Help us save usenet news for Time-Warner customers

Time-Warner corporate is dropping usenet news as of June 23, 2008.

Please help by asking them to keep it. The person to call works for the TW president:

Barbara Burroughs
phone 203-351-2281

email:

** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

Usenet user wrote:
Time-Warner corporate is dropping usenet news as of June 23, 2008.

Please help by asking them to keep it. The person to call works for the TW president:

Barbara Burroughs
phone 203-351-2281

email:

** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
On june 24, Verizon removed many of the usefull groups. You think they
did this collaboratively?

foo wrote:
Usenet user wrote:
Time-Warner corporate is dropping usenet news as of June 23, 2008.

Please help by asking them to keep it. The person to call works for
the TW president:

Barbara Burroughs phone 203-351-2281

email:

** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
On june 24, Verizon removed many of the usefull groups. You think they
did this collaboratively?

My guess is that they think no one uses UseNet anymore, and as the spam and
flames go up and the content goes down as people post using googlegroups,
yahoo groups, etd., so they are just
saving a bit of money. Here is their announcement:

Dear Verizon Online Customer,

As a Verizon Newsgroup service user, we wanted to let you know about some
important changes that we will soon be making to our Newsgroup service.


On June 24, 2008, we will be modifying our Newsgroup offerings to only
offer groups in the Big-8 Newsgroup hierarchies, which are listed below.
The 0.verizon.* newsgroup hierarchy will also continue to be available.
Users will not be able to post or download from any other newsgroups
using our Newsgroup service.

comp.* humanities.* misc.* news.* rec.* sci.* soc.* talk.*

More details regarding the Big 8 newsgroup hierarchies is available at:
http://www.big-8.org/.

This change will not affect your Internet access service. If you would
like to subscribe to newsgroups other than those we offer, you will need
to subscribe to a separate commercial news service. Please note that
your use of any such service is still subject to our Terms of Service and
Acceptable Use Policy.

There are no changes required to your software, but you will need to
unsubscribe from all Newsgroups other than the Big 8 hierarchies and the
0.verizon.* hierarchy noted above. The following link explains how to
subscribe and unsubscribe in Outlook Express:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/171190

IMPORTANT: If you continue to subscribe to unsupported newsgroups, you
may experience poor computer performance and slow throughput speeds.
Failure to unsubscribe may also interfere with the functioning of the
Verizon network or use of the network by other Verizon users, which is a
violation of our Acceptable Use Policy.

We appreciate your business and look forward to continuing to serve you
in the future.

Sincerely,


Verizon Online

To which I replied:


Over the years you have increased the cost for service, and now you are
decreasing the newsgroups to which I can subscribe. This is no way to
indicate that you appreciate my business.

They have not bothered to reply. Surprise? Also, as a large ISP, they are
remarkably ignorant, since UseNet _is_ part of the Internet, so it will
definitely interfere with my Internet access service.


--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 07:05:01 up 16:25, 5 users, load average: 4.23, 4.24, 4.18

On 6/26/2008 4:15 AM Jean-David Beyer spake thus:

My guess is that they think no one uses UseNet anymore, and as the
spam and flames go up and the content goes down as people post using
googlegroups, yahoo groups, etd., so they are just saving a bit of
money. Here is their announcement:

First of all, it's Usenet, not UseNet or USENET.

Second of all, the recent rash of decisions to limit or drop Usenet
access altogether by ISPs has nothing whatever to do with spam, flames,
or even content (except as it applies to the below): they basically
don't care what goes on in those forums. What's behind it all is the
recent legal ruling by the state's attorney general regarding child
pornography. It's a business decision (albeit a chicken**** one).

To which I replied:

Over the years you have increased the cost for service, and now you are
decreasing the newsgroups to which I can subscribe. This is no way to
indicate that you appreciate my business.

They have not bothered to reply. Surprise? Also, as a large ISP, they are
remarkably ignorant, since UseNet _is_ part of the Internet, so it will
definitely interfere with my Internet access service.

What? They didn't even send you what my late dad used to call a "TS
letter"? I'm shocked, shocked!


--
"Wikipedia ... it reminds me ... of dogs barking idiotically through
endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.
It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish, and crawls insanely up
the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and
doodle. It is balder and dash."

- With apologies to H. L. Mencken

David Nebenzahl wrote:

First of all, it's Usenet, not UseNet or USENET.

no it ain't
it is usenet

unix lower case freaks back then because they could be.

John wrote:
David Nebenzahl wrote:

First of all, it's Usenet, not UseNet or USENET.

no it ain't
it is usenet

unix lower case freaks back then because they could be.



That could be true. Ken and Dennis had a Western Electric ASR37 teletype as
the "console" of the PDP-7 (I think it was) on which they developed the
first version of the UNIX Operating System. Since their ASR37 had a "stunt
box," they could type in lower case if they wanted to.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 23:20:01 up 1 day, 8:40, 4 users, load average: 4.27, 4.29, 4.22

Jean-David Beyer wrote:

unix lower case freaks back then because they could be.



