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from the hitchhiker's-guide-to-pink-floyd dept.
Thanks to somebody at the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup, I saw a link to 'never-before-seen' lost footage of Douglas Adams playing with Pink Floyd which was recently posted to YouTube. From the video description:
For Douglas Adams's 42nd birthday his friend David Gilmour gave him the opportunity to join Pink Floyd on stage during their 1994 tour live at Earls Court in London. Douglas played rhythm guitar on the tracks Eclipse and Brain Damage. While it was always known by Douglas' family that the concert had been filmed by someone in the audience, the tape of the event could never be found. That is, until now.
Douglas' brother James Thrift finally unearthed the tape in [Adams'] Islington home, and so, at last it is here for you'll to enjoy. The sound quality is as you might expect from a 20 year old handheld video recording of a live concert, but at the end of the day, who cares.
This is Douglas Adams and Pink Floyd, on stage, together. Enjoy.
Note: the camera-work is amatuer, but it does stop bouncing around and focus on Adams and Gilmour around 1:30
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @09:15AM
Newsgroups are no shit. Rather they are a truly distributed discussion system. That's why it will likely be around longer than any web forum in existence: One provider shutting down doesn't mean that anything is gone; it just means you'll have to find another provider. And everyone can run a server and be part of the network.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CRCulver on Friday April 10 2015, @11:09AM
Newsgroups are indeed shit if the community remaining in them is shit. I participated in several sci.* groups in the 1990s, and at the time many prominent people in the field were present, resulting in some rich conversation. Around the turn of the millennium, most of the community left for other forums (mailing lists run by universities or Yahoo!, and then eventually even Facebook groups became an acceptable place to discuss one's work with peers). When I've occasionally gone back to look at those Usenet groups, I see that essentially only the same 5 curmudgeons are left, who have only used the group for a longrunning, multi-year flame war. Those particular posters are elderly, and when they pass away, I don't think they will be replaced.
Of course I see the value of news servers as a technology. Its distributed nature is nice. Plus, even if Usenet has died by and large, I still enjoy reading many mailing lists through a Usenet interface thanks to Gmane [gmane.org], and RSS feeds through a Usenet interface thanks to Gwene [gwene.org]. But to pretend that Usenet is a healthy community (outside some heavily used binary groups) is disingenuous.