Slashdot Mirror
Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies
complex writes "Jim Ellis, one of the cofounders of Usenet, has passed away. Usenet is considered the first large information sharing service, predating the WWW by years." He was 45 years old, and died after battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 2 years. Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web). Truly a man who changed the world.
If Usenet is one of the first really democratic institutions, shouldn't we all recognize this as significant as when one of the country's Founding Fathers died? Just an idea...
Out of respect, can we shutdown usenet for a while?? Just long enough for the spammers to find something better to do? Please?
No, please. If you cannot say what you want to say with simple ASCII text, then no amount of fancy fonts, bandwidth-wasteful graphics, or flashing colors are going to help you.
Usenet's beauty is that it can be read from, and posted to, on ANYthing from a dumb ASCII terminal to a Cray supercomputer cluster. Let's keep it that way.
Thank's for the first damn intelligent post on the sad passing of this man. I was scrolling and about to leave this in disgust. Yes I remember the Net when it was just BBS and Usenet. Had Jim never made this possible who knows where it would have gone? Maybe the corporate whores we have today...maybe not. Anyway...thank you. Thank you for an intelligent post and a bit of history for these kiddies. You little shits need to brush up on where you came from and who made it possible. You little piss-ants disgust me.
Nice. Is this available for download somewhere?
A whole lot of dead spammers! COOL!
alt.internet.pioneer.die.die.die
Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back. "Imminent death of Usenet predicted. Film at 11."
-- Everyone that has ever used Usenet for more than a year, regardless of what year they started.
We get Microsoft and a bazillion spammers, and God gets Jim Ellis. That's not fair! What kind of rip-off does He think He can pull on us? I want to check that deck, before the next deal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The spam is indeed unfortunate... I wonder if you could setup an extension of NNTP with authentication to prevent groups being killed in spam and restore the "ad-hocracy"?
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Personally, I've been using Usenet since 1996 (mostly sfnet.* groups, some alt.*, comp.* and rec.* groups...) and I have never used a spam-blocked E-mail address. I get a surprisingly low volume of E-mail spam.
Apparently it pays to report the spam to the originating ISPs. =)
Spam-blocked E-mail addresses, in Usenet and web, are more of an inconvinience for the users than to spammers...
> ..not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.
And actually, neither can Jim Ellis. Steve Bellovin, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel helped.
If you honestly think that USENET is/was more important than the WWW, I think you are sadly wrong. The WWW has made Grandma and Grampa and Mom and Pop go on the Internet. I don't remember any kind of surge to the Internet in 1979 when USENET started. I bet almost anyone would agree that the WWW had much more of an impact that USENET.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Usenet was never about being pretty, it was all about the information. Bastardizing it like putting in HTML, inline images and such would just be travesty. Granted, it'll probably happen (if it hasn't already in some areas), but that doesn't change the fact that it would sad.
-jay
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Sounds like someone got their feelings hurt.
Usenet is a very frank discussion, and it does offend the weak hearted who would rather have a nanny at the wheel. With a good usenet reader, and a quick mind, these problems go away.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The problem is with your Usenet client then. Mine has both killfiles and thread scoring (not to mention that newsgroups can be moderated if they choose to be). I still read usenet more than any other discussion site. Slashdot is one of the VERY, VERY few web sites that has managed to make the transition with any grace at all. Whenever I see an UltimateBulletinBoard website, I'm quick to go elsewhere; most of the people who design web discussion groups have no idea how to implement it properly. Considering the junk that must be dealt with on usenet, it's still heaven when compared to the HTTP "equivalents".
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Boogie Man died? Shit! Nobody told me!
Well, it's probably a good think no-one told me, 'cos it was my birthday party that week-end and I would have been totally bummered if I'd known.
Please, no HTML in Usenet. It's bad enough as it is. The beauty of Usenet is that you could use any client on any computer practically anywhere to read it. You didn't need a fancy computer with a fancy graphical newsreader... something as simple as tin in a shell account over a 2400 baud modem was good enough (although 14.4K made things better). Usenet's strength lay in the fact that it is (was?) universal. Bastardizing it with HTML (isn't this done already with most spam?), in my opinion, won't bring anything new to the table.
Looking at Usenet today, I am not happy with what I see. I see petty little turf wars, where the regulars bully anyone they consider to be a newcomer. For example, in alt.usage.english, someone had a question about the passive voice. One regular basically told the person that they were an idiot for not knowing what the passive voice is, since any Junior high school textbook on grammer can tell you what the passive voice is. When the original poster, in a rather gentle manner, tried to defend himself, he was flamed by other regulars on the newsgroup. It was a professional linguist who explained that the stuff those junior high school textbooks teach kids is very innaccurace, and, in his words "based on mythology".
For people who are interested, the thread is at http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&ic=1&th=a 286df8ce2d0dc9e,72
.
