Orcon's Usenet server is _still_ sh*t :-(

WTF can't they get their f**king act together and GET A DECENT FREAKING
USENET FEED?!?

Ringing them makes no bloody difference - I'm lucky if I get a help
droid who even _knows_ what Usenet is! F**ks sake...

HITH did Orcon ever win best ISP in NetGuide magazine again?

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

 

Shouldn't all of your message be type in caps ?

Makes more of a point you know, and Orcon would definetly act quicker if
the message was typed in caps.

LOL.

Angry young man there.

 

No, only the bit I wanted to strongly emphasise. Using too much emphasis
ends up emphasising nothing. Or do you not recall your English lessons?

I'm sorry - are you foolish enough to believe I'm suffering under the
delusion Orcon will actually read my post and give a damn about it? Fat
chance.

I'm young? You must be elderly because only old farts call anyone under
30 (I'm 26) "young man".

So what's _really_ bugging you? What's your problem today? Come on - I'm
sure you're dying to tell us.

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

PS: Maybe you ought to consider a little more proofreading or use of a
spellchecker before sending your deliberately irritating replies?

 

He was taking the piss out of you. look up sarcasm in that big english
text book.

then why post it if you dont think that they will read it?

well Im 25 and I had picked you as a school kid by the rant you post...
just shows that you cant judge a label by it's rapper.

what makes you so sure that he was trying to tell *us* anything... maybe
he was just replying in a childish manner to a childish rant.

This is usenet, it isn't being marked or handed in for assessment, build
a bridge, get over it.

 

Nooooo.... was he really?

Because I wanted to talk about it with the readers of this group? Or was
that no blindingly obvious?

*yawn*

 

It seems like Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:00:45 +1300 was when
(Jamie Kahn Genet) said Blah blah blah...

Uh, he could be meaning rapper as in the singer and label as in the
record company he's signed with.

 

"no blindingly obvious"? ESOL?

ahh no, rapper.

 

be kind, he's obviously not quite "with it".

 

No, only the bit I wanted to strongly emphasise. Using too much emphasis

You really need to upgrade your irony detector when you read my post.

 

Gee your a hard bastard to pleaze. Remember what their in house news
server was like? It was like every other NZ ISP news server..crap.
Their current one is heaps better.

If your so fussy go and subscribe to a paid news server like
Octanews.com or the like and stop moaning..

 

This from a guy who berates others for not proof reading or spellchecking?
Laughable.

You are a little thick no? You don't recognize a metaphorical pun when you
see it.

Go have a lie-down and leave the group to the less volatile people or get
anger-management treatment.

 

Well, angry *old* man, that's the difference between Orcon and other ISPs,
see
that post in the other thread you started from Seeby Woodhouse? He's the
Managing Director of Orcon and he reads this group regularly and does indeed
reply and act on people's problems. His posting here and being honest and
open is the primary reason I made the decision to change to Orcon.

Your insulting nature and lack of knowledge must be a real problem for you
in the real world. Or are you only arrogant and abusive when you're hiding
behind a keyboard?

 

Not unless he was making some cute little joke referencing pop culture
i.e. Rap stars and gang connections plus some rapper's generally poor
behavior, and said rappers getting hauled before Judges for firearms
offences and shooting rival rappers, etc, etc.

Nope. I doubt there was that much thought going on. Or any thought at
all.

Besides, it would have been silly and totally irrelevant if he had.

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

 

I recall reading the posts made by users of the old server (I wasn't one
of them). Not good at all.

Well then, here's a constructive comment - how about Orcon use SuperNews
as their feed (see my other post)? I disagree with some other posters
about Orcon running their own feed again (you yourself mention above how
bad that was). I think they need to get a decent third party provider
and _this_ time do some freaking research first! I'll bet Orcon
management simply chose the cheapest service available without
considering anything else. Or maybe the first one they came across.
Dumb.

Newsfeeds.com's stupid claim of 120,000 groups (the majority of which
are misspellings and bogus groups no reputable provider would carry)
"and more being added daily" (only if they're employing people to create
bogus groups for them) should have been enough to clue in any frequent
Usenet user that Newsfeeds.com are full of sh*t. There are not more than
approx. 40,000 legitimate groups. Period. Any provider who says
different is pulling Newsfeeds.com's scam to try and look better, or is
plain ignorant. Either way it ought to have set of warning bells for the
Orcon people who chose Newsfeeds.com.

So some people in nz.comp have accused me of being irrationally angry
and offensive. But think for a moment. The company you're paying to
access the internet makes such appallingly bad decisions (that any
competent Google user could have discovered) that they chose one of the
worst Usenet providers who uses dishonest advertising and other such
bullsh*t to try and draw in the ignorant newbies (funny - it actually
worked. Orcon signed up with them).

Does that not concern you? It worried me a little. But I'm obviously
different in that regard (or so it seems from the flames I've read).
Still, I suppose it's not like I'm paying Orcon for insurance or
something vitally important. So maybe I am over-reacting. I supose it
depends on how much _you_ are paying them. ADSL aint cheap. It's
probably just the pent up frustration with the poor quality of their
service that has gotten me so wound up. I'll go have a lie down now...


Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

 

It seems like Fri, 19 Nov 2004 20:50:12 +1300 was when
(Jamie Kahn Genet) said Blah blah blah...

Well either way, there was nothing wrong with the sentence from a
spelling point of view, so "rapper" was and still is technically
correct, but maybe not relevant.

Perhaps try asking him what he meant, Dave might mean rapper after
all.

 

I disagree. Orcon could easily run their own news server, it is neither
complicated nor resource intensive to provide a full text-based
newsfeed. A full text feed is only a few GB per day, and divided amongst
a relatively small number of active users, amounts to much less than can
be downloaded on a flat rate ADSL connection per day.

The number of active users would increase, as users would not need to
rely on third party news sources.

Orcon must have excess capacity to handle peak times, and pay for
capacity they can't use to full potential the rest of the time. Is
providing a few GB of bandwidth and an average x86-based PC really going
to seriously impact on their profits?

Anyone can create alt.* groups. FWIW, here are a few statistics on the
news.orcon.net.nz (host79.newsfeeds.com) server -

As of a few minutes ago, the server claimed to have 212,646,438 messages.

There were a total of 120,401 groups, including control, control.cancel,
and a bogus group called (null).

This gives a mean size of 1,766 messages per group. This is not a bad
figure if you consider most of the groups are empty. It means good
retention on the rest.

The largest group contained 1,559,018 messages.

Notes:
1/ They are running SurgeNews. SurgeNews is a BETA product (From an NZ
company too).

2/ The above message count considers only groups showing as having more
than one message (I.e. 2 or more). Groups with a single message are
treated as having zero as DNews (Which SurgeNews replaces) shows a dummy
message to trigger caching of groups when read.

Is this better than what Orcon offered before? Without the advertising,
almost certainly. My own caching server now gets around 40% of messages
from this server, before it was less than 10%. The solution is still far
from ideal, and I would most like to see a local text-based news server.

The Other Guy

 

I could live with Orcon providing a text only feed to UBS customers (and
maybe charging for a binary feed), but I don't see why I shouldn't get a
full binary and text feed if I'm paying for 2Mb per second, 10GB limit
(throttled down to 56K speed afterwards). I mean, I can only download
10GB before it becomes unrealistically slow anyway. Hell, offer a
special plan with the binary feed's cost factored into the monthly
charge, if need be.

Whoops - I drifted off into dreamland for a moment there! Please
ignore the above paragraph.

But seriously, a text only feed is just not enough IMHO. Either do it
properly or not at all, please Orcon. This is why I'd prefer Orcon stick
with a third party provider. I seriously doubt Orcon would be able to
supply a full feed with good retention cheaper than an outfit like
SuperNews could do for them.

Ah, but they would not have to rely on them if Orcon had a decent
provider handle the feed for them in the first place.

I would guess no, it would not. But only if they go with a text only
feed :-(

While Newsfeeds.com is rife with annoying misspelled and bogus alt.*
groups, they are not what really bugs me or what I meant. Groups like
comp.sys.mac.commcomp.sys.mac.system,
comp.sys.mac.misccomp.sys.mac.hardware, comp.sys.mac.app
(comp.sys.mac.apps is the correct one) and
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.hmtl piss me off. They're deliberate
padding for Newsfeeds.com's misleading claim of over 120,000 groups
carried.

My personal favourite is the group "------------------" that they carry.

I sympathise with people like yourself who are perfectly happy with a
text only feed. But I want binary groups with a decent retention and I'm
sure others do to (as I am equally sure plenty of Orcon customers would
also be happy with text only groups). So I'm curious - do people like
myself form a large enough segment of Usenet users to warrant such a
service. I'd like to think we are.

Hell, if the tiny ISP out of a garage in Palmerston North I started with
could do a half decent binary feed back in the day, I don't see what the
problem is these days. It's just another bit of traffic I'm paying for.
What does it matter if it's HTTP, FTP or NNTP? The only reason Orcon
would have to pay for a download their customers may never use is if
they ran their own Usenet server. Problem solved with a third party
provider.

Or am I totally off base?

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet

 

well said Waylon.

I meant rapper, and I meant to put it there on purpose, just so the tard
would "correct" me.

 

The (null) group gets special mention because it is almost certanly
caused by a programming error in the SurgeNews beta. On some platforms
doing a printf (or equivalent) containing a string, but specifying a
null pointer, will result in '(null)' being printed, on others it will
crash.

The other groups are bogus in a different way, but are still real
groups. Completely useless real groups

This is really a worldwide problem. NNTP has grown too big for many
providers to handle a full feed. The daily volume can be hundreds of
gigabytes per day.

NNTP was never designed to handle binaries, especially not large
binaries like CD images. Any number of 8-bit clean binary protocols are
better for this purpose.

Some have greatly reduced the bandwidth use simply by filtering out
these groups.

Although the Southern Cross cable has plenty of excess bandwidth
available, the cost to ISPs is huge. I did some rough calculations
(Once, and possibly incorrectly) suggesting that 100GB would be enough
to supply nearly 200 dial up users with dedicated Internect connections
at 50kbs^-1 per second. If this bandwidth is shared 10:1 across the pool
of users, a 100GB per day news feed would use the eqivalent resources of
2,000 dial up users.

The Other Guy

 

Of course you did.