Re: Any Chinese citizens in this group?

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 02:48:25 +0800, the renowned Iskandar Baharuddin
<brengsek@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:51:22 -0600, Lars Eighner
<usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In our last episode,
<1140336985.133357.256140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, the lovely and
talented kane broadcast on alt.usage.english:


This is a USENET news group. Although Google would like you to believe that
it owns USENET and that you must register with Google to access USENET, that
is not so. Your government may make it difficult to access USENET without
Google, but there are many news servers which are free (at least for
reading) and many web interfaces to USENET other than Google. Here is one
listing of them:


USENET is frequently mentioned in your reply,
could you tell me specifically what that is?

Many people think that the Internet is the World-Wide Web, and the
web browsers (like Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Lynx, etc.)
are the only way to use the Internet. The truth is, the World-Wide Web
is only one of many internet services. Some web browsers include features
to allow you to use the other services, but web browsers in general are
not the best way to interact with the other services.

The World-Wide Web uses the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http).
Email uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (smtp).
Files are best transferred with the File Transfer Protocol (ftp).

Messages, such as this one, are traditionally called "news," athough they
may or may not be particularly newsworthy. These days "news" generally uses
the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). USENET now is more or less
synonymous with "news." Many people access new directly, using the NNTP
protocol and software specifically designed for news.

"News" does not belong to Google, although Google tries very hard to create
that impression. Google is a very poor web interface to "news." If the news
and mail features of your browser have not been removed, perhaps by those
who might want to limit your access to the Internet, you can point
the news reader feature at one of the free servers and read news directly
that way. But you probably will not find a free news server that will
let you post unless you register with them. Although web browsers are
not so good for reading news as a dedicated news server, they are much
better than reading news on Google.

This puzzles me. Over the years I have used four ISPs, all of which
provided usenet access. I am surprised that anyone can get onto the
Web and not be able to access usenet.

ISPs are dropping usenet like a hot potato these days, probably in
part because of copyright violations and porn, and the associated
bandwidth requirements. Their studies show that only a small
percentage of users care about usenet, and those can get it by
subscribing to a 3rd party service. My main ISP recently dropped
usenet entirely, after subcontracting to an outside company for a
couple of years. My other ISP dropped all binaries newsgroups.
Naturally, neither reduced their fees.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@xxxxxxxxxxxx Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
.

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