Slashdot Mirror
Mirror.ac.uk to Scale Back Operations
KingDaveRa writes "It would seem that the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk) have decided to withdraw funding from the www.mirror.ac.uk service. They still want to run a service, but '...perhaps on a smaller scale, and limited to the most popular mirrors. This would, however, depend upon securing sponsorship or alternative funding very quickly, and the approval of our host institutions.' This could turn out to be quite an inconvenience for the UK, as the mirror.ac.uk service has proven itself very fast and reliable."
It's not just a mirror. It's a particularly fast and comprehensive mirror. It's always up, and has everything you need. OK, so I don't get the full benefit, but it's still much better than the alternatives, and I still get 3.5MB/s downloads, even without being on JANET. This is not a good day for those in the UK.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
This sort of funding should come from the people that it's relevant for: i.e. the owners of intercontinential links, or it should be cooperatively funded, say to be co-located at a large interconnect -- as these people wear the costs of non-mirrors.
It's not relevant for the academic community to fund these things: doing so is a historical throwback to when the networks were largely academic, and most of the users were too. That's not how it is now, and personally I'd rather see the money used to support academic concerns, not a service increasingly used by non-academic.
I think if anyone is upset about this: direct complaints to people that should be doing something about it (i.e. exchanges/interconnects, international link providers).