Re: Usenet Dying? [Re: Alt Gr key]

AJL wrote on Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:06:09 -0700:
"BillW50" <billw50@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Places like eeeuser.com are very difficult to download and to read offline for one.

Yes, offline reading was a big advantage of Usenet (and pop email).
Back in the early dialup days it saved lots of bux when you only had 5
hours a month. Now with broadband and hotspots that's not so important
anymore.

I still like to have it since I live in the middle of nowhere and I go to a lot of places with no WiFi access. Waiting rooms are the worst. Sit there and nothing to do. :(

Also moving people to web forums, it is so much easier to control people. As it is very hard to archive web based forums. And I have seen lots of things deleted and changed by those who are in control. Very sad in my book indeed.

It [eeeuser.com] is dictatorship at its finest, don't you think?

Yes but that's true of most forums and moderated Usenet groups. Some
are worse than others. Since I don't pay the bills I can't (or
shouldn't) gripe too much about the way things are run. If a site or
group gets too bad I'll just move on.

I forgot to mention that a lot of these web based forums seems to be really fake forums. I am guessing they were created to cash in on advertising revenue. I found this out by searching for information and I found a lot of my posts on Usenet in these forums. Sometimes my user name was used and sometimes they insert something else in there. So they are stealing experience from Usenet and making money off of it. Seems unethical to me. But they don't care about that anyway.

This is how AOL first started. It was a very cool place to be in the early days

I never liked AOL, but mainly because I often got a busy signal. They
never seemed to be able to handle the number of customers they signed
up. I also hated being locked in to their software.

Well you can thank Steve Case for that! As he often made promises he couldn't keep. But he kept the cash anyway. And since they got rid of Steve, you don't need AOL software anymore. As you can access AOL directly from the web nowadays.

Then AOL went downhill and Steve ruled...

All the dialups went downhill. AOL was the biggest so it fell the
hardest.

AOL always had and may still a cheaper option which was called BYOA (bring your own access). That means you had Internet access by other means than AOL. And you still had all of the features of AOL, except you couldn't use the dial ups. Well you still could, but it would cost you like 6 bucks an hour. Steve didn't know the meaning of fair pricing.

That is until he scammed Time-Warner out of their money too.

The TW board of directors didn't have any say in the matter??

Sure they did. But Steve had billions worth of AOL stock. So they made it worth his while to leave and he cashed in his stocks.

He did [leave], but with billions of dollars. And they say crime doesn't pay. :(

Put the TW board in jail then?? I'd take billions if they wanted to
give it (legally) to me...

Steve was a crook, very smart, and had no morals. AOL was going to court a lot back in the early days for busy dial ups, etc. But it didn't matter to Steve really. As it was just the cost of business to him. Sure they got fined and a slap on the hand. But his high priced lawyers always managed to have AOL to admit to no wrong doing. And Steve made 10 times more by ripping off the users than what it cost him going to court. So why stop? As AOL could keep this up until everybody figured it out. By then Steve would be worth billions and never in jail. So it didn't really matter to Steve.

And the reason why the Usenet will never die is

Never say never... ;)

Well as long as I am alive it won't. But after I am dead, maybe.

because there are people out there that controls too much what we do and think.

With the modern internet I don't think that's even possible anymore.

Oh I do. It is so easy to control how people think. As it doesn't take much to buy a few people here and there in the right places and that is all it takes. Controlling people hate Usenet though. As there are far too many servers and too many archives to control.

Although controlling people are pressuring ISPs and others to drop Usenet. And they do this by claiming that some binary groups carry child porn and threaten legal action against them. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if it was the controlling people putting the porn on there in the first place. That is how these people work anyway```.

Well if I was in the Usenet business, the solution seems so simple to me. Drop binaries and drop those inactive newsgroups while I was at it.

And the Usenet is one place they are not allowed to control. At least not yet.

Usenet is a very *unreliable* place to get information. Some of the
advice can even be dangerous. But it is a great place to chat, pick up
ebooks, and get mp3 files... ;)

There is no place to get reliable information. A professor at Harvard once said that 50% of what we teach you is wrong, unfortunately we don't know what 50%. And I (BillW50) find the same all over the place. Whether it be from academia or whatever.

But they are working hard to get rid of it. And they will only succeed if we let them. :(

Nah, no black helicopters in this story. Usenet will eventually just
die a natural death from disuse. Servers will go dark one by one
until... 8-O Heck even today I'll bet the vast majority of
computer users don't even know what Usenet is.

Millions are using it unknowingly thanks to Google. So it isn't going anywhere soon. ;)

--
Bill
Black Asus EEE PC 4GB 2GB SoDIMM Adata 16GB
Windows XP SP2 and Xandros Linux
.

Relevant Pages

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