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Gooja's Got Old Stuff Online Now
Chrismo was one of several readers to contribute this news: "Google Groups now has the Deja content back to 1995 online." While that still leaves plenty of Usenet not yet accounted for, it's a huge step (backward) forward.
If you check these groups, they are being archived. This looks like a labelling error.
eeeewwww!!!
oh wait..you said *grainy* pics not granny pics.
my bad
Google allows you to nuke your old posts. You only have to send them a message with your address and the URL of the article you want to delete.
The details are at http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/help.html
Wrong. Its the same 4GB of bad grainy pics over and over again. Trust me. My palm is sore and my mouse is sticky.
Yuck!
ACK
Yeah, I noticed two things right away:
:-)
1) I was really stupid in 1995.
2) I found myself wanting to reply further to some of these discussions. It was really hard not to.
-
I've solved more technical problems with google (and deja before it) by taking the error I was getting and pasting it into the search criteria. Or paraphrasing the problem and searching in the appropriate group.
...)
I've rarely found something so esoteric that *someone* hasn't asked the question. (Occasionally -- very occasionally -- I find something no one *responds* to
I've solved problems co-workers have spent days on, just by going to google/deja and searching. At one job, I taught people how to do the searches themselves as a research tool...
Very cool, and glad more of it is on-line now!
GenericJoe
Well, what do you know? I just searched for "pr0n", and what category links do I get?
I don't even want to start thinking about how _THAT_ did happen... *g*
np: Reinhard Voigt - Track 3 (Premiere World)
As always under permanent deconstruction.
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
As if we all did not use it when those hand me down pc's were dumped in our laps. I don't think Linux would be where it is today without Deja.
If only we could go back to Deja's content and moderate the hell out of it and remove the "Me too's", ads etc. But then some peoples treasure is anothers bit-bucket.
I've seen several people complain about loosing their anoniminity by the USENET being archived. It was'nt until the spammers came around that we all started hiding our e-mail address and names. Google could fix this thou by removing the e-mail addresses/posters names. Then you you would have rants without any credibility. Would it matter anymore?*sigh*. A no win situation.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I think that's because of Google's reliance on links for importance weight. Tons of pr0n sites have enter/exit buttons, and most of those exit buttons link to Disney. Thus, if thousands of pr0n sites are linking to Disney, people searching for pr0n must find it relevant!
Something similar happened with George W and the search term "dumb motherfucker."
It didn't take long to discover Netnews. Because I was basically a sorceror's apprentice playing around without a wizard at my side, I made some incredible newbie mistakes, like trying to figure out what inews did, sending out a newgroup control message by mistake, and getting personally flamed by Mark Horton, if I recall. I was part of a minor flame war that erupted on net.jokes over the appropriateness of posting ethnic humor, a fuss that resulted in the creation of net.jokes.d to segregate the discussion from the humor.
I didn't have the slightest clue that I was in on the beginning of something that would change the world, and so I saved almost nothing of what I contributed or enjoyed on Usenet in the early '80s. I'd love to recover it--embarrassing as some of it might be.
>What's the point of USENET? The few times I've ever bothered with it, it's been nothing more than random flamewars...
/google, is the single largest repository for technical information in the world. I have often found better info on usenet, than on the web.
There are still many great Usenet groups, you may not have found them, but they are there.
That there also is a lot of crap groups, flooded with trolls, kooks and spam, is because it is free and anarchic (the alt.*).
In many respects it is similar to the web; Huge, disorganized, full of crap, with some real gold nuggets here and there.
How would you react to somebody who said "I have tried this web-thing a couple of times, but it was full of crappy, rotting homepages, pr0n, pop-up sites, and whizzbang rotating banners."
About the kernel list. It too, like many other maling lists, had its of share spam (discussed many a times on the list, recently; Maps DUL)
The Usenet groups I follow are either totally spam free, or almost (a spam twice a year), thanks to moderation, or vigilant spamfighting.
And the kernel list do have a Usenet gateway, since Usenet readers, are an excellent way to read high volume lists.
