The best latest torrent soruce - Releaselog

This is a website that is my homepage now and that alone aught to speak a ton about it. You know all that time you spend in searching for a good torrent for a new releases in the scene, now you don't have to wait for the seed to catch up so that you be sure that you have found an authentic torrent.

Now, Just read the Releaselog!

It caters to a variety of content but mainly the very newest in PC games (hear! hear!) , Tv shows and all types of movies the scene releases. You will find Dvdrip, telesync, Cam, HD, R5, Old movies and what not. From what i have seen this site does a superb job of keeping up with the scene, which can be very daunting. Within minutes of a release you will find a informative and concise article consisting of an introduction, beautiful images, releasing group info, System requirements, features and a lot more about the torrent. All the best groups like Fairlight, Hatred, Reloaded and all the other big boys can be found mentioned here.

You think that is a lot? But wait there is more! Oh yes.

You will also find hundreds of very properly moderated comments with each post and categories for Technology news, music and Applications with all the love of a scene lover glowing out from every bit of the site. I know what you are gonna say. Where the hell has it been till now if not as your homepage!!!

Go get em all Fellas!

Secrets Disclosure- Microsoft Surface (Codename Milan)

Though, many of you must have heard about this newest MS "Top-Secret" project but for those who are still in oblivion I present this and of course who can keep such a cool product off their blogs.Our beloved (and sometimes hated) software giant has built a new touch screen computer. Something that utilizes the latest Multi-Input Surfaces. The newest brainchild, codenamed Milan, can definitely be called a completely new platform of computing. This product essentially puts into form the millions of concepts displayed in so many futuristic movies. Milan features a IR sensor-net under the surface to automatically detect and connect with any object placed on the surface like a digital camera, Bluetooth phone or a simple cup of' Jo.

Microsoft surface will be available for consumers as soon as the end of 2007, at a very steep price of $10,000, in a coffee table shape. More shapes are being targets at various users like a board room projection, Cafe table with ordering, Showroom counter, Kitchen helper, Education and creativity table, Real-Time project wall-size screens and many more.


News about Milan have been flooding the internet fiber-optics since around 25th May 2007. Since then a multitude of websites have served this eye-candy and surely caused a few sugar level dis-balances.

Must View:

• Highly Recommended : Popular Mechanics Video and the related article
  
• Microsoft Surface website
• Gizmodo - Project Milan (all images in this article credited to gizmobo)
• Google Search 'Microsoft Surface' and 'Microsoft Milan'
• Wikipedia on MS Surface
  

What was New in .Net 2.0

Version 3.0 is the latest release of dot.net and a much anticipated one from both me and the community. I am going to talk about the major changes in dot.net 3.0 soon. But, first I think it would be prudent to look over this article to see the major changes in dot.net 2.0 over the earlier 1.1.

What was New in .Net 2.0

1. SQL server integration - This was a big change, dot.net 2.0 brought with it a CLR version of SQL server. Thus meaning that the three products .Net Framework 2.0, Visual studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were released in unison. This gave all the .NET compliant programming languages unprecedented direct access thru-code to database features like building Stored procedures, triggers and seamless use of DB data types. The new addition of the free SQL server express 2005 replaced the severely limited MSDE.

2. 64-Bit Support - It was a big leap forward when systems changed from 16-Bit to 32-Bit and now to 64-Bit. You can now build your applications in 64-Bit with just a simple options change in the Advanced Build page found under Application Properties. Microsoft worked hard to make sure that anything you built in the 32-bit world would work transparently in the 64-bit one. Moving to 64-Bit gives us some powerful addition like, most important of all, larger address space and larger primitive types. For the earthly folk 2^32 would give 4,294,976,296, while 2^64 will give you the humongous 18,446,744,709,551,616. Probably enough to could all the sand particles on all the beaches or something.

3. Generics - Any modern programmer worth his salt would tell you that generics are the stem cells of programming. With version 2.0 came the support for generics, a powerfull and efficient feature, enabling strongly typed collections. Generics can be applied to Stack, Dictionary, sortedDictionary, List, Queue, user classes, delegates, methods and many more.

4. Anonymous methods - This is a fairly known concept but was absent before .NET 2.0. It is a method to declare fictions that have no names and use them as delegates.

5. Nullable Types - Nullable types were built into the .Net framework 2.0 giving us the valuable feature of creating variables, thru generics, that can have Null values assigned to them. This made interaction with databases values that are null easier too.

6. Iterators - Thru the IEnumerable interface under the System.Collections namespace we can now use foreach on our own custom types and classes.

7. Partial classes - This is a new feature in .Net 2.0 and extensively inter-weaved with languages like C#, VB.Net, Asp.Net. This feature allows us to use the partial keyword before class declarations so that classes can span over multiple files and locations. Some uses are in the Visual studio designer to store all the initialization and property values of your project in a separate file and to implement code behind feature in ASP.Net.

Overall, these are pretty good features and advance .NET up many levels. We will soon see what in new in .NET 3.0 in comparison.

Want ebooks? Get them at ebookshare.net

This is a amazing website for ebook lovers. The huge collection and categories is amazing. You will find all kinds of magazines, novels or study books. A perfect way to preview a ebook version before you put in your hard earned money in a paperback one.

The website is blog oriented design and presents an article each specifing every kind of detail you would want on a ebook or a ezine. ISBN numbers, ripping group, size, format, publisher and writer info, short description, link to publisher's site.. its all there.

The book download itself is via P2P torrent network thus providing good speeds and feedback. As the books get older and less popular they are phased out from the community. So, you might want to check the website periodically too grab what you like early on and before the sharing stops.

