An interesting read and gives a very graphic indication of what's happened to newsgroups in general over the years.
I think they've had their day as general discussion forums given the huge amount of spam that gets pumped into them. ISPs have also drastically reduced (or completely eliminated) newsgroup access due to the popularity of the binaries hierarchy and the potential for litigation and most people today don't have a clue what usenet is and those that have heard about it think it's all about porn or warez (which it is now - I can't imagine non-binary posts accounting for even a tenth of one percent of what's on the typical news server).
The attraction of forums like WoS is the authentication barrier to posting which although no guarantee of quality, does at least indicate at least a minimal level of commitment and responsibility.
What's really a shame is all the user interface lessons of Usenet have been discarded by web forum authors. Even the best forums don't have the usability of Usenet newsreaders that were around in the early 1990s, the threading is often bad, the list of unread articles often doesn't work right (this is true of WOS, if you visit WOS, and visit again one hour later, forums which used to show unread articles no longer do so even though you didn't read them), and you can't use the software of your choice to read the forum, you're stuck with whatever web interface you're stuck with. Web forums are seldom distributed, so when it goes down, it's gone. You've always got another server with Usenet.
Fortunately, in many corners Usenet is functioning fine, and The September that Never Ended has in fact ended or at least nearly so. There are plenty of public news servers that carry text groups, you don't need to rely on your ISP. Web forums are a rotten replacement for Usenet.
I'd completely forgotten about the SincNews email list until reading that article. Happy days.
While I'd agree that it is a shame that CSS is a mere shadow of its former self, I have to admit that I prefer the whole online forum 'thing' to Usenet as it's so much easier to find the material that's relevant to 'you'...
"[The WOS Forums were] a life raft for the more serious content, and with multiple forums covering different broad interest areas, it offered a renewed level of signal-to-noise ratio ? you didn't have to read about games if you were just into emulation, you didn't have to read about hardware if you just collected software, and you didn't have to wade through the off-topic stuff which got left behind in CSS."
It'd be a real shame if they died a death, but I feel the forums are a much more organised way of hosting our ramblings.
I feel the forums are a much more organised way of hosting our ramblings.
That's the very problem though. They have to be hosted, by a centralised entity, so if the server blows up or Martijn decides he's bored of speccies the whole database of posts just goes away.
Also unlike usenet it's basically impossible to keep your own local archive (that you can search efficiently and find the things you want) so if you want to look at a thread you read a month ago you have to hope that WoS is still online and that the thread didn't get deleted etc.
These are all disadvantages of hosted web forums over usenet groups or mailing lists.
While I totally agree with what you're saying (and have been saying similar things for a long time, especially with regard to the fact that forums needlessly enforce, and need to transmit, a particular UI along with the content).
But the reality is web forums are completely where it's at now. Most newsgroups are either full of people who've been there for years, or just attract purely (very) technical people. You've got to use a web forum to attract general interest and casual punters, as I suspect a good 90%+ of internet users have no idea what usenet is or how to get access to it.
or just attract purely (very) technical people. You've got to use a web forum to attract general interest and casual punters, as I suspect a good 90%+ of internet users have no idea what usenet is or how to get access to it.
This suits the very technical groups just fine as they don't want 90%+ of internet users coming and asking dumb questions ;)
And therefore passing the knowledge on to future generations
That's not a problem because various people maintain massive archives of everything posted on usenet so even when the group falls apart and disappears into history the posts are all archived in multiple places.
Not like when a website gets abandoned and the database deleted... :smile:
P.S. I'm not of the usenet generation and I use it... It's not about age, it's about intelligence. If people can't figure out how to connect to a usenet server and join a group then they clearly aren't able to use a search engine or read. There is no shortage of websites describing how to use usenet, and many email clients have newsreaders built in too so there's a manual to read!
Then again, the yoof of today don't use an email client either, they rely on google or facebook to look after their messages for them and access via a bloated ajaxy web interface!
They are a total mess - a topic about a game, the some chitchat than hardware, than games again then Z81 or Sincalir QL which sre no interest to me and so on... Subforums are a great invention.
And they don't have any interesting talk not covered in more details on WOS. When I recently visited them, there were more Viagra And Rolex spams than Spectrum talking.
So okay, I have chosen year 2000, the grup ast its glory and what? Again uninterestiing... Well maybe reading 10 years old obsolete talk will be never as fun as participating in current discussion.
