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Subject: retirement of the dead-flames digest
From: dead-flames-approval@gdead.berkeley.edu
To: dead-flames@gdead.berkeley.edu

Dear Dead-Flames User,

This note is to announce the end of the Dead Flames Digest.
The Digest will be shut off as of Saturday, August 31st, 1996.

It appears that the time has come to retire.
The number of subscribers to the dead-flames digest has dropped 
significantly in the last year.  At the time dead-flames was created, the
availability of Internet connectivity was still quite limited, and
many people who wished to participate simply did not have the option
of reading the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.gdead directly (and at the
very beginning, the newsgroup itself did not exist).  This is no
longer the case.  Internet access is widely available.
Anyone anywhere, given a marginal amount of
motivation, can get theirself a connection to an Internet service
provider (ISP) who will furnish them with access to Usenet newsgroups.
Retiring the digest will lessen the demands on the resources of the
people and machines who have provided the dead-flames digest.

The dead-flames digest has been provided entirely as a result of volunteer 
programming, maintenance and machine time.  No-one who has
participated in its creation and dissemination over the past 14 to 15
years has ever received compensation for providing this service.   Among
other things, this means that the processes leading to the creation
and distribution of the digest run on machines that are busy doing
other things ("real work").   The time has come when the providers of
these machines feel that the allocation of resources required to 
run the list outweighs the benefit.

There exists other alternatives to direct access to the Usenet newsgroup
rec.music.gdead such as world-wide web sites and the gopher/ftp site
at gdead.berkeley.edu.  We may continue to offer digests via
gopher/anonymous ftp/majordomo from gdead.berkeley.edu after the
dead-flames mailing list is shutdown - but this remains to
be figured out and the details are not known at this time.  
We also hope to continue to
offer the email address dead-flames@gdead.berkeley.edu as an address
to post to rec.music.gdead...

If someone would like to offer a site for management and distribution
of the dead-flames digest, now is the time.   Assuming that no-one
presents a site and a reason to continue the digests which has not
already been considered, distribution will cease the morning of August
31st, 1996.

Thanks for all the kind words and vibes we have received over the
years.  This closure comes with sadness (at the end of
this era) tempered by the realization that Internet resources
are now widely enough available that the list no longer serves its
original purpose.

take care,

The Dead-Flames Managers

Eric J. Simon (simon@xtal0.harvard.edu)
Mark Kraitchman (kraitch@eecs.berkeley.edu)


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