I Give Up!

The spam in Google groups has only gotten worse lately and there seems
to be no end in sight.  This group is getting hard to find the real
posts in and some of the other groups are just plain unusable with
five or ten spam messages to every real message.

Rather than to add spam filters as most newsgroup access providers do,
Google has invented an entirely new interface with an entirely new
look, with the ability to flag a post as spam (or otherwise
inappropriate) and it is hidden from your view.

That would be great, except that the new interface sucks compared to
the old one.  Maybe it is just that I'm used to the old one, but I
have tried the new one in one of the groups I access and I don't seem
to be liking it any more than when I first saw it.

For a company that is so good at search engines, why can't they
understand anything about how newsgroups should work?

Rick

>The spam in Google groups has only gotten worse lately and there seems
>to be no end in sight.  This group is getting hard to find the real
>posts in and some of the other groups are just plain unusable with
>five or ten spam messages to every real message.
>
 [snip]
>

I use a usenet (thunderbird) but also use dsprelated / fpgarelated for the
comp.fpga and comp.dsp.  I don't notice much spam through these web
interfaces.

chris	   
					
---------------------------------------		
Posted through http://www.FPGARelated.com

rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> writes:

> The spam in Google groups has only gotten worse lately and there seems
> to be no end in sight.  This group is getting hard to find the real

I'm using news.eternal-september.org as my nntp server and hardly see
any spam. I also prefer gnus/emacs over any web interface.

//Petter


-- 
.sig removed by request. 

On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:02:02 +0100, Petter Gustad wrote:

>rickman writes:
>> The spam in Google groups has only gotten worse lately
>> and there seems to be no end in sight.  
>
>I'm using news.eternal-september.org as my nntp server 
>and hardly see any spam. 

Me too; I don't know how eternal-september does its 
filtering but it works pretty well.  And it only
very rarely hides valid messages.

In the last month or two, though, even that filtering 
has been swamped by the volume of trash and I'm seeing 
occasional junk messages - maybe three per week.

The rot is deeper than that, though.  The three
IC-related technology groups that I used to follow
regularly are no longer of much interest to me,
and I strongly suspect I'm not alone in that:

c.l.verilog has essentially NO meaningful traffic now.
It used to be one of my primary learning and discussion
resources for Verilog, but now I have abandoned it.
I think the same has happened to most of the regulars.

c.l.vhdl still has homework-ish questions (probably
fed from fpgarelated or somesuch?) but very little
professional-level traffic.  I still monitor it
occasionally, but haven't contributed for weeks.

By contrast, c.a.fpga still gets a decent (but, I
think, decreasing) density of useful content.  It's
not very focused on my own core activity, but it
seems still to be working reasonably well apart
from the spam cesspool.

So, what's going on?  Do Verilog and VHDL 
practitioners no longer wish to share their 
experiences in a Net forum?  That sounds unlikely;
so where have they gone?  Possibly to forum sites
that have a stronger focus on application rather
than language - Verification Guild or OVM World
for verification people, for example.  That might
also explain why c.a.fpga continues to thrive while
the language groups are moribund.  The forums 
are spam-free, and although the web interface 
seems astonishingly clunky to me by comparison 
with the simplicity of a decent newsreader, 
it seems to be the way people want to go.  

The implied shift away from interest in the 
languages themselves is fascinating too.  Does 
everyone think that the languages are a done deal, 
and no-one needs to talk about them any more?  Are
the published books and resources so good nowadays 
that no-one needs to check with a live human?  
Or has everyone gone to some place else that 
I'm insufficiently Net-savvy to know about?

I shall look back on the end of 2010 with some
sadness.  I've been using various newsgroups for
about fifteen years now, and they've given me 
much pleasure, information and insight.  But that
era is over; the Internet is now a very different
place, and I'm much less at home there than 
I used to be.  Relentless march of progress, or
merely the tragedy of the commons?  Someone else
must judge...
-- 
Jonathan Bromley

On Dec 31, 9:53=A0am, Jonathan Bromley <s...@oxfordbromley.plus.com>
wrote:
> By contrast, c.a.fpga still gets a decent (but, I
> think, decreasing) density of useful content. =A0It's
> not very focused on my own core activity, but it
> seems still to be working reasonably well apart
> from the spam cesspool.