And the last thing - I don't know the other areas but when it comes to new games this group was completely fruitless. Nothing was born there Around 2000 was the worst Spectrum games time in the West when practically nothing was done.
Today many new games were born partially due to Development and New Ideas forums.
So okay, I have chosen year 2000, the grup ast its glory and what? Again uninterestiing... Well maybe reading 10 years old obsolete talk will be never as fun as participating in current discussion.
Don't know how you managed to find nothing of interest from around that period - it was the time when some of the biggest developments were taking place, new secrets about the internals of the Z80 and Sinclair ROMs were being uncovered for the first time, with more active and enthusiastic emulator authors around than there have ever been since, things like RZX being discussed, lots of heated debates between parties that were being open with their discoveries, and other parties that were (arguably, I s'pose) less open, the birth of #speccy and #spin was around that sort of time too.
For me, it was an exciting time, especially in terms of emulation.
new secrets about the internals of the Z80 and Sinclair ROMs were being uncovered for the first time, with more active and enthusiastic emulator authors around than there have ever been since, things like RZX being discussed, lots of heated debates between parties that were being open with their discoveries, and other parties that were (arguably, I s'pose) less open, the birth of #speccy and #spin was around that sort of time too.
Maybe I'm not much about emulators. I use them like cell phones and don't care much how they work at internal level.
Maybe I'm not much about emulators. I use them like cell phones and don't care much how they work at internal level.
Maybe if more people had a greater appreciation of the work that goes into them, and the amount of collective research and information sharing that went into building the exquisitely detailed level of knowledge required to make accurate, usable emulators, a few less of the people that did the groundwork wouldn't have become disenchanted and gone onto other things...
Maybe if more people had a greater appreciation of the work that goes into them, and the amount of collective research and information sharing that went into building the exquisitely detailed level of knowledge required to make accurate, usable emulators, a few less of the people that did the groundwork wouldn't have become disenchanted and gone onto other things...
The trouble is that once 128k emulation and multiloads were pretty much nailed, then emulation in general was "good enough" for (finger-in-the-air) 98+% of users. That was late-'90s stuff. Plenty of nice-to-haves were developed in the meantime, but you're right, people now take good-enough emulation for granted these days. It's now the added extras that give the wow-factor, such as screen modes, gameplay recording, etc - you'll have to pardon us for not being too impressed when a lot of work goes into emulating Z80 features no one used way-back-when.
Maybe if more people had a greater appreciation of the work that goes into them, and the amount of collective research and information sharing that went into building the exquisitely detailed level of knowledge required to make accurate, usable emulators, a few less of the people that did the groundwork wouldn't have become disenchanted and gone onto other things...
Maybe, but it works the other way too. In a thread in the emulators forum Philip Kendall asked for suggestions for new features. I wrote a detailed, coherent post detailing some things I'd like to see, and he didn't bother to reply. When I eventually posted to ask him if he'd read my post, he said he hadn't because I'd highlighted it in different colours (which I did to make it easier to read, as it was very comprehensive in describing my ideas). So I apologised and reposted without colouring any text, and he still didn't reply. When I eventually posted to ask what he thought of my suggestions he simply posted:
"I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago.", which was HTML linked (via the "answer I gave some moments ago" text) to the a post of Mr Kendall's saying simply:
"While it may shock you ZnorXman, there are actually more important things in my life than your messages. Deal with it."
So tell me why I should respect someone with that sort of attitude? He asked for input, I gave it in good faith, and get treated like that. It's hardly the first time or I'd put it down to "probably nothing, forget about it", but he's notoriously difficult to communicate with.
Having said all that, his work (FUSE) is very good indeed, and I'm certainly not knocking his technical skill and knowledge, just his (lack of) people skills.
you'll have to pardon us for not being too impressed when a lot of work goes into emulating Z80 features no one used way-back-when.
But then you have to pardon the emulator authors for not being interested in writing non-emulator-ey things and sticking to the part that interests them :roll:
As you say speccy emulation was "finished" years ago now. If it runs manic miner most people don't care what is going on under the hood and whether it is accurate or not.
I am not really bothered by games anyway and far more interested in having an accurate historical record of the speccy. I find things like csmith's ULA research fascinating but obviously none of that will affect people just having a quick game of jetpac now and then.
