Tune your bittorrent

A few of my friends talking about tuning their bit torrent clients led me to google for it and this is what I ended up with. It's a good collection of useful information about bit torrenting in general and the most interesting discovery for me - if your downloads are slow no matter what you do, your ISP may be throttling you !!

Performancing !

Don't let the name fool you :) It's a firefox addon that features a blog manager and its coooool!

powered by performancing firefox

Send pics to 911 !

Here is an intersting news after a while :) NYC plans to accept cell phone pictures for 911 calls. Very good and timely decision I would say. It would give police a first hand look at the incident and since todays cellphones are built with quite good cameras, it may even be used as evidence in court :)

Open source everywhere

An interesting entry in the O'reilly radar made me look at campware . It's an Opensource media management system (a complete one) , from news casting to radio station management. What is intersting for me is the fact that there are well built opensource alternatives even for specialized tasks such as radio station management. Amazing !

When does law prohibit the use of free software ?

I can't believe it. France just prohibited the use of mplayer to play DVD's (Specifically the ones that have CSS)
For me this is a two sided blade. One one side it violates the right of the users (to use the free software that is out there). But at the same time it supports the notion of secure content. To tell the truth , I am not at all a fan of all the DRM and the rest. However I believe that certain works of art deserve to be paid (say movies) because good works of art just do not come out of the blue. As for movies It takes a considerable amount of money and effort to make one and these movie makers deserve something in return (they have to make a living out of it). There is no notion of advertisement supported content as far as movies are considered (Show advertisements along with the movie ??) so either you pay or you don't get to see the movie !

WebOS - Are you for real ???

I found this review about different Web Operationg Systems (or Web OS's) pretty interesting . I know I know , this is where you say "A Web what ??" :) A WebOS is simply a set of applications running in a web browser that together mimic, replace or largely supplement a desktop OS environment [Its in the article anyway]
Anyway I'm impressed that there are about 15 of them around already.

More archiving the web

I always thought that archiving the web is a ridiculous if not impossible task but the way back machine proved I was wrong ! Now they've got a significant grant to do more archiving and I can't imagine what they'll do now :)