<snip>

> Or has everyone gone to some place else that
> I'm insufficiently Net-savvy to know about?

People still need support.

CAF is a great resource (no other place like it online) if you are
already an expert, but it can be intimidating and unwelcoming (and
occasionally hostile) to new users. So, newcomers don't tend to stick
around and the community here shrinks rather than grows. But I don't
think that that is the main reason for the demise of the HDL/FPGA
usenet forums. The younger crowed is more comfortable with newer types
of community-based support, ones that prioritize finding answers
quickly first, then reputation building, and then discussion. The
Xilinx and Altera forums that were revamped a few years ago have these
elements, and that's where many go for answers. Others go to sites
like stackexchange.com, but there are few FPGA experts there. There
are other community support sites out there, but there isn't a single
obvious place to go to for support, particularly for anything that
isn't very vendor specific, like "MAP failed with error 7563, what
does that mean?"

The "FPGA/HDL design" community is fragmented, and it's a shame -- we
could have it so much better. I've tried to do something about it by
proposing this:

  http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/20632/programmable-logic-and-fp=
ga-design

see my previous CAF post here:

  http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch.fpga/browse_thread/thread/e45262=
99628848b7

Similarly, others have started this:

  http://www.overmapped.com

One forum needs to reach critical mass so we could have a decent,
effective, modern, online community. Usenet, vendor-specific, and
platform-specific sites aren't good candidates for this in my
opinion.

cheers,
saar.

On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 09:53:15 +0000, Jonathan Bromley
<spam@oxfordbromley.plus.com> wrote:

>On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:02:02 +0100, Petter Gustad wrote:
>
>>rickman writes:
>>> The spam in Google groups has only gotten worse lately
>>> and there seems to be no end in sight.  
>>
>>I'm using news.eternal-september.org as my nntp server 
>>and hardly see any spam. 
>
>Me too; I don't know how eternal-september does its 
>filtering but it works pretty well.  

>The rot is deeper than that, though.  The three
>IC-related technology groups that I used to follow
>regularly are no longer of much interest to me,
>and I strongly suspect I'm not alone in that:

Definitely agree with that...

>So, what's going on?  Do Verilog and VHDL 
>practitioners no longer wish to share their 
>experiences in a Net forum?  That sounds unlikely;
>so where have they gone?  Possibly to forum sites
>that have a stronger focus on application rather
>than language - Verification Guild or OVM World
>for verification people, for example. 

I think the vendor-specific forums (fora, dammit!)
and other fragmented, closed solutions have won. Nobody has time to track
everything - if you spend an hour a day on the Xilinx fora, and another on
StackRelated or FPGAOverflow and another on Facebook, (I presume there 
are FPGA areas or groups or something on Facebook) there's not much time left
for Usenet, let alone actual work...

There may be some good stuff on some of these, but in a fragmented fashion that
is much less useful than we used to find here. And much harder to find...

I'm on comp.arch.fpga, comp.lang.vhdl, and comp.lang.ada - the latter is
unfashionable enough to have been overlooked by most of the spammers and
destructive interests, so still a really useful group.

>I shall look back on the end of 2010 with some
>sadness.  I've been using various newsgroups for
>about fifteen years now, and they've given me 
>much pleasure, information and insight.  But that
>era is over; the Internet is now a very different
>place, and I'm much less at home there than 
>I used to be.  Relentless march of progress, or
>merely the tragedy of the commons?  Someone else
>must judge...

Change is probably inevitable, and maybe it's getting time for Usenet to go the
way of the morse amateur bands, and the telegraph.

Sadly.

- Brian

On 12/31/2010 4:53 AM, Jonathan Bromley wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:02:02 +0100, Petter Gustad wrote:
>
>> rickman writes:
>>> The spam in Google groups has only gotten worse lately
>>> and there seems to be no end in sight.
>>
>> I'm using news.eternal-september.org as my nntp server
>> and hardly see any spam.
>
> Me too; I don't know how eternal-september does its
> filtering but it works pretty well.  And it only
> very rarely hides valid messages.

I've also found eternal-september's filtering to be very good.  But it 
can be slow - I've been using "news.individual.net" too, which seems to 
have similarly effective filtering but with better speed.  It does have 
a small fee though (10 euro/year, currently ~13USD).

