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* Posts by Scott R. Godin

6 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2008

Usenet's home shuts down today

Scott R. Godin
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Stop

IRC dead? depends on where you look

Freenode is definitely alive and well, supporting thousands of open-source apps, and is definitely one of my first stops when I'm looking for more information than google can mine for me.

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Scott R. Godin
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Black Helicopters

ye gods, I remember that

Used to have a Fidonet Point off of the Dragons Cave BBS (which later became MacNETIC, no relation to Apple) to follow the 60s_70s_PROGROCK echo mostly, along with a few other things.

Had some nifty little software running on my Mac (SE/30) at the time to do this with. MacWoof, by Craig Vaughan.

I still get twitted by my beardy unix guru buddies occasionally, who remember when fidonet invaded usenet, and how godawful the fidonet addressing scheme had to be, at the time, in order to participate there. :D

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Scott R. Godin
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Boffin

NNTP is still alive and well though

gmane.org currently supports thousands of mailing lists and has access via nntp rather than "web BBS/archive" or plain old email.

I find "Bulletin boards" on the web to be hopelessly uselessly obtuse in comparison with the newsreader format, and almost never glean anything useful from them. The interfaces suck hard enough to pull the Earth thru a soda-straw. But then again I'm intelligent enough to hit the floor with my hat, so... perhaps they're not meant for me.

The newsreader format (still supported by thunderbird/mozilla, opera, and many others) is so far and away more pleasant to use, it's not even funny.

I owe Gmane some thanks for making such a thing possible, that I can still keep on top of the various mailing lists without all the email clutter.

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Apple more closed than Microsoft

Scott R. Godin
Joke

Apple abbrevs?

You might use A¶ if you could just figure out how to type that nifty paragraph character ... :-)

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Satanic net neologisms - nominations invited

Scott R. Godin
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Just found another one

This one's even old -- but somehow still being used occasionally, and long overdue to die most horribly:

"Portal"

*shudder*

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Scott R. Godin
Flame

Lose the Looseness

The first and foremost is the overwhelming preponderance of pedants who seem perfectly capable of coherent conversation right up until they stumble over the word "lose", which they invariably spell as "loose". How that turned into a net-wide meme is beyond me, but let's just say it 'reduces your credibility considerably' if you not only can't get it right, but it makes it through the editorial process and into a major print magazine's published pages.... i.e. Microsoft will not "loose" to Apple. etc etc. gag. puke.

get. it. *&^#*^&#$ing. right.

LOOSE = NOT TIGHT. The word you are looking for is LOSE.

The other one that absolutely MUST die is that misspelling of 'owned' aka 'pwned' or worse 'pwnt' -- I've heard perfectly normal humans attempt to pronounce this in conversation and only regretted that the LART was not immediately to hand.

"Webinar" is a good one I'll admit, but it's definitely in third-place compared to these two bottom-grazers.

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