The problem with Usenet is that there is no moderation. As imperfect as the moderation system is, it is an effective way to moderate the people who want to play "king of the hill" with an online community by bullying anyone who threatens their turf down to the level of the goatse links. In fact, I can argue that a large number of people trool Slashdot because of their frustration at not being able to engage in the usual Usenet bullying tactics.
Another traditional online exchange which encourages bullying turf wars is IRC.
I note that both Usenet and IRC are online forums largely dominated by men. It would not surprise me if one of the reasons women do not use these exchanges is because the petty turf wars turn the women off.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
It's not naive to think that they should do it, it'd be naive to think that they will. Mental note - find a spammer and punch him or her in the gut to commemorate Jim Ellis.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I'm sure she would have been quite happy not to have received it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Aren't the advertisers smart enough to only pay for the ads that are actually reponded to?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No doubt when she got older she learned that you feed a mouse cheese, not peanut butter. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I dunno, depends what group you visit. There are still plenty of groups uninfested by AOLers, spam and flame wars - though they tend to be only the more hardcore technical groups, as you'd expect. My favourite group is comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware - apart from the occasional poster who mistakes it for something about the PlayStation 2 :-(.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's hard to believe my first exposure to the internet was through a usenet news feed at the university I attened at the time.
Back then, I hung out quite a bit on comp.sys.apple2.*. Because of the people that posted to that newsgroup I found a ton of great shareware games, and information about the apple2. I was a fan of the apple 2 at that time, as it was my first long term exposure to computers. Most of what I had learned on that system helped me later when I hopped over to PC's, IBM's VM/CMS, and Digital's VMS, and a couple of years later Solaris followed by Linux and DEC OSF/1.
I can honestly say if it wasn't for usenet I wouldn't have found all of the neat stuff and upgrades for the apple 2 that are still a part of that system. And of course the healthy respect for RTFM'ing before asking something that was answered in the FAQ (or now HOWTO's, man pages, info pages, hard copy manuals and so on).
Unfortunatley over the years my use of Usenet has dwindled to nothing. Mainly from the quality of responses on the newsgroups I read. I used to get a bunch of useful replies. Last time I posted I got a slew of "me too's", 1 sorta useful reply, and a couple of replies that didn't tell me anything that I already didn't know (basically restating my question, but phrasing it as an answer). I know a lot of it most likely has to do with what newsgroup I looking at. If I find some hardcore newsgroup (like a *BSD group) I'd imagine I'd find the quality of replies I used to find on Usenet years ago. Of course now I'm much more impatient, I just hop onto irc and ask my question there, or a mailing list.
Of course the worst part is that Jim, who came up with the idea/developed it is now gone. People like Jim Ellis are true alpha geeks. We should find a good way to preserve their work, mainly years from now when some kid reads their history book, and believes that Al Gore invented the Internet, people like Jim Ellis who did the work will be marginalized. I'd hate to see that happen.
Anyway, enough of being on my soapbox.
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Back in the 80s, Usenet was the net for those of us who couldn't get on the Internet, because we didn't have the connections into DARPA (by virtue of being a defense contractor or big research university) to get on it. The only connectivity we had was 1200 baud modems (in some cases, 300 baud). The way you got on was that you had a Unix system and a modem, and a contact with someone that was willing to give you a news feed (possibly in exchange for lightening the load by feeding a couple of other folks).
Actually, you didn't even need Unix. I was at a small company that did a lot of digital signal processing, and it was a VMS shop, so we ran Usenet on top of Eunice (a Unix-on-top-of-VMS emulation that sort of worked, but had only symbolic links, no hard links). I was the guy who did the Eunice port for 2.11B news: my first involvement in what would now be called a major open source project.
Back in those days, to send mail you had to have a picture of the UUCP network topology in your head: a series of paths that would get you from here to there. There were a couple of short cuts: sites that would move messages across the country (ihnp4) or internationally (seismo, which later became uunet, the first commercial provider of news feeds).
Because of the way Usenet worked, in the days where it went over UUCP (before NNTP), it was based on personal connections and a web of trust. Things were pretty loose, but if someone ignored community norms and behaved in a way that would clearly damage the fabric of the net, they just lost their news feed and that was that. It was cheap Internet connections and NNTP that made Canter and Siegel (the first big Usenet spammers) possible. But this reliance on personal connections had its downside: some admins enjoyed being petty dictators too much. The UUCP connection between AMD and National Semi (yes, competitors fed each other news on a completely informal basis, it was a different era) was temporarily dropped because of a personal squabble between the sysadmins.
There were many other nets then that weren't the Internet: Bitnet, berknet (at Berkeley) and the like. Figuring out how to get mail around required wizardry: mixes of bang paths (...!oliveb!epimass!jbuck), percent signs, and at-signs (user%janus@ucbvax.ARPA).