>But then again, it always suprises me how much "foward-thinking" tech types seem to want to cling on to the past.
Usenet, as archived by deja
If you need such info, then it would be a rather backward thing, to disregard Usenet.
And yes, thanks to google, you too can access Usenet by the web, with all the hyperlinks and html, that you crave.
Usenet was great in the early 90's - it was like Fidonet or somesuch, except on crack. The quality of converstation was quite high, as the only people with meaningful net access were probably in university or involved in research activities. Once the boom started, there was a period of 1-2 years (or maybe a year or two more) where Usenet degraded into a spam-filled hell.
Now, it seems most of the kiddies have gone to troll slashdot and it's kin, and left usenet alone - or at least the groups that I frequent. This has caused a slightly higher SnR... imagine getting useful information from Usenet again! Usenet is the ultimate for loading onto a palmpilot or handheld computer and wasting time-o-plenty, and at the same time, maybe learning something. The Usenet group FAQ's are an incredible repositiory of otherwise hard or impossible to locate information - I cite the rec.food.coffee FAQ as an example :).
A slashcode to NNTP gateway would be da shit though. :)
..don't panic
Well, considering that Huey, Dewey (sp?) and Louie don't even wear pants, is it really that surprising?
;-)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
In their latest incarnation, the top half of the browser window was entirely ads except for deja's logo and a few navigational controls. The bottom half had ads on the left and right sides, leaving only about 1/4 of the total screen to actually display the article. And they'd even started selling links attached to specific words in articles. They had so many ads that even the ordinary Joes would have to learn to ignore them or wouldn't be able to use the site.
Google seems to be doing OK surviving on Yahoo's rental of search services (yes, Yahoo offers a search through the Usenet archive) and the few targeted ads that show up at the top of searches if you search on the right word(s). And they don't overwhelm you with so many ads that you can't find the articles.
Furthermore, by not indenting replies to messages, Google makes it very hard to find out WHO replies to WHICH message.
And the date sorting is only available on the "Advanced" page. Many people never bother going there. If you are using a boolean search on the basic search page (which Google doesn't really allow anyway), there is no point in ranking on relevance; therefore it should be sorted by date.
-Martin
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Usenet is full of junk? Try reading slashdot at -1 for a while.
Bill, uses a newsreader.
Try using a regular newsreader. They work far better than the miriad of web-based services.
A .newsrc is very useful. It keeps a record of which articles you have read, so then when you come back a day (or an hour) later, only new articles are presented.
Why oh why can't slashdot do this?
Bill, slashdot: 1-59,61-97
Repeat after me, "There is more to usenet than the alt.* hierarchy."
Bill, "Slashdot is just a load of links to some goatsex website."
During an interview with several prospective employees I have asked if they knew of, ever posted on the UseNet. If the answer was "yes". I would go further and ask if they used it for work related purposes. If that answer was yes I have asked for the email address of their posts. Then I would search deja: a~ emplyee@oldjob.com To see their comments. Amazing what you can find out about a person this way. I would hate for a potential employer to see *all* of my postings!
--- Every day I am forced to add another to the list of people who can kiss my ass...
Besides in the FAQ google say they honor the 'X-No-archive: yes' header and it also gives you the chance to request deletion of individual old postings, so if you are really concerned about what you once wrote you can make the effort to get it out of the public domain again! So in fact you have more chances to exercise your copyright here than in other traditional media once you have released your post into to open :)
ponxx
History, my friends, history. I was trying to find my old postings here on Slashdot, but the search engine is -- to put it politely -- poor. I go to the box at the bottom of the page, type in "ChaoticCoyote", and it can't find more than a few of my postings here.
However, now that Google has the old Usenet stuff back online, I can search back and review what I've said over many years.
Are old Usenet postings relevant? Well, consider the creation of a historical record -- as more communications travel the electronic road, fewer are preserved to provide a historical context of our times. Beyond the momentous issue of history, I often like to see what I was thinking 2, 5 or even ten years ago, to see how (or if) I've grown or changed.
Let's see what Google digs up from my long career on Usenet... hmmm... sort it by date...
