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> On Monday 05 October 2015 22:28:58 Mike Bird wrote:
>> I've spent half of my life in the UK and half in the US. �
> I don't see the relevance of that.  DSL isn't very old, so it makes a
> difference which half and how old you are.  You may have no experience at
> all
> of DSL in the UK.  Besides, DSL is totally irrelevant.
>
>> I seriously
>> doubt that US DSL connections are significantly less reliable than UK
>> DSL connections. �Generally more expensive, but not much difference in
>> reliability.
>
> I answered that, then deleted it because I realised that it is completely
> irrelevant.
>
> If you think in terms of DSL in this context, then you have encapsulated
> the
> problem, and no wonder there are problems.  It is the 21st Century now,
> not
> the 20th.  Is Tim on DSL?  How on earth does he manage a modern server
> farm
> on DSL????  With difficulty would seem to be the answer.  DSL is slow and
> unreliable.  We have the answer.
>
> Lisi

Actually, no, you only think you have the answer.  DSL is outdated as you
say, and there is no way I would be stupid enough to try to run a server
farm like this on a DSL line.  In fact this location has always been
served with a "business class" line from a large provider, it's just that
they decided to focus on residential service at the expense of business
customers (probably due to people like you that seem to want everything
centralised in one spot under the control of a handful of companies, with
the resultant highly asymmetric access patterns).  They have basically
told us "sorry, there's nothing we can do for you, and by the way we have
a monopoly on service in your area.  Would you like to buy fiber for only
$20,000 USD / month?", so the only option left is a move.

Also, please remember that TDE is a donated service run by volunteers.  I
make no money off of this project, and the only reason I still keep it
alive is because I use the software internally for business purposes and
already invested the time and effort in building the public
infrastructure.  I will not be investing that amount of time and effort
again, so unless you find someone else willing to do it all, for free, to
your specifications you will just have to live with the free services the
way that they are, until such time as I am able to move them.

Yes, I want TDE to be a worldwide project.  As Slavek mentioned we have a
VPS available overseas and are moving some of the affected services to
that machine.  Can we move core services like the build farm there? 
Absolutely not!  If you were paying attention to the data transfer amounts
and disk space requirements that were previously sent to this list -- just
for a mirror of the builds generated on my systems _at my expense_ -- you
would begin to understand the reason for the "slow" "unreliable" master
server access.  It would cost a lot of money, on a monthly basis, just to
keep those services running elsewhere, and the donations coming in to the
project are so pitiful (with one or two exceptions from generous
individuals) that it would be cheaper for me just to yank all public
access to all TDE services and develop it internally only.

That last sentence brings me to my final point.  We have reached the point
where we need more developers or more contributing users, not just people
that are downloading and using the software.  While the latter are nice
they do not help to drive the project forward or to even keep it on the
Internet -- in fact, they hinder the latter goal.

I'm not going to continue this conversation further.  From what you are
saying you are going to stop promoting TDE, and that's your decision,
however I really want you to understand that actions have consequences. 
Just like the actions of thousands of people clamoring for better cloud
services, Netflix/Amazon/etc. movie streaming, etc. have damaged the
availability of symmetric Internet connections, if people stop supporting
TDE or even promoting it then it will die and disappear.  Better warm up
those KDE SC 5 or Unity configurations, because that's all we'll have
left...

Tim
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