ugh.book

96 Snoozenet

People complain about "lazy or inattentive sysadmins". One

look at news.admin and you'll instantly understand why it's

mostly a waste of time.

None of LuseNet is cast in concrete, though Bandy has been

plastered. Let you who is without sin cast the first stone.

—nick

Newsgroups .................................................................................

So far we haven’t actually said what Usenet is, that is, we haven’t said how

you can tell if a computer system is or isn’t a part of it. That’s because

nobody really can say. The best definition might be this: if you receive

some newsgroups somehow, and if you can write messages that others can

read, then you’re a part of Usenet. Once again, the virus analogy comes to

mind: once you touch it, you’re infected, and you can spread the infection.

What’s a newsgroup? Theoretically, newsgroups are the Dewey Decimal

System of Usenet. A newsgroup is a period-separated set of words (or com-

mon acronyms or abbreviations) that is read from left to right. For exam-

ple, misc.consumers.house is the newsgroup for discussions about owning

or buying a house and sci.chem.organomet is for discussion of organome-

tallic chemistry, whatever that is. The left-most part of the name is called

the hierarchy, or sometimes the top-level hierarchy. Usenet is international,

and while most groups have English names, users may bump into gems like

finet.freenet.oppimiskeskus.ammatilliset.oppisopimus.

(By the way, you pronounce the first period in the names so that

“comp.foo” is pronounced “comp-dot-foo.” In written messages, the name

parts are often abbreviated to a single letter when the context is clear, so a

discussion about comp.sources.unix might use the term “c.s.u.”)

One section of Usenet called “alt” is like the remainder bin at a book or

record store, or the open shelf section of a company library—you never

know what you might find, and it rarely has value. For example, a fan of

the Muppets with a puckish sense of humor once created alt.swed-

ish.chef.bork.bork.bork. As is typical with Unix weenies, they sort of fig-

ured out the pattern, and you can now find the following on some sites:

alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk

alt.andy.whine.whine.whine