1,620 hits since 1995. It sure does accumulate... let's see what I was talking about way back when...
Okay, there's some leftist stuff (Native American and environmental)... a lot of messages about Age of Empires and naval gaming... a random dinosaur article or two... lots of dicussion of my books, mostly positive (yeah!)... and, of course, all my C++ and Java postings.
Nothing embarrassing, to my relief. That is perhaps the only problem with history -- we have to live with what we've done. That's why I'm against Anonymous postings -- people don;t have to live with or learn from the immaturity or past stupidity.
A suggestion to Slahsdot: If Google had an "obligation" to maintain the old Usenet archive, isn't it equally incumbent on Slashdot to make its old messages readily searchable? Just a thought...
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
>I ofter wonder how anyone can find any : :-).
> specifically useful information in the
> newsgroups.
> There is SO much info there that finding
> something specific is literally looking for
> a needle in a haystack, or 16k in a terabyte
> of data.
From my own experience
Yesterday I needed to modify Stronghold (aka RedHat Apache) source code (thanks, Open source
I don't know if you ever studied it but I have to admit it has been really painful to understand its internal logics until I found out about one function which name i submitted to Google Groups.
3 minutes later I knew all that I needed to sort out my Proxy problem.
Thanks Google Groups, also thanks to the newsgroups community.
I strongly believe that a newsgroups search engine is mandatory to find the answer to your problem as soon as you realize that there are few chances that somebody has not had the same problem as you before and that he has not managed to solve it online.
So, if you have a problem, just ask Google groups and you'll be astonished by how quickly you'll refer tothe solution of a similar problem, be it technical/troubleshooting related or a buying decision.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Because, used properly, it can't get slashdotted? (a moderated slashdot newsgroup, gatewayed to the Real Thing would an interesting thing).
Because it's more resilient than the web? (One newsserver down doesn't take an entire group with it).
Because you could check up Linux's history without linking to a page that pops up windows like I just did? (Can't find a more decent archive of Linus's Linux first annoucement. We need the 1991 archives on deja/gooja).
Because of the scary devil monastery?
Too many other reasons that if you've to ask, then it's probably not for you.
Searched the archives for pr0n.
Results 1 - 10 of about 23,200,000,000. Search took 0.15 seconds.
Did you mean: porn?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I think Group Google is biased, when I search windows rox linux sux it returns Linux ROX Windows SUX
hmm...kinda fishy....
Is there anything else Google can do to avoid the same fate?
I'm concerned that the sad realities of the new-new economy may be difficult even for Google to avoid in the long-term. :-(
This is why its nice to flame anonymously.. erm.. wait..
by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27, @04:15AM EDT
Good man!
I read in the latest version of wired that Google looking to recover archived posts back to the initial tests in the late 70's.
--
--
silence is poetry.
Once it became clear that USENET was increasingly becoming permanently fixed and searchable, I stopped participating under my real name. I never flamed on it or participated in particularly controversial subjects, but I still didn't want to have to deal with the possibility of being quoted out of context years later.
While anonymity has many undesirable features, it is the second-best choice if you can't have informal, short-lived discussions (this is, incidentally, why I'm not using my real name on Slashdot). For me, what killed USENET was not anonymity but its permanent archiving.
I think something similar has happened in politics: since everything is getting recorded and republished and analyzed word-for-word, politicians can't engage in thoughtful debate anymore in public for fear of offending someone or getting attacked on out-of-context quotes. Instead, every political message has to be carefully crafted and rehearsed; no extraneous utterance or debate is possible.
Regarding janpod66: That is a typical pissy reaction to change of any sort. There're a lot of great postings in the archives. It's a fine resource. A six-month limit just makes no sense. Rather, people should own up to what they post. Most of us would find that a natural thing to do. I do it every day. Regards.
Now is the winter of our disco tent
Went off in search after asking the question...
This one has articles from 1981 - 1982:
I've been telling newbies for years that whatever you say on the net has the potential to be stored forever. Choose your words wisely. It may seem transient, but redundancy of servers, mirrors, or users downloading content can propagate your words for a long time.