Mobile Tech Reviews

Filesharing is endemic throughout schools, universities and colleges. This is an inevitable by-product of putting lots of people together that may share tastes in entertainment. They’ll naturally want to swap their latest finds with their mates. Who would blame them? Filesharing comes naturally.

Services like Ares assist the filesharing community but it is the community that perpetuates the action. This means that stopping the filesharing requires a fundamental change in the people doing the sharing. So what have universities done? They have introduced a system where students are encouraged to use an alternative. The alternative’s name? Ruckus.

Where ruckus falls down is in the way it allows us to share our files: not at all. It is essentially none of the things that a service like Ares is: it doesn’t allow us to share music, to burn to CD, nor to upload to our MP3 players. Pointless? Probably. A replacement for filesharing? Definitely not.

There are many differences between simple – perhaps they could be called ‘traditional’ – http downloads and peer-to-peer distributed downloads (pirate torrents). Though both ultimately transfer files over a network, a BitTorrent download differs from a classic full-file HTTP request in several fundamental ways.

Firstly, the pirate torrents are downloaded in many small sections. These sections are obtained by the client making many small peer-to-peer requests over differing sockets. This means that many downloads can take place simultaneously and no one socket is being continually tied up. HTTP downloads grab the whole file on one socket.

Secondly, HTTP downloads in a sequential manner, not stopping until the whole file is completely downloaded. The segmented files present in torrents, on the other hand, are usually downloaded in an arbitrary manner meaning high availability for all users. The fact that peers do not have to have a full complement of sections of the pirate torrents’ files before it can be shared with others means that great efficiency can be gained in large groups of peers (’swarms’). Pirate Torrents is the most popular source for finding valid torrents.

Apple recently announced their latest attempt at adding to the current crop of iPhone ‎applications: the iPhone SDK.‎

The apps for iPhone download SDK is designed for programmers who want to work with the iPhone ‎downloads quickly and integrate it with existing iPhone download able applications. The SDK (software development ‎kit) facilitates this integration.‎
The excitement caused by the announcement (and this is only a beta run) has been ‎enormous, with top industry players making announcements straight afterwards: game ‎producers PopCap and Capcom have registered their intention to use the iPhone apps and SDK ‎to start producing popular games like Galaga and Peggle as soon a possible. Six ‎Apart’s CEO admitted that it’s already using the iPhone SDK and developing a “native ‎iPhone application for TypePad”. All exciting stuff.‎
What of the user reaction? The numbers speak for themselves. One hundred thousand ‎downloads and one million views of the launch video are testament to the excitement ‎the iPhone SDK has caused.‎

Fans of free music, listen up! Sony have joined the Dark Side. They have teamed with a company that allows free streaming of its entire back catalogue! Interested? You should be. This is a significant advance for the music industry as a whole and an absolute revolution for music downloads.

A one-time staunch opponent of anything that resembled a music download, Sony BMG have agreed to supply their entire back catalogue for users of Peter Gabriel’s We7 site.

A lot of us love music downloads and, frankly, it’s been getting more and more hairy with many of the big players in the music industry clamping down and suing the ‘perpetrators’ who engage in music downloads. Now Sony have sanctioned this aspect of the industry, and this is a landslide victory.

There is some concern that all this free music will affect the sales of legal music downloads, but clearly this isn’t Sony’s – not We7’s – concern.

I really didn’t have much interest in filesharing before I visited the Official Ares site. I wanted to download Ares and be off. It wasn’t quite that simple, though, and I was hooked as soon as I went.

The site is by far the best place to download Ares. There are no two ways about that. What makes the downloading experience so great here is that there is an honest and unbiased comparison of the different versions of Ares. If these guys don’t like some aspect of one version then they are not afraid to tell us. These reviews are essential in a market where there are so many differing versions of the essentially the same product, all differing slightly but significantly. If you’re new to the game – or even if you’re not – then visiting the site before you download Ares is a must.

While I waited to download Ares I found some other parts of the site to explore: the FAQs and the news section. I bookmarked the news area for future reference – interesting articles written in an engaging style – and read through the FAQs for any help I might need in setting up Ares. There’s a really helpful section on setting up Ares to work with Windows Vista which proved invaluable.

I love the idea of having a home based business, and I’m working towards the ideal of setting my own hours and working for myself. It’s hard work, but I am enjoying it and it is giving me a fantastic sense of self.

