Java Help - Re: are Java programmers unfriendly and harsh people?

Author

Re: are Java programmers unfriendly and harsh people?

Andrew Thompson

2007-04-14, 4:13 am

On Apr 14, 4:24 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Andrew Thompson <andrewtho...@gmail.com> wrote:
...
>
....[color=darkred]
> Now this surprises me. My experience is pretty much
> exclusively with old-style text-only newsreaders (trn now,
> rn before that, a few experiments with tin and slrn), and:
> I don't remember too well about rn (that was a while back),
> but I may have used it as you describe. But with trn
> and the others, I configure things so that what I get on
> entering a newsgroup is a list of subject lines, and for
> most of the newsgroups I follow, I select which posts to
> read based on subject line.

I note (after a bit of googling) that these
newsreaders are *nix based. My only experience
is with Windows based newsreaders - Outlook Express,
40tude Dialog, and one or two others (that I
cannot immediately recall the names of, they
were that forgettable.)

It is no surprise to me that *nix based news
clients would be built to cater to users who
have a higher technical expertise, or are
more discerning about the software they
install.

> With all due respect, I suggest that a similar argument
> could be made for just ignoring Usenet completely and
> participating instead in -- well, I'm ignorant of such
> things, but I think "Web-based forums" may be the phrase
> I want.

No web-based forum provides the level of
technical detail, volume of experienced
posters, or the 'forthright discussion'*
that seems to exist on the c.l.j.* usenet
newsgroups.

I also post to the Sun & JDIC Forums, but they
- are very restricted in what you can say*
- do not offer the same level of experience
available through usenet (there are a couple
of questions that I put first to the Sun forums,
that through lack of any response, moved to
usenet and got a good discussion going).
- can sometimes censor words, or entire posts

* Theoretically, some usenet news groups are
also 'very restricted', but while there are
conventions of these groups that are regularly
broken - it seems few people care (even I do
not usually bother to comment).

>..But maybe you're thinking that keeping Usenet
> going, but with many people participating via what you call
> WITUNs, is a good compromise that will allow the old-timers
> and the (relative) newbies to continue to interact.

Hell yeah! But even beyond that, it is hard to
tell the difference between (for example) the
Google Groups *representation* of usenet news
groups, and those that are purely 'Google'
Groups.

My Google account offers 'Google Alerts', that
look for keywords of interest to me, and drop an
email when one appears. If I choose to answer a
post on any of the 'Google' Groups, I make a point
of letting the poster know about the c.l.j.*
heirarchy of groups (and WTE 'that is where the
Java gurus hang out'). I imagine that whoever
established the forum must get p*ssed - (shrugs)
not my problem - though several posts to a moderated
forum were 'held up' and did not appear in the
time I could be bothered monitoring it - which
is unfortunate for the OP, but also ..not my problem.

Andrew T.

blmblm@myrealbox.com

2007-04-14, 8:06 am

In article <1176530877.806549.150640@e65g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
Andrew Thompson <andrewthommo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 14, 4:24 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:

[ snip ]
[color=darkred]
> ...
>
> I note (after a bit of googling) that these
> newsreaders are *nix based.

Correct -- and I apologize for assuming that anyone who
knew the difference between Google Groups and "real"
newsreaders would also be familiar with the old-style
Unix newsreaders. A moment's thought should have told
me otherwise.

> My only experience
> is with Windows based newsreaders - Outlook Express,
> 40tude Dialog, and one or two others (that I
> cannot immediately recall the names of, they
> were that forgettable.)

So we have disjoint experiences! The only one of these
I've even heard of is Outlook Express, which I think of as
a mail program first, with "oh yeah, I think you can use
it to read news" second. My understanding is that there
are a lot of programs in this category, and that's what
many people who don't go through GG use as newsreaders.
My only experience with any of them is an attempt, some
years ago, to use Netscape (I think it was Netscape) as
a newsreader. I was told that it was very easy and obvious,
but I didn't find it so. I have that experience fairly
often with GUI-based programs, though.

GUI-based programs that are only newsreaders -- I don't
know. I hear Agent and Forte mentioned in this context,
I think. They may provide more functionality than using
a mail program.

> It is no surprise to me that *nix based news
> clients would be built to cater to users who
> have a higher technical expertise, or are
> more discerning about the software they
> install.

I think that's a pretty accurate statement, though it
could probably be stated a lot less diplomatically. :-)

>
> No web-based forum provides the level of
> technical detail, volume of experienced
> posters, or the 'forthright discussion'*
> that seems to exist on the c.l.j.* usenet
> newsgroups.

Okay .... Obviously I haven't been interested enough to
check them out. Maybe I can continue to put that off. :-)

By the way, my post had a subject line of

Subject: Re: [OT] [Provocation] are Java programmers unfriendly and harsh people?

while yours has

Subject: Re: are Java programmers unfriendly and harsh people?

It's GG stripping off the text in brackets, right? I seem
to remember this being discussed somewhere sometime, but --
<shrug>.

[ snip ]

--
Decline To State
(But the e-mail address in the header is real.)

Jeffrey Schwab

2007-04-25, 8:07 am

printdude1968@gmail.com wrote:
> On Apr 14, 7:06 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> Thuderbird is another one, but it too, is first an email program.
> Seamonkey is another product. It is an all-in-one similar to the way
> Netscrap used to be. It has a Web Browser (which I am using as a
> WITUN to post this reply via Google Groups), a "Mail and Newsgroups"
> program, an IRC interface (IRC=ick), an address book and a composer.

Opera is similar. I just tried it for about a day, but the news reader
was either buggy, or so non-intuitive that it appeared buggy. I'm using
Thunderbird now, but it has a few rare-but-nasty bugs of its own. I
found Agent much less attractive, and more difficult to use. I'm about
ready to settle for tin or slrn, either on Cygwin, or on Linux or FreeBSD.

What I would really like to see is an Eclipse-based Usenet reader.
Surprisingly, no one seems to have written such an animal yet.

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