[Oberon] Re. OCP - Forum unavailable

[Chris Glur]

I don't think I posted this yet ?

 "Bob Walkden" <bob at web-options.com> wrote:-

> What is to stop the scientists using usenet now? 
> Then it won't be replaced.

They do. As noted, there are some 'very competent' usenet
groups. Which proves how well the original design was 
conceived.   But you know about the 'network effect' and
critical-mass and if 1% of C users were working with Oberon,
then we'd have eg. a utility which can list the display-tree 
& reorder the display. Eg. to bring a hidden frame to the top
of the pile.

Stefan Salewski wrote:-
> I think you confuse the term "Blog" with "Internet_forum" 
> -- you did it multiple times in the past. 
> 
Yes, I favour brevity.
I often label entities as 'crap' when they are not 
strickly speaking c.r.a.p.

> And you may ask yourself if it is really a good idea to put a 
> space in front of the question mark 
It's NOT a question mark.
It's AFAIK a yet un-named symbol, which I often write as !?! .
Some times I use the Spanish style of having a '?' before the
sentence too - to switch the reader to 'question mode'.
It means [the semantics is]:
* like Swiss/german 'oder', or 'ya know';
* note my assertion, and refute it if you can;
* this is a question [in my post] which requires an answer:
** N questions require N answers;
** a tripod can't function with one leg missing;
** especially top-posters, can't answer all the questions,
   and you have to write back to re-ask the unanswered 
   question/s.

Inet comms. is NOT what you learned at school.
Some people use smileys.
BTW school also didn't teach you to germanic-like, 
hyphenate multiple-words into a single concept; that's 
another one of my 'extentions' to 20th century 
school-english.

> -- kids often do this...
I can believe you. They have extended/refined beyond
what 'I learned at school' - like your above use 
of "..." ?  <--- "oder"

Here are some of the serious problems that I have when
trying to mine informations from 'blogs' [and I welcome
suggestions on how to improve/change my methods]:

* the knowledge base is not indexed like usenet,
  so if I want info. on a new/unrelated topic, I'd first have
 to goog several cycles to home-in on a selection of blogs.

* to read the http format [I guess normal/herd-followers
use a 'standard'/monster browser] I'd use lynx or elinks,
possibly fetching-to-file multiple blogs, from a script,
while I'm d/l-ing my email. Being in a 3rd [going 4th] 
world country, my connection costs are high.

* a big problem, is that the OP's original article, plus 
the accumulating thread is passed back-and-forth for
each iteration. 

* Usenet is designed so that if you exchange the info. for
20 different topics in one brief on-line session, all the 
'book-keeping' of keeping topics and threads properly 
sorted, is done. AFAIK *not* for blogs ? <-- = 'oder'

? what am I doing wrong ?
Can your method of handling 'internet forum', handle
20 topics, spread over law, medicine, economic,
technology ..a,b, c in one brief on-line session ?

BTW perhaps the whole question is answered by:
do "Internet_forum" have RFC/s, or equivalent; 
or was it just evolved via suck-it-and-see by the
marketing-boys and art-students ?

You might have realised that the current interesting
global economic situation, also came about by 
discarding sound, proven theory for the latest fads.

Brantley Coile wrote:
> I think the forums are a great improvement.  
> I find the presentation more useful and more convenient.  
> All the threads are in  the same place.  

That could be maximum entropy: no ordering/classification !?

> Searching is much easier.
So then, you have classification - not all mixed together.
Or if your info-set is small, you just search it all, every time ?
How do you find the paragraph in that [perhaps] *.pdf 
document ?

IMO 'searching' is the most important task.
How do you make search easier ?

Let me throw out a few ideas.   I suspect
that [today - new fads will sweep through] most users,
use a monster-browser that does http, mail & potentially
usenet ?  And when the browser crashes they've lost all
their data.  Which doesn't matter because it's just twitter
kiddie stuff ?

I've concluded that the 'importance heirarchy' of your
'computing assets'  is:
 your knowledge & skills > your data > your data-holding
   hardware > your CPU.

Kiddies [driven by marketers] wrongly emphasise the
CPU/engine.  I had an accident last week, by saving
a linux-eth-oberon file as '/temp' - STUPID; which renamed
the essential-for-the-OS-dir to 'tmp.Bak' and caused other
unknown problems.   Since my data is separate, I just swapped
to an alternate/less-favourable engine/OS-installation.

If you're persuing topics in law, medicine, economics,
technology ...you might find a OOD-approach [which I must
admit, I didn't design, but which just evolved from LEO].
The knowledge that you are accumulating on topicX
arrives by, email, newsgroups & increaingly by the crappy
blogs. There's also the problem of *.pdf, which, as is 
often the case, the absence of diagrams allows the text
to be stored as ascii, or even better for heavy-stuff in LEO
format, where you've font & colour edited the material
while analysing it.

So, with this 'data instead of procedure' approach, your
data, which is the treasure, is attended-to by the current
utilities.  The latest browser, or even the OS is just a
throw-away. 


== Chris Glur.

PS. what's the record/history of memory-leaks with 
ETH-Oberon ?   I keep on reading about these major
research projects that are being updated and 'just
fixing a few memory leaks' ?!
======
PSS. using LinuxEthOberon [LEO} I d/l-ed 
http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/
Yes anything from eth should be d/l-able by LEO ?
Then with HyperDocTools.LinkIndex *
I extracted many URLs to a file, with which I
[would have, if the blaug was working] fetched
multiple pages which I could read, at my leisure off-line.
Yes, there's a rational for blogs over Usenet: to avoid
the contamination of spam. But it's more of the 'I want
my *own*: to be in control', like 'I can't use public
transport, if I want to be independant' ? "oder"

PSSS. another bad feature about blogs/http based coms:
when you switch tasks from initiating a blog d/l to eg.
fetching your email, the blog [now in the background]
asks 'accept cookies?'. So that when you go off-line,
assuming, wrongly, that the blog has done it's job,
it had been waiting, and now it has lost it's connection.
I.e the task can't be completed, without human supervision.
http hates automation, because it want's your personal 
attention. Because they want to influence your mind.