Newsgroups (Who needs P2P???)
Newsgroups? P2P? Many are probably asking what are these? Newsgroups are similar to a forum, a blog for that matter, pretty much a meeting place. P2P or Peer to Peer, is a way individuals can connect to one another as if networked together for sharing files, ideas, and music, remember Napster? This topic though is about Newsgroups only.
You can get to newsgroups from your ISP who usually has a news server you can set up (Free) or you can use a Newsgroup Service (Giganews for a monthly or yearly fee) these can be accessed by your basic email client usually Outlook Express and other software just made for newsgroups (XNews, Agent, Newsbin), I'm sure there are many others?
These software's are what are called Newsreaders and pretty much are just ways to make your newsgroup browsing an easier process. Some of these readers require a fee because it is software. I use XNews it's free. These are what Front Ends were to emulation, a graphical user interface to make it easier to do the things needed to accomplish your goals, pretty much doing everything for you. Here is what a newsreader looks like.
Xnews
One thing about newsgroups is you can post anything you want, good or bad, people can reply good or bad. Some newsgroups are beneficial for those with health problems, computer problems you name it. You simply ask your question and individuals who frequent the group may reply with the answer? Most large companies have their own newsgroups with people there to answer incoming questions similar to a forum, just another medium.
You can learn quite a bit from newsgroups. Just about any topic thought of has a newsgroup associated with it. Within your newsreader you search for a topic such as mp3 and this would bring up any newsgroup with mp3 in it's name. You then subscribe to the group you are interested in (no fee associated just a figure of speech). It then would place this subscription on another page within the newsreader for easy access and add to your other subscribed newsgroups (Favorites would be a good example).
There is so much to learn about newsgroups that it would take a 100 page blog to touch on everything. I'll try to touch on the basics and what I can before my fingers fall off. As mentioned earlier newsgroups are free from most ISP (Internet Service Provider) and for a small fee by other news services (Giganews). The differences between the two is of course money, available newsgroups and last but not least, a retention period. What I mean by available newsgroups is that some servers filter out say porn, warez, cracks, things that may be deemed illegal or obscene by your ISP (looking out for your well being), LOL. Retention period is the length of time a news server will hold on to a particular post. Most ISP forms have a retention period of about 24-48 hours, then everything is lost to the great newsgroup gods in the sky, keeping their servers clean. As far as news services (Giganews) have a retention period of months. Retention is a big factor in finding what you want because if you do not read your subscriptions every single hour or day you may miss what you've been waiting for, that answer to your question or that post to your REQUEST (about this in a minute).
There are different forms of newsgroups some are simple text and others are binary which has both. Common sense tells you what text is, but what about binary? Binary is what makes up everything in computers and software - ones and zeros - programming, or life in general. Remember the movie (Matrix)? This post isn't about Binary though sorry. Binary newsgroups are those that turn that text into binary code and vice versa. This allows people to post software, mp3, movies, books, you name it. Now I mentioned Request earlier if you look at the picture above you can see someone placed REQ: within their subject line, this tells you that someone is looking for something and can you fill his Request? If so and you have it, you could post an ISO image or CD Image of this file regardless of size.
Most posts on news servers have a 15MB limit, but no limit on the amount of posts. In effect you can take say a 500MB file and post 15MB pieces of it to the group which would equate to 500 divided by 15 giving you the amount of posts needed = 34 posts, the technical term for this is ENCODING (Taking the binary file and converting it to binary text). Yenc and UUencode are two forms of doing this process of Encoding and Decoding. With the use of certain newsreaders this is done for you when posting or when downloading a post.
In the early days you had to use a program that would do this for you before you could post, but this has since been added or controlled by the newsreaders. Example if you were still using Outlook Express as your news reader which Downloads and Decodes the files to a text file if Yenc'ed. If it were Yenc'ed you'd have to use Yenc32 to turn that text file into it's proper form the actual file, which became a long and drawn out process. You can google about this item and uuencode.
So now you see 34 posts all stating the same thing? Once all of these posts are downloaded or what is known as DECODED (Taking the binary text and converting it to a binary file) say a 500mb ISO. This is very complicated stuff and this is where the newreader comes in and many other pieces of software so with say XNews it doesn't matter if it's Yenc'ed or uuencode it does the work for you. In XNews it's as easy as selecting all the binary posts all 34 of them and hitting F4 function key. Depending on where you Decode these items to, you may see 34 rar files upon completion. Now knowing about rar and zip files or (ARCHIVES) is a completely different subject and at times some downloaded files may not be complete thus needing another piece of software for repairing these archives by the use of Par and Par2 files or posts.
