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M V C o m m u n i q u e
June/July 1994
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!
Upgrades
Certain things have kept us busy over the last couple of
months, busy enough to push off one billing period into the other,
and that's why you haven't heard from us (or received our bill) for
a while. Please note that this month's invoice combines two bil-
ling periods: May and June (unless, of course, you weren't online
with us in May).
One of the things that had us busy was an across-the-board
upgrade to our systems. We found during late May that the main mv
system was pushing the limit on its amount of RAM. RAM is the tem-
porary memory used by the computer to hold programs and data while
the program is running. When RAM fills up, the system has to store
some of this data on disk, which is much slower than keeping it in
RAM. Our system had as much RAM as it could hold, so we decided to
upgrade the system and increase the amount of memory we could put
into it.
The new system is a Pentium P66 EISA/PCI with 64 megabytes of
RAM and just shy of 3 gigabytes of disk. The system that was mv,
that is, the one it replaced, was used to replace the news system
(quartz) in order to improve its performance as well. Within the
next couple of weeks we'll be adding another 1.7 gigabytes of disk
space devoted entirely to Usenet news storage; the ftp and server
system (beryl) is also due for an upgrade.
It almost goes without saying that we have continued to add
telephone lines, with 7 main lines added just last week, as well as
expansions to the Manchester and Nashua numbers. The list of tele-
phone numbers and modems may always be found in the file
/pub/mv/info/phone-numbers on mv.
World Wide Web access through lynx
You may know of the World Wide Web - a system of intercon-
nected multimedia data sources, which you read in hypertext form.
WWW provides mixed images, text, and audio to those with direct
Internet connections and bitmapped display devices. But the most
important part of the Web may be its hypertext organization. Web
documents usually contain links to other related data: for
instance, if you access a document with a list of courses offered
by the provider of that data, you could put your cursor on a par-
ticular course listed and type a key to find out more about that
course. That extended information might list the names of the
instructors and the books used, and you may be able to similarly
find out more information about those individual items, and so
forth. In many cases you'll be able to interact with Web pages by
filling out forms or submitting search queries to find data.
SLIP and PPP users can access the Web using Mosaic or other
multi-media information browsers. Online users can access the web
by using a program called lynx. You won't see the graphics, but
you'll be able to view the content of most Web information, and use
keyboard commands to navigate around the WWW documents. Lynx has
been on mv for a couple of months while we attempted to clarify the
licensing issues involved; we are now officially clear to make its
availability known. To start using lynx from your online account,
just type its name at the command prompt, e.g.:
lynx
This will fetch a brief intro text from MV. If you know the source
of a specific Web document, you can give its URL (Uniform Resource
Locator, which you will learn about by using lynx) on the command
line, e.g.:
lynx http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/Movies/moviequery.html
Notes
For the perverse among you, we've recently installed (by
request) a text editor called vile. vile is a cross between vi and
emacs: it takes vi commands, but can have multiple screen windows
and multiple buffers like emacs can. It also sports an extension
language. Note that this is not supported software, we simply men-
tion it as a curiosity.
On June 21 we celebrated our third anniversary of incorpora-
tion and operation in our present location (the domain mv.com and
associated access distribution was established in 1987).
A new Usenet news hierarchy nh for New Hampshire was created
recently: its only group thus far is nh.general. Participation in
this group, including posting suggestions for other nh groups, are
encouraged.
News about ClariNet news
We also have a few things to report about ClariNet news.
ClariNet is a commercial news source that delivers real world news
and feature articles over Usenet. As you may recall, early this
year ClariNet dropped its UPI feed and instead picked up feeds from
Reuters and AP. Along with this they drastically altered the way
that material was offered to Internet providers such as us. We
retained a subset of Clarinet news, including "AP Bulletin Line"
and assorted features. We may have the option of providing Reuters
and some other departments (notably techwire) to individual
accounts at a higher price per account (in the neighborhood of
$3.00/month). If you have interest in this let us know and we can
evaluate it further.
Latest terms from ClariNet place more restrictions on the way
we can talk about them, so we are not likely to be mentioning them
in any future promotional material. On the other hand, we're now
permitted to allow users for personal SLIP and PPP systems to
access ClariNet news for reading via a NNTP-based reader. This
does not apply to business accounts or other organizations. If you
qualify and want access to the ClariNet hierarchy via NNTP reader,
please tell us.
New Feature - Question of the Month
Starting with this issue of the newsletter, we are going to
try to ask a specific question every month. These will cover
important issues that we wish to solicit your ideas and opinions
about. Please email your answers to mv-qotm@mv.mv.com (for "ques-
tion of the month"). We'll collect the results and report on them
the following month. Here's the question this month:
What would be the best way for us to support special
events? For example, how could MV help everyone enjoy
the recent Shoemaker-Levy 9 collisions with Jupiter,
which are providing lots of pictures?
MV Communications, Inc. (603) 429-2223