Uncategorized

usenet, university, video, newsgroups
Usenet University™ High Definition Videos Available on giganews.usenet.university
Giganews makes Usenet University™ videos available in high definition on giganews.usenet.university.
By now I’m sure you’ve come across Giganews’ new Usenet newsgroups tutorial content available via our Usenet University™ tutorial series.

You may also have seen that Giganews produced an entire series of Usenet tutorial videos along with our extensive Usenet tutorial web content.

These videos are available in low resolution on our web page; however, Giganews is now making high resolution videos available via the newsgroup giganews.usenet.university.

Visit giganews.usenet.university to access high definition screen captures and instructions showing you all the techniques you’ll need to become a Usenet pro. If you’re not sure how to access giganews.usenet.university, visit our web content linked above for instructions on configuring your news client.

Enjoy!

usenet, history, poke
Usenet and the History of the Poke – Giganews Blog
“Poke” history as it relates to Usenet
You log into your Facebook® account and find that one of your friends from junior high has poked you…and the battle begins, poking back and forth until one of you gets horribly annoyed and a truce is called. This is an experience that millions of users have every day. The poke is ubiquitous in Facebook culture. But where, you must ask yourself, was the first poke war fought?

According to Andrew Girdwood at e-consultancy.com, the poke is a comfortable middle aged concept born in 1963 with the BASIC computing language. This is a far cry from the rambunctious poke that Facebook addicts recognize today.

The poke of 1963 turned into a “social currency for the gamer geeks” who used it to cheat games and shared their knowledge with friends and fellow users over Usenet. Girdwood’s article goes on to compare the poke to Linux’s finger command, which allowed users to get personal information such as phone numbers and real names from their friends on the network. Nowadays, the poke has devolved into something more playful and, says Girdwood, something not “quite so simple and elegant” as its ancestors.

So the next time you get poked, nudged, or winked at, think of the 45 year old father of the poke hanging out in Usenet newsgroups, facilitating gamers in accumulating unlimited lives, hordes of ammo, and more, and let the battle wage on.

giganews flame wars, usenet, arcade game
Giganews Flame Wars
Post your high score for the Giganews Flame Wars™ arcade game!
Giganews recently announced the release of our Usenet-themed arcade game, Flame Wars.

In the Flame Wars™ game, you’ll take on the role of a Giganews^® recovery pilot, given the task of recovering Usenet articles that have been waylaid by trolls. Power-ups at your disposal include kill-file missiles for taking out those nasty trolls and a Giganews Accelerator to speed up your download beam.

So far, our in-house high score is 198,000. Post your own high score as a comment on this blog post. Comments are moderated so please be patient if your comment doesn’t appear right away.

Good luck!

usenet, history, newsgroup, town, map
Usenet History Puts Town on Map – Giganews Blog
Nashau, New Hampshire is the state’s second largest city and the one time home of Digital Equipment Corp.’s Unix Engineering Group. DEC’s move to New Hampshire in the early 1980s, according to a recent article in the Nashau Telegraph, put the city on the map. The article also states another, related, claim to fame for the Nashau area: one of the first Usenet newsgroup articles to appear in Deja News’s (now run by Google) Usenet archive.

The Deja News/Google Usenet archive began as the personal archival project of Henry Spencer after he took over the Duke University Usenet feed in 1981. You can read more about Henry Spencer, including an interview, at our Usenet History Project site. By the time Spencer handed his archives over to Deja News he had accumulated more than two million articles dating from 1981, including Nashau’s DEC Unix announcement.

The Deja News/Google archive and all of its millions of archived articles are important historical resources and certainly document an exciting time in computing history. The early 1981 DEC post may be one of the earliest archived Usenet articles, but Usenet had been humming along for two years before Spencer started his archive and the Unix post was captured for the future’s eyes. Get details about the earliest days of Usenet by visiting Giganews’s Usenet History Project at http://www.giganews.com/usenet-history/index.html.

giganews review, giganews, review, reviews
Giganews Review
Customers help Giganews review services and features.
Giganews is celebrating our 10th anniversary next year and this year has been one of the most exciting in our history. We’ve made lots of advances and have worked very hard to provide improved and updated service for all our customers.

In an effort to keep improving and to make our 10th year a memorable one, we’re asking Giganews customers to do a review of our services so that we can better understand what you all are thinking.

In an effort to get a thorough Giganews review, we’re asking that our blog readers leave comments reviewing a variety of aspects of our service and customer care. Please, feel free to give an honest review of your Giganews experience. Do remember that the comments on this blog are moderated, so try to avoid inappropriate comments which may not make it through moderation.

