On Jan 9, 2005, at 7:12 AM, Matt Shields wrote:
NNTP is old and outdated as well and I'm not a fan of subscribing to Yahoo Groups.
I think perhaps you misunderstand.
You use a client on your computer, for example Thunderbird, Sylpheed, slrn, Agent or Unison, to connect to an nntp server. Nothing with Yahoo Groups, or Google Groups, or any of that. Also note that there is a difference between usenet and nntp: while usenet is shared over nntp, not all nntp servers serve usenet groups; you can have a private nntp server that does not have any usenet groups on it.
As to being "old and outdated," that's pretty funny thing to say in a UNIX (1970) support forum. TCP/IP is "old," dating from 1974. SMTP (RFC 821) is from 1982. NNTP's is from 1986. HTTP isn't new either: Tim Berners-Lee says the first remote URL was hit toward the end of 1990. Linux was first distributed in late 1991. Old isn't so bad: it's well understood, it's been around the block long enough for broad adoption, and usually if it's that old it actually does the job. New and slick frequently means untested and buggy. Fine for video games and hobbyist systems, lousy for systems where outages mean money. At least that's my opinion.
--Jim