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Microsoft to do for Usenet what it did for Email & The Web?
tjones2 writes "Seems like Microsoft isn't content with sad state of email these days. They now want to "make engaging with communities easier and friendlier". This means extending their reach into Usenet." Fortunately most of Usenet is such a cespool that really they can only make it better. And after cornering the market on email worms, imagine the benefits they can bring to NNTP!
If you know where to look, and what you are looking for, usenet is ok. It kind of has that wild west, last frontier kind of charm.
btw, if you hate having to decode stuff by hand with the various newsreaders, www.easynews.com is great for various binaries
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Score: -10000
X-Newsreader: Microsoft
Usenet is an open system that has been that way for years. We don't need microsoft going and adding their proprietary crap into usenet.
Usenet is one thing that hasn't changed much in recent times. You can find anything on usenet. It was the first place you could find massive amounts of mp3s. The first place for full movies and cd images. There's more free porn on usenet then someone could even dream of sorting through.
Usenet is many things to many people. Outside the binary areas there are some great discussions taking place and some excellent ideas constantly evolving.
We don't need microsoft changing standards around and screwing things up.. Luckily most usenet servers are old unix boxes and so they won't be able to do much harm to nntp. This still scares me though that they may try..
They want to "discover" who uses newsgroups and how often they come back. Hmm...
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
usenet is supposed to be distributed and resiliant to poor communications and have no choke points
:-(
Then it's failed, because the indescribably poor communication commonly called "spam" has all but choked it.
I haven't bothered with Usenet for several years simply because of the quantity of junk. Not to mention the quality
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
correlation != causation. Maybe there are a lot of people saying that AOL users say "me too" a lot. Had this discussion taken place on usenet, we would have incremented the count by two, yet neither one of us are aol users.
Every time someone predicted the death of usenet, the responses were "ha, again the imminent death of usenet is predicted". I think we can safely say that those complaining of the imminent death of usenet were proven right several years ago at the latest.
It's a shame that there is no decent, centralized place on the net for intelligent discussion. It's one of the biggest losses to humanity in recent years.
Everything they're talking about there can be done locally at an NNTP server, at least as I read it, and won't affect the wider usenet. So it's more user-interface work and work on a server with a different set of design goals to the current NNTP servers.
I'm all for it. You'll need a proxy server to protect the Exchange box running the MS-NNTP server from direct access by scary things like non-Lookout news readers of course. It sounds like an interesting idea though, and perhaps some of the better / more useful ideas might propagate to other NNTP software.
OK, well I'm one of those old fogeys who actually care about Usenet. I've been using it for twenty years and I still think it's a great thing. Admittedly a lot of groups are losing their vibrancy and vitality, and spam is an increasing problem. But Usenet is still a great way for communities of people with common interests to foregather and hang out with one another, bounce ideas around, solve technical problems and exchange ideas, irrespective of geographical distance.
Usenet, also, because of its primitiveness, is one of the parts of the network revolution which is most resistant to interference. It doesn't need the Internet; it can propagate happily over ad-hoc UUCP links on dialup lines. So even if the corporates come to control the Internet and dictate what we can do with it, even if governments put carnivore boxes on every router, Usenet is still ours and can still route around it.
It has it's problems. It was conceived in a more innocent age. We do need a successor.
But please, not Microsoft, the inventors of default top posting. This is one of the things which is making Usenet increasingly difficult to use. Microsoft do not have our interests at heart - only their own. If you want to see a new and better Usenet, look at projects like Usenet2.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Something tells me that Joe Averagecomputeruser will be fairly disappointed when he gets a taste of Usenet, but that's beside the point. As CmdrTaco noted in the original news post, Usenet is to a point that it can't really get much worse. Who knows? This might be one of those rare occasions when Microsoft is actually on to something.
Then again, it will probably just end up being Usenet with pretty Outlook stationery.
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
Do I detect ^M in you text? ;)
Yes, Microsoft provide few other alternatives for this rude kind of behavior. I see it in the "easy" groups like Yahooo groups I'm a member of. Microsoft users consitantly post crap in .DOC format instead of splitting out text and images, the same way they do email. It would be forgivable, but they make no effort even when told that others, including other Microsoft users with almost the same software, can not read the files they are trying to share. All of the Micrsoft defaults are to RUDE, word as an "editor" of email, email in "html" format or "rich text", it's really a challenge for the user to not be rude and once things are set they are very dificult to undo. Typical M$.
Microsoft, by encouraging their users to venture into the "difficult" world of usenet, will force all of these things along.
The answer it fix the user. Provide detailed instructions on how to undo M$'s rude defaults in a place where they can be pointed to. The M$ abusers will find themselves shunned and locked in a little M$ ghetto devoid of cluefull and polite people.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Who the hell visits usenet for news anymore?
Actually I've found that as the signal/noise ratio on sites such as Slashdot have decreased with all of the AC posting and such, usenet groups such as comp.lang. have become much more useful because the signal to noise ratio has increased significantly. On usenet, questions are answered by folks who typically know the answer rather than the pure drivel and conjecture that we are seeing more on Slashdot.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I get about 50 spam messages a day in my email. I read several usenet groups, and see total of 5 a week on the busy weeks. Even then they are easy to weed out from the subject line, and rarely cross all groups.
I'll agree that the quality varies, but then it does everywhere else too. Those opinioniated people are everywhere in real life. Once I see a thread dropping into something that doesn't interest me it is very easy to skip the rest of the thread. This isn't Spam, because it is individual people (often 10 or 20) with strong opinions in one thread. Ignore the thread and you ignore the entire conversation. Much easier than email.
If this catches on, it will be worse than the yEnc problem.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.