New ISP to read RCM?

On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:02:20 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, Bill Schwab quickly quoth:

Amen to that. The web latencies are horrible in online forums, not to mention the ghastly user interface and program structures. I pray that Usenet retains its usefulness to millions so it stays online for eons; until something better comes along. I love it as is.

-- Smokey the Bear's rules for fire safety should apply to government: Keep it small, keep it in a confined area, and keep an eye on it. --John Stossel in _Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity_

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I can't tell for sure where you can get a reasonable ISP, though you might check whether Covad serves your area. I'm using them, but I've got a serious high-speed full-time connection -- a T1 line, and you proably don't want to pay for that. They also offer DSL and ADSL connections -- and maybe even dialups.

But for a reasonable news server -- try

to set up an account. They have their own newsreader (which I haven't tried, since it is for Windows and Macs) but I do use their news server itself. Cost is $9.95 a month, and since I don't bother with the binary newsgroups, I simply accumulate more unused bandwidth every month. It was one figure until recently (and I was growing my bandwidth backlog then), and they have now jumped to ten times that monthly bandwidth, so it will be not too long before I have a terabyte of unused bandwidth. If I ever get hooked on the binary newsgroups, I could do a major downloading binge for a while. :-)

Note that Covad's news server is quite poor in my experience.

Enjoy, DoN.

news.individual.net is 15 bucks a year, fast, reliable, and is filtering out whatever spam a bunch of others are talking about in here today. Doesn't do binary groups though, if that matters to you.

Doesn't Newsguy have a $70/year rate if you pay for a year at a time? I'm pretty sure that's what I'm paying but have been using them for several years and may have been grandfathered into that rate. It would be worth checking out if saving $50/yr is important to you.

Mike

While my ISP does provide Usenet, they do not support it and the server they have for it is really a mess. I found that Google Groups is actually a web interface to Usenet, so that is what I use now. While it is not as handy as Usenet with a good newsreader, it is certainly adequate and I have learned to live with it. BTW, I tried Terranews and do prefer Google Groups now.

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It may well be available. At the time I first got it, I thought that it was temporary, so I went for the monthly payment. I should look into it again.

Thanks, DoN.

I can go through hundreds or thousands of articles (w/heavy spam filtering) quickly in an NNTP reader. I like the text-based ones where I never have to click on a mouse. I just do

- to read more N - to skip this one, and go to the next K - To kill the subject R - Reply

And I just don't look at "high volume" articles. I look at all new articles since last time. Web forums really can't do this well.