On 2/24/2011 2:00 AM, John W. Krahn wrote:
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
On 2/23/2011 11:32 PM, John W. Krahn wrote:
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Think of this as a chance to educate. If you were teaching a math
class in elementary school and a child asked how to add 2 + 2 would
you tell them to get a calculator? The NNTP protocol is very simple and
this only uses a few of it's commands.
The code works on older FreeBSD, and on a modern Ubuntu system running
the same version of Perl as on the newer FreeBSD. I have to thus
assume the problem isn't the code, the problem is something inherent
in how Perl is implemented on FreeBSD 8.X. I just don't know what it
is.
That all depends on how you define "works"?
Displays the posts (articles) on a web interface.
The program 'readmsg' has
some serious problems with incorrect regular expressions.
I'm sure it does. Cheap hacks have always characterized Usenet.
And if you
compile the programs with warnings enabled you will get a few messages.
Well, unfortunately there is a huge lack of web-to-Usenet interfaces out
there that are open source (ie: free) Most folks that are content with
a Usenet webinterface can get their web access from Google Groups. So
there is little incentive for many ISP's to field a web-to-news
interface and far less than that for anyone to write one.
It has already been written, and I've even used it myself: Net::NNTP
That's not a web interface that is just a module that can be used
to create one. Many people say they have written such a thing and
even deployed them but I can't find much code out there. Is the
interface you wrote using this available, for example?
There are a number of PHP webnews interfaces and I have also deployed
some of those for fun. All have their warts. And most are slower than
this script. Not that that matters much nowadays, with hardware what
it is.
When I first put up this system it was in 1999 and I found no
webinterface code then either, although the situation was the same,
people saying they were using it but no examples. The SCN scripts
came out a year earlier and they ran on FreeBSD 3. Once you get
people trained to use an interface and the interface works and is
stable, you keep using it as long as it runs on the newer platforms.
The readnews interface is one of the few out there and although it is
probably classed as "antique" software, it still works fine.
Antique yes! It is written for Perl4 which is about 18 years old.
But this is a sales point. Many people have 18 year old cars that still
run and they drive every day. You have to understand that with non-
technical members of the general public they absolutely detest this
constant harping on upgrading to the newest and latest software. They
have never bought into it and still don't. It isn't the consumers who
want new software every year, it's the software vendors that push it
on them.
I guarantee to you that LOTS of people would still today be buying
brand new PC's with Windows XP loaded on them if they could.
Linux would never have made the inroads against Windows that it has
today if it could not run older software. For that matter there are
people running decade-old versions of Microsoft Office on Windows 7.
Software lasts, man, and there's good money in supporting it. Look at
all those COBOL programmers who made a mint in 1999 due to Y2K. I'll
bet most of those programs are still running today.
Ted
John
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