These are those pieces of software needed to accomplish your newsreading experience. Learn everything you can about all of these. You can choose the newsreader you desire, of course these are what I use.
Xnews:
Here is a How To and Download Site:
http://www.slyck.com/xnews.php
Winrar:
This can do just about every format of archive which is needed to extract those downloaded binary files whether in zip or rar form from newsgroups and the internet or p2p:
http://www.rarlab.com/index.htm
QuickPar:
This software is what is needed if you download zip or rar files that are not complete and someone posts Par or Par2 files which actually will fix those corrupt or incomplete files:
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/Download.htm
Once you've mastered these three pieces of software you will see how easy it is to get what you want and when you want it. This pretty much equates to why do you need Peer to Peer? As I mentioned earlier you can get anything and everything, software, ebooks, mp3, movies, books, nothing is left out here. Who says it cost 100,000 dollars for a BMW - if it could be posted in binary and decoded it would be free.
You can also get online newsgroups which I will not touch much on and these usually require a fee or sign up but it's no different than browsing the internet or forum. To learn more about this you can read this article.
http://www.cyberfiber.com/articles/web_based_newsgroup.htm
A few key points about newsgroups (NEVER) use your real email address because a lot of spammers take these from places like this and use them for their spam attacks. Actually never use your email online period unless you truly want to be contacted by someone or site. You may be asking what about virus's? Most servers don't want them either so the posted files are scanned when being posted then scanned again once you download if you use this kind of software and if something does get posted of worry someone will warn you of it with another post. Either way you have risks just use common sense.
Here are two of my favorite binary sites that I frequent. I mentioned in one of my earlier posts about emulation and getting ROMS well this is what you've been waiting for.
MAME ROMS:
alt.binaries.emulators.mame
Anything Software:
alt.binaries.cd.image
As always this is just a brief take on Newsgroups but believe me once you get started you may never turn back. It is very rewarding and time consuming but well worth the effort. You can google as always about anything mentioned within my post and I hope you've all learned something with this post. Remember we are all FREE why not get it FREE.
You can get to newsgroups from your ISP who usually has a news server you can set up (Free) or you can use a Newsgroup Service (Giganews for a monthly or yearly fee) these can be accessed by your basic email client usually Outlook Express and other software just made for newsgroups (XNews, Agent, Newsbin), I'm sure there are many others?
These software's are what are called Newsreaders and pretty much are just ways to make your newsgroup browsing an easier process. Some of these readers require a fee because it is software. I use XNews it's free. These are what Front Ends were to emulation, a graphical user interface to make it easier to do the things needed to accomplish your goals, pretty much doing everything for you. Here is what a newsreader looks like.
Xnews
One thing about newsgroups is you can post anything you want, good or bad, people can reply good or bad. Some newsgroups are beneficial for those with health problems, computer problems you name it. You simply ask your question and individuals who frequent the group may reply with the answer? Most large companies have their own newsgroups with people there to answer incoming questions similar to a forum, just another medium.
You can learn quite a bit from newsgroups. Just about any topic thought of has a newsgroup associated with it. Within your newsreader you search for a topic such as mp3 and this would bring up any newsgroup with mp3 in it's name. You then subscribe to the group you are interested in (no fee associated just a figure of speech). It then would place this subscription on another page within the newsreader for easy access and add to your other subscribed newsgroups (Favorites would be a good example).
There is so much to learn about newsgroups that it would take a 100 page blog to touch on everything. I'll try to touch on the basics and what I can before my fingers fall off. As mentioned earlier newsgroups are free from most ISP (Internet Service Provider) and for a small fee by other news services (Giganews). The differences between the two is of course money, available newsgroups and last but not least, a retention period. What I mean by available newsgroups is that some servers filter out say porn, warez, cracks, things that may be deemed illegal or obscene by your ISP (looking out for your well being), LOL. Retention period is the length of time a news server will hold on to a particular post. Most ISP forms have a retention period of about 24-48 hours, then everything is lost to the great newsgroup gods in the sky, keeping their servers clean. As far as news services (Giganews) have a retention period of months. Retention is a big factor in finding what you want because if you do not read your subscriptions every single hour or day you may miss what you've been waiting for, that answer to your question or that post to your REQUEST (about this in a minute).
