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My Almost-daily Journal |
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| About I love trying out new things, especially when it comes to internet technology. I never really kept a journal, but it's something that I've always wanted to do. Now, everybody will get a chance to look inside my twisted, and somewhat-warped mind.
I've also subscribed to Audio Blog, so a few times a week, I'll leave actual voice blogs. Very cool!XML Newsfeed Previous Posts
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Thursday, April 10, 2003
The Dell Axim Fetish Like I said last night, ya gotta love those newsgroups, specifically alt.binaries.warez.pocketpc. I spent the last few hours downloading from that newsgroup like a mofo. I have more apps than I could possibly ever use on my Axim in a lifetime. Most of my time was spent loading some of them to the handheld, and the rest of the time was spent playing the awesome games. Newsgroups and the Exploitation of Intellectual Property Rights Incredible that newsgroups still exist today. It's one of those mediums that mostly power-users use. What's even more amazing is how these newsgroup servers still exist, and why the government hasn't shut them down. Who needs Napster, when you can pretty much get ANYTHING and EVERYTHING right from newsgroups. I still believe in "giving back", so if I like something, I'll usually buy it. The History of Newsgroups Newsgroups are one of the oldest uses of the Internet. Many years ago, when computers really started taking off, some Duke University graduate students realized they could dedicate computers to distribute "information" for all to enjoy. Thus, the birth of the bulletin board system (BBS). Many different BBS's were created at this time for many different platforms (IBM's, Commodore's, Atari's, etc.) People soon found that all they had to do was dial into an access number via their modem and log onto the BBS of their choice (usually a local number). Peter even ran a BBS. Ask him about William B. Hackenson. I got a ride to work by the Secret Service one fine summer morning. :) During this time, people not only wished to communicate with other local users, but also users from all over the world. Hence, the birth of BBS mail forums. Users would dial-in to their local BBS and post their messages to the appropriate group or person. At a certain time, the host BBS would dial into a hub computer elsewhere and upload it's message to be distributed to the appropriate locations. This is how users could talk with others from all over the world. It also tended to result in high phone bills for the host computer systems since they usually had to dial long distance to dump the messages to the hub computer. University subsidies, anyone? I even remember while at Michigan Tech in 1987, connecting to Gopher, and trying to use U. of M.'s dialout modems to post to BBS's at home. Newsgroups and Usenet Snatched from: http://www.stereophonicsweb.com/ams/newsgroups/index.htm In 1979, a couple of Duke University graduate students connected some computers together to exchange information with the UNIX community. At the same time, another graduate student at the University of North Carolina wrote the first version of the software used to distribute news. This network, called Usenet, grew into a voluntary, cooperative exchange of news feeds, eventually evolving into electronic discussion groups. While there are some places that charge a fee for the news feed, Usenet continues to reflect its origins as an academic project designed to distribute information freely to anyone who wants it. Usenet newsgroups are transmitted through through UUCP (a fee-based system) or NNTP, a more common and free method of transport. The news feed can be held on a system until a sister site calls up and gets it, or as is increasingly the case, direct connections remain open between sites at all times, sending news out to other nodes on the Net as soon as it is received. Each system administrator decides which newsgroups will be carried on the system. Since newsgroups take up valuable hard drive space and transmission bandwidth, administrators may choose not to carry some hierarchies at all. The Internet carries many kinds of resources, of which Usenet is only one. Usenet is also carried on networks that are not part of the Internet. posted by Dino at 1:12 AM (permanent link) |