There are the "techy folk" and the "gamer folk" and that's fair enough it takes all sorts :)
However there should be no surprise if the two groups have very different goals. :smile:
Maybe, but it works the other way too. In a thread in the emulators forum Philip Kendall asked for suggestions for new features. I wrote a detailed, coherent post detailing some things I'd like to see
No, you didn't. You wrote a post which was full of either (a) trivial ideas which had been suggested by other people or (b) ideas which were technically infeasible, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how both the Spectrum and emulators work.
and he didn't bother to reply.
Correct. I didn't respond to the majority of posts in that thread, so I don't see why you're taking it as a personal slight.
When I eventually posted to ask him if he'd read my post, he said he hadn't because I'd highlighted it in different colours (which I did to make it easier to read, as it was very comprehensive in describing my ideas).
At least, very comprehensive in showing that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
"While it may shock you ZnorXman, there are actually more important things in my life than your messages. Deal with it."
So tell me why I should respect someone with that sort of attitude? He asked for input, I gave it in good faith, and get treated like that.
You were given plenty of hints that I didn't want to reply to your ideas - they apparently passed you by. You decided to force the issue once, and I gave you what I admit is a fairly brusque response (although entirely true - those people who know me personally know what the more important reason is. And if you don't know, it's none of your business). However, even that wasn't direct enough for you, so you've decided to bring the issue up again. Exactly how important is it to you that I reply to your ideas?
And so, to repeat: your ideas were bad ideas. Various people have been in similar conversations with you over the years, and you don't seem to understand that they're bad when it's explained to you that they're bad, and you don't seem to have changed your behaviour at all over time. As such, the easiest thing for me to do personally was just to ignore you, because the value I get out of your posts is minimal at best. However, you still seem convinced that you are the most important person around - as noted above, I didn't reply to most of the posts in the thread in question. Nobody else got grumpy about it. What makes you special, other than your ideas being really, really bad?
Is that clear enough for you yet?
Now hopefully we can finally draw a line under this one.
Back in 2000 CSS posts were dealing more with obscure UK children TV programs of the '70s than Sinclair stuff. I quitted consulting it at the time, also because of the creation of the first WoS forum (before the Great Crash of 2001, which only users who already joined it at the time, and now appear to have all joined the current forum on the 28th of January, 2002, can remember).
Now I can be absolutely sure I made the right choice back then :lol:
And they don't have any interesting talk not covered in more details on WOS. When I recently visited them, there were more Viagra And Rolex spams than Spectrum talking.
I think that is a sad thing, but wasn't usenet supposed to have moderators that can remove spams?
And the last thing - I don't know the other areas but when it comes to new games this group was completely fruitless. Nothing was born there Around 2000 was the worst Spectrum games time in the West when practically nothing was done.
Today many new games were born partially due to Development and New Ideas forums.
Other people already replied to this, but back in 1998 it was a place where many things got done.
Besides, the fact that WoS is the place to be in 2011 doesn't mean it will stay that way. Perhaps next year it could be IRC, Yahoo Groups or another social media hype.
Maybe if more people had a greater appreciation of the work that goes into them, and the amount of collective research and information sharing that went into building the exquisitely detailed level of knowledge required to make accurate, usable emulators, a few less of the people that did the groundwork wouldn't have become disenchanted and gone onto other things...
I think this has never been spoken about enough, but writing an emulator is a lot of hard and ungrateful work. At least writing games and utilities there are people who thank you, but with emulators you only get people complaining that something doesn't work as expected.
I think that is unfair to those developers.
The reason that I don't use Usenet nowadays is because I don't know how to post to them without getting a lot of spam back. And because my current provider doesn't provide Usenet access :-( If anyone has some good ideas about accessing Usenet then I'm all ears :)
I think that is a sad thing, but wasn't usenet supposed to have moderators that can remove spams?
They aren't moderators per se, but there are ways of removing spam. Certainly my Usenet provider doesn't let much spam through to CSS.
The reason that I don't use Usenet nowadays is because I don't know how to post to them without getting a lot of spam back.
Don't post with your real e-mail address and you'll be safe. That said, I do post with my real address and little to no spam gets through my mail provider's filter (but that's because they have a very good filter).
And because my current provider doesn't provide Usenet access :-( If anyone has some good ideas about accessing Usenet then I'm all ears :)
Google Groups will give you access, although with all the bad features of a web forum :-) Other than that, there are various organisations who will give you Usenet access for money. (I have no recommendations as I've never used one).
