mazova@sally.acns.nwu.edu, also jmazo@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Jacob Mazo) (12/28/90)
Hello. I would like to be able to read news from a remote machine (I work on a NeXT, the news server is a large SunOS machine). I currently use a newsreader for the NeXT, but IT DOES NOT POST!!!!!!!!!!!! That, together with the fact that it is so slow, makes me wish that someone out there sent me a better one (or an update of my current one!). Also, if and when you e-mail to me the thing, please add a README file so I can install the reader (I am an almost total UNIX and NeXT novice, so please include installation instructions!
wjs@milton.u.washington.edu (William Jon Shipley) (12/29/90)
Jacob Mazo writes: >I would like to be able to read news from a remote machine (I work on a NeXT, >the news server is a large SunOS machine). I currently use a newsreader for >the NeXT, but IT DOES NOT POST!!!!!!!!!!!! Man, who would write a screwed up newsreader like that? Yeesh. >That, together with the fact that it is so slow, makes me wish that someone >out there sent me a better one (or an update of my current one!). News is slow because nntpd, the process supplying the news articles, is slow. Switching News so it would read articles directly from disk would help a lot. Simson Garfinkle is working on a faster and better newsreader, with the ability to post. Last I knew he was trying to get MIT's permission to give it away, since MIT media lab apparently has a cute policy of owning everything you write there. -william shipley
amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) (12/29/90)
In article <13525@milton.u.washington.edu> wjs@milton.u.washington.edu (William Jon Shipley) writes: >News is slow because nntpd, the process supplying the news articles, is slow. >Switching News so it would read articles directly from disk would help a lot. That's one really hosed nntpd, then. We run nntpd on a Sun 3/50 (our slowest machine), and we have seen no performance problems at all. I'd suspect the reader first... -- Amanda Walker amanda@visix.com Visix Software Inc. ...!uunet!visix!amanda -- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view." --Obi-Wan Kenobi in "The Empire Strikes Back"
glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) (01/02/91)
In article <NE7Mgm5q@visix.com> amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) writes: >In article <13525@milton.u.washington.edu> >wjs@milton.u.washington.edu (William Jon Shipley) writes: >>News is slow because nntpd, the process supplying the news articles, is slow. >>Switching News so it would read articles directly from disk would help a lot. > >That's one really hosed nntpd, then. We run nntpd on a Sun 3/50 (our >slowest machine), and we have seen no performance problems at all. >I'd suspect the reader first... Although 'rn' is a bit of a complex beast, there are some good ideas lurking in it. One of the best is that it contains heuristics for guessing the next article it thinks you are going to read, and it retrieves it while you're reading the current article, perhaps getting several articles ahead. This eliminates a lot of the overhead of the nntpd daemon or disk latency or NFS glitches or whatever, and 'rn' always feels pretty zippy. A simplistic algorithm would be to be able to retrieve the next article in sequence in the current newsgroup after the existing one has been displayed, and perhaps caching the last several articles that have been read until the newsgroup is exited. Given that 'rn' is available in source form, you might check out its heuristics. Larry Wall is pretty good about commenting the code. On cursory examination I can't find the place where the heuristics appear, but here is a paragraph from the "HACKERSGUIDE" file that comes with the source code, indicating that the algorithm is in there somewhere: " * Lots of contortions are gone through to try to do things when people aren't waiting, or have only been waiting a very short time. Guessing the next article to be opened and opening it, searching ahead for the next article with the same subject, delaying the look up of the number of articles in a newsgroup, writing the rest of the page while the reader is examining the header, cacheing up subjects while the user is reading, checkpointing the .newsrc only while the reader is in the middle of an interesting article, are some of the strategies employed. " Cheers, Glenn -- Glenn Reid RightBrain Software glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us PostScript/NeXT developers ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn 415-851-1785
dennisg@tti.UUCP (Dennis P. Glatting) (01/08/91)
In article <383@heaven.woodside.ca.us> glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes: >Although 'rn' is a bit of a complex beast, there are some good ideas >lurking in it. One of the best is that it contains heuristics for >guessing the next article it thinks you are going to read, and it >retrieves it while you're reading the current article, perhaps getting >several articles ahead. This eliminates a lot of the overhead of the >nntpd daemon or disk latency or NFS glitches or whatever, and 'rn' >always feels pretty zippy. > check xrn. it is a very good reader and reasonably fast. -- Dennis P. Glatting | ...!uunet!tti!dennisg Threaded Technologies Inc. | X, NeXT, and threaded | application developers
fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer) (01/08/91)
>>>>> On 28 Dec 90 03:22:59 GMT, mazova@sally.acns.nwu.edu (Jacob Mazo) said:
Jacob> I would like to be able to read news from a remote machine (I
Jacob> work on a NeXT, the news server is a large SunOS machine). I
Jacob> currently use a newsreader for the NeXT, but IT DOES NOT
Jacob> POST!!!!!!!!!!!!
Since you have GNU Emacs for your machine, why not get GNUS, the GNU
Emacs Newsreader. Lots of nice features, like presenting a menu of
articles when you enter a new newsgroup, allowing you to pick the one
you need. Or, if you're really in a hurry and don't care for a lot of
many features, get nn (No News is good news :-) -- also menu based,
with a cache that makes reading news really fast.
GNUS is available from prep.ai.mit.edu. nn is at freja.diku.dk and
several other places. Both have ample instructions for installation
and are quite straightforward to install (well, kind of. NN requires
you to set up a daemon, but its easy enough to do).
/Lars
--
Lars Fischer, fischer@iesd.auc.dk | Q: How does a project get to be one
CS Dept., Univ. of Aalborg, DENMARK. | year late? A: One day at a time.