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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering system for physicallycorrect
Date: 24 Oct 2007 17:35:38
Message: <471fbaaa@news.povray.org>
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On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:23:22 +0100, Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> And where all the users delighted? No. Obviously, no. One person
> remarked that logging in to some web app is still slow as hell. (Gee,
> could that be because we have a 2 mbit/sec Internet link shared between
> 50 PCs and no web proxy?) Another person complained that they wanted
> newer monitors. And somebody else complained about how long it took to
> log in. (This is likely to be related to their roaming profile. It is in
> excess of 700 MB in size, after all...)
You need to read BOFH if you don't....
Jim
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From: Nicolas Alvarez
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering system for physicallycorrect
Date: 24 Oct 2007 17:59:41
Message: <471fc04d$1@news.povray.org>
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> One person
> remarked that logging in to some web app is still slow as hell. (Gee,
> could that be because we have a 2 mbit/sec Internet link shared between
> 50 PCs and no web proxy?)
Aha, there is your problem. Web app.
I'm currently working on linking a web forum into the greatness that
NNTP is. Compare performance of Outlook Express on povray newsgroups and
a phpBB forum and you'll see a bit of a difference...
(no it's not a phpBB forum I'm linking to NNTP; that would be masochism)
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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering system for physicallycorrect
Date: 25 Oct 2007 01:40:04
Message: <47202c34$1@news.povray.org>
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On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:59:34 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 escribió:
>> One person
>> remarked that logging in to some web app is still slow as hell. (Gee,
>> could that be because we have a 2 mbit/sec Internet link shared between
>> 50 PCs and no web proxy?)
>
> Aha, there is your problem. Web app.
>
> I'm currently working on linking a web forum into the greatness that
> NNTP is. Compare performance of Outlook Express on povray newsgroups and
> a phpBB forum and you'll see a bit of a difference...
>
> (no it's not a phpBB forum I'm linking to NNTP; that would be masochism)
Out of curiosity, which one is it? vBulletin seems quite good if you
haven't looked at it...
Jim
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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering system for physicallycorrect
Date: 25 Oct 2007 01:40:52
Message: <47202c64$1@news.povray.org>
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On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:33:52 -0400, Jim Henderson wrote:
> IME it's always been that way - you're doing your job right if nobody
> knows you're there...
To expound on that a little bit, that's the case when you're supporting a
network; when you're building it, depending on how you go about it,
that's a different story (doing needs assessments and whatnot gets you
noticed, but not necessarily in a bad way).
Jim
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From: Nicolas Alvarez
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering system forphysicallycorrect
Date: 25 Oct 2007 14:51:21
Message: <4720e5a9@news.povray.org>
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Jim Henderson escribió:
> On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:59:34 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>
>> Orchid XP v7 escribió:
>>> One person
>>> remarked that logging in to some web app is still slow as hell. (Gee,
>>> could that be because we have a 2 mbit/sec Internet link shared between
>>> 50 PCs and no web proxy?)
>> Aha, there is your problem. Web app.
>>
>> I'm currently working on linking a web forum into the greatness that
>> NNTP is. Compare performance of Outlook Express on povray newsgroups and
>> a phpBB forum and you'll see a bit of a difference...
>>
>> (no it's not a phpBB forum I'm linking to NNTP; that would be masochism)
>
> Out of curiosity, which one is it? vBulletin seems quite good if you
> haven't looked at it...
>
> Jim
None of those forums have proper threading. People add their posts to
threads, they don't reply to other posts. Converting that to a tree like
it's shown on newsgroups wouldn't work at all. Even if the forum
software stores what post is a reply of which, most people click "reply
to this thread" when replying to one of the last few posts, breaking the
chain anyway.
For example here:
http://community.electricsheep.org/node/102
Posts are indented to show correct nesting. That's easy to get working
in a newsgroup. But most forums are "flat".
The one I want to link to NNTP is pretty much custom software.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/
Posts show "In response to message ####" so that's kinda better. On my
forum, I removed the "reply to this thread" link completely, forcing
users to reply to individual posts, instead of throwing posts in the thread.
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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering system forphysicallycorrect
Date: 25 Oct 2007 19:12:46
Message: <472122ee$1@news.povray.org>
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On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:51:31 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> None of those forums have proper threading. People add their posts to
> threads, they don't reply to other posts. Converting that to a tree like
> it's shown on newsgroups wouldn't work at all.
Actually, it can be configured to work properly with NNTP - I'm in the
process of converting some private newsgroups to use that as a web
interface.
