See an unfamiliar term? Check the newsletter glossary.
News from:
M V C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , I n c .
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
(603) 429-2223
August 1993
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /pub/mv/inews. They're also in
the online menu!
Staffing
MV has added a part-time staff person to help with our adminis-
tration and user assistance needs. He is Eric Mallett
(ebm@mv.mv.com), Mark's son. We believe Eric will be a valuable addi-
tion to MV, and he will be busy learning the ins and outs of the
Internet as he helps us; and you can challenge him by sending him your
tough questions! He will be on site weekday afternoons and will be
part of the mv-admin mail drop.
Internet Business Journal offer
The Internet Business Journal has extended to MV clients an offer
to subscribe to two free months of the Journal for evaluation pur-
poses. While this is clearly a promotional activity, we often find
this a good way to check out new publications, and we thought we'd
pass along the word. The IBJ, published monthly, is a new magazine
devoted to informing the business community of who is doing what on
the network; what innovative new uses the Internet is being put to;
what resources are out there; new issues raised and strategies
employed; and reports of successes and failures of network ventures.
Normal subscription price is $149/year for regular subscribers,
$75/year for individuals, educators, and small businesses. A limited
electronic sample edition (table of contents, abstracts, letter from
the editor and a selected column) is available for the asking.
IBJ will not resell or redistribute mailing lists gathered by
this offer. To accept the offer, contact us with your mailing
address, or send it to:
Michael Strangelove, Publisher
The Internet Business Journal
Internet: 441495@Acadvm1.Uottawa.CA
Compuserve: 72302,3062
S-Mail: 60 Springfield Road, Suite One
MV Communications, Inc. August 1993
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Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA K1M-1C7
Voice: (613) 747-0642
FAX: (613) 564-6641
Usenet News as an information resource
There are many ways, some existing and many unforeseen, of dis-
tributing information to people through computer networks. Currently
in favor (and rightly so) are software systems such as gopher and WAIS
that turn you into a participant in the Internet maze: you step from
one point on the net to another, possibly without knowing that you are
commanding signals to travel thousands of miles, or realizing that you
are casting your presence across machines on different continents as
you follow that data path.
But while becoming fascinated with these things, don't overlook a
sometimes valuable, nearly always entertaining resource: the Usenet
network news system, which brings information to you at mv or at your
own site. Every day there's over 50 megabytes of new news delivered
here from all around the world. it's like a million people all talk-
ing in little groups at a party, except that you can join in at any of
these groups that interest you, and you don't have to miss out on one
because you're paying attention to another (except, of course, as lim-
ited by your available time and interest level). And the same topic
of conversation may be being discussed in multiple groups at once - by
some of the same people.
Usenet news is classified and filed according to category, with
categories grouped in hierarchies from most general to most specific.
For instance, a most general (top-level) newsgroup classification is
rec - for things related to recreation. A subclassification is arts,
for various artistic topics, and a subclassification of that is
movies, for theatrical movies. String the classifications together,
with periods, from most general to most specific, and you have the
name of a newsgroup: rec.arts.movies. (When you speak the newsgroup
name, periods are pronounced "dot".) There are also, for example,
rec.arts.tv and rec.arts.comics, and rec.sport.baseball,
rec.games.chess. Other top-level hierarchies are comp for computing,
soc for social issues, talk for general debate, ne for New England,
and alt for alternative groups.
Using the same news mechanism, ClariNet news provides you an
online newspaper divided into hundreds of newsgroups containing UPI
news stories, business news, technical reports, features and columns
by such people as Mike Royko and Dave Barry. Although ClariNet news
is a for-money service of ClariNet Communications, MV provides Clar-
iNet to its online accounts free of charges.
With an online account you access USENET news via a newsreader (a
program that, natch, lets you read news). The two most popular news-
readers are nn and trn. nn is described in detail in the book The
Whole Internet by Ed Krol, but most of the MV staff prefers to use
trn. trn has hundreds of features, and you can usually get help by
MV Communications, Inc. August 1993
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typing h at any time. But basically, within trn you start out by
selecting a newsgroup to read. At this level, you can type n to go to
the next newsgroup, p to go to the prior one, space or y to read the
current newsgroup, q to get out of the program, or h to get more info
about the many other commands you can type. Once you've chosen a
newsgroup to read (via space or y), you'll be shown a list of some of
the conversational topics (or subjects) in that group, and the authors
of some of the articles within that topic. You will remain "in" that
group until you go back to the newsgroup selection level (one way to
do this is to type q at this point).
There are several different things you can do at this point. If
you see a topic you want to read, type the letter of that topic, and
then the tab key. You can pick several topics by typing the letter
that is next to each, and then press D (capital D) to read all those
topics and get rid of the ones that you didn't select. (This is the
fastest and most convenient way to read news). News is presented to
you one article at a time through an screenful-at-a-time interface
that works like the more program (hit a space for the next screen, q
to get out of the article, or h to see what other things you can do).
While there are a lot of things to remember about using trn, if
you learn just a few commands (such as the above, and some favorites
that you may discover on your own), you will find it very easy and
comfortable to explore the information on line.
Reading news with a UUCP account is a matter of obtaining the
proper news software, installing it on your system, and having us
enable the feeding of selected groups to you. You can use our ufeed
server to select, by email, which groups you want to enable or disable
at any time.
News via SLIP or PPP is sent to your system using a network news
transport protocol (NNTP). NNTP can send whole batches of news to
your system for storage there, or it can be used by your news reader
programs to fetch individual articles from MV.
MV Communications, Inc. August 1993