Bandwidth?

[David T. Sandberg]

In article <20561 at unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo at unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes:
>[not comprehending the meaning of bandwidth and the importance
>of using it wisely...]
>
>Or is this another one of those terms that is bantied about by the
>partially informed in hopes of impressing the totally naive?

Bandwidth means nothing more complicated than "how much of the net's
time and money is spent sending the stuff".  For instance, using your
signature in an email message isn't so bad, because then only a few
interim sites have to handle the useless 240 bytes (although they won't
be too thrilled about the idea if you send a lot of mail).  But when
you post a news article with a wasteful signature, *every* site on the
net has to pay for receiving those 240 bytes, plus sending them to
every site they feed news to.  For instance, the site that feeds me
news does the same for seven or eight other sites.  Considering that
you seem to be posting perhaps twice a day in this group at the moment,
that's 4K or more of useless '@' characters which that one site has had
to send for you on a daily basis recently.  Now, multiply that by the
thousands of sites which handle news, including a lot of long distance
connections, and I hope you can see why the bandwidth taken up by the
non-informational part of your signature is bad netiquette.

-- 
   /* old functions never die: they just get rewritten in assembler */
   fixed david_sandberg = "quadric systems"
   if not (dts at quad.uucp) then (..uunet!rosevax!sialis!quad!dts) end if