On Wed, 3 Jun 1998, Julian Assange wrote: > The problem here is essentially a physical one. Drive heads move too slowly, > and ram is too expensive (although I know some bigger news sites > that keep their entire history file in 4Gb of ram disk - yes, don't turn off :) It's more a combination of physical (equipment costs) and social problems. Warez bunnies and spammers have contributed greatly to the explosion of news costs in the last 2-3 years. Prior to people posting entire pirated CDs and spammers hitting every group on the spool, I was seeing a tapering off in the rate of increase of postings. If spam and massive binaries are removed from the current daily logs, Usenet appears to be shrinking rapidly as fewer and fewer people find it of use. U2 may help, but I think it's been fatally tarred with the same brush. I've turned off 50 UUCP uucp newsfeeds in the last year because the people taking them found that the signal to noise ratio made newsgroups basically worthless and I suspect that many more haven't asked for them to be turned off because of intertia or lack of knowledge. AB
