Soft District

Hehehehe...one of my favorite topics, once again! No, no, it has nothing to do with hardware, Linux, video compression or music. Wait! I think it has, in the end. After all, it's not the tool that really matters, it's how you use it, don't you think? No, I am not talking about THAT tool! Now wash away your dirty thoughts and let's talk about P2P, one of the reasons for starting modern witch hunts on a regular basis, even when there are no real "witches" around...

Yesterday, Northwestern University decided to drop communist methods like filtering, monitoring, bandwidth caps, and others (I think the RIAA and MPAA would even enjoy shooting P2P users on stadiums, as long as they get their money...), simply switching to a battle with flowers instead of guns! Well, not quite flowers, but when talking about copyright infringement, an email warning is just like a flower facing a gun - considering we have a really bad P2P user, of course.

Developed at the University of Michigan, Be Aware You're Uploading (BAYU) really had some success in reducing P2P usage and DMCA takedown notices, as ArsTechnica reports. This University turned the entire program into open source, including the documentation, so now everyone could do it. The idea is very simple - packets inside the network are scanned, and the system generates automatically an email notice to the one uploading data through a P2P connection. That's it!

Unfortunately, these emails are not answering questions like "Is it OK to download promo records?" or "Is LimeWire Illegal?," but I think I like this idea. After all, we're talking about people who are willing to learn about a lot of stuff, including copyright infringement...

At last, it should be noted that a lot of users have P2P programs installed, but some of them simply don't understand the fact they may be sharing copyrighted content located on their computers, like the iTunes library, for example. Knowledge is power, that's the conclusion, my friends, but feel free to add your own thoughts below.

Apart from antiviruses, most fake programs I have seen so far are related to video conversion. What is a fake program? Well, think about a program that you pay for, and you end up with an empty interface that does...absolutely nothing! Anyway, I am not going to talk about that now, because I have to tell you about a free video converter, or maybe more than just one. More is better, right? OK, ready or not, here we go...

For most users, until starting to have DVD burning problems, the most annoying problem is that of the video conversion. Why? Well, think about a new camcorder or a new digital camera with decent movie making capabilities - what do they usually have in common? I am not talking about a certain brand, the maker of these devices doesn't really matter.

From my own experience, and from what I heard from my friends and other people I talked to, virtually all digital cameras and camcorders come with video conversion software that can be described by a single, meaningful word: disaster
(you can also think about the "F word," it describes perfectly one of the first words you'll say out loud after using those conversion programs for only a few minutes).

If you want to know more about this kind of "free video converter," then let me add two more things - these programs always sacrifice power to be as user friendly as possible, and the range of video formats supported is usually extremely limited.

About two weeks ago, when we talked about free DVD player downloads, I told you about one of those programs that saved the day for me a few times, VLC. Just read that article, get the program, and once you start to find your way through its not-so-friendly interface, you'll surely be rewarded by its very good video conversion capabilities, but now...

...let me tell you a few words about today's free video converter, namely VirtualDub, described by its author as "a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP)."

Unfortunately, while this software comes with extended audio and video processing filters, plugins and options, its main target is to work with AVI files, and while it can open MPEG files and convert them to AVI as you wish, it doesn't work properly with other formats popular with digital cameras and camcorders, like MOV, for example. VirtualDub has support for third party plugins, so it can be pushed pretty far, depending on what kind of plugins you can find for your tasks.

These being said, I think I'll leave the next free video converter for another time... What do you think? After all, you have a lot to work with today, especially if you missed grabbing a decent free video player so far!

You know what's three times better than the iPhone? No, it's not the Samsung Instinct, and not even some revolutionary James Bond prototype from CIA or FBI! Obviously, if I would write about such a thing, I would be stone cold a few minutes after pressing the "Submit" button, and since we're not talking about phone prototypes, I think we should move on and play with the sentence above - you know what's seven times faster than the Firefox 3 browser?

...still nothing? Really? Now, that's a good question, don't you think? No matter how strange this may seem, Firefox 3.1 is seven times as fast as its predecessor. Don't ask me how's that possible, because I am fully aware of the fact this is extremely impressive, and also pretty hard to believe. If you think this is a rumor, then I also have to tell you this is not true, because this info comes straight from Mike Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla.
You can see his post about this topic on the official Mozilla Blog - it's really worth your time, trust me!

According to John Resig, a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation, "A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla's JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a technique, called trace trees (PDF), which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey. A major goal of the project has been to set JavaScript up to compete with natively-compiled code, rather than simply against other interpreters. This means that we're starting to see speeds that are completely out of this league when it comes to performance." Pretty cool, huh?

At last, if you're one of those courageous ones into trying Alpha-stage software, here's something for you - the faster Firefox 3 known as Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 can be downloaded already for the Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. Have fun with it(or maybe "crashing it")!

Oh, here's one more - I was just about to skip giving you the answer to the initial question - obviously, three iPhones are three times as good as one iPhone...or three times as bad, depends if you're looking at it on the bright side, or not.