Re: Statistics on remail message sizes

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

>In article <9408291623.AA29767@ah.com>, Eric Hughes <hughes@ah.com> wrote:
>>Based on Hal's numbers, I would suggest a reasonable quantization for
>>message sizes be a short set of geometrically increasing values,
>>namely, 1K, 4K, 16K, 64K.  In retrospect, this seems like the obvious
>>quantization, and not arithmetic progressions.  Live and learn.
>
>A brief suggestion:  Code the progression, not the four values.  As
> time goes on (and lossy sendmails disappear), people are sending larger
> and larger messages;  it's easily conceivable that people could be
> swapping multiMB files at some point in the not too distant future
> (indeed, I do occasionally send out files that are 4-5 MB large,
> uuencoded binaries and tar files).
>
>No point in limiting future behavior due to current usage.

Except that coding only the progression and not the actual values lessens
the usefulness of quantizing. We may have one group of remailers/users
which uses the Hughes sequence: 1, 4, 16, 64, and another group that uses
another sequence: 3, 9, 27, etc.

I'm not saying we'll ever get everybody to agree, but there are times when
it's better to converge on solid, actual numbers and not on the
more-elegant abstract progressions.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding the point here.

--Tim May

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