The user interfaces on sites like Slashdot are still vastly inferior to newsreader interfaces, like trn and friends. I could quickly blast through hundreds of messages, killing threads I wasn't interested in, skimming to get to the meat. If only sites like Slashdot would pay more attention to what worked so well about Usenet.
Tonight, I will lift a glass to the man responsible for so much of my free pr0n.
pooptruck
They are!
o n.obit/index.html
d ley.ap/index.html
That and the actor Jack Lemmon died yesterday, and of course Walter Mattau died about a year ago. A year ago next Monday actually.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/28/lemm
And John Yardley who helped design the first spacecraft that put an American in space, died yesterday too:
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/06/27/obit.yar
2001 seems to be a bad year for the deaths of well known people.
--
Delphis
Delphis
I wish that tin over 2400 bps was the minimum client for Usenet. Unfortunately, the tradition of hardwrapped text dates back to teletypes.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
My list of subscribed groups that I am active in on a daily basis is over 20. I am also active on a few mailing lists related to Solaris and security issues.
:-). That group was killed by spam.
alt.certification.cisco
comp.dcom.*
comp.sys.sun.*
comp.unix.solaris.*
news.admin.net-abuse.email <g> - gotta post the kills
Stuff like that... Very active groups with nearly 100% signal/noise ratio.
Guess what, the spammers picked up my unmunged e-mail address from NANAE. That is a death wish, obviously.
Most of my spam is to my slashdot address... Some choose to harwest it from the ICQ Whitepages. I advise AOL of such violation of terms of use of Whitepages and AOL doesn't kid around.
The traffic is VERY strong today. I can't keep up at times.
You can't post to alt.2600 anymore like you could in 1996 though
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Today, people consider the Web to be the Internet. But back before the web, Usenet held that distinction.
Sure, today Usenet isn't what it used to be, but it is in many ways the model in which discussion boards like slashdot are based. So on a historical basis, it certainly is fair to call it one of the top three applications on the net.
Having lost my own father to the very same cancer, I sincerely hope they had the same opportunity to say good-bye as we did.
The final downhill slide took only a matter of days, but you sure do make good use of them when the writing's on the wall!
--The more you know, the less you know.
But I think that spammers should stop spamming the USENET for a day in memory of such a great man.
A sig is redundant.
a reference for those unfamiliar with the story, the jargon file entry for the tale of the kremvax: http://tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/kremvax.html.
And I have to say that by and large we really blew it. It wasn't just the spam, or even the massive flamefests. It was really the corrosive effects of ignorance and greed. Take Tom Christiansen (most recently tchrist@mox.perl.com). Not always a bunch of rainbows and smiles, he, but an incredibly well-informed individual whose contributions to Usenet are the stuff of legend. Apparently chased away from Usenet for good by one too many "gimme gimme" question and one too many displays of horrible netiquette. A real tragedy.
This was around the time I discovered Slashdot, and saw what looked like a more clueful albeit imperfect mirror of the Spirit of Usenet. I was quite cheered when I found out that tchrist himself was becoming a key contributor. It might be a new geek paradise! But, of course, that didn't happen. Tom got chased away again by a bunch of cretins.
And, getting back to the idea of an elegy for Ellis, I believe the final straw there was some jerk maligning Jon Postel when his obituary came up in this forum. Much worse than spam.
Babar
No, it's just that it's been quite a while since anyone made any great strides for humanity, so there's a generation gap.
the web is more important than ftp?
------ Poo-tee-weet?
The discussion is completely off topic but I feel I have to comment anyway:
I would very strongly disagree that http can do
everything that ftp can do. ftp is a general purpose file transfer program that provides a lot of the functionality that you get from ls,cp,rm but between two machines. It provides authentication, separate data and control channels and heaps more stuff. http is simple and stupid and thats why it is so widely used. http is very poor at file transfer - it can't do restarts.
Another victim of the CancelMoose(tm).
*sigh*
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
the 200 graves adjacent to Jim Ellis are engraved with "MAKE MONEY FAST!!!" and "GET OUT OF DEBT!!!"
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Reminds me of some discussion on /. about /. that there might be NNTP support at one point.
Whatever happened to that?
It would be great for taking a complete thread with you on a PDA.
The Internet to me, at first, was news, ftp, and telnet. I spent an inordinate amount of time in 'nn' every day reading sci.electronics, alt.hackers (that was a very fun newsgroup about *real* hacking), and host of others.
When I first saw the 'web' I thought, "this is crap, random words are linked to various things and it doesn't seem to make sense. Back to the newsgroups with me." I realise now that it was just my initial sampling that was total crap, but I kept up with the newsgroups anyway.
I'm totally sad about the state of USENET over the past few years, and this just makes it all worse.
However, for that long time I spent thriving on the USENET, I'll have to thank Jim Ellis. He indirectly helped me find out about Linux, electronics, hardware hacking, etc. Things I do professionally these days.
