Colored Backgrounds

[John Thompson]

On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 14:20:08, David Gaskill wrote:

>The company that supplies my  electricity frequently sends me circulars urging 
>me to buy appliances which will use more of the stuff. However this is not 
>probably a good parallel with Internet bandwidth even though I suggested it in 
>the first place.

Interesting.  The company I buy my electricity from frequently sends me
information on rebate programs to buy appliances that use *less*
electricity.  It seems the company has determined it is less expensive
(and more profitable for the shareholders, no doubt) to make more
efficient use of the existing generating capacity than it is to add more
generating capacity.

An analogy might be made to ISP's: my ISP (attglobal.net; AKA ibm.net)
decided some time ago that it made sense to make more efficient use of
their network bandwidth and therefore implemented a policy on their news
servers that binary and html content would only be allowed in news groups
specifically chartered for such content.  Non-compliant articles, whether
they originate inside or outside the system are filtered before they even
reach the servers.  According to the news admins this has saved ibm.net
quite a bit: the need for new hardware to handle the traffic has been
pushed back, expire times on the messages need not be so aggressive, etc. 
Who has lost here?  Only those people who who don't abide by the "de
facto" standards (RFC's and newsgroup charters) and insist on posting
binary and/or html content non-bianry and/or non-html groups.

Unfortunately, (or not, depending on your point of view) such a policy is
not feasible for email.


John (john.thompson@attglobal.net)