[Centos] NNTP versus web forums

[Jim Zajkowski]

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 NNTP is old and outdated as well and I'm not a fan of subscribing to 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As to being "old and outdated," that's pretty funny thing to say in a 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

-- 
Jim Zajkowski          OpenPGP 0x21135C3    http://www.jimz.net/pgp.asc
System Administrator  8A9E 1DDF 944D 83C3 AEAB  8F74 8697 A823 2113 5C53
UM Life Sciences Institute