And what has happened as a result is that for the most part it has become almost useless, unless you happen to be able to get an ISP with enough diskspace. My current ISP, ameritech, for all it's other faults, has the best newservers I've had access to in 5 years. There's literally *months* old posts on there, so you can follow whole threads. Most other ISPs keep a week, or less. Understandable, but worthless for the tech groups. I really wish they'd split usenet up-- take the binary junk elsewhere, although most ISPs will tell you it's the binarys that most of the customer base want, not the techie info. Declan McCullagh wrote:
A brief data point to add to Bill's interesting post:
I had dinner with someone from alt.net during my not-exactly-voluntary visit to the Seattle area recently. He told me (this is from memory) that Usenet is now on the order of 300 GB/day and they get a full feed. 90 percent is binaries.
-- Harmon Seaver, MLIS CyberShamanix Work 920-203-9633 hseaver@cybershamanix.com Home 920-233-5820 hseaver@ameritech.net