Continuing the WWW vs the Usenet thing.

Lt. Sniper · Post by **Lt. Sniper** » 14 December 04 1:02 am

EcoTeam wrote:
CraigRat wrote:BAH! Kids today.

Back when I was first on the internet, there was no WWW ,just newsgroups, ftp, fsp , telnet and we read our email with vi (or emacs if you had some kind of brain injury)..AND had to use 'sz' to get our files of the server.... and we were greatful!!

Search engines??? WTF is a search engine???

I miss those days, back when posting an ad into a newsgroup was considered taboo......

That said, WWW is now pretty much most of the traffic on the 'net along with P2P stuff... FTP is still reasonably strong...

Used to love newsgroups/usenet but theres so much useless stuff there now that it makes it too hard to find what you need.....

Oh for the old amiga/pc flamewars......................

Sorry for the timewarp..... now, back to the discussion :
BAH!
When I was a boy, you BUILT your own computer and you had a 7 segment LED HEX readout.
Then along came monitors in nothing but Green, Amber, or if you were really funky, WHITE!
BBS's ruled the land, 300 baud was FAST!, and Kermit wasn't just a frog...

EcoDave

BAH!! and I dared to call CraigRat old......

Hounddog · Post by **Hounddog** » 14 December 04 2:02 am

Sorry Guys, I have quite a bit of work on at the moment but I will try to keep a toe in on this one because it is interesting how people's opinion changes so greatly

Some good advice has already been given on how to access the usenet, or "newsgroups" if you like, so far, so I won't touch on it that much, other than to agree with the following points.

Nothing beats a dedicated usenet service, certainly I would go this way rather than Google. Like most ISP news servers, Google has lousy retention and completion.

I am currently using www.usenetserver.com This is a great service with almost 100% completion rates and the longest retention times of any server I have used in the past. For the big 3, i.e. completion retention and speed look no further.

This is where I download 90% of my mp3 music, because it's very fast (a lot faster than peer to peer) and does not have the privacy/legality/idiot factor of peering as well.

In spite of it's shortcomings, I still do spend a fair bit of time on the Winmx peer to peer network but find it very frustrating with it's regular drop offs and idiots dumping me even though I am sharing thousands of files. This doesn't happen on the Usenet. There, I always get what I want without prejudice and without fear of dumping or being booked because of some copyright violation that may or may not exist. In any case, my Usenet provider does not keep records of who downloads what anyway

The content is good too. Right now I am looking at alt.binaries.sound.mp3.1970's.......someone has posted the top 300 songs of each year in the 1970's . If I want to, I can download them all.

It really is a great area of the internet to keep in mind and explore.

If anyone wants some tips on what software to use/how to access etc let me know and I'll try to help.

EcoTeam · Post by **EcoTeam** » 14 December 04 7:38 am

Lt. Sniper wrote:
EcoTeam wrote:
CraigRat wrote:BAH! Kids today.

Back when I was first on the internet, there was no WWW ,just newsgroups, ftp, fsp , telnet and we read our email with vi (or emacs if you had some kind of brain injury)..AND had to use 'sz' to get our files of the server.... and we were greatful!!

Search engines??? WTF is a search engine???

I miss those days, back when posting an ad into a newsgroup was considered taboo......

That said, WWW is now pretty much most of the traffic on the 'net along with P2P stuff... FTP is still reasonably strong...

Used to love newsgroups/usenet but theres so much useless stuff there now that it makes it too hard to find what you need.....

Oh for the old amiga/pc flamewars......................

Sorry for the timewarp..... now, back to the discussion :
BAH!
When I was a boy, you BUILT your own computer and you had a 7 segment LED HEX readout.
Then along came monitors in nothing but Green, Amber, or if you were really funky, WHITE!
BBS's ruled the land, 300 baud was FAST!, and Kermit wasn't just a frog...

EcoDave
BAH!! and I dared to call CraigRat old......

I'm not old, I just started YOUNG!

EcoDave

Geof · Post by **Geof** » 14 December 04 10:17 pm

Hound dog:

Also I downloaded some old movies, most of which are not obtainable on the web, and some very interesting privately written Games posted by the authors..
Then there's the photography, again not obtainable on the web (At least not without high cost)
I just Downloaded a manual for my hopelessly out of date air conditioner, the manufactures website had nothing.

Some internet based FAQ site

How Big is Usenet?
At last count (Jan 2004), and not counting "bootleg" (those groups not properly set up) and "local" (those groups set up to be seen only by a service providers customers or for in house chat) there were somewhere north of 85,000 different groups on usenet. And the volume on the groups - the amount of data being passed through the feed is running about 1,080 GigaBytes each day - that's one Tera Byte. This is up from 200 Gigabytes 2 years ago and 2 gigabytes 5 years ago. Simply put, there are a lot of us out there using usenet very heavily. And as broadband connections become the norm, this is likely to continue to put a strain on the resources. The current servers in place are having problems keeping up, are replaced, more come on line and more is posted, and the cycle is repeated.
Think of the most congested road in the city where you live, then pass a law requiring every car in the city to drive both ways on that road each and every day. Pretty jammed up, uh? Now what would be the easiest way to fix up that road so it would handle the traffic? Shut it down, close it off, and rebuild the whole thing from the beginning - but then no one could use it. And chances are that during the time the road was being widened to handle the existing load, the traffic trying to use it would get even bigger, so that when it reopened it would still be jammed up.
Now go back and replace the word "city" with "usenet", "car" with "data packet", "road" with "bandwidth", and "jammed up" with "missing packets" and you might begin to understand what can go wrong between the poster's house and yours.

