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2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

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Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#111

Post by ericbarrett »

Multicomp wrote: post #98
jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

THANK you for doing this (I said, having never so much as logged in to a usenet thingie)! I do have one question. Those tapes...how old were they? Were they contemporary to the postings? (bonus question: if so wow, but under what justification?. tapes were expensive right and nobody valued archiving at the time (except maybe this guy)?) this individual you got the tapes from meticulously copy onto new media and all t…

To satisfy the "third place" you might look into storing these files in Amazon S3 Glacier, which is about $1/TB/month, so long as you don't read them back. (Retrieval is delayed, batched, and expensive.)

It would take some engineering: I might store each optical disk image as a compressed image file, for example (zstd would be good for the large amount of data), to avoid metadata charges. Fun to think about.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#112

Post by usefulcat »

throwaway89201 wrote: post #86
jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored, but this one really puzzles me:

"Getting good FP performance from a micro seems to require pipelining. Keeping the pe(s) full seems to require a certain amount of parallelism and regularity."

https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.arch&g=14965...

Edit: Ah, the irony. HN markdown causes two consecutive asterisks to disappear.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#113

Post by jolmg »

usefulcat wrote: post #112
throwaway89201 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored, but this one really puzzles me: "Getting good FP performance from a micro seems to require pipelining. Keeping the p e(s) full seems to require a certain amount of parallelism and regularity." https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.arch&g=14965... Edit: Ah, the irony. HN markdown causes two consecutive asterisks to disappear.

> For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored.

Actually, it's not that obvious. It censored "Dirty Sanchez". I'm thinking it thought it was a person's name, and censored it for privacy reasons?

> Keeping the pe(s) full seems to

I suppose "pipe" can have an offensive/sexual connotation. Even if it doesn't so much today, perhaps it did back then.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#114

Post by _Qeomash_ »

kibwen wrote: post #82
ravi-delia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.

My internet coming-of-age was between 2000 and 2008, and I was happy to learn that all the forums I used to frequent are now kaput, with no public archives. It's always a bit of a shame to lose historical documents, but who knows what embarrassing comments I'm now free of forever. (And don't worry, my mortifying preteen Super Mario RPG fanfiction yet survives in personal backups.)

That is very oddly specific. Hello, fellow old school SMRPG fan.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#115

Post by chubot »

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003.

https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p...

Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/c/rv...

And what's insane is that there appear to be some flames still going on from 20 years ago ???

I vaguely recall this dude's name from back in 2002 ... I guess he must have been a prolific poster / troll, but I don't remember. But there appear to be some people trolling him. I think he did sell drums or something.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/c/Nh...

Good ol' Usenet I guess ...

Yeah this is insane, I search for "Rob Schuh" and this flame war has been going on for decades !!!

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.makers.percussion/c/8Z...

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#117

Post by gravitas »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

Thank you! Is 2003 a hard limit to how far back was captured, or just a current point in the import? I was looking to comp.os.linux.* groups from a bit earlier than that, a lot of the 90s. Thanks again :)

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#118

Post by jodrellblank »

hprotagonist wrote: post #5

has google stopped destroying things yet? https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/

> and it's not great, since there is no other comprehensive archive after Google's purchase of Dejanews around 20 years ago.

Bit unreasonable to complain that Google is evil because they don't want to keep an archive of Usenet when the only reason this is an issue is because nobody else wanted to do that either. Every organization which ran an NNTP server had a copy of all messages because Usenet is decentralised, every single one could have kept an archive and didn't, it's not like websites where nobody but the webserver host has full access.

Not gonna go as far as saying "it cannot be evil to do what everyone else does", but if there is only one remaining archive on the planet and you desperately value it ... why are you shitting on the company which owns it?

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#119

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.

I'm getting this:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function real_escape_string() on null in /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/3.vars.php:80 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/1.header.php(190): include() #1 /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/view.php(22): include_once('/var/www/html/u...') #2 {main} thrown in /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/3.vars.php on line 80

Pretty consistently.

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