F I D O N E W S -- | Vol. 9 No. 2 (13 January 1992) The newsletter of the | FidoNet BBS community | Published by: _ | / \ | "FidoNews" BBS /|oo \ | (415)-863-2739 (_| /_) | FidoNet 1:1/1 _`@/_ \ _ | Internet: | | \ \\ | fidonews@fidonews.fidonet.org | (*) | \ )) | |__U__| / \// | Editors: _//|| _\ / | Tom Jennings (_/(_|(____/ | Tim Pozar (jm) | ----------------------------+--------------------------------------- Published weekly by and for the Members of the FidoNet international amateur network. Copyright 1991, Fido Software. All rights reserved. Duplication and/or distribution permitted for noncommercial purposes only. For use in other circumstances, please contact FidoNews. Paper price: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $5.00US Electronic Price: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . free! For more information about FidoNews refer to the end of this file. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents 1. EDITORIAL ..................................................... 1 Editorial: Revelation! ........................................ 1 2. ARTICLES ...................................................... 3 Cost Recovery (Yes!) .......................................... 3 Geography and Fidonet ......................................... 6 New version of WorldPol released .............................. 9 3. RANTS AND FLAMES .............................................. 23 4. LATEST VERSIONS ............................................... 24 Latest Greatest Software Versions ............................. 24 5. FIDONEWS INFORMATION .......................................... 30 FidoNews 9-02 Page 1 13 Jan 1992 ====================================================================== EDITORIAL ====================================================================== Editorial: Revelation! by Tom Jennings (1:1/1) Us FidoNet sysops have been outdone at our own game. There's a group with higher expectations, less willing to put forth effort, regardless of consequences. U.S. automakers. Un-be-liev-able. OK, so Pres. Bush and the big-three CEOs (Ford, GM, Chrysler) visit Japan to "do something" about the massively declining U.S. auto sales. Japan is unfair to the U.S., is the assertion. An article in the S.F. Examiner (8 Jan 92) goes on and on about this Japanese showroom vs. that, sales figures, etc. Depressing. However a few glaring details leak out. Example: a Jeep Cherokee cost twice as much, with half the MPG (at twice the fuel price!) as an equiv. Nissan product. And the steering wheel is on the left side! (Japanese cars are righthand drive.) "It's too expensive to change this for the Japanese market", says Chrysler spokesman Izumi Kato. (Many American cars used to be made with provisions for either-hand drive; my 1963 Rambler has obvious provisions in the sheet metal, and factory parts catalogs show RH drive parts. (Ramblers were sold in Australia and Brazil, for instance.)) Oh yes, and they don't seem to advertise their cars on Japanese TV. Kato said it's too expensive (huh?!). Chrysler's ad budget in '91 was $1M (less than 1/4th Lee Iacocca's '91 salary!), and 1/10th of Nissan's US ad budget. And American car dealers in Japan do there what they do here -- sit in showrooms waiting for customers to come to them. Except, in Japan, car salesman go door to door, and have lots of salespeople -- Toyota's 42,000 to Honda's with 12,000. Ford and GM have only a few dozen in their showrooms! In another article in the same paper, an unnamed Bush administration official said, regarding Japanese consessions to what Bush & co. are asking: "Culturally, they'll never change. We'll have to ram it down their throats." (Of course we here at FidoNews! also recognize that there's only one way to do things -- OURS! I assume you all do too.) Whatever happened to the open market? FidoNews 9-02 Page 2 13 Jan 1992 In yet another article (which I don't have in front of me for direct quotes), a United Auto Workers union official was quoted to the effect, "we build the best cars we can with what we're given". Seems they know who's fooling whom. We've been outdone, boys and girls. Can we take the hint? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FidoNews 9-02 Page 3 13 Jan 1992 ====================================================================== ARTICLES ====================================================================== Original Message Date: 08 Jan 92 08:52:16 From: Reinhart Behm on 2:242/38 To: Tom Jennings on 1:1/1 Subj: Fnews ^AINTL 1:1/1 2:242/38 Hello Tom, as the archiver of embbs and fnews for the nodes of Berlin I'd like to have the very old fnews issues (below 650). Could you give me a fido address of someone in germany or at least europe which (to the best of your knowledge) holds these files? Or, if you don't know, would you agree to receive a letter from me with diskettes, envelope and postage and to copy these files for me in a lonely and boring hour? cu :-) Reinhart ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cost Recovery (Yes!) by Jack Winslade (NEC 285) 1:285/666 (DRBBS Technical BBS) jsw@drbbs.omahug.org ('Net 285, where few people run an IBM-PC, but nobody holds it against you if you do.') This is in response to Joe Jared's article in _Fidonews_ 901. For the past 1 1/2 years, I have coordinated a successful cost-sharing plan for Net 285 which appears to be well-received by all. I'd like to respond to some of Joe's remarks, and I have taken the liberty of including brief quoted sections where appropriate. Right after Joe's article, 'Cost Recovery (hah)', appeared in _Fidonews_, another sysop wrote to me in our local sysops' conference asking '... do you and Larry {our alternate 'gatekeeper'} ever take any of the flak like that guy {Jared} did?' I replied that no, we do not, and with rare exception, our Net 285 sysops are appreciative, helpful, and seldom complain. I've also never heard anyone try to excuse themself from paying their fair share of the load. When I was elected NEC of Net 285, we had never had an echomail cost- sharing plan. Sysops imported echomail on an individual basis, most often at the lower speeds, and phone bills in the hundreds of dollars per month were frequent. My goal was to establish a cooperative echomail 'gateway' which would be funded by all who receive echomail through it. FidoNews 9-02 Page 4 13 Jan 1992 When I proposed the gateway to the local network, we agreed on the following principles under which it should operate: o It should be voluntary. Each sysop should be free to join or get echomail elsewhere at his/her own expense. It was my hope that the cost savings would be the incentive necessary for almost everyone in the local net to join. o It should be convenient and reliable. To me this meant that it should have its own dedicated processor, modem, and phone line. The processing and delivery of echomail should not have to compete with regular BBS usage. o Cost to the member systems should in all cases be less than what it would cost the sysop to obtain the desired quantity of data using independent means. o It should be self-supporting. Nobody should be financially burdened by it. o It should pay its own way in the nationwide Fidonet echomail system. Not only should it pay its own way locally, but it should contribute to its upstream feeds (the members recently voted a 20% 'tithe') to help with recovery of their costs. > I'd like to know how anyone can justify accounting for echomail on a > echo for echo basis. I can sum that up in one sentence. It's the only fair way to do it. In Net 285, the ratio of echomail volume between the system receiving the most and the system receiving the least is close to 100 to 1. It is simply unfair to ask the sysop who receives one low-volume echo to pay the same as the one who receives many medium and high-volume conferences. (A standing joke at our local users' group meetings is for two of the low-volume sysops to speculate if their combined bills for the month are enough to buy me a soda from the machine. ;-) If all sysops wanted roughly the same volume of data, I could see how a flat-rate scheme might work, but in our case (as I am sure is the case in many other networks) the low-volume sysops would be subsidizing those who had higher volume. > When it's all averaged out, the cost of accounting would > significantly outweigh the cost of charging a toll for backbone > echomail. The cost of accounting ?? What cost ?? We let the machine do the grunt work of keeping track of who gets what. It maybe takes a few extra minutes of machine time per month at most. The accounting utility is a simple 'c' program driven by a called batch file which runs every time the message areas are cleaned up and purged. Something like this can easily be written in less than an hour by anyone who has had a couple of programming courses. I'm sure that many teenage hackers with no formal instruction could easily write such a program. It's almost trivial. It could even be done (although more slowly) by redirecting each message directory to a text file and processing the result with an AWK script just prior to cleanup. FidoNews 9-02 Page 5 13 Jan 1992 > I don't believe for a minute that any single node can pickup > even 1 echo with the speed and reliability of a backbone net hub > for less than it costs if everyone contributed. There are cases where it will not pay for someone to use our system, and I believe it should be the choice of the individual sysop whether or not to join a plan such as ours. We have one node that cannot benefit from our cost-sharing plan. Due to the oh-so-close-but-yet-so-far extortive in-state telephone rates, he can call the regional hub directly for less than he can call us. (We're working on some innovative [and legal] ways around this, but as of this time we do not have an effective solution to this problem.) If he were to join the gateway, he would pay twice, once as his share for getting the data to the gateway, and