Sonic.net

OK I still need contact with some old newsgroups. And I do not want to become one of those www-posters thru something like google.

Alternatives? Does Sonic still have a secondary feed that recognizes sonic users? Is there any news service that carries the text groups which uses sonic?

Or should this topic be shifted to the Hosting board? UUCP? NNTP?

Gandalf Parker
--
It used to be "cant see the forest for the trees"
I think the new version is "cant see the internet for the WWW"

My take from Kelsey's usenet message is that news.sonic.net is not going away, they just created this forum so this style of support is more accessible to the masses.

Yes, this is correct - NNTP is not dead, but we're struggling with it. See the MOTD for details.

Our point primarily with these forums was that most Sonic.net customers don't use Usenet, so it was well over time to launch a web enabled forum.

-Dane

dane wrote:Our point primarily with these forums was that most Sonic.net customers don't use Usenet, so it was well over time to launch a web enabled forum.

-Dane

I would suspect that it is also easier to link a customer directly to a forum post when they are asking something unsupported than to direct them to the newsgroups where "look in sonic.help" was the best pointer to the information that they were looking for. I know that as Customer Support, I will like this feature to better help our customers.

I understand. And I agree. It's the right thing to do.

But it's still sad. Look at it this way: If I read the same amount of text, over an existing terminal connection (ssh) from a news server, I probably use 1% of the computer and bandwidth resources required to deliver the same text via forum.

Ralph

Ralph,

That is a false economy. Idle bandwidth goes to waste. It's not a natural resource, with limits.

-Dane

dane wrote:Ralph,

That is a false economy. Idle bandwidth goes to waste. It's not a natural resource, with limits.

-Dane

Dane,
I suppose that's true now. You're certainly in a position to know. Bandwidth certainly was an extremely limited resource back when some of us old-time Usenetters first started getting active. Back in the mid-80's my employer's first Internet connection (we were previously "connected" to Usenet via UUCP, and to the ARPANET) was a 56Kb leased line to Palo Alto that cost $2000 a month. That was for a campus with about 1500 people, at least 200 of whom knew what a network was. Old habits die hard. I still use lynx for a good portion of my surfing.

--
Ed Mooring
Back in the day:
{arcvax,decwrl}!oliveb!tymix!mooring
MOORING@OFFICE6

Hasnt Internet been a long line of huge capability, followed by oversell, followed by developments to use the capability, followed by backpedalling as companies realize they can no longer treat it as an unlimited resource?

I remember it with number of phone lines, with CPU (number of users on servers), with harddrive space (limits on email, how much webspace given users, etc), with logins, with concurrent connections, with port numbers, with IP numbers. People became more continually online with more machines at the same time and running incredibly huge apps. If there is XXX available then developers will find a way to allow "users" to use it.

Im not saying that the statement isnt true. But it feels abit like the guy in the horror movies who is saying "ok we should be safe here". Saying it should come with a change in the background music.

For a customer on our network, they have a pipe of Xkbps to their premise - that's dedicated bandwidth, with no "cost" associated with it. For use of a web forum here, that's traffic entirely within our network, and if there were congestion it would just mean we'd buy a faster interface for a one-time cost at whatever the point of congestion was.

I guess the point is, "bandwidth" is created via the deployment of one-time cost items: interfaces - it's not a natural resource like coal or oil with a limited supply. If we need more bandwidth, we (as in the Internet as a whole) just deploy faster interfaces (which admittedly have some cost, but it's a one-time cost.)

-Dane

Dane=

You wouldn't think that with the way AT&T and the rest are starting the bandwidth caps! lol