On 8/28/18 1:48 PM, Michael Stone wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 05:02:08PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
Lots of people download files from FTP servers but that's a wholly
different
culture and use case than Usenet provided for in practice. And who
said that
binaries (whether legal or illegal) was not a big part of Usenet at
its height?
Anyone who argues that NNTP is the most efficient thing around? I
guarantee that for large files FTP is more efficient, and that when
one person is sending a file to a small number of other peopl, FTP is
dramatically more efficient. I guess NNTP binary distribution is more
efficient in some theoretical world where exactly the right
subscriptions are distributed to exactly the right people via local
transit servers, with no reposts. We can probably just write the
volume of such transfers off as noise in the real world.
NNTP is exceptionally efficient for large scale message distribution -
when compared to, say, a mailing list server that sends a message per
subscriber.
For binary files, something like bit torrent is clearly more efficient.
Though, a while back, somebody implemented a rather efficient mechanism
that used NNTP for distributing header information, and a distributed
hash table for the files themselves. Saved a lot of bandwidth.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
