You must have heard about BitTorrent up to now. It is one of the few modern P2P systems out there gaining popularity each and every day.
In order to find what is available for download through BitTorrent, you must know where the meta-files and servers are. There are several community sites that provide these links, and most if not all of this content is illegal (and free as in beer). Technically, exchanging links is not illegal, but let's not go there.
Probably the most well-known site in this category is Suprnova (there is no typo!). Instead of going to their site which is .org, I accidentally went to .com with the same name yesterday.
Well, surprise surprise, there is an almost perfect visual replica of Suprnova there, but packaged in a marketing speak, claiming that downloads are legal (!), and that it will cost you only $XX to start the download. It sort of implies that you must pay in order to get your downloads, but all known BitTorrent applications are free, some even come with the source code, and links to files shared are everywhere.
These scammers are apparently targeting those who heard about P2P and BitTorrent, but have no idea on how or why it works. The legal spin is smart too - many don't feel that good knowing that what they are downloading is illegal, and statements like this are soothing.
Sometimes I can't but admire the creativity of scams like this. If only these people would put their creative potential into something more useful for society... and not just their wallet.
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Believe it or not, I've had my Smartphone Orange SPV e200 for about a year now. It's not the old model, it runs Windows Mobile 2003 and behaves much like current US favorite Audiovox 5600 that Scoble fell in love with. Scott Guthrie got hooked in a few minutes too.
It's probably the only thing we in Europe got first. At the time I got my phone (December 2003) in US you could only buy older Motorola model that run Windows Mobile 2002.
Naturally, now that these phones are selling in US, there are providers with great monthly rates - AT&T offers unlimited data connectivity for $25! Compare this to (French) Orange which wants to charge me 20€ for 20MB of GPRS traffic or I could use 200min of Wi-Fi, if they had any widespread coverage that is (which they do not).
One of the most fascinating features of the phone came with the first update - ClearType! Yes, the same technology that makes text crystal clear and easy to read on your laptop screen is present here as well. It is understood that phone has Bluetooth that actually works, that it can also sync over the USB and that sync actually works very well (if you have Outlook). Not to mention that with a high capacity SD card, phone can be used as an audio player as it has quite a decent sound.
Here are some obligatory screenshots:
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This is one of the cool things you can do even when using GSM network only - Orange (my provider) portal found all cinemas less than an hour from where I am. It's also useful that I can see where they show VO ("version originale" in other words not dubbed in French). The phone is actually very smart and will use any kind of connectivity it finds - GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth or USB connection to the desktop. |
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The phone has full blown Internet Explorer, and here I am browsing to this very blog. This is a cached page, but at the time I was actually using my computer's Internet connection over Bluetooth ;) which is completely upside down from "normal" usage where you would use your phone as a modem and connect to the Internet from the computer, but it is possible and works like a charm. |
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Active sync wirelessly over Bluetooth - no problem. |
There are two must have applications for your Smartphone - equivalents of Windows Explorer and Task Manager. Both can be found here.
Note that Windows Mobile 2003 has .NET Compact Framework in ROM, and that Visual Studio .NET 2003 has great support for Smartphone development out of the box. You can even debug an application running on the phone from your desktop IDE completely transparently.
In the end, I enjoy looking at the faces of people nearby when my phone “rings”. Since you can use any wave or wma file, I decided to use the beginning of live version of AC/DC The Razor's Edge song, with some great guitar riffs :)
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Few days ago I heard on the radio that many serious language institutions are now debating whether France should loosen up a bit regarding their overprotective attitude toward the French language.
You see, here in France just like in most of the Europe, practically all content is dubbed to French - movies, TV series, cartoons. I won't go into details about reasons for that, but apparently someone finally noticed that this slows down foreign language adoption (you really have to be a genius to know that ;)).
So now they are waiting for the “old grey and wise heads” to tell them if they should maybe start with not dubbing English (mostly American) TV series for a start.
I guess they'd know the answer if they listened to some of my colleagues' English accent for a minute or two :)
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As everybody knows by now,
NewsGator made it's simplest online offering free as of yesterday.
I am using both Outlook add-in and Web version of NewsGator, including synchronization between the two. Up to yesterday, this was a paid service that cost around $6 a month for my subscription level (the lowest one).
Naturally, I wondered - what happens now? Can I somehow switch to the free version?
My previous experience was that it is hard to cancel a paid service. Companies are very reluctant to give up the subscription income (can't say I blame them) so they use various techniques to keep you onboard. Some try to give you better terms of service, various discounts, yet some simply play dumb trying to milk as much money as possible even if it means losing you as a customer.
Newsgator faired extremely well in this regard. When I went to my account maintenance, I immediately saw the option to switch to free version, and I was actually credited around $4 because I've used up only a third of my monthly subscription period.
Four dollars only - some would not even bother with the amount so low. Kudos to NewsGator!
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While I can't say how good X1 is I do agree with Sam about one thing - Google desktop search sucks.
What's even more funny is that I haven't even tried it yet - the damn thing refuses to install. It flat out does not want to install itself.
