Tuesday, January 25, 2005

THis is funny, and at a real company's webiste, no less! Postal Experiments: "Postal Experiments"

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Hey look Eric "Screw You Hippee" V. has a blog now, too ENVy's journal

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

OK, so you went to CNN and they want you to pay for the real player so you can see the tsunami footage. No way am I even going to let that crappy software ruin my computer for free, much less pay for it. (helpful hint - don't install realplayer, Gator or AOL on your computer and you'll live a happier life).

Everyone who tries to host footage has their site swamped immediately. Even sites who wre planning quite a bit of traffic like http://www.asiantsunamivideos.com/ and even the venerable archive.org get slammed, slashdot style.

The only way to download the footage quickly, like today is to use a BitTorrent. Bittorrents are what peer to peer post Napster file transfer wishes it was. The short version is that say, if I was downloading a file from Bob, who had 100% of the file, and I had 50% dowloaded and you wanted to also download, your download would come off my partial file, rather than compete with me for access to Bob's file. Then, say Debbie, who had 70% downloaded previously restarts her torrent. Her computer would then start downloading from Bob and my download would switch to downloading from Debbie's. Well, actually that's an oversimplification but it's basically how it works.

Bit Torrents are not a particular software or company. They are a distributed file sharing protocol and all you need are an application and the seed for a download. I use TorrentStorm. There are a lot of places you can find "seeds" (actually they are called torrents, but this is kind of confusing in a way because then you get a torrent of bits) for torrents, and one of the most popular on the net is torrentreactor.net. The old torrent king was Suprnova.org

But back to the story. Do a google search for tsunami bittorrent and see what's posted. You'll see that sites that were hot yesterday like the Cheese and Crackers Blog are shut down today because of bandwidth consumption.

But you will find torrents and they will work, pretty much.

Tsunami Torrents

Bit Torrents are under attack from the MPAA because, well a lot of poeple use them to download movies ripped to divx. But it's like hunting down drug lords in a way. Knock one down and more spring up.

Anyway, be nice and leave your completed downloads of the tsunami videos up for a while so others can complete their downloads.

Monday, January 03, 2005

Lots of people still are not over the election The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Election 2004