response 47 of 143:

Oct 9 23:21 UTC 1998

Two people expressed a interest, one wanted me to bring up grex at the annual
convention this November, but I am not going.  I suggested he try to telnet
to grex and look around, and I may start an item in the language conference
to discuss a translation conference.  I just got two emailed answers to some
questions that I mailed in a copule of months ago to our monthly journal, a
bit too late to be useful (two months too late).  I offered to set up accounts
for people if they could not manage on their own.  May publish a short
paragraph in the next monthly publication (for all translators) and quarterly
(Slavic only) and they can email me for particulars.

response 49 of 143:

Oct 10 17:47 UTC 1998

They'd need to telnet in & run newuser, wouldn't they?  That is, if they don't
want to see everything as new every time, I mean.  (If I'm wrong, well, I
don't use backtalk, I'm afraid.)

response 51 of 143:

Oct 11 00:47 UTC 1998

Problem is I don't know how to use backtalk and I do know what to do if I
telnet.  We could set up newuser accounts for them.  WHen I looked at the
website there was something about downloading 140K on backtalk, did I
misunderstand something?
        I got more feedback, someone wondered why we don't just all use
Compuserve's FLEFO (foreign language forum), since we would have to subscribe
to grex otherwise.  I explained that grex is free and Compuserve is not.
Planning to put a couple paragraphs in the next newsletter.  
        I should try backtalk again when I have free time, November?

response 53 of 143:

Oct 11 16:33 UTC 1998

I apparently should not have clicked on Backtalk but on Go to the conferences.
I just figured it out, and then sent off an email to 14 Slavic translators
and one person who runs the terminology Q and A column in the general
newsletter, giving brief instructions on how to get there, and asking them
to enter comments in Language item 96.  And to pass along the info.
It looks rather easy to set up a new account in Backtalk, not as complex as
if you dial in or telnet.  If this works out, is it okay to attempt to link
a conference somehow to the translators' association webpage?  (Or to a fruit
growers' webpage?)  Or at least list grex's homepage there?
I am waiting for the ideas to come pouring in from other translators....

response 55 of 143:

Oct 12 16:36 UTC 1998

If he is on a mailing list and has an opinion about how bbs's compare to
mailing lists, it soundls like he already knows what the difference is.

response 57 of 143:

Oct 12 18:15 UTC 1998

An advantage of a mailing list for a lot of people is that if they
already know how to manage email, they don't have to learn anything
new. To use a bbs, they have to get an account on the bbs, log in
with a username and password every time they want to use it, and
learn how to operate whatever software the bbs runs. This may be
the kind of thing your correspondent had in mind when he said that
a bbs seemed too complicated.

An advantage of Grex-style conferencing over mailing lists is that
the software organizes discussions by a conference/item/response
structure, which makes it easier to maintain separate discussion
threads and to look things up later.

(By the way, "majordomo" is a particular mailing list software
package. There are others, "listserv" being the best known and
most elaborate.)

response 59 of 143:

Oct 13 01:53 UTC 1998

Someone else emailed me and said she will bring up the subject at the Slavic
transalators' meeting at our convention, in the near future. 

response 61 of 143:

Oct 13 18:34 UTC 1998

That sounds a lot more complicated than going to the grex webpage for a
conference.  I will email all these people giving them instructions directly
to the signup page and to the language conference (when I have more time).

response 63 of 143:

Oct 14 04:29 UTC 1998

Another advantage of the mailing list is the conservation of online time.
My phone line is tied up far too much while I read the bbs on grex.  If I
could use a pop-like service to batch it all down to my linux box, I could
read it offline.

  Now there's a project for our Italian volunteer programmer: Write a
server that would look like a POP3 server to the outside, but would serve
instead picospan postings, with each 'mail piece' containing the output of
a 'read new' for a single conference item.  The user's .cflist would be
consulted to see which conferences must be read, parsed, and re-formatted
into pseudo-SMTP form. 
  For extra credit, code the reply-to: header item with a pseudo-userid
which would be parsed by a procmail-like filter, and directed to a 'bot
which would enter the text of the mail piece as a response in the correct
conference and item.

Then, we'd be accessable through all three of the internet's most popular
protocols: telnet, http, and POP3/SMTP.  AND, we'd see shorter telnet
queues!

response 65 of 143:

Oct 14 07:07 UTC 1998

The telnet queues aren't the resource to conserve.  Network bandwidth
and CPU are the network resources to conserve.  Reading stuff off-line
isn't necessarily less network intensive -- if you download stuff that
you don't read, it could be more CPU and network intensive.  Also, if
you download stuff all at once, the resulting big hit is worse than a
small distributed hit, plus there's a human engineering factors thing to
worry about: if you have to use the thing while it's not so fast, you
will be careful to not do the things that are slow (quite unconsciously
too!), whereas if you can just push a button and walk away (or even
automate it in a cron script) you may not care if the server slows to a
slug-like crawl.

response 67 of 143:

Oct 14 14:28 UTC 1998

(He's probably thinking of mic, our Australian volunteer programmer with
an Italian-sounding name.)

response 69 of 143:

Oct 15 06:01 UTC 1998

No, I was thinking of mic.  Thanks, marcus, for the discussion of
conservation of bandwidth vs. CPU resources.  I agree with you, especially
about the human factors.
  To be honest, the resource I was thinking of conserving is my modem
on-line time.  My ISP account is limited to 10 hrs/mo., so these long
late-night telnet sessions end up costing me real money towards the end of
the month.  I kinda liked my old tapcis with the Compuserve forums.  I
could go online once to download my mail, and just the subject line of new
postings in my favorite forums, then offline I would mark just those I was
interested in. Another quick online session would bring them down, and I
could then read and compose replies offline.  A third online session to
upload my replies, and I was done for the night.