On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 17:28:36 -0500, "TonyB"
<ben### [at] panamac-comnet> wrote:

>How about povray.binaries.images.XXXX, where XXXX is the year? That way, you
>could get better organized, and the current group would be smaller.
>
I was thinking of this, but didn't mention it for some reason. It's
actually what I would like to see happen. As far as I'm concerned,
this could be done to some of the other groups on this server as well.
News readers weren't usually designed with the idea of immortal
postings in mind. It really bogs down the process when there are so
many old posts in a group.

For what it's worth, I have both online and offline readers. My
offline reader has the option to only download headers if I want. If
new groups were formed for the old posts, I would only download the
headers for reference. I wouldn't download the message bodies or
attachments, unless I saw something that really interested me. Odds
are, I wouldn't download much of anything that is over a year old. It
would be nice to have the ability to do so, if I wanted, of course.

later,
Glen Berry

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I second the idea. What is a reasonable price?
Mr. Art

"Greg M. Johnson" wrote:
> 
> I'd buy a CD of p.*.*  archives!
> 
> A lot of tricks and tips I had not dl'ed because I knew I could access them
> later on p.*.*.
>

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On Sat, 19 Feb 2000 01:05:45 +0200, Peter Popov <pet### [at] usanet>
wrote:

>Tony, do you realise that this would make offline readers re-download
>350+ megabytes of attachments?

Don't most off-line readers have a provision for downloading only the
message headers? One could download all the headers, and then only
download the messages bodies and attachments that they really needed. 

You seem to assume that someone actually wants a complete archive of
POV-News on their local hard drive. I've found that I can live without
many of the old posts. Remember, some of those posts are only relavent
to someone running an outdated version of POV, for example. Some
others are snapshots of "works-in-progress." I don't really need to
keep 5 generations of the same basic image. My free disk space is more
important to me.

For those of use who have been regulars here for awhile, we should
already have the old attachments downloaded anyway - at least the
attachments that we decided we decided to keep. If Chris created the
archives sorted by year, I would only be downloading the headers for
my possible future reference. Who knows, maybe one day I might even
download an old message body or attachment.

later,
Glen Berry

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On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 20:04:23 -0900, "mr.art" <mr.### [at] gcinet> wrote:

>I second the idea. What is a reasonable price?
>Mr. Art

Hmm...  Is it ethical to sell old news posts? Maybe it is. It just
seems odd for some reason. Perhaps I'm just too sensitive to potential
copyright issues.

later,
Glen Berry

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I didn't see them as old news posts, I saw them as a learning 
tool. Much of what can be done with povray can be found in the
posts and almost nowhere else. I, for one, would hate to loose 
that source. And I never thought that a profit had to be made,
just what was fair for the time and effort.

Glen Berry wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 20:04:23 -0900, "mr.art" <mr.### [at] gcinet> wrote:
> 
> >I second the idea. What is a reasonable price?
> >Mr. Art
> 
> Hmm...  Is it ethical to sell old news posts? Maybe it is. It just
> seems odd for some reason. Perhaps I'm just too sensitive to potential
> copyright issues.
> 
> later,
> Glen Berry

-- 
We are the POVRay of Borg.
Your data has been assimilated into the POVRay
users List of Ages
Resistance is in Ohms.

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Glen Berry wrote:
> If Chris created the archives sorted by year, I would only be downloading
> the headers for my possible future reference. Who knows, maybe one day I
> might even download an old message body or attachment.

 I passed on your earlier suggestion to Chris but I see some flaws in it
already. The biggest problem facing this server right now is available
space. If he simply moves the older messages to a different group there
is still the problem that the server does not have enough space to make
them available.

 What I think might work is an annual purge of older files. For example
once per year in the month of November we can announce that on Jan. 1
all message 1 year or older are about to go away. This will give everyone
a couple of months to decide if they want any of the resources from that
time period. Once Jan. 1 comes around they are gone. This will free up
server resources and keep groups sizes down to a managable level. It
is either that or Chris will impose automatic message expirations and
the group will continiously scroll. Each day a new batch of messages
will expire that are one year old.

  Then again it teaches us all a lesson that if there is a resource
posted here that we are interested in then we should take advantage
of it now instead of waiting for later time to do it. It does cause
me some problems because I often do search through older messages
trying to find answer or examples to new questions. Sometimes it
is just fun to go back through some of the earlier work posted here
for nostalgia's sake. I have seen a definate difference in the
quality of images posted here. While there was some good posts
in the early days of this server the posts in the last year have
improved consistantly since that time. I think it really proves
that peer support on news groups really works.

Comments ?

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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"mr.art" wrote:
> 
> I didn't see them as old news posts, I saw them as a learning
> tool. Much of what can be done with povray can be found in the
> posts and almost nowhere else. I, for one, would hate to loose
> that source. And I never thought that a profit had to be made,
> just what was fair for the time and effort.

Fortunately Chris is only targeting the binary groups at this time.
All of the text based discussion groups are still available back
to the beginning of this servers operation.

I mentioned the CD idea to Chris but he has not and may not reply
to that idea. It's up to him.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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I agree with you. The idea of selling people's conversations just
seemed a little odd at first.

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Glen Berry wrote:
> 
> I agree with you. The idea of selling people's conversations just
> seemed a little odd at first.

One benifit of a CD version of the server is that you would not have
to wait for large binary attachments to download over a slow assed
modem connection :)

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 21:20:46 -0800, Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:

> I passed on your earlier suggestion to Chris but I see some flaws in it
>already. The biggest problem facing this server right now is available
>space. 

I thought you might say that. If there isn't room, then I can live
with losing some of the older posts. In fact, I had already deleted
many of the older posts on my machine anyway. I had the same lack of
space problem myself. I had already moved my favorite attachments to
other directories for safe keeping.

I think that most of us could live with posts that expire after a
year's time. It sure beats typical usenet servers that sometimes
delete posts within the same week.   :)

>I have seen a definate difference in the
>quality of images posted here. While there was some good posts
>in the early days of this server the posts in the last year have
>improved consistantly since that time.

I have been thinking the same thing lately. I remember the images
before POV 2.2 came out. Things have come a very long way since then.
As you say, even in just the last year, there has been remarkable
progress in image quality. The two things creating this are the peer
support that you mention and the continuing improvement of POV-Ray
itself. 

Even the growth of POV-Ray itself has benefitted from the peer support
here, because many of the custom features have been suggested,
created, shared, and improved on here. Without this news server, the
Super Patch and Mega-POV might not have become what they are today.
I'm not forgetting the Official POV, because some of the features in
the Official POV were once found in custom patches, and no doubt, many
of the features in the current Mega-POV, and other patches,  will find
their way into a future Official POV version.

It would be nice to keep this history archived *somewhere*, but I'm
not sure where. Perhaps distributing CD-ROM's with news archives as
someone suggested is a possibility, but even if we don't have an
archive of news, we'll still get along fine. 

I know, because as interesting as the past might be, the best of
POV-Ray is yet to come.


later,
Glen Berry

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