The reason that I don't use Usenet nowadays is because I don't know how to post to them without getting a lot of spam back. And because my current provider doesn't provide Usenet access :-( If anyone has some good ideas about accessing Usenet then I'm all ears :)
I think the spam harvesters have "done a NickH" ;) and given up on usenet now (as they must have got to the stage of harvesting more spammer's fake addresses than actual humans)
I post to c.s.s with a totally un-obfuscated email address and it gets very little spam at all (even before filtering).
For text only nntp access I use eternal september (formerly motzarella.org)
It is free (requires registration and a valid email address to reduce spam)
It has good retention and is very reliable, I've been using it several years now.
The trouble is that once 128k emulation and multiloads were pretty much nailed, then emulation in general was "good enough" for (finger-in-the-air) 98+% of users. That was late-'90s stuff. Plenty of nice-to-haves were developed in the meantime, but you're right, people now take good-enough emulation for granted these days. It's now the added extras that give the wow-factor, such as screen modes, gameplay recording, etc - you'll have to pardon us for not being too impressed when a lot of work goes into emulating Z80 features no one used way-back-when.
Things that didn't exist in the late 90s:-
TZX (well maybe just, depending on where in the late 90s you take your datapoint).
RZX
SZX, PZX
Timex display mode emulation
A number of ULA and TV effects now taken for granted in emulators
Emulators with sophisticated debuggers (might not be of interest to you personally, but it is to people who write games)
Emulators with integrated assemblers (ditto)
Emulation of devices like uSpeech, SpecDrum, DivIDE, Spectranet
Probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten
These things haven't happened by magic. It goes way beyond "emulating Z80 features no one used way-back-when". There were e-mails and snippets of code flying around like you wouldn't believe back then.
No, you didn't. You wrote a post which was full of either (a) trivial ideas which had been suggested by other people or (b) ideas which were technically infeasible, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how both the Spectrum and emulators work.
Right, so I have to be an expert on emulation to make suggestions, do I? How am I supposed to know exactly what is and isn't possible? And even if I had asked the impossible, would it have killed you to, I don't know, answer my post and say so? Anyone else on this board would have done so.
And my post did not contain "trivial ideas", as you dismiss them with your usual lack of grace and good manners, they were well thought out, at least as far as possible given the limits of my technological skills and knowledge. Maybe they were wholey impractical, but even if they were impossible they'd still justify a response from you.
And I think you'd find that loading FRAMES with a random value to make instantly loaded games still random, a FAST FORWARD key, and a REWIND key, are all not only possible, but would be liked by users of FUSE. In fact I know the latter two suggestions are possible, as they already exist in X128 and EmuZWin, respectively, and I don't see how my FRAMES idea is impossible. Care to tell me why it's impossible? And then you could perhaps tell me how X128 and EmuZWin somehow manage to do the impossible?
Go on.
Correct. I didn't respond to the majority of posts in that thread, so I don't see why you're taking it as a personal slight.
So your defence is that you lacked the manners to respond to other people, so I shouldn't be offended that you treated me the same? Really? You asked for suggestions, then ignored them, or just gave rude, self satisfied answers, which is neither fair nor civil.
At least, very comprehensive in showing that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Maybe not. But I'd never be obnoxious or condescending, as you so frequently are. Yes, you're smarter than most people on this board, but that gives you no right at all to be unpleasant to others.
You were given plenty of hints that I didn't want to reply to your ideas - they apparently passed you by. You decided to force the issue once, and I gave you what I admit is a fairly brusque response (although entirely true - those people who know me personally know what the more important reason is. And if you don't know, it's none of your business). However, even that wasn't direct enough for you, so you've decided to bring the issue up again. Exactly how important is it to you that I reply to your ideas?
Plenty of hints? Where, exactly? Ignoring my post, then ignoring it again, then giving me a "I have more important things to do than read the suggestions that I asked for and you took the time to detail" type response? Those aren't hints, they're just plain bad manners.
And if you didn't want to reply to ideas, then why ask for them in the first place? And even though the reason for you lack of civility is "none of my business" as you put it, that doesn't give you the right to be uncivil.
And it is, or was, important for you to respond to my suggestions (even with a "None of those are possible", or "sorry, too busy at the moment to read them") as I thought that you genuinely wanted peoples' input. If you didn't want people to post suggestions then why ask them to do so in the first place?