I think it's a somewhat appropriate time for an:
ObHack (I'm sorry if it's not a very good one. Good hacks, that are not your employer's intellectual property, seem to decrease to almost nothingness when you're no longer a poor student): We had this hub where a heatsink had broken off inside. I grabbed some solid wire and threaded it through the fins and through holes in the circuit board. Through a fair bit of messing around I made sure that it will *never* come out of place again. Ok, that was bad, so I'll add another simple one: Never underestimate the power of a hot glue gun. It allows you to easily provide strain relief for wires that you've soldered onto a PCB and I've also used it to make prototypes of various sensors. If you want to take it apart, and x-acto knife does the trick very easily.
Sigh.
I don't even know what to say but to RIP. It is very sad when peope die young. :-( Fuck death
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Ahh..the good ole days! Back when to see a pr0n pic you had to save 13 messages, cat them together after removing the headers and then uudecode it.
;)
If there is one thing that I still hold against AOL it is letting its users gain access to Usenet news. Whoever the dude is that threw the switch on that should feel really bad. Of course he probably has plenty of AOL stock to be cashed in.
I'd not heard of Jim Ellis until I read this post, but his creation has become a part of my daily life. For that I want to express my appreciation for Usenet - a truly amazing idea that has proven to be a continual source of information.
RIP Jim
I mean, really, you can argue any 3 items are the '3 most important'... I'm not entirely sure how Usenet got up there with web and email applications. Instant messaging and IRC are obviously more 'important' to the majority of people. But are we talking about the most important, financially? Usenet would be on the bottom, web and email on the top, alongside things like remote administration and such.
I mean, really... everyone knows that pr0n, warez, and f00derz are the 3 most important parts of the internet. :)~
-------
Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
There's an old european saying that old bastards live the longest, so I guess Bill Gates will outlast everyone ;)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Even better.... you can have random.example.com have an MX record to point to a nice interface that doesn't exist or is very, very slow. If you do this kind of thing and have the ability to, you owe it to everyone on the net to mess with spamers as much as you can.
Great idea...
from a guy who's web page won't even work in netscape.
Maybe I'm just misreading this, but, as I already replied to another post, I think he meant that Usenet was the second of the big three services to be created.
:)
The wording of the statement could have been a little better, I know I had to re-read it, but I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.
After all, his forum is on the Web... it seems unlikely that one of the Lords of Slashdot would assign more importance to another medium than his own.
But do you think Richard Stevens and the Usenet creator were enjoying today's internet ? They built something that worked perfectly to exchange tons of messages with low bandwidths. Now, everyone has 100x the bandwidth they had when they designed their product. Computers are 100x faster. So what ? Do we find info 100x faster than before ?
Actually not. To read a simple text, you have to download hundreds of kilobytes. 99% is bloat (ads, bloated HTML, useless Java, etc) . Reading messages on a web discussion board is slow. You have to issue dozens of clicks before reading a thread, and wait for every ad to load. Usenet provided a consistent, sorted, easy to parse, and *fast* way to share info with other people.
7 years ago, I was providing access to 12000 newsgroups on Minitel. Minitel is a french terminal, with a 1200 bauds modem (and 75 bauds in emission) . And it worked. People could easily browse all Usenet news. Faster and easier than on web sites.
Another thing is that Usenet let you choose any client. You can choose your preferred fancy interface. Web discussion boards don't let you a lot of choice.
Migrating from Usenet to web sites is stupid. It wastes a lot of bandwidth for nothing. People do this because :
Usenet solved this a long time ago.
What killed Usenet is the load of uuencoded warez and spam. Everyone has to filter messages to find real ones. Lousy. But we can't fight stupidity. Give people mail access, they will send spam. Give people Napster, they will share copyrighted songs. Give people a CD writer, they will burn commercial software. Give people the web, they will DOS it or try root exploits. Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back.
-- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
{{.sig}}
It's been a while since I saw some of those legendary people... and in the case of McElwaine, I hope it's a long time before I see his posts again.
Does Argic still go nuts around Thanksgiving?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I started with BBS'es and prodigy on my c64 in the mid-80's, and used BITNET from '88 to '89. I first got on the net in '92 with email and nn. In late 94, I had xrn up on my sparcstation for about 45 hours a week. I remember having to compile Mosaic to get on the web. I commuted 4 hours a day to NYU in NYC, and probably printed a ream's worth of FAQ's each month. I studied for my ham radio license, wrote my papers in LaTeX, and learned about Linux. Usenet really planted the seeds for my technical career.
:). I used to try to spend time each week answering q's in comp.os.linux.setup or #linuxhelp, but I hardly have time to keep up with the sheer volume anymore.
Then came Deja, which has been easily the most important all-time tool I've used. After using Linux for 3 years, I started training friends on it. Once I helped them get under way, I taught them how to use Deja. I would even tell them that when they come to me with questions, I'm always going to reply first with, "what did Deja say?" The first guy I trained is now running 1,000 hosts in a Qwest facility.
