Of course, this all looks a lot sillier with 20/20 hindsight. Things weren't so clear in 1995. No one had made any money at an advertising revenue model yet. Now the Dilbert Zone is one of the most expensive places to buy advertising on the net.
Wed, 5 Apr 1995I'm disappointed that Dilbert is not longer available via ClariNet. I find that to be a very unwise technical decision, although it may have been motivated by the need to maintain better control distribution.
1. ClariNet provided a very fast and distributed way of managing the load of thousands of readers every day. Since each of the ClariNet sites had a local copy of the strip, access time was very low and there were very few network bottlenecks as a result.
2. Depending on the popularity of a comic strip, it is quite reasonable to assume that the state of the art technology isn't to the point yet that *any* centralized server can be expected to manage the needs of the entire world. In fact, it was a great deal of trouble accessing your web site. This can only encourage people to make their own local copies of the strip and violate the copyright in the process.
3. When I read Dilbert via ClariNet, the software is tailored for dealing with a dynamic media. That way it was easy to tell which ones I had read and which ones I hadn't. I didn't waste anyone's time or bandwidth by reading the same strip twice.
4. The current format for the Dilbert web page is very much static. So I cannot tell which ones I have read and which ones I have not read easily. Therefore I waste a lot of bandwidth reading previous strips over and over again, when this isn't really necessary.
5. The centralized server does allow you to encode a secret bit sequence into each of the copies of the strip, using one of many well known steganographic techniques. That way if you find it elsewhere you will be able to figure out where the strip originally came from. Although I would tend to believe that the actual economic loss is relatively small from the current ClariNet distribution. So, there isn't much gained in this added level of protection. However, there may very much be a measurable economic loss when people get fed up with the poor performance and unreliablilty of the Dilbert web server.
6. The ClariNet medium is fault tolerant. If your main distribution server goes down, then no one in the world can access that information. While if one ClariNet server goes down, then only the few hundred people using that server are affected.
I ask you to reconsider your decision, since I was an avid reader of Dilbert on ClariNet. Unless something can be done to rectify the problems I have mentioned above, I'm afraid that I will probably have to discontinue reading it because it has become so inconvenient. At least I suggest consulting someone who is familiar with the technology sufficiently to make an informed decision.
-Brian K. Zuzga, Graduate Student in Computer Science