And so, to repeat: your ideas were bad ideas. Various people have been in similar conversations with you over the years, and you don't seem to understand that they're bad when it's explained to you that they're bad, and you don't seem to have changed your behaviour at all over time. As such, the easiest thing for me to do personally was just to ignore you, because the value I get out of your posts is minimal at best. However, you still seem convinced that you are the most important person around - as noted above, I didn't reply to most of the posts in the thread in question. Nobody else got grumpy about it. What makes you special, other than your ideas being really, really bad?
Right. First of all, tell me where I've posted those ideas, and who the people are who responded
And show me where I have ever given the impression that (to quote you) I am "the most important person around". Go on.
Is that clear enough for you yet?
Now hopefully we can finally draw a line under this one.
A line under it? You ignore my responses to your request for help, and then are rude, because of this unspecified reason that apparently allows you to be as obnoxious as you like just to compensate for whatever it is drives your lack of civility towards others. I'd suggest us never responding to each other's posts again, but for now I'm too keen to see you post the links to your evidence of my conceit, and also of my endlessley repeating lame ideas despite endless proof given to me that my ideas are bad.
Go on, post the links. You won't of course, as they don't exist. But go on, show me where I'm wrong. And don't forget to tell me how loading FRAMES with a random value, having FAST FORWARD and REWIND buttons, etc, are impossible. Despite, erm, X128 and EmuZWin having them.
There were e-mails and snippets of code flying around like you wouldn't believe back then.
Great days.
^This^
They don't have to be history though. I think it's great that people are still developing hardware, new file formats etc etc.
And what interests me most of all (being a hardware guy) is people still discovering things about the speccy and z80 we didn't know before.
To me csmith's ULA research is an amazing bit of archaeology. It's people like Chris that the human race is going to need in the distant future* when we realise that we've forgotten how all the machines keeping us alive work because no-one thought to save the original designs ;)
I just love the idea of working out the things that people have forgotten. It's like a good murder mystery novel, you have to gather the evidence together, work out what is true and what is folklore and piece it all together. I don't expect ITV to commission a two parter based on my search for the history of the +3 and black +2 but I certainly had a lot of fun researching it :)
*Assuming the distant future is like a sci fi film where we all live in giant bio-domes or on Mars obviously. :)
a) you surely know by now that PK is the forum's resident grumpy so-and-so :)
b) you've surely realised that he doesn't like you very much
why push the matter? :-o
:)
True. To bring the thread back on topic, then, can I ask if it's possible to download all of a newsgroup, as I infer (probably wrongly, it's late and I'm tired) from you saying that you can "keep your own local archive (that you can search efficiently and find the things you want)"? I did once download all of the Elite newsgroup, but that was as a single zip file that someone had uploaded somewhere - I wanted it to help me get Frontier or First Encounters (can't remember which, one of them was a total git where base memory was concerned) working under Windows. I seem to remember I gave up and used a CONFIG.SYS menu instead to play it from DOS.
And if it is possible to download a whole newsgroup then is there a particular server that it's best to do it from, I'm not just thinking of comp.sys.sinclair, but of the XBox and N64 (or Nintendo?) newsgroups that I used to go on, but it's been so long that I can't even remember what they're called (traffic died down to almost nothing, and I've never used a newsgroup for the XBox 360).
Thanks for any help, I've never used newsgroups except first via Outlook Express, then via the web browser and google.
Comments
An interesting read and gives a very graphic indication of what's happened to newsgroups in general over the years.
I think they've had their day as general discussion forums given the huge amount of spam that gets pumped into them. ISPs have also drastically reduced (or completely eliminated) newsgroup access due to the popularity of the binaries hierarchy and the potential for litigation and most people today don't have a clue what usenet is and those that have heard about it think it's all about porn or warez (which it is now - I can't imagine non-binary posts accounting for even a tenth of one percent of what's on the typical news server).
The attraction of forums like WoS is the authentication barrier to posting which although no guarantee of quality, does at least indicate at least a minimal level of commitment and responsibility.
Heh, one of my Easter Eggs :) Not one of my best bits of writing - too much blah, and it loses its way here and there, but a nice bit of history.
Fortunately, in many corners Usenet is functioning fine, and The September that Never Ended has in fact ended or at least nearly so. There are plenty of public news servers that carry text groups, you don't need to rely on your ISP. Web forums are a rotten replacement for Usenet.
