--On Friday, August 16, 2002 10:41 PM -0700 Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 8/16/02 10:06 PM, "Tom Neff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Actually, Usenet (I still remember the capswars on that one) scales well >> because as long as Google Groups grabs the posting, > > Google Groups isn't USENET. It's a USENET archive, which is a much > different beast. Now, if the entire universe used Google to read and > post, you'd be right, but then it wouldn't be USENET any more. It'd be > yahoogroups, only much bigger and designed right.
I don't want to drift off into semantics here. Obviously Google Groups isn't Usenet, but since it archives Usenet, if you can get your list onto Usenet, Google will take it from there, using an architecture that does scale well, which was my point. Usenet by itself isn't much of a solution, but Usenet plus Google Groups is. Now here's an idea: why don't we pitch Google Lists at them? Listowners would opt-in by signing up and then adding a special Google member address to their rosters. This might be a nice hack! >> I think that I would be as terrified of entrusting a list's long-term >> archive to MySQL as any other possible software choice. Plain text would >> rule for me. > > And how do you build a search engine? With grep? Glimpse or Google. > My lists.apple.com archive is heading towards 600,000 messages. Do you > know how much fun it is to try to keep that sucker straight, much less > browsable, indexed and searchable? Plain text works for small sets of > data, and scales horribly. USENET even figured that out eventually and > finally rebuilt the spool structures into something from this century... (I assume you mean that several of the more widely installed NNTP server packages did this, because Usenet itself is simply the galactic network of machines serving NNTP and exchanging the core hierarchies - there is no master "spool structure" to be rebuilt.)