I still go to Deja/Google every single day when I want to know *anything*. Lately, it's been "who plays the song for such-and-such commercial?" and I usually find my answer within seconds, and have the mp3 within minutes (although I'm still trying to identify the music in the Boeing ads
Usenet has been a major influence in my life, and any website that sports threaded discussions will always look like a second-rate Usenet to me.
--
Steve Jackson
Intelligent Life on Earth
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.
Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want on Alice's NNTP server.
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.
Well, yes it is. Essentially, http can do everything that ftp can do, and is a little more robust. So yes, it is.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Yep, I spent a lot of time setting up mail relays and I learned a lot. The other thing I learned about back then was what a waste of time it was to do things like troll or flame.
I see the trollers and flamers and jihad's that get started on bboards today, and I am glad that people are going through the same stuff I did when I was 14 or 15, because I learned a lot about people and discussions there.
The thing I took from all of that was if you have something that will enlighten other people, say it. If someone says something you believe is inaccurate, help to get that cleared up (you may be wrong). If people want to bash others or start flamewars or bandy insults about, let them. People used to start flame wars, and it directly affected my download times. That's S/N in effect, let me tell you. I used to get involve, but thank god I have better things to do with my time now.
Mike
Troll Like a Champion Today
Anyone who remembers FidoNet or BBS can realize just how far ahead of its time usenet was. Fidonet was a direct descendant of usenet, and it was quite a resource in its heyday.
The model of usenet, where people can post new articles or reply to older ones is seen right here on slashdot discussions, and all the other web based discussion boards. Bulletin boards are one of the great things about the Internet. The format for discussion, seen today in mailing lists and forums like this, started with usenet.
Fido was my first exposure to this type of information, way before I had an IP address.
If the core of this model was not usenet, what was it? If it was, I must give credit to the people who developed usenet for their forward thinking on information exchange and hierarchy.
It is not a perfect system, but in its flaws (namely the signal to noise ratio) is hope for better methods of communication.
Troll Like a Champion Today
This is the funniest thing since the September that never ended.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Carol O'Connor ruled.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Jim Ellis changed the world and will be sorely missed. Usenet is still going strong. In Jim's honor, I propose that we slightly modify usenet protocols so as to allow greater freedom in message formatting. It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting. There is only so much one can do with plain text. The new usenet could then be renamed ellisnet in Jim's honor. Just a thought.
While I agree with your basic concept, I must say that yes more people are dying. Why? Because there are more people. As the population increases that means that more people (not % just number) have to die.
At the next Usenet Olympiad, let there be a moment of silence in his memory before the traditional lighting of the flame thrower. All in favor, follow-up to alt.test with ME TOO!!! All opposed, spelling flame.
Yes, I offered this with tongue in cheek. But in all honesty, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. The net would not be what it is today without his creation. I have nothing more appropriate to say than "thank you".
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I also analyse all he spam I get and (mostly) eliminate automatically. And guess what: only about 4% of the spam I got since I started using a legal email adress on usenet again were send to the special usenet email.
So I figure that the 'email collecting bots' are collecting most of their emails someplace else (the web?) but not on usenet.
Statistics are fun
Yeah... getting old does that.
Sigs are awesome huh?
The applications were listed in chronological order. E-mail predated Usenet (which, as I'm sure someone in this discussion must have pointed out, was not originally carried over the Internet) which predated the Web.
And the brethren went away edified.
Excellent idea! This is a superior method over using temporary just to the left of the @ symbol.
Mail sent to 'user-TRASH@domain' is still received by your server, and then disposed of automatically. The server/network resources necessary for the receipt of that spam is still used, so you are no better off, but it doesn't end up in YOUR inbox.
By instead using 'user@TRASH.domain', the MX for that domain cannot be found, and thus it never leaves the hands of the spammer. The server/network resources are thus conserved for another day. :-) Much better.
That's one reason why I've been using a different domain to send spam reports from - I can eventually dispose of that domain if I no longer have need for it ...
Merely an "effort to stir the Slashdot pot"? Hardly! Sure, more people have experienced the web - but that's not even the point. Usenet was one of the original Internet tools that allowed people to grow into the WWW as we know it!
(I'd say the same for ftp and telnet.)
Really, the WWW provides a pretty front end interface to the other, more basic, Internet functions. Think about it. "Click here to email joeuser@imhere.com." "Click here to download this file." Deja and Google Groups provided people with a direct, searchable interface to the Usenet via WWW front-end. A telnet session can be started from a simple WWW link that launches your telnet client.
Despite all the spam, I find more purely useful information on Usenet, even today, than I do through web searches. When you need a technical solution to a specific problem, try searching Usenet as opposed to a web search. The WWW search usually just finds you vendors wanting to sell you the product you need help with, or expired links to a WWW based message board. People discussing the problem and attempted fixes are more often found on Usenet.
