Aggregation sites always seem to come at the top and rarely have even a single word in the page matching your search criteria. The less keywords the more rubbish so as I have suggested before using a detailed and lengthy search string to find what you are looking for. These sites work very hard to get you to click on them so they can get click statistics and better advertising revenue. They are a business model in their own right but not helpful for the casual surfer. If for example you were, as an experiment to put the word Torrent at the front of your search you will see such sites always come up first.
The next type is the individual sites that have triggered on your keyword. Try adding the word “review” in front of something you may be interested in buying. When I do this i want to read a review of the item before I think about buying one. The majority of the sites returned however are selling sites that have the ability to post a review of the item where there are typically none entered. Sales sites also work very hard to be in the top returns for a search. This does not help you if you are actually looking for a review and you will often need to go to the next page to find one, or go to Amazon. That being said there are different kinds of reviews e.g. professional, consumer, company (really just info on the product) and they can be biased, unbiased, positive, negative, neutral and so on. It is best to check out a few of them. Reviews of Apple products by Appleheads for example are always positive no matter what flaws the product may have. There are similar people for other brands.
Wiki information is never any good if it is about a current individual because opinions vary from individual to individual and the latest edit may have nothing to do with reality or facts. The problem with a product like Wikipedia is that the things you read can appear to be accurate but unless they have been verified they could be absolute rubbish. The mass media are masters of such information e.g. the reporting on the Japanese nuclear plants and the supposed critical radiation stories. Unverified information can be quite misleading.
Opinions are like armpits everyone has at least two and in general they tend to stink. With very few exceptions all opinions in say Australia on TV have varying degrees of Left leaning slants. That being said there are also plenty of Post Modernist opinions, rumors, made up stuff, I heard it from a friend stuff and what I like to call fluffy stuff, i.e. an opinion based on absolutely no facts but that sound really convincing. The latter are typically found on the morning shows. Opinions are fine when moderated and balanced by other opinions from the other side of the issue but this is so rare in Australia now. It is also why I often point out that at least the US has Fox and cable TV to provide some kind of alternative opinions.
In the final category is what I think of as balanced and also scientific sites. An example of this would be www.climatedepot.com or www.wattsupwiththat.com. These sites have links to alternative views, scientific data feeds, peer reviewed papers, data sets and so on that can be used to independently check out information and opinions. They are sometimes hard to find but I wish they listed more often at the top of search results. Sadly many people get their data and even opinions from those sites that have dubious value.
Let’s say you could be connected to a 100mbps service today. What could you actually connect to and get support from a Web site for such a speed? Depending on where you live the answer is “not much.” On my ADSL 2+ service I have seen speeds of over 650kbps, that is bytes not bits, on occasion but this is quite rare. Since I know the line will support it the question is, why don’t other things come down quickly? The answer is simple, the supplying sites don’t provide those kinds of speeds or don’t have the necessary bandwidth assigned, especially if people are sharing the site.
So to date the only two places I have seen very fast download speeds are Microsoft and using a BitTorrent to download a large file. The former has good servers and a lot of bandwidth. The latter works because hundreds of sites are providing different pieces so the aggregate is quite fast.
Industry News
I admit that since they changed the CPU numbering scheme I have not been paying too much attention to chips in general. Toshiba have moved from 32nm flash chips down to 24nm SmartNAND with on chip error correction. This means faster read./write speeds in upcoming flash devices but they are not giving figures out yet. Chips will range from 4GB to 64GB which means more storage capacity in consumer devices and they are talking single and multi-layered devices in the near future. Mass production will start in Q2/Q3 this year. Intel and Micron are already using 25nm technology.
Opera now has a free Web based e-mail service along the lines of Yahoo and Google. The service is in beta and you will need a My Opera account to use it. The service is based on the Australian FastMail.FM product that Opera bought last year. The service has been mostly rewritten in AJAX and looks a little like Gmail in its approach as the messages are grouped by conversations. It has been spam tested and is a somewhat bare bones service for the moment.
In line with what I mentioned earlier BitTorrent is trying to organise good versus ‘evil’ downloaders and file sharers. Most people think of torrents and only have bad thoughts. As pointed out earlier the technology can also be used to speed up regular downloads. In general BitTorrent users occupy the 18-34 age space. BitTorrent has been working with content providers to leverage the existing users as they put it “for content discoverability, distribution and monetisation.”
There has been a test of the concept with the Torrent only Pioneer One TV show. It generated 2 million downloads, US$55,000 in audience donations and $30,000 in sponsorship from Verisign. Next month there will be a new project called The Tunnel that Paramount has an interest in along with members of the general community. Sacnturary was another one that started on the Net before moving to regular TV production.
BitTorrent is also apparently working with Facebook on something but that is still hush-hush. Some have speculated that it involves streaming downloads of some kind. YouTube started out as a pirate streaming concept before Google grabbed it. If the content is widely disbursed then the streaming can be very fast, cost almost nothing and have very few delays.
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