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Google's 20-Year Usenet Timeline
theRG writes "Google just released its 20-Year Usenet Timeline. Among the highlights: First Mac rumor, first 'me too' post, Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the Web, and Linus' announcement of Linux."
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Heh, this was reported on Slashdot over ago...
utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely
distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear
from you, so I can add them to the system. I'm using Earl Chews estdio
right now (thanks for a nice and working system Earl), and similar works
will be very wellcome. Your (C)'s will of course be left intact. Drop me
a line if you are willing to let me use your code.
It's no accident that Linux was such an pleasant project to hack on way back when, Linus is just such a humble and polite person. He still is today. What ever happened to that? These days you're lucky to get a reply to an email when offering to contribute code to an open source project, let alone someone actually thanking you for going to the effort of making something for others to enjoy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Granted, they seem to be doing bad things with it (the groups-beta thing really kinda bites), but I don't see them ditching it -- it fits in very well with their key business (searching), and I doubt it costs them much money (compared to their web search, for example) to keep going.
And it's useful -- when looking for answers to technical issues (like `I got *this* error. How do I fix it?', searching Usenet is often more useful than the web.
Seriously, I wish we could go back in time and tell him not to look forward to it too much...
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The posts are about aircraft, so are the ads. You don't think there are clerks manually selecting the ads for every search you do, do you?
Perhaps it would have been if Linus and Linux hadn't shown up?
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
It's moronic to hide them in Google's interface when any spammer interested can harvest them directly from a newsfeed. Google still forces you to use an active address when registering to post, and the spammers do harvest that, regardless that's it's munged in Google's interface. And I rather doubt spammers really want a bunch of 20-year-old addresses -- and if anyone is still at the same address that long they're already on every list.
I actually miss the early Dejanews interface and search capabilities. It had some arcane limitations, but it was more expressive than what I can do with Google.
And I don't see evidence that people have largely learned the lesson from when Dejanews went away and Google had not yet brought up Deja's database -- the lesson being that Usenet is of value and Usenet article collections need to be mirrored and kept up to date by multiple independent administrators. Placing all of those metaphorical eggs in one basket is very risky. Doubly ironic when one considers that decentralization is one of the hallmarks of netnews. With all the bright people thinking up ways to host mirrors of files in varied places in P2P networks, I would have imagined someone would have done so for Usenet articles by now.
Digital Citizen
Microkernels still have a performance disadvantage and some greater complexity in designing. They certainly have advantages, but they aren't clearly superior on the whole.
The best approach for the real world seems to be a hybrid design, either adding monolithic elements to a micokernel design, such as in OSX and NT, or adding some microkernel concepts to a monolithic kernel, such as the module system added to Linux. Either approach will have some of the key benefits of a microkernel design without sacrificing much, if any, of the performance of a monolithic kernel.