I just wonder, as cool people they are, Google people could change page bacground to black for 1 day.
Winzip etc. done that when ZIP creator died.
For people isn't used to this yet, groups.google.com=www.deja.com
It must be easy to do even!
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (nat'l. non-profit org.) has this amazing program called Team in Training - basically, you train for an endurance event (marathon, century cycle, triathlon, etc.), and in exchange for 3-5 months of professional coaching, staff support, transportation, accomodation, and entrance fee for your event, you agree to fundraise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
It's such an inspiring experience. It's totally doable - you can go from complete slothdom to finishing a marathon in just a few months. And you get to meet patients with various blood-related cancers, and hear about their experiences - after you find out what chemo & marrow transplants are like, suddenly your upcoming 14-mile run doesn't seem so hard - and you directly affect their chances of survival with every dollar you raise. It is such a good feeling, both physically and mentally, to be a part of this program.
"Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"
Have you got anything without spam?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
I think that Usenet is the one thing that can survive all the upheavals, because you can create its infrastructure out of nothing.
When the Web is spammed and commercialized until its content approaches zero, when better-than-a-modem bandwidth is either unaffordable or choked with advertising, any group of three people with modems can start a new Usenet, with a lot less cost and effort than it would take to build a new Internet.
Most CS schools (at least mine) has their own newsgroups.. many the the groups are oriented for each specific class, but if you go outside those, you can often find cool niche communities using usenet at your school. Our school has an opensource club, and a very active opensource newsgroup.. a good tech politics newsgroup.. general discussion.. etc. Using these groups, you see familiar names, familiar personalities.. it really gives you a taste of what usenet was like in the pre-web / pre-spam days.
-gerbik
The irony. ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
I still use USENET more than any other forum for general purpose Q and A type stuff. If there was no USENET and I had a problem I couldn't solve there is nothing comparable on the web. Sure there are websites, but many require logins. With USENET I can search the list of groups for a forum that relates to a *very* specific topic, such as comp.graphics.algorithms. If these were all done by specialty websites, I'd have to have a login for each one! Yuck! Can you imagine maintaining a list of 30,000 links and userids for each user? I don't even want to think about it.
As to Mr. Ellis, it's sad that he died at such a young age. I didn't know him, but his idea has helped me and will continue to help me for many years. Maybe someday there will be an Internet hall of fame. He should certainly be there.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You obviously haven't read the Pink Squishy Computer FAQ. Here is the relevant excerpt:
17.1 Q: Why isn't my PSC Pink?
17.1 A: The "pink" part only refers to the interior components. Cases come in a wide variety of colors. The easiest way to verify this is to observe the Speech Synthesis Unit, which contains an opening that leads to the interior.
17.2 Q: Is a PSC of one color compatible with PSCs of other colors?
17.2 A: Under normal circumstances, and with the proper software all units have a baseline social compatability. For a deeper understanding of problems that arise, see chapter 22 of the PSC Programmers Guide, Race Conditions And How To Prevent Them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I use USENT and have done so since I first heard of the internet (back in 88) but to claim USENET is more important than IM, the WWW, FTP, etc.?
Usenet's popularity has been somewhat overblown, and has been largely irrelevant once AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve gained access. Once that happened, plus Canter & Siegel's SPAM, USENET has turned into a mess of trolls, spam and attempts to spread trojan horses/virii/worms/etc.
Usenet was designed as a forum, kinda like slashdot is, where people were able to discuss whatever issues piqued them. The difference between BBS forums (popular at the time) and USENET was merely the fact that one BBS reached only a specific city while USENET reached across the world.
/., the growth of instant messaging and so on have rendered USENET to irrelevance.
"It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world."
Not anymore.
Usenet's problem is the lack of moderation, which is good and bad. Lack of moderation means you can say whatever you want. But it also means that the noise to signal ratio is going to be higher than expected. With the advent of the web, and the ability of people to put up web sites to dissemenate info, plus webbased forums like
Usenet started in 1979. Did this predate BBSes? I don't know that USENET ever did much to foster a sence of community that BBSes didn't already do (and do a better job of IMO)
The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.
Cheers.. .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
With what kind of hardware can you get the feed? I satellite dish yes, but do you have a website with more details?
So in the future, you will have to go to google's cached copy of Jim Ellis. Remember not to run any binary attachments Jim may have without screening with a virus scanner.
Yeah -- didn't the old kremvax joke become a reality because it was vectored through Usenet?
/Brian
I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning. No offense to the /. community, but to those of you who never experienced it, Usenet back in the day was a place the likes of which we probably won't see again.
/. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet, and you likewise still get some of it on mailing lists now, but take a look through Google Groups now -- too much garbage, and the community that's there is somewhat isolated because Usenet isn't as integral to the net experience as it once was.
Places like
Two taps and a v-sign for the man -- not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.