Jim
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From: Nicolas Alvarez
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering systemforphysicallycorrect
Date: 25 Oct 2007 22:38:01
Message: <47215309@news.povray.org>
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Jim Henderson escribió:
> On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:51:31 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>
>> None of those forums have proper threading. People add their posts to
>> threads, they don't reply to other posts. Converting that to a tree like
>> it's shown on newsgroups wouldn't work at all.
>
> Actually, it can be configured to work properly with NNTP - I'm in the
> process of converting some private newsgroups to use that as a web
> interface.
>
It's more about how people use it than technical issues. If the web
interface has such a thing as "reply to this *thread*", people will
click on it; and where in the tree would that post go?
Also, really long threads (see below) are "wrong" in newsgroups...
Clients aren't really designed for that; for example, Thunderbird
doesn't let you collapse individual posts; only the first level of
nesting (threads) can be collapsed. Again, not technical reasons (the
protocol isn't really "limited" in terms of posts-per-thread at all);
it's just annoying to browse a 10000-post thread with news readers.
By the way, the forum->nntp linking I'm doing involves writing the NNTP
server itself, since I didn't find any code flexible enough to let me
stick any backend. POV-Ray uses DNEWS, but it's commercial software. I
found one that seemed to have the same goals as me (interface with
forums) but it's written in Python, and I don't know a single thing
about it.
-- insanely long threads --
* Ctrl-Alt-Del forum, "Official I need Help finding a CAD Comic Thread",
712 posts. In a sane NNTP server, it would be done by setting a whole
group for those kind of requests, and each comic request would go on its
own thread, with one or two or five replies, but not much more.
http://www.cad-forums.com/showthread.php?t=47935
* RCN BOINC project forum, Cafe category, "Last one to post here wins",
15135 posts at the time of this writing. Thread grows just for the hell
of it. I think no BOINC project lacks such a thread, with usually all
the same people :)
http://dist.ist.tugraz.at/cape5/forum_thread.php?id=12
I was told SETI@Home once had one of those "last to post wins" threads
reach *two hundred thousand posts*. An admin deleted it because it was
loading the database more than *anything* else (the forum software has
no paging; you can only get either the last X posts or the whole thread).
* And an even worse thread, again in Ctrl-Alt-Del forum. "The Official
Chat Thread". It's exactly what it sounds like: abusing a forum for
chat-like conversation. 76391 posts at the moment.
http://www.cad-forums.com/showthread.php?t=74371
Imagine those three in NNTP.
PS: Going off-topic is something completely normal of any
forum/newsgroup/mailing list/chatroom. Wasn't this thread about a render
engine? :)
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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software rendering systemforphysicallycorrect
Date: 25 Oct 2007 23:22:08
Message: <47215d60$1@news.povray.org>
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On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:38:33 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> It's more about how people use it than technical issues. If the web
> interface has such a thing as "reply to this *thread*", people will
> click on it; and where in the tree would that post go?
Yes, but I am talking about a specific program that front-ends an NNTP
interface using an NNTP gateway.
> Also, really long threads (see below) are "wrong" in newsgroups...
> Clients aren't really designed for that; for example, Thunderbird
> doesn't let you collapse individual posts; only the first level of
> nesting (threads) can be collapsed. Again, not technical reasons (the
> protocol isn't really "limited" in terms of posts-per-thread at all);
> it's just annoying to browse a 10000-post thread with news readers.
Yes, but it does happen. c.f. NNTP server forums.novell.com, group
novell.community.chat. This is the testing group used at Novell, and it
holds a lot of random chat (with thread drift and so on). There are
*NNTP* threads there that run for several thousand messages (there are
stats as well on this, as one of the moderators of those groups wrote a
program to parse the data stored in the newsreader he uses - Virtual
Access, I think it's called).
> By the way, the forum->nntp linking I'm doing involves writing the NNTP
> server itself, since I didn't find any code flexible enough to let me
> stick any backend. POV-Ray uses DNEWS, but it's commercial software. I
> found one that seemed to have the same goals as me (interface with
> forums) but it's written in Python, and I don't know a single thing
> about it.
Well, there again, the NNTP gateway on vBulletin is a generic RFC-
compliant NNTP client. As such, it doesn't care what's on the backend
(Novell use Twister with Cyclone, which are commercial, but they can just
as easily be INN or DNEWS).
> -- insanely long threads --
>
> * Ctrl-Alt-Del forum, "Official I need Help finding a CAD Comic Thread",
> 712 posts.
Tiny. Very tiny compared to the long threads in n.c.c. There was one
guy who wrote a program to just generate replies for the hell of it - and
it ended up being used to test the web-based interface in use at the
time. And it broke it (the front-end provided by the company that does
Twister, in fact).
