Chris Glur posted a message to Waldek Hebisch and me, and I am posting
my reply to comp.lang.pop and pop-forum as the issue may be of interest
to others.
Chris,
> Aaron previously mentioned the News server problem.
Curious that your message should arrive the same day I had re-read your
last one posted in November, and had started composing a reply, before
I got interrupted by something else. I'll reply to that one later.
> Does *that* News server control the poplog world community ?
No, except for the bridge between comp.lang.pop and pop-forum.
Each location that provides services to a group of attached users, e.g.
an ISP, a university, a university department, a company, is capable in
principle of running a news server, which connects with other news
servers from which it receives news postings and to which it sends news
postings.
Then local users can read news items stored on that local server, and if
they post news items the server stores them and sends off copies into
the great wide internet world, where the items get forwarded from one
news server to another, with various mechanisms to prevent wasteful
loops etc. (Some news groups are moderated and newly posted items have
to be sent to the moderator for approval, though bad news servers can
ignore that convention.)
Our departmental news server is attached to a news server in the
university information services centre, which is our gateway to the rest
of the world.
When I posted my message about a news server problem, the campus-wide IS
news server had got into a state in which it needed to be rebooted. It
was accepting local posts and sending them out, but it was not accepting
news items being forwarded to it from others. So we got no news items
for a couple of months, and nobody complained until I noticed that
stuff going to google groups was not reaching us.
They people responsible for the service restarted the news server with
the obvious comment that it wasn't being used much if nobody else had
noticed and they should consider whether to keep it running.
It is probably one of many services provided on the same machine and
only needs occasional attention, so the cost is not enormous, apart from
the hard drive space and a slight extra load on the network connections.
But they may decide it's not worth the bother if so few people use it.
Likewise our departmental news server runs on an old unix machine, with
low cost, but our computer officers may reasonably decide one day that
if it is hardly ever used by anyone the service should be terminated to
reduce their responsibilities.
> Have we got other possibilities ?
Some people use wikis, but mostly they don't work because you have to
remember to look at them. wikipedia is a rare exception, but it is not
used for discussions and mutual help with technical problems.
Wikis and news groups have the same problem: interested people don't
notice when something new is added unless they check the service
regularly. In contrast mailing lists don't have that problem: people
check email frequently and you get informed by your mail browser when
email arrives for you.
For me, and some others, comp.lang.pop acts like a mailing list because
all messages reaching it get forwarded (on our departmental machine) to
the pop-forum email list. I then see them in my mail file. Likewise all
messages posted to pop-forum@cs.bham.ac.uk get forwarded to
comp.lang.pop
They also get archived here on our web server:
http://mailman.cs.bham.ac.uk/archives/pop-forum/
If our local news service is removed, the link between the mail list and
the news group will break. This link was previously provided by Sussex
university, and in principle some other site still running news could
offer to take over connecting the email list and the news group. We have
not got there yet.
For some purposes, where there's a group of people who already know one
another an email list is enough. But a news group has the advantage that
people can discover it serendipitously, eg while browsing comp.lang.*,
read the messages and decide it's something they want to get involved
in.
That serendipitous discovery can also happen with mailing list archives
maintained by mailman, listserv, majordomo, etc. but only if they are
made freely accessible by search engines -- as our pop-forum archive is.
Chris' message included a copy of a discussion about why groups were
becoming dormant and whether this was a a result of google's existence.
A discussion of the causal link is here
http://aplawrence.com/Opinion/nntp.html
There is another factor. In the years before the world wide web, when
internet access was far more restricted, there was a lot of interesting
discussion on news groups, e.g. comp.ai, comp.ai.philosophy among
others.
As more and more people gained access the quality of discussion on those
groups (signal to noise ratio) steadily deteriorated and people often
retreated to mailing lists, sometimes closed mailing lists, sometimes
open but moderated mailing lists, e.g. the psyche-d list archived here
http://listserv.uh.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=psyche-d
[That used to be linked to the sci.psychology.consciousness group, but
that link now appears to be broken (perhaps because the server providing
the bridge no longer runs).]
Of course in the case of comp.lang.pop one of the causes of decline may
be the decline in usage of pop-11. There is still a lot of use of it for
teaching and research here in Birmingham (pop-11 is the introductory
programming language for AI undergraduates) but users here either don't
know about the existence of the newsgroup or email list or don't need
them because there is enough local mutual support.
It is also used at the university of Notre Dame, as part of simworld,
http://www.nd.edu/~airolab/simworld/
but the author, Matthias Scheutz seems able to cope without using
the news group or mailing list.
I think we have a great resource which is underused for some good
reasons (e.g. lack of a full blooded port to windows), and
over-dependence on its own editor -- especially the use of file formats
that nothing else can read, which was a dreadful mistake even though at
the time the change was made it cause files to look much prettier in
Ved. I always refused to use the fancy formats for any of my teaching
materials or program documentation because I knew there would always be
users who did not wish to use Ved.
There are probably also some bad reasons why pop-11's resources are
underused (e.g. powerful teaching materials that don't use fancy and
unnecessary graphics), and also the argument that if students learn to
use it they will not learn programmable skills needed where pop-11
is not used. The latter is only half true. They will not learn the
syntax of Java and C++, but they will learn most of the deep concepts
and many of the design and testing techniques, including some not
available in more popular languages.
It's very sad. E.g. many of the educational objectives of the One laptop
per child initiative would probably be better served by pop-11 and its
teaching materials than by anything else, but there is no hope of space
for it being made on those machines.
That drift seems to be unstoppable now, despite what some third year
AI&CS students say to me about how glad they are that they learnt to use
Pop-11 and had it available for their project work.
[I did not mean to write so much. Sigh!]
Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/
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