I'd completely forgotten about the SincNews email list until reading that article. Happy days.
While I'd agree that it is a shame that CSS is a mere shadow of its former self, I have to admit that I prefer the whole online forum 'thing' to Usenet as it's so much easier to find the material that's relevant to 'you'...
"[The WOS Forums were] a life raft for the more serious content, and with multiple forums covering different broad interest areas, it offered a renewed level of signal-to-noise ratio ? you didn't have to read about games if you were just into emulation, you didn't have to read about hardware if you just collected software, and you didn't have to wade through the off-topic stuff which got left behind in CSS."
It'd be a real shame if they died a death, but I feel the forums are a much more organised way of hosting our ramblings.
That's the very problem though. They have to be hosted, by a centralised entity, so if the server blows up or Martijn decides he's bored of speccies the whole database of posts just goes away.
Also unlike usenet it's basically impossible to keep your own local archive (that you can search efficiently and find the things you want) so if you want to look at a thread you read a month ago you have to hope that WoS is still online and that the thread didn't get deleted etc.
These are all disadvantages of hosted web forums over usenet groups or mailing lists.
But the reality is web forums are completely where it's at now. Most newsgroups are either full of people who've been there for years, or just attract purely (very) technical people. You've got to use a web forum to attract general interest and casual punters, as I suspect a good 90%+ of internet users have no idea what usenet is or how to get access to it.
This suits the very technical groups just fine as they don't want 90%+ of internet users coming and asking dumb questions ;)
And therefore passing the knowledge on to future generations
That's not a problem because various people maintain massive archives of everything posted on usenet so even when the group falls apart and disappears into history the posts are all archived in multiple places.
Not like when a website gets abandoned and the database deleted... :smile:
P.S. I'm not of the usenet generation and I use it... It's not about age, it's about intelligence. If people can't figure out how to connect to a usenet server and join a group then they clearly aren't able to use a search engine or read. There is no shortage of websites describing how to use usenet, and many email clients have newsreaders built in too so there's a manual to read!
Then again, the yoof of today don't use an email client either, they rely on google or facebook to look after their messages for them and access via a bloated ajaxy web interface!
They are a total mess - a topic about a game, the some chitchat than hardware, than games again then Z81 or Sincalir QL which sre no interest to me and so on... Subforums are a great invention.
And they don't have any interesting talk not covered in more details on WOS. When I recently visited them, there were more Viagra And Rolex spams than Spectrum talking.
So okay, I have chosen year 2000, the grup ast its glory and what? Again uninterestiing... Well maybe reading 10 years old obsolete talk will be never as fun as participating in current discussion.
And the last thing - I don't know the other areas but when it comes to new games this group was completely fruitless. Nothing was born there Around 2000 was the worst Spectrum games time in the West when practically nothing was done.
Today many new games were born partially due to Development and New Ideas forums.
For me, it was an exciting time, especially in terms of emulation.
Maybe I'm not much about emulators. I use them like cell phones and don't care much how they work at internal level.
The trouble is that once 128k emulation and multiloads were pretty much nailed, then emulation in general was "good enough" for (finger-in-the-air) 98+% of users. That was late-'90s stuff. Plenty of nice-to-haves were developed in the meantime, but you're right, people now take good-enough emulation for granted these days. It's now the added extras that give the wow-factor, such as screen modes, gameplay recording, etc - you'll have to pardon us for not being too impressed when a lot of work goes into emulating Z80 features no one used way-back-when.
Maybe, but it works the other way too. In a thread in the emulators forum Philip Kendall asked for suggestions for new features. I wrote a detailed, coherent post detailing some things I'd like to see, and he didn't bother to reply. When I eventually posted to ask him if he'd read my post, he said he hadn't because I'd highlighted it in different colours (which I did to make it easier to read, as it was very comprehensive in describing my ideas). So I apologised and reposted without colouring any text, and he still didn't reply. When I eventually posted to ask what he thought of my suggestions he simply posted:
"I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago.", which was HTML linked (via the "answer I gave some moments ago" text) to the a post of Mr Kendall's saying simply:
"While it may shock you ZnorXman, there are actually more important things in my life than your messages. Deal with it."
So tell me why I should respect someone with that sort of attitude? He asked for input, I gave it in good faith, and get treated like that. It's hardly the first time or I'd put it down to "probably nothing, forget about it", but he's notoriously difficult to communicate with.