I also read about lots and lots and lots and lots and ........
Gee wiz you could start world war 3 if you did or said the wrong thing in there.

Complaints to your ISP if you do bla bla bla. Fedral court action for doing ...
Donking (I think that was it)

Are we talking about the same place?

If you get your file in a 1000 parts and over up to 10 days is it still faster?

I still want to have a go but am not so sure any more

.

Hounddog · Post by **Hounddog** » 14 December 04 11:52 pm

The days of having to wait weeks for all the bainary parts of a movie etc are gone. A good news server will pull in all the parts as quick as they are posted.

I think somebody here said that the usenet is not really an efficient way of transferring data, but the truth is, if you get the right server, it's extremely fast and efficiient.
It's the ISP's that have given the usenet a bad name. Because of the limited amount of storage space they allow on their computers, it frustrates a lot of users. Messages often drop off before they get a chance to be loaded and many parts are missing because the file sizes exceed the limits set by the ISP.

EcoTeam · Post by **EcoTeam** » 15 December 04 9:02 am

Hounddog wrote:The days of having to wait weeks for all the bainary parts of a movie etc are gone. A good news server will pull in all the parts as quick as they are posted.

I think somebody here said that the usenet is not really an efficient way of transferring data, but the truth is, if you get the right server, it's extremely fast and efficiient.
It's the ISP's that have given the usenet a bad name. Because of the limited amount of storage space they allow on their computers, it frustrates a lot of users. Messages often drop off before they get a chance to be loaded and many parts are missing because the file sizes exceed the limits set by the ISP.

You can't really blame them too much I guess. It costs money to host the space required for all the newsgroups, especially the binary groups. The users have to pay for that, and your average ISP user doesn't know what Usenet is let alone care about how many groups they host, what the retention rate is etc.
Guess you just gotta shop around if you want that sort of thing.
I have never heard of a single Usenet server which hosts *every* newsgroup 100% without error, it's probably not even possible. You gotta takes your chances.
I've lost count of the number of times I've switched news servers because someone tells you this one works 100%, but you try it and it's crap for the particular groups you want to access.
Usenet is a wild beast indeed.
It's only when you get involved in big threads do you find that your news server drops a message here and a message there. You won't ever get 100% reliability with usenet.

EcoDave

Mind Socket · Post by **Mind Socket** » 15 December 04 9:36 am

Well, I've got myself a trusty ol' usenet console client, and found out where to connect to. My ISP is part of PIPE networks that has a news server in Sydney. It apparently includes binaries, and if I understand correctly, downloads from pipe doesn't count towards my usual downloads (although I can sync overnight for free anyway).

I look forward to seeing how good this server is when I get some time. Given that they exist for the sole purpose of sharing and transferring large volumes of data between Aussie ISPs, I feel optimistic.

A friend of mine is the administrator for the aus. newsgroups, I might see what insights he has. There _may_ even be a useful reason to have an aus.geocaching (or similar) group set up (no need to debate the merits of that here just yet).

- Rog

EcoTeam · Post by **EcoTeam** » 15 December 04 11:42 am

Mind Socket wrote:A friend of mine is the administrator for the aus. newsgroups, I might see what insights he has. There _may_ even be a useful reason to have an aus.geocaching (or similar) group set up (no need to debate the merits of that here just yet).
- Rog

I proposed this a long time ago, before this group came along. No one was interested.
The only major advantage to a Usenet group is that the data gets indexed and archived for generations to come.
This BB forum works much better for our needs. I like having the seperate categories.

EcoDave

Mind Socket · Post by **Mind Socket** » 15 December 04 11:46 am

EcoTeam wrote:
Mind Socket wrote:A friend of mine is the administrator for the aus. newsgroups, I might see what insights he has. There _may_ even be a useful reason to have an aus.geocaching (or similar) group set up (no need to debate the merits of that here just yet).
- Rog
I proposed this a long time ago, before this group came along. No one was interested.
The only major advantage to a Usenet group is that the data gets indexed and archived for generations to come.
This BB forum works much better for our needs. I like having the seperate categories.

I'm inclined to agree for the most part. The same is true of other communities that I participate in, but there are a few people who like to use it for discussing bits n pieces in a different setting.

- R

EcoTeam · Post by **EcoTeam** » 15 December 04 11:48 am

Hounddog wrote:I am currently using www.usenetserver.com This is a great service with almost 100% completion rates and the longest retention times of any server I have used in the past. For the big 3, i.e. completion retention and speed look no further.

I just looked www.usenetserver.com up and it appears as though this a commercial fee based service? They only advertise that they have 32,000 newsgroups, a lot less than what is actually available.
I didn't know there were paying usenet servers, but I guess it makes sense if you want good access and all the binaries hosted?
Don't know if I'd ever pay for Usenet though, it's the principle of the thing

EcoDave

Hounddog · Post by **Hounddog** » 15 December 04 1:09 pm

EcoTeam wrote: I just looked www.usenetserver.com up and it appears as though this a commercial fee based service? They only advertise that they have 32,000 newsgroups, a lot less than what is actually available.
I didn't know there were paying usenet servers, but I guess it makes sense if you want good access and all the binaries hosted?
Don't know if I'd ever pay for Usenet though, it's the principle of the thing

Horses for courses I guess. I use the Usenet a lot so it is worth paying for a dedicated server. I have to say though, I am paying a lot less than the prices quoted on the site Probably because I have been with them for a few years.

There are a lot more newsgroups than 32,000, but if you want access to any that are not listied, just send them an email request and they will include it for you without problems.