CS 380 at Cal Poly Pomona

Barb Knox

2006-04-04 23:04:54 UTC

In article

Post by Rich Craig
This is a message posted for CS 380 students at Cal Poly Pomona.
NNTP---the Network News Transfer Protocol---is one of the earliest
application-layer protocols used in the Internet. It is a protocol for
distributing news messages
(essentially the same thing as e-mail messages)

That depends on what you consider to be the essential v. inessential
aspects. For example, it would be reasonable to consider a "push"
protocol to be essentially different from a "pull" one. Do you teach
your students that difference?

Post by Rich Craig
for posting on bulletin boards (a.k.a. news servers)

No. Usenet is not a BBS.

Post by Rich Craig
around planet Earth.
Although there are a -lot- of news messages posted in various newsgroups
(e.g. comp.edu),
use of NNTP is presumably waning

Presumed by whom? I expect this is just your WAG and not based on any
actual analysis (e.g. statistics).

Post by Rich Craig
since bulletin boards
can be very effectively built and more efficiently distributed to readers
using web services and avoiding NNTP altogether.

So what is your beef with NNTP? In what sense do you mean that web
services are "more efficient" than NNTP? Thanks to Google (and its
forerunners), Usenet has the advantage of being archived, as well as
being accessible via a web browser if one so chooses.

Post by Rich Craig
Did the application you used to read this message really use the NNTP
protocol or did you happen to find this message purely through the web? It
has most certainly been made available through the HTTP protocol (e.g. at
groups.google.com).

In general, I hope this post is not representative of the quality of
teaching at Pomona.