OT Raspberry-pi newsgroup starts

[Huge]

My wife's new cheapo machine from Novatech came with a 1Tb disk as standard.

There was a recent thread about the traffic volume of usenet recently,

More like 30Mb/day now.

[The Natural Philosopher]

How many news servers are there in the world, huge? or were then.

well over ten thousand at its height.

All carrying the same articles.

total waste of storage

[Theo Markettos]

...connected by thrice-daily dialup (or, if you were lucky, a leased line). And your site had hundreds of Usenet readers, on fast 10base2 local ethernet. Time to introduce TNP to the concept of a 'cache'...

Theo

[Darren Salt]

I demand that Graham Thurlwell may or may not have written...

More like 10, I think. I recall seeing its source being worked on at one Wakefield show.

A few commands for those who still think otherwise:

$ apt-cache search doom $ apt-cache search quake

[snip]

Well. 26-bit code, as others have said. Aemulor?

(I still have code to port...)

[Huge]

You only used to post the occasional ludicrous article, but these days you're up with dennis in demonstrating the breadth of subjects about which you know nothing. Write the word "distributed" on a 2x4 and hit yourself on the head with it for a while. It won't help, but hopefully it will hurt. A lot.

[Jasen Betts]

Because then it would be "prboom" and not "doom" ?

[Jasen Betts]

A can do USB-OTG, uses less power and is slightly cheaper than the B

[Gordon Henderson]

Is the game the executable program that interprets the data file, or is the game the data file?

doom.exe interprets doom.wad and lets you play Doom the game.

prboom interprets doom.wad and lets you play Doom the game.

Same when playing Zork - is the game the z-code intrepreter or the data files? I doubt anyone would argue that in the Zork case the game is the data file and the z-code intrepreter has been ported to many platforms - same for Doom - since the doom engine has been ported to many platforms, prboom is just one implementation of the doom engine that happens to run under Linux.

So I have had the ability to play Doom (and Doom II - I have the original CDs) under Linux for many years and the Pi is just one more PC I can run Doom under.

If you think it can't run Doom just because you're not running doom.exe then I think you're just being a shade too pedantic - the game is the WAD file not the interpreter.

The photo I posted earlier was taken almost a year ago. Doom runs fine on the Pi - it's been running for a year.

Gordon

[Windmill]

In short, revive the UUCP stuff (does it need reviving, or are there not still a few dedicated old-timers?) to once again carry Usenet over dialup links (which are more than fast enough for the text-based NGs though certainly not for the binary ones).

I'm pretty sure I still have some of the old software for that, kicking around here somewhere...... Yes, here's part of the README for uucp-1.05 :-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- This package is covered by the Gnu Public License. See the file COPYING for details. If you would like to do something with this package that you feel is reasonable but you feel is prohibited by the license, contact me to see if we can work it out.

WHAT IT IS

This is the complete source code for a Unix UUCP package. It provides everything you need to make a UUCP connection. It includes versions of uucico, uusched, uuxqt, uux, uucp, uustat, uulog, uuname, uuto, uupick, and cu, as well as uuchk (a program to check configuration files), uuconv (a program to convert from one type of configuration file to another) and tstuu (a test harness for the package).

This is the standard UUCP package of the Free Software Foundation.

The package currently supports the 'f', 'g' (in all window and packet sizes), 'G', 't' and 'e' protocols, as well a Zmodem protocol and two new bidirectional protocols. If you have a Berkeley sockets library, it can make TCP connections. If you have TLI libraries, it can make TLI connections. It supports a new configuration file mechanism which I like (but other people dislike).

The package has a few advantages over regular UUCP:

You get the source code.

It uses significantly less CPU time than many UUCP packages.

You can specify a chat script to run when a system calls in, allowing adjustment of modem parameters on a per system basis.

You can specify failure strings for chat scripts, allowing the chat script to fail immediately if the modem returns ``BUSY''.

If you are talking to another instance of the package, you can use the new bidirectional protocol for rapid data transfer in both directions at once. You can also restrict file transfers by size based on the time of day and who placed the call.

On the other hand:

It only runs on Unix. The code is carefully divided into system dependent and system independent portions, so it should be possible to port it to other systems. It would not be trivial.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Windmill]

Only if you store everything forever. I've got 356,391 old uk.d-i-y messages (it sez) dating back several years, which occupy only about

4GB on an 8GB partition. That could be reduced several times by a good compression algorithm.

(I don't forward, and don't actually need all that guff, but I keep it for the invaluable nuggets it contains).

So with a couple of 2 TB disks I could if I was interested store and forward a heck of a lot of different NGs.

You don't have to carry all groups; part of the setup for UUCP is to specify which groups you will accept from elsewhere, and which forward. For us it might be mainly uk groups.

And if Usenet is truly 'dying' there won't be a need for much storage, or fast transfer times, in any case.

Low latency isn't usually important; this reply is to a post dated

5th. April.

I don't know why you're so hot about it. Why does it matter to you?

[Windmill]

Allegedly one was also written in TECO to prove that although it was an editor, it was also an extensible language.

[Bob Eager]

I'd love to see that one....

[Elliott Roper]

What and where is the recommended version of teco for RPi?

I'd like something close to DEC teco-11 v40

...and a pony, onna stick

[Huge]

I got mine from here;

[Huge]

Don't be ridiculous. There's no reason not to carry on using NNTP over the Internet.

[The Natural Philosopher]

that was my exact thought.

you are more likely to see a low bandwidth IP link than a modem able to sustain an hours conversation in the less developed parts of the world - mobile and satellite reaches places copper - good copper - does not.

[Man at B&Q]

r may not have written...

John

Doom was running, compiled natively, on ARM 10 years ago.

MBQ

[Elliott Roper]

Thanks, I have that one for OS X. Sadly, it does not do m,n:w for split screen editing. (f'rinstance 3,7:w gives you a three line scrolling region for commands on the bottom of your VT220 with the rest scrolling the buffer contents) I dunno whether it is teco or Mac terminal's emulation of VTs that is holding it up.

It would be fun to run it on a pi regardless.

[Windmill]

Gustad

Obviously one uses the best/fastest communication link one can get (and rely on). My point was that if (as hinted at) all the large Usenet providers closed down, it would still be possible to carry on by reverting to old methods. Not necessarily via dialup modems only; it ought to be possible to use Android gadgets, Bluetooth devices, Wifi etc., maybe with some range-extending enhancements.