I really hate planning: I’m more of a doing person. Fortunately I’m pragmatic enough that I realize there is a lot of planning that goes into every business decision. Or at least there should be, if this decision is to be the right one.

The planning that has gone into my own business has been extensive and I’m really pleased that some of the work has been done for me in the form of a great home business review on almost all decent home business opportunities. The place to find the home business review for your business? CitizenCorps.com.

CitizenCorps.com isn’t just a place for a great home business review, of course, and there’s a wealth of other information on there that will undoubtedly help the budding entrepreneur.

Finding an honest home business review for your home business can mean the difference between success and failure at a very early stage in your home business’ lifespan. Measure twice, cut once, as the old adage goes.

I thought that I was a pretty knowledgeable Ares user. But when I had major trouble getting Ares connecting again after a brief down period I was a little stumped. Fortunately Google is my friend and I after a brief search around some Internet forums and notice boards I knew that I was not alone. This is one of the beauties of Ares: there’s always someone with the same problem (and invariably they’ve solved it, too).

Apparently the problems in getting Ares connecting properly started to emerge in late 2006. In December 2007 they reappeared and now they’re back with a vengeance.

The problem seems to be based around something called a ‘cnode’. These cnodes are the initial IP addresses that Ares uses when it starts up; it is these that really get Ares connecting to the outside world in the first place. Some of the older implementations of the Ares software – old, worn, classics like Ares Galaxy – were simply not repopulating this list of cnodes, so when you restarted you’d get a series of dud IP addresses to connect to.

Newer versions of Ares – superstars like Ares Vista and Ares Ultimate – just update this list of cnodes constantly and so you’ll have no trouble getting Ares connecting just as it should.

My recent trips to Patong have been fantastic, and I think I’ve finally found someone who I love – she certainly loves me and tells me all the time. I gave up trying to understand Patong girls some time ago, as it’s clear that they’re an enigma. I just take them at face value now and it’s clear that my girl loves me dearly. Never again will I make an attempt at trying to understand Patong girls again.

We met in a bar where she danced and also loved to play Connect 4. I have been trying to understand Patong girls and their love of such trivial games (and the reasons why they’re so damn good at them!!) but, again, I have given up. Naturally she beat me at the game and I was forced to shell out most of my vacation money to keep her in drinks. She deserved it, though.

I honestly thought I had died and gone to heaven when I came here. I came from the US where I was a below average looker to here, where the girls simply loved my looks! I thought I should be trying to understand Patong girls but, ultimately, I was happy enough not knowing.

The little drug Salvia Divinorum is legal under US Federal law. Individual states, though, have recently passed laws that see Salvia banned or restricted in some way. Salvia is legal across most other countries except Australia.

Salvia gained notoriety when the parents of a Delaware teen blamed the drug for tragic and untimely death of their son who committed suicide, seemingly while under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug.

Users say that using Salvia induces hallucinations which can make users feel like they are having outer body experiences or are merging with inanimate objects or even the floor. There have been no confirmed reports of Salvia being bad for you in the long or short term; which makes the laws seeing Salvia banned just more ludicrous.

Oklahoma and Kansas are the latest of 11 states to see Salvia banned, with another 20 or so considering the banning or limiting of the drug.

As noted above Salvia is still completely legal under US federal drug law and it is widely available over the Internet. The drug comes in its natural state or as a concentrated extract which is up to 60 times more potent than the natural form. We don’t want to see Salvia banned, but there is little we can do to fight against the country’s lawmakers.

The recent ascendancy of Salvia may perhaps be surprising to some of the lawmakers and politicians that are now trying to ban it. At least this is the impression that they try to give. The fact that Salvia has been around for many, many years tends to make a mockery of their ’surprise’.

Salvia’s first use recorded was, on paper, in 1939; this use was by the Mazatec Shamans that used Salvia to help their spiritual healing and in their spiritual exploration. Whether the plant (a member of the sage family no less) is useful for ’spiritual healing’ or not is open to debate. What is clear is that Salvia gives a really impressive hit. Correction: it gives a really impressive legal hit.

The legality of Salvia in the US (and in almost all other countries worldwide) is obviously a matter of grave concern to the few lawmakers and politicians that want to see it banned. It is, it seems, the legal, naturally occurring, hallucinogenic of Satan himself.

There are a number of ways to ‘use’ Salvia but by far the most potent is to smoke it. Salvia in both leaf form and in the form of concentrated ‘potentiated’ Salvia is easily available – quite legally – over the Internet and through some brick and mortar shops. Give it a go!