Having said all that, his work (FUSE) is very good indeed, and I'm certainly not knocking his technical skill and knowledge, just his (lack of) people skills.
(Links: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showpost.php?p=548128&postcount=240
and
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showpost.php?p=552074&postcount=284 ).
But then you have to pardon the emulator authors for not being interested in writing non-emulator-ey things and sticking to the part that interests them :roll:
As you say speccy emulation was "finished" years ago now. If it runs manic miner most people don't care what is going on under the hood and whether it is accurate or not.
I am not really bothered by games anyway and far more interested in having an accurate historical record of the speccy. I find things like csmith's ULA research fascinating but obviously none of that will affect people just having a quick game of jetpac now and then.
There are the "techy folk" and the "gamer folk" and that's fair enough it takes all sorts :)
However there should be no surprise if the two groups have very different goals. :smile:
No, you didn't. You wrote a post which was full of either (a) trivial ideas which had been suggested by other people or (b) ideas which were technically infeasible, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how both the Spectrum and emulators work.
Correct. I didn't respond to the majority of posts in that thread, so I don't see why you're taking it as a personal slight.
At least, very comprehensive in showing that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
You were given plenty of hints that I didn't want to reply to your ideas - they apparently passed you by. You decided to force the issue once, and I gave you what I admit is a fairly brusque response (although entirely true - those people who know me personally know what the more important reason is. And if you don't know, it's none of your business). However, even that wasn't direct enough for you, so you've decided to bring the issue up again. Exactly how important is it to you that I reply to your ideas?
And so, to repeat: your ideas were bad ideas. Various people have been in similar conversations with you over the years, and you don't seem to understand that they're bad when it's explained to you that they're bad, and you don't seem to have changed your behaviour at all over time. As such, the easiest thing for me to do personally was just to ignore you, because the value I get out of your posts is minimal at best. However, you still seem convinced that you are the most important person around - as noted above, I didn't reply to most of the posts in the thread in question. Nobody else got grumpy about it. What makes you special, other than your ideas being really, really bad?
Is that clear enough for you yet?
Now hopefully we can finally draw a line under this one.
Now I can be absolutely sure I made the right choice back then :lol:
You're too much too young :razz:
Other people already replied to this, but back in 1998 it was a place where many things got done.
Besides, the fact that WoS is the place to be in 2011 doesn't mean it will stay that way. Perhaps next year it could be IRC, Yahoo Groups or another social media hype.
I think this has never been spoken about enough, but writing an emulator is a lot of hard and ungrateful work. At least writing games and utilities there are people who thank you, but with emulators you only get people complaining that something doesn't work as expected.
I think that is unfair to those developers.
The reason that I don't use Usenet nowadays is because I don't know how to post to them without getting a lot of spam back. And because my current provider doesn't provide Usenet access :-( If anyone has some good ideas about accessing Usenet then I'm all ears :)
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They aren't moderators per se, but there are ways of removing spam. Certainly my Usenet provider doesn't let much spam through to CSS.
Don't post with your real e-mail address and you'll be safe. That said, I do post with my real address and little to no spam gets through my mail provider's filter (but that's because they have a very good filter).
Google Groups will give you access, although with all the bad features of a web forum :-) Other than that, there are various organisations who will give you Usenet access for money. (I have no recommendations as I've never used one).
Has anyone lost a MAME cab? It's in the field behind my house. The cows appear interested.
D.
I think the spam harvesters have "done a NickH" ;) and given up on usenet now (as they must have got to the stage of harvesting more spammer's fake addresses than actual humans)
I post to c.s.s with a totally un-obfuscated email address and it gets very little spam at all (even before filtering).
For text only nntp access I use eternal september (formerly motzarella.org)
It is free (requires registration and a valid email address to reduce spam)
It has good retention and is very reliable, I've been using it several years now.
Me too. Works an absolute treat.
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These things haven't happened by magic. It goes way beyond "emulating Z80 features no one used way-back-when". There were e-mails and snippets of code flying around like you wouldn't believe back then.
Great days.
Right, so I have to be an expert on emulation to make suggestions, do I? How am I supposed to know exactly what is and isn't possible? And even if I had asked the impossible, would it have killed you to, I don't know, answer my post and say so? Anyone else on this board would have done so.
