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     The Newsgroups alt.binaries.??? are newsgroups dedicated to the transfer of data in the binary format. What I mean is, data can be represented in the form of text, which is what Newsgroups seem to be all about, but data can also be represented in the form of a program. A program is in binary form, it only makes sense to the computer. The alt.binaries.??? groups are dedicated to the transfer or mass distribution of programs, audio mp3s, pictures, etc... any information (data) that is not plain keyboard text. If you are familiar with email and sending and receiving attachments, think of alt.binaries as newsgroups which are geared toward file attachments, not discussions.

     UseNet was designed years ago, before the internet was popular with the common household, as a text based protocol. Transferring binary data with the NNTP (UseNet) protocol introduces some obstacles which make the overall process more involved than the other groups.

     With the alt.binaries groups, you need a newsreader other than Outlook Express. Forte's Agent is a common software client used in these groups. It recognizes the unique posting formats and makes the messages seem as though there were no special characteristics about these binary files. Keeping in mind that media (pictures, music, etc) and applications are larger than a simple message, download speeds will be slower than the text messages of the other groups.

     When a person posts a binary (or file), they most often break it into smaller pieces. If the entire file was posted as a whole, and something happened during transmission, the poster would have to re-post the entire file. Some of these files, such as CD-ROM images, are 640Mb and can take hours to upload. Breaking the files into pieces prevents the user from having to repost the entire file, he only has to repost the piece that became corrupted. These 'chunks' are ofter broken into 2Mb pieces for small applications and around 10-15Mb for CD-ROM images.

     Once you save these pieces of data, you must re-assemble them into their original format. This is done with an Archive application. The most popular is called RAR, have you heard of ZIP? RAR, in the newsgroups, is more popular than ZIP due to its ease of breaking and joining these 'chunks' of files (you have to use the format the poster used).

     If you download CD-ROM images, you will also have to have a CD burner and the proper software. When I say the proper software, you must have software that can read the CD-ROM image encoding used by the poster to write it to the CD-R. You would most often use software that uses CUE sheets and BIN images such as CDRWin and Fireburner. There is also the CCD image format created by CloneCD, if someone posts a CD-ROM image in this format you would have to use CloneCD to write the image to a CD-R. There is also the Nero software with its own special format. The most popular type is ISO 9660 or just ISO. Most all applications will write this image format. You may wonder why ISO isn't used every time, some CDs will not image properly with all formats, different methods work for different CD-ROMs.