Farm1 wrote:
"ant" wrote in message

Someone from Snowy.net (to which I'd just subscribed and spent a
fruitless few minutes trying to find the newserver) informed me
that no one uses Newsgroups any more. (he was the only person at
the ISP who had even heard of it).

Snort! You are so right. Here I am, an old fart in my mid 50s and I
got onto my ISP to ask if they permitted me to "mung my addy". I got
some snotty nosed wee lad who's voice hadn't yet broken and he didn't
have a clue what I was talking about. I had to explain to him what
ngs were and how to get them to show up on one's machine etc, etc ad
nauseum.

They seem to have learned exactly what they need to make the servers go, and
no more. Which is why I think they went to TAFE rather than just learning it
by being interested in it - very structured, defined learning, limited by
what the teacher knew. Of course, there's nothing stopping them from going
further and finding out stuff for themselves, but most of them seem not to.

even though I now am on an ISP with a giant newserver, I maintain and use my
German newserver subscription, because it gets pretty well every message,
bugger-all latency and drop outs, but the main thing is I can use it
anywhere in the world. Very handy when you spend 5 months of every year in
the US!


--
ant
Don't try to email me;
I'm borrowing the spammer du jour's addy