I have asked this in uk.comp.misc but I have not had a reply to my problem that is within a tight budget i.e. nothing, if I can get away with it.
We are dumping BT and I have gone on contract with an Orange mobile dongle at £4 98? a month. I can get on line to the internet and because of this, I'll be able to pick up my e mails.
Is there a low cast way to download the news groups I subscribe to?
Dave
cheap -
albasani.net works well for me. Totally free.
Bob
Andy Burns coughed up some electrons that declared:
and reliable...
Davey coughed up some electrons that declared:
Emergency use - OK.
Regular use: please, no - spare the rest of us the related grief of poor quoting that seems to afflict it (when used in conjunction with the devil's underpants that is OE). Seriously - compared to a real newsreader (especially if the OP already has an established one) web interfaces don't do justice to either email or USENET IMO.
correction - used to be very good - but for usenet, currently pants.
John Rumm coughed up some electrons that declared:
Is this the case of "I know there was a thread on blah, but google can't find it"?
I'd heard rumours, but not been doing the sort of searching that I could catagorically say results are missing...
Seems strange - would have thought indexing and searching text only USENET would be a piece of piss for a company that's mastered indexing the web with all its introspections into weird formats like DOCs and PDFs, not to mention that they never have to reindex old stuff - just whatever is coming off the backbone of new posts (OK I accept that is still *much* data).
I don't get the angle of "we're protecting peoples' right to privacy", either. Usenet is public-domain; folk can't wave a magic wand and have every copy a specific post vanish from existence, so I don't quite follow why Google are so worried about what's in their archives of any particular group.
What would be nice, I suppose, is if there were a non-profit alternative to Google for usenet archives - one whose goal it was to preserve and make available all the 'holes' in Google's archive.
I find news.individual.net reliable as well.
As for using google, well if you want to download roughly 100 times the actual message content in web page eye candy fair enough.
And of course there is no spam filtering either, unlike news.individual.net or, I believe, eternal-september.
I wonder how much data the OP's =A34.98/month buys?
Is this an additional cost on top of a contract phone rental, or is it a stand alone deal? If so, got any pointers to details?
Wasn't that Deja.com before Google grabbed it?
Yes, the good old days. Now it's an archive with holes and a shitty web interface controlled by a company who don't seem to realise that usenet and the web and email are three different animals.
Much as I quite like Google otherwise* (they seem to handle web search pretty well, and no complaints about email so long as they don't ever force me to use their web interface) they really screwed this one up IMHO.
cheers
Jules
One gigabyte / month. With a maximum cap of £40-00 if I go over. I can't ever see me going over the 1 gig, I don't download very much. Thanks to all that posted on this, I'll take a look at the posts later.
Dave
It was an offer that I found in the local Orange shop last Saturday. You sign up to an 18 month contract and then hand over a box that contains a USB dongle, a USB extension cable and basic instructions. The dongle has its own phone number and SIM card hence the £4 98 a month rental.
Dave
Google rescued it, you mean.
Deja.come was flat broke and the archive was only days away from being lost forever before Google stepped in where absolutely no-one else would. You may not like what google have done since, but the alternative was possibly worse.
tim .
Interesting - didn't know that! I remember when deja were building the archive and patching together bits from here, there and everywhere - wonder what happened to all the original media that the data was on? I wonder if folk sent their CD / hard disk / data tape / disk pack off to deja in the mail, or whether it's all (more or less*) still out there, and deja just accepted stuff uploaded over the 'net?
Presumably a lot of people would have binned any local copy they had after they assumed that some big company was going to do something responsible with it.
cheers
J.
Jules coughed up some electrons that declared:
Well, Google did continue that work, receiving backup taps and wotnots from various sources and adding to the archive.
Suddenly that long forgotton flame war with a hint of Godwin was now appearing 20 years later with the OP's full name and email attached.
eternal-september seems to let a lot through, but then I was using news.individual.net before that, and their spam filtering really was very good indeed; it's possible that eternal-september are actually doing a lot, too.
I'd definitely recommend news.individual.net if you can deal with the payment systems (their normal payment gateway - which I think is BT - messed me around no end when it came to renewal time, but Paypal were no use as an alternative because their systems couldn't handle the fact that I'd moved countries, or that I now had a joint bank account with my wife :-)
cheers
Jules
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