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Deja For Sale
yet another coward writes: "According to a story in Internet Week, Deja.com is for sale. The company plans to sell the Usenet archive and the buying guide separately. This move might mean a comeback for the archive." So what's the going rate for 1,000,000 MMF posts?
It would be cool for some IT-oriented company such as IBM to buy the comp.* and alt.comp.* branches, slap on a real search engine that lets you perform actually useful searches, and put it back on the web. The wildcard capabilities need to be greatly enhanced, as well as searching for special characters. I used to live in deja for developement research, and it's still my first stop even today, even though my expecations are greatly lowered.
It strikes me that IBM in particular could use it as a show piece for their technologies: DB2 (scalability, speed etc), their storage farms, search engine frontend etc. Make it part of their developerWorks and keep it really fast to show off their stuff.
http://www.deja.nsa.gov
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here is my offer for Deja
3 Cans of Spam
1 used Napkin (paper)
My Slashdot and ICQ accounts
The Head of Rob Malda
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Spam: $0.01 a.b.p.erotica posts: $0.10 The perfect troll: Priceless
I've got some posts in that archive, I'm sure... Maybe I should sue for part of the asking price? ^_^
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Most of the books in the public library are crap, too, IMO, but I wouldn't once suggest that libraries are of limited use.
Almost every single coding problem I've come up against, or configuration problem, or hardware problem, or VCR-clock-setting problem, has been asked already. All I need to do is a Deja Power Search, some thoughtful keywords, and I have my answer, courtesy of someone the previous year.
Market value? Yeah, probably not. Usenet isn't there for market value; it's there to facilitate a huge meeting of the minds. And we need to preserve that information, so that those of us trying to write code and support the rest of you aren't forever asking the same questions.
How about "It blew goats!"? Deja should have stuck to what it did best -- archiving Usenet -- and left that "portal" crap to places that believe in such things.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
If you have a DSL or Cable modem, you can roll your own archive. Since Sept 99, I have archived about 500 newsgroups, including most of comp.*, microsoft.*, linux.*, and a few rec.*, etc. Since then, I have archived 8.2 million messages. Each article is individually saved in a separate file and compressed with gzip. This still consumes 13 gigs of space over 3 partitions. I do not archive any "binaries" groups, either. When I get new articles, I store the subject of the article in a MySQL database. I wrote an Apache/PHP front end for the system. Once nice thing is that I can do a SQL select/like statement which gives me great flexibility when searching. Searching the entire database can be slow (50 secs). However searching in an individual group (or a small subset) only takes a second or two on a celeron 450. Since, my connection has a slow uplink, I send the requested file over the wire compressed with a gzip mime-type, and netscape and/or IE will decompress it on the client side.
I like my implementation much better the deja. The interface to deja was horrible, IMHO, and was one of the main reasons I decided to roll my own. I'd suggest archiving stuff you'll never think you will need. Back then, I didn't know that I would be running Sybase on Linux, but since I archived most of the comp.* groups, including comp.databases.sybase, I was able to use the information with relative ease.
there'd be one fewer source of headaches for them. Usenet contributes to the perpetuation of spam, and it's the ISPs' majordomos that have to clean up when their users get led astray.
Many ISPs are trying their best to set up their own proprietary bulletin boards accessible through their own channels. Usenet is an unnecessary source of competition
Usenet is a big gaping sucking legal wound waiting to happen, what with all the copyright infringements, obscenity, and violations of the DMCA being tossed around. Any prudent ISP wary of tort suits should be wary of affiliating itself with such an anarchic beast.
Usenet still, above all, requires enormous resources to maintain. Especially binary groups.
In general, there has been a move away from Usenet and towards other fertile discussion forums within the last four years. I expect this trend to continue well into the next five years. Today, Usenet is nothing like what it was ten years ago. It'll be even less so, tomorrow.
-- Anne Marie
I have the weirdest feeling I've seen this article somewhere before...
I always wished I could read usenet postings that were really old, say 8+ years. The old-timers always talk about the glory days of usenet, and we always see references to the famous postings of "Larry Wall" on April Fool's day, when the concept of Perl Poetry was first seen, or of course, the famous Linus posting when Linux first met the world. Anyone know of a place where you can read really old messages like these?
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Creating a open network of Deja.com like servers is my dream and I already have stable running code for it...
At SourceForge.net the project UsenetWeb is located that is the Open Source implementation of Deja.com
Currently the software is stand-alone, but is could be expanded to form a network of OpenContent deja.com like servers. With the sharing of news groups across several servers, it could become a volenteers only job... The software only supports text-only newsgroups for now.
Are there people here that would like to run this software and build a Open Usenet Network? ? ?
See a demonstration of Open Source deja.com at Usenet4free.com
Johan.
I was just wondering to myself, "If I had $500,000,000 in my wallet, how much would I spend on the Deja archives?"
I came to the conclusion that I would spend nothing at all. Why? Because I feel that ideally, these archives should be free to all and any attempt to charge for access would be somehow wrong. These are ideas in their purest form, when they were just first beginning to be transferred into digital format en masse. This stuff belongs in a museum, not a pay site.
On the other hand.. maintaining such a behemoth for no profit would suck, and would take someone far more idealistic than me.
In conclusion, I don't want Deja, and anyone who does want it will either be A) A zealot we admire but secretly resent; or B) A big businessman with a stupid business plan and no soul.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
For a couple of years now I've been arguing that ISPs ought to kick in for the maintenance of a Usenet archive in much the same manner that cable companies kick in to cover C-SPAN's costs. While some newsgroups are higher content than others, there's no denying that there is an absolute treasure-trove of information that passes through news servers every day. Since the entire online community benefits, the entire online community ought to pay to maintain an archive.
Just today I saw an online article that over half the households in the US are online in some capacity. According to the Census Bureau, that means around 50 million households are online. A buck a month per customer routed through ISPs and you're looking at six hundred million dollars a year -- enough to cover an archive without even asking the rest of the world to kick in. We could pay for it ourselves as a token gesture of reconciliation for "Americanizing" the rest of the net through brute force.
You run into the issue of censorship almost before the proposal hits paper. For every newsgroup there will almost certainly be someone or many someones who wants the content sifted or outright not in the archive. Beating these people into submission so that they will be silent forever will be difficult.
Just a notion, make of it what you will. I'm sure there's a vast array of technical issues that would have to be worked out up front, but I'm absolutely convinced that this could work. Further, I think this is the only way a Usenet archive _can_ work (barring some well-funded philanthropic gesture from a dead billionaire).
Comments?
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