is integrate web access with store inventory, and express
pick-up.... you can order on the web, pick-up in the store.... order inthe
store, have it shipped to your house.... order in the store, have it shipped
to another store.... well - there's a lot of permutations...

And why not!? Chapters does it!


We just want more lint...

Cheers -

Rob





--
Will R.
Jewel Boxes and Wood Art
http://woodwork.pmccl.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.” George Bernard Shaw

Doug Payne wrote:
On 19/12/2005 2:59 PM, Doug Payne wrote:

Let's face it, the Web is where it's at today. I see a lot of other
forums (fora?) moving from Usenet to Web-based things.


It occurred to me after writing that, that if LV wanted some good PR,
they could add a Web-based woodworking forum to their Web farm. Some of
the other (non-woodworking) forums that I visit use vBulletin. Dunno
exactly what it takes to run one of those, but they work quite well.


http://www.canadianwoodworking.com/

Canadian Woodworking has a reasonable forum...

Good mag too and getting better.



http://www.vbulletin.com/

They use logins, but typically userids are free for the asking, and
guest access is permitted, at least for browsing. Here's an example of
one that I visit:

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/

which will give you an indication of my age if you know anything about
photography :-) Hell, I remember when Lee Valley was based in a little
old house in Ottawa. I think Robin was a little boy back then.

There are others like WebBBS, phpBB, and so on. As with anything, you
have to weight the cost of operation, and the backlash when (not if) it
breaks, etc., against the potential gain.


--
Will R.
Jewel Boxes and Wood Art
http://woodwork.pmccl.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.” George Bernard Shaw

In article ,
Upscale wrote:
"Doug Payne" wrote in message
10 years. By contrast, Usenet news traffic has gone from 16% of our
total Internet bandwidth consumption in 1996, to almost unnoticeable
today at about 0.3%.

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.

Unfortunately, that last statement is *NOT* true.

there isn't a lot of bandwidth consumed _reading_ news, because it's
a very small (comparatively speaking) number of uses.

The _incoming_feed_ to the news-server is an entirely different story.

Present-day, the load is a *sustained 130+megabits/second. 24 hours/day.
7 days/week. Thats about 1.4 _terabytes_ of *new* messages every day.

And about 12 terabytes of disk required to hold 'history' for *seven* days.

Unless you have _lots_ of users, you simply cannot afford to run anything
like a 'full feed' news-server these days.

Rogers could have
capitalized on it as a "reward" for the continued support of their
customers. I dare say that if you put Lee Valley Tools in place of Rogers,
usenet access would have continued unabated.

On 21/12/2005 4:12 PM, Robert Bonomi wrote:

Present-day, the load is a *sustained 130+megabits/second. 24 hours/day.
7 days/week. Thats about 1.4 _terabytes_ of *new* messages every day.

And about 12 terabytes of disk required to hold 'history' for *seven* days.

Unless you have _lots_ of users, you simply cannot afford to run anything
like a 'full feed' news-server these days.

Yes, if you're crazy enough to run a "full feed". We stopped doing that
years ago. Cut out binaries and the load is very manageable.