> In a sane NNTP server, it would be done by setting a whole
> group for those kind of requests, and each comic request would go on its
> own thread, with one or two or five replies, but not much more.
> http://www.cad-forums.com/showthread.php?t=47935
Maybe in your world, but Novell don't create a newsgroup per topic posted
in NCC - that would be nuts. There's over 650,000 messages in that group
*alone*, and at one time, it was pegged as the busiest newsgroup on the
'net, with several thousand messages being posted each day.
> * RCN BOINC project forum, Cafe category, "Last one to post here wins",
> 15135 posts at the time of this writing. Thread grows just for the hell
> of it. I think no BOINC project lacks such a thread, with usually all
> the same people :)
> http://dist.ist.tugraz.at/cape5/forum_thread.php?id=12
>
> I was told SETI@Home once had one of those "last to post wins" threads
> reach *two hundred thousand posts*. An admin deleted it because it was
> loading the database more than *anything* else (the forum software has
> no paging; you can only get either the last X posts or the whole
> thread).
>
> * And an even worse thread, again in Ctrl-Alt-Del forum. "The Official
> Chat Thread". It's exactly what it sounds like: abusing a forum for
> chat-like conversation. 76391 posts at the moment.
> http://www.cad-forums.com/showthread.php?t=74371
>
> Imagine those three in NNTP.
Simple, the xover file could get quite large, but most NNTP servers can
handle it with enough disk space (spool tends to be the biggest issue).
I wouldn't do it with leafnode. :-)
I mean really, NNTP message linking is essentially a linked list, linked
by reference field. IIRC, the NNTP RFCs specify the first message in the
thread and the last 1 or 2 replies prior to the post itself, but many
newsreaders don't do that or tack on as many references as they can.
Some newsreaders stupidly thread by subject as well (fortunately most can
have this disabled).
> PS: Going off-topic is something completely normal of any
> forum/newsgroup/mailing list/chatroom. Wasn't this thread about a render
> engine? :)
Yep, it was.
I've got many years working with the forums at Novell and most of the
iterations of software they've been through - Hypernews, Proxicomm,
Twister/Cyclone, Twister/Typhoon, and a few tests of some customized
software (KNova, for example, which ended up not being implemented).
And personally, I *hate* web-based forums, but I understand that
sometimes you can only use what's available through your firewall, and
usually that means "web".
The worst are the "flat forums" which are basically message lists (like
buffistas.org, which my wife has participated in in the past - I found
that incredibly difficult to read or follow).
Jim
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From: Nicolas Alvarez
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software renderingsystemforphysicallycorrect
Date: 2 Nov 2007 14:14:48
Message: <472b7728@news.povray.org>
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Jim Henderson escribió:
> Maybe in your world, but Novell don't create a newsgroup per topic posted
> in NCC - that would be nuts. There's over 650,000 messages in that group
> *alone*, and at one time, it was pegged as the busiest newsgroup on the
> 'net, with several thousand messages being posted each day.
Waitwaitwaitwait I *just* noticed I misread that, not noticing you had
misread my post. Of course it wouldn't be a *newsgroup* per topic. I
meant a *thread* per topic. Making a "tech support thread" with
thousands of posts is what web forums do, and wouldn't work on
newsgroups. Making a "tech support group/forum category" with one thread
per question is what people should do; and how it works on newsgroups.
When somebody gets a rendering artifact in POV-Ray, he posts a new
thread on povray.general, like for any other problem. Some web forums
would have a sticky thread called "Rendering artifacts help" with
thousands of posts, and asking everybody with an artifact-related
problem to post there. I think that is a stupid idea.
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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: New, open-source, free software renderingsystemforphysicallycorrect
Date: 3 Nov 2007 16:54:38
Message: <472cee1e@news.povray.org>
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On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:14:39 -0300, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Waitwaitwaitwait I *just* noticed I misread that, not noticing you had
> misread my post. Of course it wouldn't be a *newsgroup* per topic. I
> meant a *thread* per topic. Making a "tech support thread" with
> thousands of posts is what web forums do, and wouldn't work on
> newsgroups. Making a "tech support group/forum category" with one thread
> per question is what people should do; and how it works on newsgroups.
Ah, yes, well, as you said, thread drift is always going to happen, too.
But many "web forums" interchange "discussion group" with "thread".
vBulletin doesn't do that - it has an NNTP gateway that maps a newsgroup
to a forum.
> When somebody gets a rendering artifact in POV-Ray, he posts a new
> thread on povray.general, like for any other problem. Some web forums
> would have a sticky thread called "Rendering artifacts help" with
> thousands of posts, and asking everybody with an artifact-related
> problem to post there. I think that is a stupid idea.
I agree that it's a stupid idea. :-)
Jim
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