Giganews is asking you to review:

– Retention
– Completion
– Giganews Accelerator
– 256-Bit SSL Encrypted Usenet service
– Customer service
– Control panel
– Website
– Etc.

If you can think of anything else we should include in our Giganews review, feel free to comment on that, as well.

Thanks for all of your help!

new, usenet, newsgroups
New to Usenet Newsgroups?
Giganews helps explain Usenet newsgroups to new subscribers
So you know that Giganews has 160+ days of binary article retention and 1500+ days of text retention (as of the date of this post). You know that we have 99% completion across all of our 107K+ newsgroups. Great, sign me up! Now what?

Usenet is a vast community, and when paired with a high performance provider like Giganews, the options a user has are nearly endless. Variety is great. But it can also be a little overwhelming.

Users who are new to the Usenet community can find several helpful Usenet tutorials on the Internet, which will guide you through the process of setting up your newsreader, navigating newsgroups, and contributing your own posts to newsgroups of interest.

If you need a basic overview of Usenet terminology, check out Giganews’ glossary where you’ll find definitions for terms such as headers, streams, completion, retention, and much more.

Giganews customers who need help with any aspect of their service, accessing Usenet, posting to newsgroups, downloading articles, etc. can contact our 24/7/365 tech support staff, who will be able to guide you through these steps.

If you’re a Giganews customer who is unfamiliar with how to use our service or if you’re considering signing up, but need some more information make sure to use our contact form to reach out to one of our friendly support reps!

giganews, maintenance, usenet, retention
What Giganews Doesn’t Do
Giganews discusses maintenance windows, retention upgrades, news server capacity, and binary retention claims.
You may be familiar with all the things Giganews does, like increasing our retention, launching encrypted Usenet access, and developing the Giganews Accelerator, but do you know about all the things that Giganews doesn’t do?

Maintenance Windows

A complex server cluster like Giganews’ Usenet system requires maintenance all the time. We have to replace hard drives, swap out servers, update operating systems, and a whole host of other tasks.

Even though from time to time we need to take down certain parts of our cluster, we never actually have to take our service off line. This means Giganews’ service is always available and isn’t subject to maintenance windows similar to what is experienced through other Usenet servers. We are also able to take down elements of the network without negatively affecting the download speeds of our customers.

Weekend Rush

One of the more common problems people report with Usenet servers are slow download speeds related to increased traffic. This is most often experienced during the period of increased Usenet usage over the weekend, called the “weekend rush”. When news servers have very little capacity, customers experience slow download speeds when usage increases.

Giganews maintains extremely high levels of capacity so that weekend rushes or increased usage driven by service improvements (i.e. 200 days binary retention) don’t affect the speeds at which our customers can download.

Upgrade Pains

Giganews has completed many upgrades to our storage and server clusters over the years. These upgrades include adding and replacing storage, adding servers, and moving to new data center locations. These upgrades are generally seamless for our customers and very rarely even noticed.

For most of Giganews’ customers the only sign that an upgrade has taken place is all the extra retention!

Many Usenet systems, in trying to keep pace with Giganews’ break neck retention upgrades, experience problems almost immediately after an upgrade. These problems include lost articles, downtime, and roll backs (undoing the upgrade).

Giganews is a bit spoiled because we have a top-notch team of engineers and programmers who have developed a custom, in-house Usenet server application. This custom Usenet server application was developed 100% in house and utilizes proprietary code (it’s not an open source or third party Usenet application). Our server software is designed to let us upgrade both code and hardware without interrupting service to our customers.

“Funny” Retention

Many Usenet servers will advertise retention levels which don’t exactly match their actual retention. They may carry long retention in certain groups or even forgo carrying some groups all together in an attempt to reduce the size of the news feed.

These techniques allow certain Usenet servers to advertise “up to X days retention”. While this may be technically correct (even if the advertised retention is only available in one group) the reality of the situation is that these claims aren’t exactly accurate.

Because of Giganews’ robust Usenet system and our vast storage capabilities, we don’t have to hand pick newsgroups in which to offer long retention. We also carry the full suite of newsgroups, so we’re not reducing the number of newsgroups we carry in an attempt to make it seem as if we have more retention than we really do.

Giganews is able to stand by our service levels without having to use “funny” retention statistics to make our service look better than it really is.

Announcing: Nothing

We’re always excited to announce improvements to our service, but writing announcements about how everything is okay isn’t exactly exciting news. We don’t talk a lot about how our upgrades, maintenance, and retention management all run smoothly, but we feel this is an important part of the value Giganews provides to our customers.

The next time you notice Giganews increasing retention or adding features to our service, remember that there is a lot of complex work going on behind the scenes to make sure we’re delivering the level of service you expect without having to interrupt your access or slow down our service.