[tex-live] hosting inst image

Robin Fairbairns Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk
Fri Mar 2 10:43:34 CET 2007


Philip Taylor (Webmaster)  <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:

> Yes, exactly : BT is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The more
> people that use it, the faster it becomes for everyone (crazy,
> I know, but although an over-simplification it's close to
> the truth).

sure, it removes bottlenecks and (to some extent) overloads, but i can't
see it as a panacea.

> I envisage the main CTAN systems becoming "super-seeders",

you don't see this ctan becoming a super-seeder, i'm afraid.  my traffic
for last month is in excess of 400gbytes higher than the running
average, and given that the department (thanks to the u. of cambridge's
insane accountancy practices) pays by the gbyte, i'm in no position to
add a service that might add still more to the traffic.

(note that uktug had some ambition to support this traffic charge, but
they hadn't understood quite the extent of it.  the suggestion seems to
have become rather quiet.  and that was before this excitement...)

> and the whole TeX community then acting
> as secondary sources (i.e., what you download, you auto-
> matically make available to others for download).  It's
> a rather nice Utopia, don't you think ?!

except for those who are on a contract where they pay for traffic, or on
a net connection that has monthly limits (i know several uk people who
are).

robin


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