During the Q&A period a member who had T1 access to the Internet at work wanted to know how he could get Newsgroup access, so he could download some large video clips from a Babylon5 News Group. When he went to his ISP's news site he did not see anything. That is because ISPs make a sizeable investment in hard disk space, internet bandwidth, and news feeds to make UseNet news groups available to their customers, and they make certain that they are only available to people who have dialed in on their dial up lines (they know the IP ranges that that they assign to those calls, so they can set their news readers to only respond to that range of IP addresses). If they did not have such a restriction, a new ISP could gain a competitive advantage on them by not spending the money for the hard disk space, internet bandwidth, and news feeds and just tell their customers to point their news readers at the other ISP's servers.

http://www.newsguy.com/ is one way the member could get the news access he wanted, by paying for eithe a Basic Newsguy accounts (7500 newsgroups - cost $25 for one year of service) or Extra Newsguy accounts (25,000+ newsgroups - cost $10.95 for one month, $39.95 for 6 months, or $69.95 for 12 months).

He could also access the newsgroups via the web through http://www.remarq.com/.

http://www.deja.com/ also provides web access to messages in news groups, but it does not cover the binary newsgroups this member wanted.

One member wanted to know what abbreviations like IMHO (In My Humble Opinion), RTFM (Read The Fine Manual - other translations for F are sometimes quoted, but it was a mixed audience so we used that one), LOL (Lots of Luck), GDRVVF (Grinning, Ducking, Running Very Very Fast), etc. We showed how one could use a search engine like AltaVista, by putting a +sign in front of each abbreviation, to come up with pages like http://www.pact1.com/public/acronyms.htm which showed those and other abbreviations. We also discussed how one could search for emoticons like :-) or ;-) (also called smiley faces).

One member raised a question about why his Statewide Commercial Real Estate Web Site was so hard to find in the search engines. We checked some and found that there were a very large number of residential real estate people with their own web sites, many of whom would claim commercial properties as well. My recommendation was that the commercial real estate professionals in his organization needed to be encouraged to put up their own personal web sites, even if they were initially very simple sites, and to show how that could be done we generated a sample web page that they could easily modify to set up such a page. And if that web page included a prominent link to the Statewide Organization page, that would help more people find his page.

We then went into a discussion of sites to generate maps on the internet, including http://www.mapblast.com/ which would provide a map with a particular point identified, both by a mark on the map, and with latitude/longitude information which could be used by the other web site, http://tiger.census.gov/, which can create a map of an area with marks for a number of different locations.

A MapBlast map will show street name; a Tiger Census map will not, but it can have multiple points identified, using a variety of dots, pushpins, etc, and each one can be annotated if desired.

In the Internet Sig meeting at 1:00 pm, we covered both FTP and NewsReaders. http://www.tcs.org/webpage9.htm#FTP provided links to the FTP program we covered at an earlier meeting, but at that meeting we unfortunately were not able to meet in M1, so we did not have Internet Access, and it was hard to see how FTP worked with out actually being able to show it.

I made a couple of simple changes to web pages, on the TCS web site, and another site I maintain, adding one link to each, and then we used FTP to upload those web pages, and showed that they had indeed been changed.

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