another to get the data from the gateway to his node. Certainly this extra burden would far outweigh the cooperative cost savings. Some numbers ... One local system always comes in under a dollar each month. He is certainly saving. Some systems exceed $20 per month, but those are the exception and not the rule. Most systems fall somewhere between the extremes. The cost of a 2-3 minute long distance call each day easily exceeds what many systems pay for echomail using the gateway. If we assume a reliable 9600 bps feed, a plan with a major long distance carrier that charges about $.10 per minute for phone time, and a 50% compression of echomail using ARC or ZIP, it should cost right around $0.0089 to import each kilobyte (unpacked) of echomail into the local network. Now when we take into consideration the sharing of some of these echoconferences, the actual cost of each kilobyte typically runs $0.007 or so at most, even considering the inefficiencies of session startup, orphan portions of minutes, etc. We can even add a 20% 'tithe' to our upstream feed and come in lower than the 100% efficient cost. Toward the future ... Our network is small, but growing. As more systems join the network, more echoconferences are shared, and everyone's cost per kilobyte drops. As sessions grow longer, the overhead of session startup and unused portions of minutes becomes less and less significant. Since our gateway system is dedicated, it will be able to meet the echomail needs of the network as it grows and requires more volume of data. In conclusion, I will say that there is no such thing as a one-size- fits-all echomail scheme. What works for one network might not work for another. However, I think that any cost-sharing plan, in order to serve the network to its best, must be voluntary, equitable, under the control of the network sysops as a whole, and should not be a financial burden to anyone. FidoNews 9-02 Page 6 13 Jan 1992 Good day JSW . . . . . ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Geography and Fidonet by Daniel Tobias, 1:380/7.0 Once again, the question that has led to much political strife within FidoNet rears its ugly head: the issue of whether nets, regions, and zones must be strictly constrained by geographical boundaries, or whether a more "creative" interpretation should be applied to permit nodes to overlap these boundaries where it suits a need. The latest volley in this battle is the article by Dennis McClain- Furmanski (1:275/42.0) in FidoNews 901. In it, he raises a valid gripe of inconsistency on the part of the FidoNet hierarchy: they vehemently disallowed the addition of Cuban notes to his U.S. net, even though due to a geopolitical quirk those nodes (on a U.S. military base) were actually more directly connected, in telephone topology, to Net 275 than to the "geographically-correct" Zone 4. However, in an unrelated squabble later, the same hierarchy "looked the other way" at some blatant violations of geography on the part of an adjacent net (which seems to be having a "turf war" with net 275, from the looks of things). This is blatantly inconsistent, and results in feelings of unfairness on the part of those affected by these rulings, whatever the reasons for them might have been. However, McClain-Furmanski's response hardly seems likely to improve the Fairness Quotient. Rather than attempting to get the hierarchy to reach a consistent, impartial resolution of the geographical problems that affect Net 275, he has (on what authority?) unilaterally declared these two decisions to both be reversed, to agree with HIS desired positions. In case no other FidoNews reader has noticed, this mirror- reversed position is STILL fundamentally inconsistent; it is just fundamentally inconsistent in the direction of supporting Mr. McClain- Furmanski's wishes, which presumably is thus regarded as fairer by him and his friends, but not by anyone on the other side of the issues in question. It is certainly not a generalized solution to the problem of geography. While the hierarchy disallowed Cuban nodes for Net 275 but allowed another net to "raid" its territory, the new "solution" is to arbitrarily ban geographical exceptions for the neighboring net, but allow them for Cuban nodes. No lasting solution to FidoNet's political woes will result from different people unilaterally declaring the geographical exceptions THEY want to be good, and those that THEY dislike to be bad, and attempting, successfully or not, to make their wishes binding on everyone else. To end such squabbles, it is necessary to have a universal, binding rule that everyone can live with. Two possibilities: FidoNews 9-02 Page 7 13 Jan 1992 1) Allow no exceptions whatsoever to geography. All nodes would be forced to join the zone, region, and net of their location. Somebody can take a world map and parcel things out so there isn't a square inch of land anywhere that isn't covered. ADVANTAGES: If the net/region/zone affiliation of a node is predetermi