On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 12:51:54PM -0800, Horace Heffner wrote: >Thank you very much for checking this out. It will probably be a bit >embarassing to folks like me who kept posting the same stuff over and >over - when it eventually all comes to the surface.
You're very welcome! You may be able to delete the extra posts. Usenet has a "cancel" mechanism for doing that. When the posts finally show up, you can see if there's a way to cancel them from the Google Groups web interface. Currently Google is running about 16 hours behind, down from about 27 hours yesterday, so it's catching up. You can measure Google's delay like this: 1. Go to a high-volume newsgroup like talk.politics.misc . 2. Hit the reload button on your browser. 3. Click on the top thread in the display, which is the one in the newsgroup to which an article has been added most recently. 4. When the thread's page comes up, click on "Sort by date" in the article index on the left. 5. Scroll down to the very bottom of the article index. 6. Click on the bottom (most recent) article in the index. 7. When that article comes up (you may have to scroll down in the article display to see it), look at its date/time. 8. Subtract that from the current date/time to get the delay. Google's web interface has a problem in that the righthand 25% or so of the article display page is taken up by ads. A blocker like Adblock Plus with Filterset.G for Firefox removes the ads but doesn't recover the space. Greasemonkey (another Firefox extension) should be able to remove the righthand pane and extend the center pane to make it easier to read wide articles, and to use a larger font size. Greasemonkey runs Javascript programs of your choosing on web pages coming in from whatever sites you select, so you can systematically modify those pages any way you want before your browser displays them. Someone may already have written the Javascript to fix the Google article interface. http://www.nivi.com/blog/article/greasemonkey-and-business-models http://www.greasespot.net/ http://userscripts.org/ >Say, it just occurred to me, aren't the sci groups on servers that >google doesn't own? In other words doesn't google just provide an >interface to the usenet servers? Absolutely! Usenet newsgroups are on many servers around the world, and are unaffected by delays in Google Groups. You can buy access to Usenet for about $8/month for 20 GB of download (which should suffice unless you want to pull down a lot of music or videos), or you may have 1 GB/month or so of access for free from your ISP. Here are some Usenet providers: NewsgroupDirect - $20/15/8 unl/60/20G - 70 days Thundernews $20/15 unl/60G - 70days EasyNews $10/20G 30 day Giganews $25/13 unl/25G - 70 days Ngroups.NET - $15/mo unl, 71 dy, global binary search UsenetHost.com $25/10 unl/10G 23dy The parameters (collected about a year ago) are dollars per month, download limit in gigabytes per month for each payment level (unl means unlimited), and days retention time. These sites retain articles for only a few months at the most, unlike Google, which keeps them forever, and provides a very good search facility for all of them. But Google doesn't have any binary file Usenet articles (music, movies, etc.) at all. When I have time and disk space for binaries, I subscribe to Ngroups.net; they are quite reliable and responsive. I just use Google for text articles. For reading text articles from a Usenet provider, you'll need a newsreader program. Pan runs on Linux, Mac, and MS-Windows: http://pan.rebelbase.com/ http://pan.rebelbase.com/download/ http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/pan If you do want to download binaries, another company, Newzbin, will create an "NZB file" for you containing the message-IDs of all the Usenet articles that comprise any binary (or set of binaries, e.g., an album of songs) that you choose from Newzbin's excellent listings (which can be searched in a variety of ways). You download the NZB file with your browser while viewing Newzbin's website. Newzbin costs $2/month and is well worth it. http://v3.newzbin.com/ http://docs.newzbin.com/index.php/Newzbin_Documentation:FAQ http://v3.newzbin.com/account/signup/ http://docs.newzbin.com/index.php/Newzbin:Premium_Membership http://docs.newzbin.com/index.php/Newzbin:Payment_FAQ You'll also need an NZB-capable download program like hellanzb (a free Python program -- you'll need a Python interpreter), which runs under Linux and BSD Unix, and the Darwin system on Mac OSX. If you're using MS-Windows, you'll have to find some other NZB downloader, but if you're using MS-Windows, you have much worse problems than that! Ah, apparently Pan can utilize NZB files, and also act as a downloader without a graphic interface. http://www.hellanzb.com/trac/ http://www.hellanzb.com/distfiles/ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pan-users/2006-03/msg00030.html http://cosmicpenguin.com/linux/ >Glad to see your courageous posting of google's phone number. I got it from their domain record, which you can get using the "whois" program, or from http://samspade.org . Mark >On Jul 18, 2007, at 9:43 AM, Mark S Bilk wrote: > >>The Google Groups website was not getting updated. The last posts >>in talk.politics.misc and comp.os.linux.advocacy, both high-volume >>newsgroups, were dated about 7am 7/17 -- yesterday. The last post >>showing in sci.astro was dated 5:28am yesterday. The last post in >>the Gravimagnetics thread is yours from 5:26am yesterday. >> >>This happens every couple of months. I finally got through to a >>phone operator, who wouldn't tell anyone that Groups has not >>been updated for 27 hours. Of course she treated it as my problem >>and said they don't give phone support. She told me to go to >>Groups Support on the website, and it turns out that the only way >>to tell them about anything is to post a message in one of the >>support groups, which of course doesn't work. I told the operator >>over and over again that it's a recurring problem with Google that >>they need to fix, and that I'm a computer engineer and I didn't >>need any personal help. She finally said she would tell someone, >>but I don't know if that was just to get rid of me. >> >>But in any case, I think someone has fixed it. The latest articles >>in those three newsgroups are now from about 7:40am yesterday. >> >>It will take many hours for the system to catch up and show recent >>posts. >> >>Google's phone number is 650-623-4000. >> >> Mark > >Horace Heffner >http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/ > >