There are different forms of newsgroups some are simple text and others are binary which has both. Common sense tells you what text is, but what about binary? Binary is what makes up everything in computers and software - ones and zeros - programming, or life in general. Remember the movie (Matrix)? This post isn't about Binary though sorry. Binary newsgroups are those that turn that text into binary code and vice versa. This allows people to post software, mp3, movies, books, you name it. Now I mentioned Request earlier if you look at the picture above you can see someone placed REQ: within their subject line, this tells you that someone is looking for something and can you fill his Request? If so and you have it, you could post an ISO image or CD Image of this file regardless of size.
Most posts on news servers have a 15MB limit, but no limit on the amount of posts. In effect you can take say a 500MB file and post 15MB pieces of it to the group which would equate to 500 divided by 15 giving you the amount of posts needed = 34 posts, the technical term for this is ENCODING (Taking the binary file and converting it to binary text). Yenc and UUencode are two forms of doing this process of Encoding and Decoding. With the use of certain newsreaders this is done for you when posting or when downloading a post.
In the early days you had to use a program that would do this for you before you could post, but this has since been added or controlled by the newsreaders. Example if you were still using Outlook Express as your news reader which Downloads and Decodes the files to a text file if Yenc'ed. If it were Yenc'ed you'd have to use Yenc32 to turn that text file into it's proper form the actual file, which became a long and drawn out process. You can google about this item and uuencode.
So now you see 34 posts all stating the same thing? Once all of these posts are downloaded or what is known as DECODED (Taking the binary text and converting it to a binary file) say a 500mb ISO. This is very complicated stuff and this is where the newreader comes in and many other pieces of software so with say XNews it doesn't matter if it's Yenc'ed or uuencode it does the work for you. In XNews it's as easy as selecting all the binary posts all 34 of them and hitting F4 function key. Depending on where you Decode these items to, you may see 34 rar files upon completion. Now knowing about rar and zip files or (ARCHIVES) is a completely different subject and at times some downloaded files may not be complete thus needing another piece of software for repairing these archives by the use of Par and Par2 files or posts.
These are those pieces of software needed to accomplish your newsreading experience. Learn everything you can about all of these. You can choose the newsreader you desire, of course these are what I use.
Xnews:
Here is a How To and Download Site:
http://www.slyck.com/xnews.php
Winrar:
This can do just about every format of archive which is needed to extract those downloaded binary files whether in zip or rar form from newsgroups and the internet or p2p:
http://www.rarlab.com/index.htm
QuickPar:
This software is what is needed if you download zip or rar files that are not complete and someone posts Par or Par2 files which actually will fix those corrupt or incomplete files:
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/Download.htm
Once you've mastered these three pieces of software you will see how easy it is to get what you want and when you want it. This pretty much equates to why do you need Peer to Peer? As I mentioned earlier you can get anything and everything, software, ebooks, mp3, movies, books, nothing is left out here. Who says it cost 100,000 dollars for a BMW - if it could be posted in binary and decoded it would be free.
You can also get online newsgroups which I will not touch much on and these usually require a fee or sign up but it's no different than browsing the internet or forum. To learn more about this you can read this article.
http://www.cyberfiber.com/articles/web_based_newsgroup.htm
A few key points about newsgroups (NEVER) use your real email address because a lot of spammers take these from places like this and use them for their spam attacks. Actually never use your email online period unless you truly want to be contacted by someone or site. You may be asking what about virus's? Most servers don't want them either so the posted files are scanned when being posted then scanned again once you download if you use this kind of software and if something does get posted of worry someone will warn you of it with another post. Either way you have risks just use common sense.
Here are two of my favorite binary sites that I frequent. I mentioned in one of my earlier posts about emulation and getting ROMS well this is what you've been waiting for.
MAME ROMS:
alt.binaries.emulators.mame
Anything Software:
alt.binaries.cd.image
As always this is just a brief take on Newsgroups but believe me once you get started you may never turn back. It is very rewarding and time consuming but well worth the effort. You can google as always about anything mentioned within my post and I hope you've all learned something with this post. Remember we are all FREE why not get it FREE.
posted by Cellar Dweller at 11:58 AM
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