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Subject:Re. Students and bandwidth problems? From:Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Thu, 19 Oct 1995 16:30:29 LCL
In defence of the posting that we can't accomodate everyone
interested in joining techwr-l (specifically, students),
I'd like to note that (Mark?) had a good point. Today's
digest weighed 127K; I don't want to imagine what it would
have looked like if all 20,000 STC members joined, and each
one brought half a dozen students along, and the same
proportion posted messages as post from our current list of
subscribers.
Maybe we'll have appropriate software to manage the
overload by the time it becomes a real problem, but in the
meantime, the problem is real: digest size has almost
doubled since I joined the list, far less than a year ago.
The essay "The tragedy of the commons" (sorry, don't have a
copy handy to provide author/year) reveals what happens
when you try to divide a limited good (here, the time we
each devote to the list) among everyone.
This is NOT a suggestion that we keep out students. We can
learn lots from the ones who get past the "big-boned women"
comments, and even when we can't, we do have a certain
measure of responsibility to help our colleagues in
training, as others have noted. FWIW.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of our
reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.