And my post did not contain "trivial ideas", as you dismiss them with your usual lack of grace and good manners, they were well thought out, at least as far as possible given the limits of my technological skills and knowledge. Maybe they were wholey impractical, but even if they were impossible they'd still justify a response from you.
And I think you'd find that loading FRAMES with a random value to make instantly loaded games still random, a FAST FORWARD key, and a REWIND key, are all not only possible, but would be liked by users of FUSE. In fact I know the latter two suggestions are possible, as they already exist in X128 and EmuZWin, respectively, and I don't see how my FRAMES idea is impossible. Care to tell me why it's impossible? And then you could perhaps tell me how X128 and EmuZWin somehow manage to do the impossible?
Go on.
So your defence is that you lacked the manners to respond to other people, so I shouldn't be offended that you treated me the same? Really? You asked for suggestions, then ignored them, or just gave rude, self satisfied answers, which is neither fair nor civil.
Maybe not. But I'd never be obnoxious or condescending, as you so frequently are. Yes, you're smarter than most people on this board, but that gives you no right at all to be unpleasant to others.
Plenty of hints? Where, exactly? Ignoring my post, then ignoring it again, then giving me a "I have more important things to do than read the suggestions that I asked for and you took the time to detail" type response? Those aren't hints, they're just plain bad manners.
And if you didn't want to reply to ideas, then why ask for them in the first place? And even though the reason for you lack of civility is "none of my business" as you put it, that doesn't give you the right to be uncivil.
And it is, or was, important for you to respond to my suggestions (even with a "None of those are possible", or "sorry, too busy at the moment to read them") as I thought that you genuinely wanted peoples' input. If you didn't want people to post suggestions then why ask them to do so in the first place?
Right. First of all, tell me where I've posted those ideas, and who the people are who responded
And show me where I have ever given the impression that (to quote you) I am "the most important person around". Go on.
A line under it? You ignore my responses to your request for help, and then are rude, because of this unspecified reason that apparently allows you to be as obnoxious as you like just to compensate for whatever it is drives your lack of civility towards others. I'd suggest us never responding to each other's posts again, but for now I'm too keen to see you post the links to your evidence of my conceit, and also of my endlessley repeating lame ideas despite endless proof given to me that my ideas are bad.
Go on, post the links. You won't of course, as they don't exist. But go on, show me where I'm wrong. And don't forget to tell me how loading FRAMES with a random value, having FAST FORWARD and REWIND buttons, etc, are impossible. Despite, erm, X128 and EmuZWin having them.
^This^
They don't have to be history though. I think it's great that people are still developing hardware, new file formats etc etc.
And what interests me most of all (being a hardware guy) is people still discovering things about the speccy and z80 we didn't know before.
To me csmith's ULA research is an amazing bit of archaeology. It's people like Chris that the human race is going to need in the distant future* when we realise that we've forgotten how all the machines keeping us alive work because no-one thought to save the original designs ;)
I just love the idea of working out the things that people have forgotten. It's like a good murder mystery novel, you have to gather the evidence together, work out what is true and what is folklore and piece it all together. I don't expect ITV to commission a two parter based on my search for the history of the +3 and black +2 but I certainly had a lot of fun researching it :)
*Assuming the distant future is like a sci fi film where we all live in giant bio-domes or on Mars obviously. :)
a) you surely know by now that PK is the forum's resident grumpy so-and-so :)
b) you've surely realised that he doesn't like you very much
why push the matter? :-o
:)
True. To bring the thread back on topic, then, can I ask if it's possible to download all of a newsgroup, as I infer (probably wrongly, it's late and I'm tired) from you saying that you can "keep your own local archive (that you can search efficiently and find the things you want)"? I did once download all of the Elite newsgroup, but that was as a single zip file that someone had uploaded somewhere - I wanted it to help me get Frontier or First Encounters (can't remember which, one of them was a total git where base memory was concerned) working under Windows. I seem to remember I gave up and used a CONFIG.SYS menu instead to play it from DOS.
And if it is possible to download a whole newsgroup then is there a particular server that it's best to do it from, I'm not just thinking of comp.sys.sinclair, but of the XBox and N64 (or Nintendo?) newsgroups that I used to go on, but it's been so long that I can't even remember what they're called (traffic died down to almost nothing, and I've never used a newsgroup for the XBox 360).
Thanks for any help, I've never used newsgroups except first via Outlook Express, then via the web browser and google.