There is a reason of course - there is an incompatibility with my antivirus application NOD32. At least, that's what it claims. Reading a cryptic diagnostic message from the installer, I conclude that the problem is in NOD32's Internet monitoring module. This is a module that scans POP3 and HTTP traffic looking for virii.
Knowing that Google desktop search is browser based, I turn off the HTTP scanning module. No go - installer apparently does not know if HTTP or POP3 scanning is on, and it won't let me decide if it's safe to install the application.
I hate software that is overprotective. Why can't I decide if I want to install it or not?
I guess that's why it's still called Google desktop search beta - it's definitely not finished. Note that NOD32 is not the only application it's not compatible with - there's non-trivial list of incompatibles.
I can't recall the last time I saw such a big list. Whose idea was to have browser-only interface anyway? Or was it only an anti-MS move, along the lines of controversial Joel's article on API War? If so, that is ridiculous...
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I have seen this pattern before, but this news item has broken all records. Apparently, bazillion C# developers requested one particular feature [edit and continue] so when it was finally decided that it will make it for the next release of Visual Studio, we had... bazillion C# (or related) bloggers announcing the same.
Looks like many of us are so egocentric that we think other people read our and only our blog, so why not?
Well, because most of us are really insignificant. Especially the people on weblogs.asp.net do not seem to understand that many of them would have almost no readership if it weren't for the aggregate blog subscriptions. Thus there is no need to announce something that everyone already knows about.
I find it most amusing when some poor soul, pressured to put out something (”OMG, I haven't blogged for days/weeks, I must write about something”) decides to abuse this and just “releases” some generally known info. I have seen “annoucements” of Windows XP SP2 almost as much as above mentioned feature months after it was published.
I know, some will say that if
Scoble can do it, they can do it too. Now, while Scoble does have a lot of news-like content on his blog, he knows how to write. His posts are not simple repeats of the news. He almost always adds something interesting either as a comment of some of the participants, or his own opinion.
It's fine to mention something if you have something to add to it. If I wanted news, I'd turn to mainstream media - they have RSS feeds these days too.
As for me, I am unsubscribing from aggregate blogs. The noise/content ratio is basically infinite...
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Do you have a VCR or DVD player? Is it blinking “12:00”?
If yes, don't bother with computers. If you don't know how to set up the time on your player, computers are way too complicated for you.
Don't be offended. This does not mean you are lesser in any way - computers are simply not simple enough to use yet.
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My copy of Doom 3 finally arrived some time ago and I started playing. I will describe my experience in another post but now I want to rant about an annoying issue that is not really Doom 3 specific.
When you start the game and don't have CD 1 (out of three) inserted, the game refuses to start. This annoys me because I play the game on the laptop and I keep my DVD burner swapped out and my spare battery in practically all the time.
Now, if this “protection” was hard to break I'd agree it was useful for the author/distributor. However, all it takes is to make an ISO image and then mount that using a CDROM emulator that knows how to emulate popular CD protection schemes. Note that many sectors will be unreadable (that's the protection) while making the image but that's OK - the CDROM emulator will respond correctly to the application's inquiries about the presence of these fake bad sectors.
I do not feel bad about revealing this “trick” because there are several places where you can download so called no-CD crack - patched game executable that does not require a CD.
Conclusion? This kind of protection is useless and only servers one purpose - to annoy honest buyers. Those that download the game of P2P networks will use cracked exe and will not care anyway.
And one more thing - was it really necessary to publish the game on 3 CDs instead of a DVD? Other high-profile games published during this year all had either both CD and DVD issues or even only a DVD version.
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After several months of waiting for appropriate thematic issue, my article is finally out. Looks like November (2004) is the .NET month for
C++ User Journal - if I remember correctly last year's November issue was also dedicated to the .NET.
This will inevitably sound like (and be) blatant and shameless self-promotion :) but you should really check the article out.
It is not for the faint of heart though - I have implemented .NET-like asynchronous function calls in portable C++, heavily relying on the
boost library. Code uses and implements several template meta-programming (read: compile time) techniques, and isn't big - few hundred lines of code.
Working on the article has made me appreciate even more the work that's been put into the .NET Base Class Library.
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Run into an interesting post today at
Coding Horror. Jeff estimates that “
The huge body of intermediate users is so dominant that you can and should ignore both beginner and expert users”.
Before I continue, make sure you've read the whole post. Taken out of context, this might sound more unreasonable than I argue it is ;) The dilemma is actually very real - what is the effort/result ratio for each of the three dominant user groups (as defined by
Alan Cooper - beginner, intermediate, advanced)?
I wouldn't go as far as to say that you should ignore all but intermediate users, however dominant their number be.
Beginner users are future intermediates (most of them will be, anyway). If they don't start by using your product, they'll likely simply continue using what they got in the first place once they transition to intermediates.
Power users influence other people, write reviews and are generally quite vocal, especially when your product is not up to their standards. They are also more inclined to try beta/experimental versions. Some of them provide excellent input on the possible future features of the product while what most intermediate users want to do is just effectively use your product to get the job done.
So you need all of them. And the effort is huge, I agree; but I don't see that you have any choice.
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