That could be true. Ken and Dennis had a Western Electric ASR37 teletype as
the "console" of the PDP-7 (I think it was) on which they developed the
first version of the UNIX Operating System. Since their ASR37 had a "stunt
box," they could type in lower case if they wanted to.

I passed on the opportunity to get into computers then because the
industry that offered it used Hollerith cards, tape, hand-wired logic
boards, machine sorters... but I did learn about some awesome tricks
with sort/merges done on multiple tape spools. "Cascading Sort" was the
one that is impressive to this day. Had I known of the PDP then rather
than in 1978 when I managed two PDP 11/70s after becoming exhausted from
photography...

Unix is a stroke of genius. PICK is another, but I digress. I am a
photographer again, not a computer weenie.

John wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:

unix lower case freaks back then because they could be.


That could be true. Ken and Dennis had a Western Electric ASR37 teletype as
the "console" of the PDP-7 (I think it was) on which they developed the
first version of the UNIX Operating System. Since their ASR37 had a "stunt
box," they could type in lower case if they wanted to.

I passed on the opportunity to get into computers then because the
industry that offered it used Hollerith cards,

Actually, the punched cards were on their last legs then. In the world of
batch processing, vendors were supplying machines that went direct from
keyboard to tape (which was used as input to the mainframe machines of the
day). General Electric and others were offering dial-up time-sharing
services already where you _could_ use punched paper tape as input or
output, but this was seldom used. It was about that time that the BASIC
OS-Language came out.

tape,

That is still used to this day, though as a percentage, perhaps less than in
its heyday.

hand-wired logic boards,

Do you mean the plug-boards used to program machines like the 407 printer,
the 602 calculating punch and such? They were almost gone by 1960.

machine sorters...

Gee, I thought card sorting machines were pretty neat. You could do a lot
with them. I do not miss them, though.

but I did learn about some awesome tricks
with sort/merges done on multiple tape spools. "Cascading Sort" was the
one that is impressive to this day. Had I known of the PDP then rather
than in 1978 when I managed two PDP 11/70s after becoming exhausted from
photography...

Unix is a stroke of genius. PICK is another, but I digress. I am a
photographer again, not a computer weenie.


--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 11:05:01 up 1 day, 20:25, 4 users, load average: 4.40, 4.36, 4.31

Jean-David Beyer wrote:

It was about that time that the BASIC
OS-Language came out.

Misunderstanding. BASIC was never used as an operating system language.

BASIC was prevalent in RSTS/E (at least to V9 when I quit it) and one
could execute BASIC statements at the command line, and it was used in
many utilities, but the OS was coded in assembler.

Trivia: utilities were so novel that a comment line in part of the SORT
utility was:
1024 ! WOW I FINALLY GET TO USE XOR

Wow. Talk about naive.

John wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:

It was about that time that the BASIC OS-Language came out.

Misunderstanding. BASIC was never used as an operating system language.

We may be quibbling here. Basic was initial interface anyone got when
logging into the Dartmouth Time Sharing System and it was also the one they
programmed in. So from the user's viewpoint, it was both the operating
system and the programming language.

Another way of looking at your statement would be if you thought I meant a
language in which to write operating systems. I think it would be possible
to do it in BASIC, but I sure would not want to try it. I know ALGOL 60
compilers were written in ALGOL 60, even though it was by no means ideal to
do so.

The first OS I know of written in a higher level language was MULTICS that
was written in an early version of what came to be PL/I. (I am _not_ saying
it was the first one that was written in a higher level language, just the
first one I know about.) Linux was first written in assembler for the PDP7
(and later the PDP11), and was converted to C in the early to mid 1970s.
Later Steve Johnson wrote the portable C compiler that made it practical to
port the UNIX OS from one kind of machine to another. I believe they ran it
on Interdata machines, and they for sure ran it on System/360 machines and
Amdahl machines. Of course now it will run on any machine that have the
right resources that people care enough to port it.

BASIC was prevalent in RSTS/E (at least to V9 when I quit it) and one
could execute BASIC statements at the command line, and it was used in
many utilities, but the OS was coded in assembler.

Trivia: utilities were so novel that a comment line in part of the SORT
utility was: 1024 ! WOW I FINALLY GET TO USE XOR

Wow. Talk about naive.

My favorite comments I saw in code included:

1.) Trickey

after some really obscure code. This was the only comment and it was not
funny to the person who had to maintain it.

and

2.) They made me do it.

After some stupid code; pretty clearly something the programmer did not want
to write, but a micromanaging supervisor forced it in.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 14:30:01 up 1 day, 23:50, 4 users, load average: 4.08, 4.27, 4.38