TCS - UseNet Can Be Interesting

UseNet Can Be Interesting

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the June 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

At a recent meeting, in response to a question from the audience, I attempted to demonstrate some of the UseNet News Groups. Unfortunately I selected the ok.general news group, hoping it would have some interesting discussions about Oklahoma, forgetting that the bulk of the topics being discussed in that news group nowadays seems to be various conspiracy theories and other strange topics like Washington Post Review of that silly movie, Converting Automatic Weapons to Semi-Auto, KFOR Weather Coverage, The Turner Diaries, Converting Automagic Weapons to Semi-Jamming, TWA Flight 800 - Oops - What now, Of hog farms, chicken farms and water pollution, and Analysis of WACO FLIR Tape: (why they are being discussed in ok.general I don't know.)

I then jumped over to one of the humor categories, and mistakenly selected alt.humor.best-of-usenet, which sometimes has some pretty good stuff, but this time both I and the audience had a little trouble seeing the humor. I should have gone for rec.humor which is usually a little better, but I did not think of it at the time.

I should have gone to something like alt.support.headaches.migraine where topics like Dizziness and migraines, Question re: Inderal, Disability, FAQ Part 4 Cluster Headaches, and AZ migraine study are currently being discussed, or something like comp.databases.ms-access where topics like Problem with subform event proceedure, Challenge: Open 2nd database from the first, Setting report properties at runtime, Attendance Register, Controlling Toolbars from Access Basic, Combo box display floats to top, Comparing 2 tables from month-to-month, how to select fields using combo box?, Sloow form/subform link, Access 8.0 and lines on reports, Accessing Delimited Text files instead of Access, Retrieving Contents of a Directory, Scrollable date fields?, Help! Using a Form & Combo Box to display, How to import e-mail from POP3 into Access 7, Inventory control problem, Internet Database Connector, Adding time in MSaccess, [Q] How do I get mm/dd/yyyy date?, About Locking in Access & VB, Attaching Tables using code, not the user int, VB5 and Access 95, compatible?, Dollar values in words, Using Access to Quote my Customers, Dynamic Web Pages - WebFiler, Can't open a secure Access 2.0 DB from Visual Basic, MS Access, outer join and ODBC, Using Access w/ Netscape LiveWire, Access v2.0 - AfterUpdate problem, Label Wizard Bug?, Resetting Page Numbers, Export to Excel Problem w/ Access97 Runtime, and Summing in Report Footers were being discussed.

I captured the topic headings when I decided to write this article and did not read the questions, and I regret it now, because one of the topics was Solve this and I'll have your babies. The thing that makes that topic so interesting, is that it was apparently posted by Jeff North. Maybe I should go over to DejaNews and look it up (they archive news articles that have appeared in news groups for quite a while.

In general, although the short demos I did did not seem to illustrate it, there is A LOT of useful information available on usenet news groups. You may need to put up with a certain number of Spam Posts (where some fool decides to post a message about his latest get rich quick scheme in every news group he can find), and occasionally someone will disagree with a response and will come back with an abusive response (called flaming) which will trigger a few responses from the attacked individual and his friends, but UseNet News Groups offer very good opportunities to post a question, have it read by people all over the world, and hopefully triggering good answers to a vexing problem.



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Tulsa Computer Society 05/14/97
Don Singleton, President
tcs@galstar.com