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.

response 71 of 143:

Oct 15 20:06 UTC 1998

Re resp:70 2nd point - Heh. Like, old topics are never brought up over 
and over again and rehashed to death on BBS's. :)

The basic point - that a conferencing system provides orderly archival 
- is quite correct, of course. There are software packages like Mhonarc  
and Hypermail that do web archiving of mailing lists, however. But there 
has to be an account on a server somewhere to store the archive, which 
usually costs money. Grex, as has been pointed out before, is free.

response 73 of 143:

Oct 20 21:56 UTC 1998

While the translators were thinking about whether to talk about conferencing
at the annual convention, I wrote in a short paragraph, before the Oct 31
deadline, to the NAFEX (North American Fruit Explorers) quarterly offering
amateur fruit growers the use of a grex conference.  I may here something
early January when the next issue comes out.  There are lots of questions that
would be more usefully answered now rather than in three months (how deep do
we plant the akebia seedlings that we brought home yesterday?).  Plants need
to be cared for in real time.  I also mentioned our bbs to the Seed Savers'
Exchange.  Prepare to be swamped with new conferences (I hope).  Seed Savers
are a group of a few thousand people mostly in the US who grow out old
vegetable varities to preserve them and trade seeds.  I have some cowpeas from
Burkina Faso that grow 4' tall in Australia but 2' here, but at least they
survive to produce a good crop of seeds.  NAFEX has a website.

response 75 of 143:

Oct 27 22:17 UTC 1998

j  language    (at an Ok: prompt)

response 77 of 143:

Oct 27 23:36 UTC 1998

Yep, that works, if you want the pistachio interface.

Substituting "vanilla" for "pistachio" in the above just gave me
a Backtalk crash, however.

response 79 of 143:

Oct 28 01:14 UTC 1998

Leaving out pistachio also got me a page "Backtalk Crash".