/brian
My sympathies go out to his family and friends.
Carousel is a lie!
Well, they death's of famous people always come in three's...
yeah :( kept playing right up till the end.
Am I the only one who's noticed that there's a hell of a lot of people dying lately who have made great contributions to humanity (well, specifically, who've made my own life a lot better) - Douglas Adams, John Lee Hooker, and now Jim Ellis. Damn, the world is becomming a worse place :(
RIP.
Usenet made excellent sense when most network connections were 2400 bps UUCP links and access was mainly limited to academics and the computer industry. It allowed people to share information without accessing a central repository, but it relied heavily on trust, civility, and volunteerism.
Now I just wish Usenet would go away. You can't do anything with it that isn't better done with a web forum -- Slashdot is a classic example.
My company maintains a massive array of newsgroups. And it's a huge waste of human effort. People ask the same questions over and over, the volunteers who answer most of them (and who actually do a lot of good work) waste a lot of time saying, "You're in the wrong group!", "Did you check the archives?", and of course "RTFM!!!" I try to follow the discussions occasionally, so I'll know more about our customers' needs, but it's pretty frustrating.
Yes it would work better with moderation, and better coordination of the volunteers, and regular FAQ posts. But that takes company effort and organization (the newsgroup volunteers are mostly enthusiastic consumers of our products) -- and if we had that, we'd be better off using it create a web-base repository, like Abuzz.
__
Jim, thank you so much for leaving us such an important legacy. As a daily user of the usenet, you can't imagine how much I've learned about everthing, not to say so much of my programming skills are learned thru usenet.
45 years old, that's too young! That's not fair!
Depends on how you define "important". If I need the answer to a really tricky or obscure problem, the web is next to useless. Oh sure, I could go to google and do a search and hope that one of the 200 results that come up has something useful. But the best chance of finding an answer is to post to comp.whatever, where thousands of people can read my message.
Just this week I found the solution to a maddening problem I was having with a complicated MPI program. After searching the web (and finding nothing), I posted to comp.parallel.mpi. A fellow in the UK read it and sent me a mail saying he was having the same problem. We traded some info back and forth about what we had tried and what hadn't worked. A day later he had figured it out and sent me the info on how to fix it. If it wasn't for Usenet, I'd probably still be banging my head against the wall.
The difference between the web and Usenet is that when I post a question to a newsgroup, it gets distributed to the people who know how to help; but with the web, I have to go rummaging around trying to find a needle in a giant haystack.
Check out RFC2616 and look for "partial GET". HTTP 1.1 could do a restart by requesting the range after the last byte it received. The browsers just aren't implementing it.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
So long, and thanks for all the pr0n
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Does anybody else thinks that Taco posts flamebait just to get more people to read the comments and then hit the reply button, all for more advertising?
/. My guess is that it would be Web, FTP, E-Mail, Gnutella, and somewhere after VRML would be Usenet.
I'd like to see the order of those three internet technologies when they're put into a poll on
News is by far more useful service, and has
not been shutdown by RIAA or any other entity.
Sure @home groups were, but that was stupid
move on their part.
Now I wonder if the cancer had to do anything with
computer radiation or not. People already know
that there are some adverse effects in facing,
low freq. radiation most monitors produce.
Now it is tons better than even 3 years ago.
Overall question is this article brought onto me,
will human flesh integrate well it increasingly
very much radioradiation(Wireless ethernet, cells,
cordless phoens, radio based remotes,...)
polluted space? Kinda sitting back sipping coffee,
pondering to get an LCD for work, out of my
pocket, which contains a cellphone...
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Thank your respect Deity or non-deity for people like this...
Burn Hollywood Burn
Thank your respective Deity or non-deity for people like this...
Burn Hollywood Burn
Depends on what you consider important, but in some ways, Yes. UseNet was one of the first non-centralized way of distributing information. It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. Why you ask? Despite what you might see over at alt.binaries.pictures.* and alt.barney.die.die.die the singal to noise ratio is infinitely better than doing a search on google and you can generally get multiple informed replys to questions on almost any subject....
Burn Hollywood Burn
Agreed. Slashdot is much more like the BBSs that many people should remember from their high school days.
For us, it wasn't September that brought on the yearly flood of newbies... it was Christmas, with lots of kids getting new computers as presents from their parents, and somehow finding their way onto the BBS scene.
My first experience of USENET was that it was much more mature than the BBS culture. People on USENET did not engage in fp-like antics, like we did on the BBSs. The professional programmers and sysadmins who frequented USENET did not concern themselves about being 31337 hacker doodz like on the BBS scene. Most shocking to me at the time, people mostly posted to USENET using their real names.
where there's fish, there's cats
But if you were serious, you need to go get a bit of clue.
:(
- Dan I.
Last week, I posted a question to comp.graphics.animation about Final Fantasy's skin shaders, and got a response from Square Pictures' senior shading guy Kevin Bjorke!
