Everything Else

I tend to use Google Groups to keep an eye on the comp.sys.acorn.* groups, though I appreciate the comp.sys.sgi groups seem moribund. Google has for months been saying that older browsers (including IE7) will be incompatible with "new" groups. For the usenet groups, this seems to be a case of fixing what ain't broken - after all, usenet predates most current browsers by a long margin.

Just come across this petition http://www.change.org/petitions/google- ... s-software , though at the current level of signatures, it's not going anywhere, and thought Nekochaners might be interested notwithstanding the recent advances in browser capability (thanks again, diegel).

Dude, I'm signing. The new JavaScript-infested Google Groups bites turgid moose wang. Even with JIT on my Power Macs with TenFourFox, it still chugs. Without it, it's nearly unusable.

I don't understand what was broken about the old Groups that they had to "fix" it.

Remember deja news ? Sigh.

It's all about control now. Innovation my left walnut, it's all "How can we fuck people by charging them for what's really theirs ?"

Patents on a round corner, what a large appetizing bowl of fragrant steaming pigshit. It's class warfare all right, and pretty obvious who is winning, one little piece at a time.

If you want to know the truth, petitions do nothing. An Uzi in Google headquarters is the correct response to this. 枪杆子里出政权

Signed.

exactly, unfortunately you see that so often these days. not only websites but also software.
solid and fast stuff gets replaced by totally bloated but fancy crap for absolutely no reason. it then needs at least twice the performance to do exactly the same it did before

now the main problem and one of the main reasons for this is that people dig it. tablets, smartphones ... you name it. it's only about toys, toys, toys. oh my i'd love to hear from cosmos about that

well, well, looks like there's an appetite for a reunion lately.

nice to see you foetz, hope joerg and the rest of the north-european nekochaners are doing fine :)


as for the iBastardization of everything, it was only expected

hehe thanks but i have no idea about joerg tho.
and yeah got a new tape recently and seen the firefox3 so that were 2 damn good reasons to spend some quality time with sgi/irix again. haven't done that for way too long anyway

Goetz quotes were sourly missed. Welcome back

Google groups should DIE! It's one of the worst things ever to infest Usenet, even worse than AOL.

99% of spam and posts from idiots comes from google groups.

Use a Usenet newsreader and a free news server.

http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

And why did you exclude not-north-European-Nekochaners? We are doing fine, as well:-)

I think Usenet went away for a few reasons :

First, the ISP's dropped their nntp servers to save a few dollars. This is the standard "business practice" called bait-and-switch.

Then the free servers became unreliable and hard to come by. There have been several that came and went.

Concurrently, as you pointed out, Usenet became worthless. It's not just google groups. It only takes a few people to ruin a newsgroup.


Result : It's dead, Jim.

I know what you mean, but just when you think something has gone NLA somebody goes and finds a couple pallets in a warehouse, or they find another uncontacted tribe of native peoples in the Amazon...

There seem to be a few groups like sci.crypt and comp.os.vms toddling along in their niches. I would only be mildly surprised to find netnews servers still fulfilling a role on campus, running a local hierarchy alongside a Gopher server. (There you go, we're ready for you now Cameron... )

Usenet didn't go away. There are numerous reliable free servers, there are plenty of pay servers, and there's FOSS software to run your own newsserver. I run my own news server and so do many people. It's the ultimate distributed network, there is no one place all the Usenet news lives.

There are gateways like gmane and google groups but they aren't Usenet, they're interfaces to Usenet.

Usenet is very much alive, despite more "modern" alternatives like this forum, etc. Usenet still has advantages like simple text interface, high performance, usual lack of moderation etc. Biggest advantage of all is it's free as in freedom. Nobody can censor Usenet, nobody can delete posts or stop people from sharing information. Usenet is one of the best things left about the internet.

GOPHER EVERYWHERE!

NOTHING IS BENEATH GOPHERSPACE!

If not for usenet, Linux might still be one guy's basement project and we'd still be stuck with Minix...

True, but reading Minix's source should still teach you one thing or the other...

Or perhaps the Hurd may have progressed faster.

Don't forget the *BSDs as well.