<snip>
>
> The implied shift away from interest in the
> languages themselves is fascinating too.  Does
> everyone think that the languages are a done deal,
> and no-one needs to talk about them any more?  Are
> the published books and resources so good nowadays
> that no-one needs to check with a live human?
> Or has everyone gone to some place else that
> I'm insufficiently Net-savvy to know about?

If anyone does discover the Lost World of HDL expert discussions please 
do post here.  As a newby in HDL I haven't been able to make useful 
contributions, but I've been reading this newsgroup for some time now 
and have learned a great deal. I really hope that this sort of resource 
doesn't get completely disappear from the net.

And I would like to state that I really appreciate the fact that people 
with deep knowledge and experience will spend their time providing 
guidance to those of us who really need it. Jonathan - I've found your 
contributions to be especially valuable, as they are always informative 
and often provide a broader perspective that goes beyond the issue 
raised by the OP.  Besides that they're invariably well written and 
often entertaining.

>
> I shall look back on the end of 2010 with some
> sadness.  I've been using various newsgroups for
> about fifteen years now, and they've given me
> much pleasure, information and insight.  But that
> era is over; the Internet is now a very different
> place, and I'm much less at home there than
> I used to be.  Relentless march of progress, or
> merely the tragedy of the commons?  Someone else
> must judge...

I hate to think that newsgroups are dying, but just in case we're 
nearing the end let me thank the many experienced contributors to this 
group who have illuminated some of the subtleties of VHDL for me.

Chris Abele

On 12/31/2010 1:53 AM, Jonathan Bromley wrote:

> So, what's going on?  Do Verilog and VHDL
> practitioners no longer wish to share their
> experiences in a Net forum?  That sounds unlikely;
> so where have they gone?

Some are busy looking for work.
Logic synthesis may be going the way of the mechanical cash register.
Interesting in theory. http://192.220.96.166/

> The implied shift away from interest in the
> languages themselves is fascinating too.  Does
> everyone think that the languages are a done deal,
> and no-one needs to talk about them any more?  Are
> the published books and resources so good nowadays
> that no-one needs to check with a live human?
> Or has everyone gone to some place else that
> I'm insufficiently Net-savvy to know about?

Given the plunging cost of virtual servers,
other languages are waxing.

> I shall look back on the end of 2010 with some
> sadness.  I've been using various newsgroups for
> about fifteen years now, and they've given me
> much pleasure, information and insight.  But that
> era is over; the Internet is now a very different
> place, and I'm much less at home there than
> I used to be.  Relentless march of progress, or
> merely the tragedy of the commons?  Someone else
> must judge...

HDLs may be on the wane, but the internet is not the cause.

                    -- Mike Treseler

On Dec 31, 8:05=A0pm, Mike Treseler <mtrese...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/31/2010 1:53 AM, Jonathan Bromley wrote:
>
> > So, what's going on? =A0Do Verilog and VHDL
> > practitioners no longer wish to share their
> > experiences in a Net forum? =A0That sounds unlikely;
> > so where have they gone?
>
> Some are busy looking for work.
> Logic synthesis may be going the way of the mechanical cash register.
> Interesting in theory.http://192.220.96.166/
>
> > The implied shift away from interest in the
> > languages themselves is fascinating too. =A0Does
> > everyone think that the languages are a done deal,
> > and no-one needs to talk about them any more? =A0Are
> > the published books and resources so good nowadays
> > that no-one needs to check with a live human?
> > Or has everyone gone to some place else that
> > I'm insufficiently Net-savvy to know about?
>
> Given the plunging cost of virtual servers,
> other languages are waxing.
>
> > I shall look back on the end of 2010 with some
> > sadness. =A0I've been using various newsgroups for
> > about fifteen years now, and they've given me
> > much pleasure, information and insight. =A0But that
> > era is over; the Internet is now a very different
> > place, and I'm much less at home there than
> > I used to be. =A0Relentless march of progress, or
> > merely the tragedy of the commons? =A0Someone else
> > must judge...
>
> HDLs may be on the wane, but the internet is not the cause.
>
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 -- Mike Treseler

Odd post.  Do you have a basis for saying logic synthesis is on the
wane?  What is replacing it?

Rick

"Mike Treseler" <mtreseler@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:8o7cufF6ttU1@mid.individual.net...

> Logic synthesis may be going the way of the mechanical cash register.
> Interesting in theory.

Why do you say that?