Re: What Microsoft has to do with...

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farhana_dev@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote in news:1168381510.216232.41020@
77g2000hsv.googlegroups.com:

Hi Everybody

I had used these groups a few times. This time this is not a VB
question and a request to the watch-squad here: please dont send me
away saying this is not the right group to ask this question.

I am intrigued by the prefix 'microsoft' in these groups' names. I
could not contain my curiosity anymore and hence this question. Some
one with a little patience can put me stright.

What exactly Microsoft has to do with these groups? Are they
monitoring/promoting/supporting/sponsoring these groups in some way or
other? If YES, how come these are part of Google? In the past I had
come accross a posting to the effect microsoft is issuing awards to the
guys answering queries here. But as the posting itself was pretentious,
ill-concieved and studded with phrases blatantly borrowed(?) from
someone else, I could not attach any face value to the information
portrayed in it.

Please, anybody here can throw some light... Thanks in advance

Farhana


OK. These groups are a (little known) part of the Internet called UseNet.

You are most likely viewing them through a web-to-Usenet interface, which
is the worst way to access them.

Google just indexes and archives the posts. What happened was the largest
indexing site on the Net was (IIRC) DejaNews (?). Google bought them and
continued on with the archiving, and it is now called Google groups.

MS has no affiliation with Usenet, other than running the MS Usenet
servers. They have no control over ANY servers worldwide other than the
ones they themselves run.

The Usenet network is a peer-to-peer setup. A specific server will have
several peers that they share posts with, who will have other peers, and so
on, and so on. Once a message is posted to a Usenet server, it will contact
it's peers to see if the peer already has the message, if not, it will be
pushed to it, and so on, and so on. A post could take an amount of time to
propagate throughout the world.

A web interface is usually klunky and hard to work with. Many times they
report incorrectly that the post you made failed, so the user will click
the 'Send' button on the web page until it says successful. This is one of
the reasons you see so many duplicate posts.

It's best to use a Newsreader to read Usenet newsgroups.

Outlook Express has a News client built in. XNews is one of the other more
popular readers.

Many ISP's offer direct-to-Usenet server access with your account.

Regards,

DanS
.

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