Now that the WWW has been hijacked by the PHB's Usenet is still the only place where, once I've lurked and solved problems and gained knowledge for a while, I feel guilty about not giving anything back. If I have the chance, I will post a repsonse to someone's cry for help.
But this chance rarely comes as I usually see a response there already. Some people out there obviously stay online and pounce on posts! Thank you guys/gals.
And thank you Jim Ellis. Rest in peace.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Rest in peace.
Taco didn't mean second in importance; he meant second in time.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
For me, usenet is the richest, most organized and accessible source of technical information out there. The only thing better than usenet is the usenet archives. Only rarely have I not been able to find solutions to problems I could not solve. It has saved me countless hours and increased my knowledge immensely. Regular search engines have become almost useless, but the usenet is just as good as it was when I started using it 10 years ago. I hope that it will stay that way forever.
Usenet definitely changed my life and for that I am grateful for Jim Ellis and am sad to hear that he died, especially so young.
CmdrTaco is a shitty writier/editor, I agree, but it was pretty clear to me that he was listing these things chronologically, as opposed to order of importance. No biggie.
But that's where I get all my porn!
The world is not fair!
Email certainly gives it a run for its money, but it didn't help turn the net into a community like Usenet did. When one looks toward the future of the net the web will be gaining in prominence I'm sure, but everything seems to be headed toward a community type structure.
Thank you for reading this comment.
My condolences to all his loved ones.
Sad, but true.
Needless to say more.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
I used to be a regular poster in some of the alt. and rec. groups. I even got to meet a group of the regular posters from ARC (alt.romance.chat, when I was young and foolish) ARC, along with most of Usenet, is now just a ton of Pr0n spam, and flamefests...
Jim, say hello to Douglas Adams when you get there!
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
There are various places where one can get free Newsfeeds, wether your ISP supplies a server or not.
Check out This as one place.
Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.
Yes, Usenet shaped many people's idea of what the internet should be (insert obligatory Usenet=!internet here). It was, in many ways a small community, especial since many people had to search out a way to gain admission (no free AOL disks every other day). It was a place where reputation mattered, and despite the wonders of electronic communications, people still valued face2face activities. My favorite corner was alt.folklore.urban, where the old hats welcomed newcomers, and we actually got togther for parties from time to time. There was also a spirit of helpfulness - no one cared if you new a k3wl way to munge a return address - what mattered was did you teach others so they could avoid spam? And people trusted each other- no bidpay, no paypal, just for sale posts and mailed checks - and, maybe I was lucky, but I never got ripped off. And, perpetual september could be a fun thing only matched by the star-trek and star wars groups. So, while it's been fun to grow into a full fledged globale village, we've added all the problems associated with rapid, unchecked growth. Daeth of Usenet predicted - Film at 11. RIP
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
...as an attempt to help bolster Gore's claim to have invented the Internet. Damn those cancer-carrying bees!!
They get archived by DejaNews.
And then _it_ dies.
I consider myself somewhat "old school" (I was first introduced to the internet through email and newsgroups on CompuServe -- on a 300 baud modem when I was 5), but even I would argue that the web has had more significance than Usenet. True, Usenet fostered a lot of ideas (and, ahem, child pornography), but the web has touched a vast greater majority of people, and while nacient set off an economic boom (and drop) Usenet never saw. Plus, the web is a heck of a lot user-friendlier (something that means a lot in today's computing world -- even to myself).
I imagine this is just another effort by Rob to "stir the Slashdot pot". God it gets irritating after awhile.
No, not the computers themselves. It's sitting on your dead ass, twenty-four/seven, eating nothing but stale pizza, staler cheetos, and drinking huge doses of carbonated and caffienated beverages that is bad for your health. That's why I like to do one of those things you probably read about on your precious web called "exercising". Occassionally, I even go so far as to go "outside". The light coming from the sky isn't that scary after the first hour or so.
Stupidity never felt so good.
It is sad to see the decline of Usenet. My current ISP doesn't even provide newsgroups. :(
(but I can routinely max out my 768/128 DSL line, I have a static IP and I pay less than $20/month, so....)
I don't have any far reaching comments or opinions on Usenet, I just wanted to say thanks and RIP to Jim Ellis for making it possible for me to learn so much from people all over the world about linux, computers, and life...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
I wonder if there will be an article about this on alt.tasteless...
Works surprisingly well, thanks a lot.
--
>> From the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. -- M
alt.rest.in.peace
It is so sad to hear about an old friend passing away by reading it on the web. I went to work at MCNC in '86 doing all the computer support, and I remember both Jim and Carolyn. One of my most memorable stories is from him. They had a little girl (VERY little) and let her play with the computer. Of course, that wasn't supposed to happen, but one day he brought me a mouse that didn't work. When I opened it up, it was full of peanut butter! Your techie always knows all your secrets!