On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:26:58 -0400, Casey Tompkins wrote
(in article ):

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:59:12 -0400, hielan' laddie
wrote:

A good feed costs as little as $8/month. A good newsreader costs under $30,
and may even be _free_. (Forte Agent is $30, Forte Free Agent and MTNW are
_free_.) And, news flash for those who depend on their ISPs for a
newsfeed...
thanks to that idiot in New York, many American ISPs are going to be
dropping
USENET feeds Real Soon Now. Y'all had best find a cheap feed which is
independent of your ISP, and be quick about it, or you may lose access to
USENET... period.

RoadRunner dropped EVERYTHING at the end of June. They no longer
provide ANY access to usenet. Verizon took out the entire
alt.hierarchy, and other major providers followed.

Thank you New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, you meddling,
nanny-state Nazi.

laddie: what's MTNW? Always ready to check out a new reader.


MTNW is MT-NewsWatcher. The 'MT' originally stood for 'Multi-Thread'. The
original Newswatcher was one of the first newsreaders for Macs, written by
John Norstad of Northwestern University. He allowed free use of the basic NW
code, so long as anything produced using it was free. Many other programmers
used the NW code to build their own newsreaders; the two best were Brian
Clarke's YA-NW (Yet Another Newswatcher) and Simon Fraser's MTNW. After a
long, involved, bout of politicing which largely revolved around Clarke's
asking for a 'donation' of $20 for YA-NW, YA-NW was withdrawn from
circulation, with Clarke departing the scene, swearing that he didn't have to
take this abuse... and, indeed, just plain swearing. About two years later
Clarke released Thoth, a shareware newsreader which he swore had no NW code
in it, but which looked awfully like YA-NW. He had another hissy-fit and
pulled that from circulation, too. The original Newswatcher, upgraded for OS
X and now called Newswatcher-X, and MTNW, both still free, are still
available. MTNW is the best free newsreader available for the Mac, and
possibly the best free newsreader available, period. It's been in continuous
development for a decade. A really good way to get yourself into serious
trouble would be to go to the comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy and say something bad
about MTNW.