On 10 Jul 2008 18:28:34 -0400, (David Combs) wrote:

On some posting here I recently saw reference to
alt.engineering.electrical

I thought that surely my isp, panix.com, would have that one,
but no, it didn't.

And jeez, if it doesn't have *that* one, what *else* "equally
obviously desirable" doesn't it ALSO have!

Well, if I had the full list of what some other isp allows

(on unix, via doing eg:
nntplist ! all-newsgroups-on-panix.txt

and then doing an awk '{print $1 }'
on that file, gives me just the names (thousands of them)
available on *that* machine/isp, then via the wonderful "comm"
command:

comm -3 names-on-my-isp.nam names-on-your-isp.nam

gives me a two column file -- ones on mine that are not on yours,
and vice versa.


Then, at least here on panix, we can ask them to add others
(as long as we know their names!), which they always do add
for us, so I too can read it!


Suggestion: various of us on various sites get (somehow)
lists of the names of the available newsgroups, make it
available somehow (maybe post it here, although the
file-of-names will be HUGE (here, it's 9900 lines long
(ie 9900 newsgroups!, making a file that's 200K size, a bit
large to post?)

Anyway, you probably *not* having unix (linux, etc) available,
and maybe not being willing to download the gnu "tools" (unix/linux
tools like awk, comm, nntp, etc), *I* can do the comparisons --
as long as I have the list of groups on your isp.


Anyway, that's my idea.


In a few minutes I'll put up my list of available newsgroups,
at:

www.panix.com/~dkcombs/available-newsgroups.nam

so you can see what at least *this* isp "knows about".


Comments?


David


It would be more productive to just use Google and search "groups" for
topics that interest you.

One of the bad things about Usenet is 8 out of 10 groups are dead.

Just worry about the ones that interest you.

alt.engineering.electrical can be useful, but unless you are an
electrical engineer, they usually tell you more than you want to know
over there.

I wish Google had a separate search for Usenet and for Google groups.
I would almost never include Google groups in my searches as they are
pretty much useless. Not all of them are, but because the crap groups
outnumber the good ones by about 10000 fold, I would gladly have them
excluded from the searches.