I found at high-street. I have intentionally broken the link, just in case (between ‘/’ and ‘high’):
Why the hell did you break the link? Too many ugly old guys and stick figures? Ugly ass blue background and fonts?
I just don’t get it.
I have no idea what any of that is.
My god, those people are all fucking morons. I’m glad they all think Usenet is dead so a more interesting class of people can have it to themselves again.
Sadly, Verizon is just as stupid and they apparently think Usenet is dead as well. Their actions have nothing to do with [del]Communism[/del] [del]terrorism[/del] [del]gays[/del] child porn and everything to do with cutting their bandwidth costs.
bbs2k: Verizon just dropped a whole huge chunk of Usenet, a distributed collection of message boards, from its servers. That means Verizon customers will have to go elsewhere to access a gigantic number of discussions. Luckily, there are plenty of high-quality Usenet providers, some of them completely free. (Aioe and Motzarella come to mind.)
They have a random page header.
D - Well, someone gets it.
Probably to reduce the chance that referrer logging might track a bunch of stupid back here.
(I haven’t used any usenet discussion groups with any regularity for a few years now, but I still use the hell out of the binary groups. The download speeds from local servers still beat the pants off of Bittorrent.)
Didn’t everyone who used Usenet switch to pay servers a decade ago to avoid having to deal with the lousy propagation, horrible retention, and missing messages so common to ISP servers?
IIRC, the last time I had Verizon (a little over a year ago), their Usenet access was limited enough as to make it next to useless for binaries, anyway.
So not really a huge loss that I can see.
No, because of two things:
[ul]
[li]ISP servers are not all that bad. They get feeds from Supernews or other large-scale dedicated Usenet sites and, until recently, propagation and retention have been cheap enough for them to do it tolerably well. My old ISP had a relatively good server that even included binaries.[/li][li]People like me, who only use text groups, can get good feeds from the free servers I linked to. I especially like Motzarella, since I’ve had problems with Aioe in the past that they refuse to fix. A lot of people use Usenet for discussions, not software distribution, and Google Groups is a horrible joke in every respect. (I use Gnus and Leafnode. Wonderful having my own little news server on my laptop.)[/li][/ul]
Well, you don’t see Usenet the way I do. You don’t see it the way a lot of people do.
I’m 29 and used usenet. It was a good way to learn programming since it was all the old guys who, just as likely as not, invented any one of the features of all the big languages.
True, but it’s also true that some ISPs don’t offer Usenet access at all, no matter how limited. It’s not like Verizon owed it to their users. They offered it as a free service until it got to be more trouble ($2.25 million more trouble) than it was worth, apparently.
I don’t fault them for that. I fault them for blaming their actions on child pornography, instead of doing the honorable thing and saying what you just said.
Kent Pitman is active in comp.lang.lisp and Dennis Ritchie is active in comp.lang.c. It’s always amazing when you are going along and notice that a few posts down, one of the original people involved in the language’s current form has added to the current thread. I highly recommend the language’s Usenet group (comp.lang.name, usually) for anyone interested in a given programming language. (Lurk first, please.)
I’m like decades late, but how does one break into using Usenet? I tried using IRC around five years ago and it’s like I had to suck digital cock in order to get anywhere in the various channels I joined.
Autolycus: read the Wikipedia article on Usenet for a brief primer. Downloading binaries from it can be complicated (decoding, joining, par files, unRAR…), but the text based groups, for which the network was created for, are simple to understand.
For binaries, if you can spare $10 a month, try www.easynews.com
Their web interface simplifies the binary side of usenet, and retention will soon be up to 100 days. Images and Videos have thumbnails for previews, and audio files have a 30 second sample. They have an “Auto unRAR” and “Auto PAR” system, so you just right click on the file and “save as” to download something. And they still offer a NNTP server with retention up to 200 days.
If you just want to check out the discussion side of things, call up your ISP and ask for the name of their usenet server, then download FreeAgent.
ETA: the EasyNews hompage still advertises the old 50 day retention plan. They are currently increasing retention to 100 days for basic access and 200 for premium access or NNTP access
Honestly? There’s not going to notice a thing. NNTP traffic is rounding error next to HTTP and P2P.