These are articles I've saved from Usenet newsgroups (and a few from web forums). The vast majority of these articles were posted by people who have a well-deserved reputation for a high level of accuracy. The most extreme case is perhaps that of Henry Spencer, who makes errors so rarely that in the space newsgroups it is an event, involving the awarding of a (virtual) "I corrected Henry Spencer" T-shirt, when anyone else finds an error of his. Aside from that, the only endorsement I have of these articles is that looking at them casually, I didn't detect anything seriously wrong. Most of the time I haven't even looked at the rest of the thread that the articles came from, since I read Usenet chiefly by scanning for certain authors, and automatically discarding articles by everyone else. Even if corrections were posted a day later in the same forum, I may not have noticed them -- unless, of course, the corrections were acknowledged, as often happens for the people whose articles I read: most of them are sharp enough to realize when a correction is accurate, and gracious enough to admit it, which is part of what makes their articles worth reading. But none of them is all-knowing, and a correction that lies outside their expertise often passes un-commented-on. Thus anyone who wants to stake anything serious on the truth of any article here -- anyone who wants to rely on it for making money, choosing doctors, playing politics, or trying out the techniques described in it himself -- would do well to look at the rest of the thread of discussion, such as is currently maintained by Google; this can be done by clicking on the link in the header of the article, which attempts to lead to Google's copy, and then clicking on Google's links to get the whole thread. This is not to imply that the rest of the thread should be given as much credibility as the articles I've saved here. And if significant danger is involved, the serious reader should do more checking than that. And significant danger often is involved. "Everything that is perfectly safe is perfectly useless", and many of these articles are very far from being either.

Articles are not put up here immediately; only a year or three after first saving them do I look at them again, sort them out, and make index pages for them. (By that time I've forgotten enough of them to make them worth rereading -- and if I find they are not worth rereading, I discard them.) I've largely automated the making of index pages; the programs I've written for it (mostly in Perl) are available as a tar file (tools.tar). The making of the links to search for Google's copy of each article is also automated. If it stops working because Google changed their query syntax, please let me know.

Some changes have been made to these articles, but nothing that would destroy any possible meaning. When I reread them, it is with a text editor in an 80-column window, and I often automatically reformat paragraphs so that I can read them better. I also sometimes correct typos which really annoy me (and which are unambiguously typos), or delete large blocks of text quoted from another article which I also saved in the same file.

Though few of these articles have copyright notices, by law they still are copyrighted by their authors. (This is a new and bad feature of copyright law; most of the time, when people write things without a copyright notice, they don't care whether or not it is copied.) Since the spirit of this website is mostly the same as the spirit in which the original articles were posted -- an attempt to disseminate knowledge without profiting from it -- it has been assumed that this use is acceptable, though I will of course remove articles if their authors so request, and have, when possible, notified authors whose articles comprise a significant portion of this archive. The main exception to the nonprofit nature of this website is that some files have Google ads on them -- in particular, files containing articles by either Steve Harris or John De Armond, and containing articles by no other authors. Those ads should be text-only and should not blink; if either of these become untrue, please let me know. If you find their presence annoying even as is, there are two ways to disable them: either disable JavaScript in your browser, or set your ad-blocking software (e.g. the Adblock Plus plugin for Firefox) to block everything from the website "pagead2.googlesyndication.com". (You can also download entire directories of the website; there are no ads in the downloadable versions.) I do not monitor these ads in any way; caveat emptor.

The authors of these articles are not responsible for the headings and names under which I have filed their articles. When several authors' articles have been put together in a single file, the ordering of their names in the index means nothing; it is usually alphabetical order (but by first name -- an artifact of the index-making program).

Corrections and comments are welcome.

-- Norman Yarvin (yarvin@yarchive.net)

(If you wish to email me, please note that I use automated spam filtering (CRM114). However, mail whose subject includes the phrase "not spam" is treated as non-spam. That phrase must be in the "Subject:" line of the mail header.)