[H-GEN] Multi-thread downloads

Russell Stuart russell at stuart.id.au
Sat May 29 22:17:21 EDT 2004


On Sat, 2004-05-29 at 08:00, Greg Black wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

Again I take my hat off you, Greg.  One of the few on posters
on Humbug (the only one?) who (a) don't like reply to munging
and (b) bother to set their reply-to appropriately.  Whats
more, you take the time to do it manually.

> An annoyance?  No, it's an abuse.  This is really pretty simple,
> but I'll try to put it in words of one syllable to make it even
> easier to understand.

No, its not abuse.  Its a mess.

I may have missed something, but I don't recall saying officially
what Humbug's position on download during the meeting is.  This 
is the real problem - its a communication problem. 

If someone has said, "look - Humbug's bandwidth usage is putting
a strain on our relationship with the University - we must limit
it", then this response is entirely appropriate.

But that is not what happened.  No one has said anything.  We
are left to infer what the new Humbug policy might be, given
the restrictions that have been enacted.

Only I doubt the Humbug executive has a new policy, because they 
are in the same position the members are in - somehow bandwidth
limiting came into being, and they don't know why it has been
put in place either.

As a wild guess, it looks like is was put in place to stop
students with laptops sucking bandwidth while they attending
lectures and tutorials.  From the Universities point of view
the most negative part of this might be the students are being
distracted from what they are supposed to be doing in the
lecture theatre - not the bandwidth usage.

Whatever the real reason might be - we don't know it, or at 
least I don't.  So everybody posting here is second guessing 
what the Universities real position is.  But for all we know
they might view Humbug as  an important adjunct to the  comp 
sci education process - a time and a place the University
student can use to experiment with (implying downloading) new 
OS's and tools and play with them.  If that is the case (a
big "if" I know) that Harries response is entirely appropriate.

In any case, pontificating on how morally bad it is seems to 
me to be waste of time until we know what behaviour is expected
from us.  And that requires real communication.  So lets do
that.






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