Henry Spencer - Any Word?

I probably don't know enough about the alternatives to Usenet, but one
thing that seems to be missing is the archival and searchability
aspect. With Deja News and now Google Groups, you can go back years
and decades to find out what was said about some topic. That, IMO,
has been extremely useful -- and isn't it being lost with the demise
of serious posting on Usenet with no equivalent alternative?

Henry Spencer kept much space-related Usenet material going back to
1980 or so that is now available to all. Is anything like that going
on now that discussions are taking place in so many different venues?

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:50:16 -0800 (PST), in a place far, far away,
Allen Thomson made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

I probably don't know enough about the alternatives to Usenet, but one
thing that seems to be missing is the archival and searchability
aspect. With Deja News and now Google Groups, you can go back years
and decades to find out what was said about some topic. That, IMO,
has been extremely useful -- and isn't it being lost with the demise
of serious posting on Usenet with no equivalent alternative?

Henry Spencer kept much space-related Usenet material going back to
1980 or so that is now available to all. Is anything like that going
on now that discussions are taking place in so many different venues?

It's called Google, and Google cache.

h (Rand Simberg) wrote:

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:50:16 -0800 (PST), in a place far, far away,
Allen Thomson made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Henry Spencer kept much space-related Usenet material going back to
1980 or so that is now available to all. Is anything like that going
on now that discussions are taking place in so many different venues?

It's called Google, and Google cache.

Which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. Much depends on whether
the board operator allows spiders or not. (Many, particularly
subscription driven ones, do not.)

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

It's called Google, and Google cache.

Which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. Much depends on whether
the board operator allows spiders or not. (Many, particularly
subscription driven ones, do not.)

Exactly so. If it doesn't get indexed/captured, it's on a perhaps-
findable server that will perhaps be around five years from now.

On 19 Feb, 04:40, Ed Kyle wrote:
On Feb 18, 3:22 pm, (Rand Simberg)
wrote:

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:01:04 -0800 (PST), in a place far, far away, Ed
Kyle made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

It has been six months. Does anyone have any information about Henry?

He posts daily to Arocket. I suspect that he's just decided that the
newsgroups aren't worth the trouble any more.

It is a bad, and possibly historic, moment when one of the gentle men
who helped create Usenet decides to abandon it.

Why are you still posting here Ed? On NASASpaceflight your comments
get appreciated.

Granted Google Groups lays out and presents discussion better than
Spaceflight.com, but without moderation, usenet is descending into
complete dross. Five years ago we had good debates, but now everyone
with a computer is an expert on space flight. Spaceflight.com still
has some real maths which scares off 95% of the population, and its
bit too reverent of NASA.....

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 07:34:48 -0800 (PST), Alex Terrell
wrote:


It is a bad, and possibly historic, moment when one of the gentle men
who helped create Usenet decides to abandon it.

Why are you still posting here Ed? On NASASpaceflight your comments
get appreciated.

If I read "THERE'S A SPACE SHUTTLE Q&A THREAD" in response to a
question on that site one more time, I'll throw something heavy
through my monitor.

Brian

On Mar 1, 10:50 am, Brian Thorn wrote:
On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 07:34:48 -0800 (PST), Alex Terrell

wrote:
It is a bad, and possibly historic, moment when one of the gentle men
who helped create Usenet decides to abandon it.

Why are you still posting here Ed? On NASASpaceflight your comments
get appreciated.

If I read "THERE'S A SPACE SHUTTLE Q&A THREAD" in response to a
question on that site one more time, I'll throw something heavy
through my monitor.

Brian

And what is the matter with that?

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 08:03:27 -0800 (PST), wrote:


If I read "THERE'S A SPACE SHUTTLE Q&A THREAD" in response to a
question on that site one more time, I'll throw something heavy
through my monitor.

And what is the matter with that?

Readers, especially newbies, lose their train of thought and probably
never get the answer they seek, so they become disillusioned and we
lose another prospective space supporter (we don't have enough as it
is.)

Reading a discussion about, say the SARJ problem, if they ask a
question, they get shot down with "Go read the Q&A!". But the Q&A
threads is/are enormous and NSF's search function is pathetic. By the
time they find their answer (assuming they don't get bored wading
through all those pages in search of their hidden answer and just give
up) they've probably forgotten why they asked.

On Usenet, they can ask the question and almost certainly get an
answer and a link to more detailed information. Everyone else can just
ignore replies from someone asking that question. It's easy to tell
what reply is to what question and ignore it if you've heard it all
before.

There's a lot of good information on NSF.com, but it is very
user-unfriendly. And one guy decides what you can and cannot do there.
I have no complaints about Mr. Bergin, I'm just saying, he's one guy
accountable to no one. Will they always be as open-minded as Chris?
What happens if Lou Dobbs or Elon Musk buys him out and it becomes a
mouthpiece for NASA, or Boeing, or SpaceX? Those of us who have been
around awhile have already seen one cycle of mergers and acquisitions
and watched good space websites go down the drain. But then, we still
had Usenet. Soon, we won't. That's a bit too high-risk to free speech
for my taste.

When Usenet finally dies, there won't be a good alternative, and the
world will have lost something. Yes, we get spam and idiots here.
That's why on the eighth day God created killfiles.

Brian

Alex Terrell wrote:

Granted Google Groups lays out and presents discussion better than
Spaceflight.com, but without moderation, usenet is descending into
complete dross. Five years ago we had good debates, but now everyone
with a computer is an expert on space flight.

"sci.space.*" != "Usenet"

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 07:34:48 -0800 (PST), Alex Terrell
wrote:

but without moderation, usenet is descending into complete dross.

....The problem isn't moderation, it's that ISPs and USPs aren't
listening to complaints about scumbags any more than they are about
spammers. Asswipes like Guthball, ElfNazi, the Maxson Trash, and even
Alan Erskine - who I see has managed to escape from everyone's
killfile *again!* - would have been quickly had their posting privs
yanked from them back in the 80's. Hell, Spaf banned Tim Maroney for
*life* over his harassment of those who didn't show some semblance of
tolerance for his satanic beliefs(*); these days, you've got to shut
down the backbone at least *twice* before anyone will take any sort of
action. Either that, or post kiddie porn.

....What changed all that were two USPs - Portal and CUNY/CCNY. Portal
was the first non-educational USP that allowed users to pay for
access, and refused to kick anyone off unless they did something
*REALLY* bad - and spamming wasn't considered a TOS violation for
several years by Portal's rules. CUNY/CCNY had a policy of refusing no
student access, nor removing said unless they were caught doing
someting feloneous. Flaming people and spamming were not considered
feloneous. Those two USPs allowed trolling trash the first carte
blanche they'd ever seen, and in the case of Portal most USPs and a
lot of ISPs have followed the same Golden Rule - whoever's got the
Gold to help pay the costs and keep food on your table, makes the
Rules.


(*) Of course, Tim's found out whether he was right by now...

OM
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