Some ebooks that are available are - Reader's Digest, You Magazine, The Ticket, Wrox Professional C# with .Net 3.0, Harry potter 7, Science, PC World, Computer power user... Basically everything you would ever want.

Here are the categories, at the time of writing this article, available at ebookshare (click to visit)-

• Business and Investing
• Certification Central
• Database
• Game
• Graphic Design
• Hardware
• Internet
• Microsoft
• Networking
• Operating System
• Other
• Professional and Technical
• Programming
• Software
• Web Development
• Magazine

Overall, you wouldn't want to miss such an important website. Also, you will need a torrent client to download the books, so get utorrent here. For information on torrent network see the wiki.

Happy Reading.

- Coming soon: A review of various ebook readers for all formats and reading habits -

Who really created "Windows"

Contrary to popular belief, the omnipresent Windows operating system does not owe its existence to Bill Gates, Paul Allen or the development team at Microsoft.

The man responsible for giving us Windows was actually a marketing expert called Rowland Hanson. Work on the operating system had started after Gates had seen a demo of VisiCorp’s software called VisiOn, which featured a graphical user interface (GUI), at Comdex, in 1982, and had decided that Microsoft would also come out with a GUIbased operating system. Gates and
the development team referred to it as ‘Interface Manager’ and the name stuck, at least until Hanson was hired to develop a marketing campaign for the product. He was unimpressed by the rather geekish ‘Interface Manager’ and proposed that the product be named ‘Windows’, as the user saw a number of ‘windows’ on the screen that contained the tools and files they needed to work with.

And the rest, as they love to say, is history. Had it not been for Hanson, ‘IM’ would have been an abbreviation for an operating system rather than for instant messaging.

btw this a documented and acknowledged fact...

Also see History of Microsoft Windows at Answers.com

adapted from: anandk

Einstein's letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt

This is an amazing find. I was reading The Andromeda Strain, a strong techno-thriller, written by Michael Crichton in 1969, and I came across a fact in it about a letter to President Roosevelt written by Albert Einstein on August 2nd 1939, just a month before World War II began. I felt a sudden urge to investigate and was amazed at what Google and Wikipedia said, which also confirmed it to be correct. The content of the two page letter is amazing, you can view high-res scans of the letter from

Quote from dannen.com -

In the summer of 1939, six months after the discovery of uranium fission, American newspapers and magazines openly discussed the prospect of atomic energy. However, most American physicists doubted that atomic energy or atomic bombs were realistic possibilities. No official U.S. atomic energy project existed. Leo Szilard was profoundly disturbed by the lack of American action. If atomic bombs were possible, as he believed they were, Nazi Germany might gain an unbeatable lead in developing them. It was especially troubling that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium ore from occupied Czechoslovakia. Unable to find official support, and unable to convince Enrico Fermi of the need to continue experiments, Szilard turned to his old friend Albert Einstein...[Continue the Story]

After going thru some links and lots of text I conclude that, Albert Einstein did not directly participate in the invention of the atomic bomb or World War II, but he was inadvertently instrumental in facilitating, respectively, the development and disintegration of both. This letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt led to the Manhattan Engineering District, also known as "The Manhattan Project". This is where early US nuclear development happened, and the nuclear bombs code-named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" were constructed and dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and August 9, respectively. The Manhattan Project, a national crash program racing to develop atomic weapons before Nazi Germany, was the seed that grew into the modern national laboratory system, which today includes many non-weapons-research laboratories, such as Argonne (a U.S. D.O.E RnD Lab).

Worth a look -

Aerial photo of the Argonne National Laboratory

Concept design of "Little Boy"

Concept design of "Fat Man"

Albert Einstein at the U.S. Library of Congress

Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum

The Andromeda Strain at Amazon

The Andromeda Strain movie adaptation (1971) at IMDB

Smart Search tip for FireFox users

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Scientists Create Molecule-Size Keypad Lock

Israeli scientists have come up with the ultimate in small-scale security:, a molecule that can act as an electronic keypad lock like the ones in home security. This process give new heights to small scale safety measures and has the potential of providing unbreakable security. The molecule lock, resembling an iron binding compound secreted by special bacteria, ‘unlocks’ when exposed to a smart combination of two chemicals and UV Light, giving out florescence as a signal. The molecule consists of pyrene and fluorescein linked by an iron-binding segment. The molecule lights up green or blue in response to the correct passwords and fluoresces dimly if the same inputs are introduced in a different order(wrong password). Moreover, the molecule would lock-up upon failed retries and block any further attempts at breaking it.

As acid, base, and irradiating UV light are introduced at three minute intervals, the molecule jumps between various charged states. The result, report researchers at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, is that the sequence ‘acid-base-light’ makes the molecule fluoresce green, while a separate input ‘acid-light’ gives a blue fluorescence. Any other sequence input gives dim light or none at all. This behaviour, says co-author Abraham Shanzer, mimics an electronic keypad lock. The device lights up only when the correct chemical ‘passwords’ are introduced.

Basic Molecule Structure

"By harnessing the principles of molecular Boolean logic, we have designed a molecular device that mimics the operation of an electronic keypad, a common security circuit used for numerous applications in which access to an object or data is to be restricted to a limited number of persons," the researchers state. "The development of a molecular-scale keypad lock is a particularly attractive goal as it represents a new approach to protecting information at the molecular scale."

How the molecular keypad lock works

A significant application to this lock might be to recognize when certain sequences of chemicals are released in the body—for instance, after exposure to Sarin or another deadly chemical including various biological weapons and allow safeguard triggers.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Chemical Society, Science Daily, Live Science and Scientific American.

Citing Wikipedia? Read this first…

Are you a wiki fan? Do you have the compulsive nature of automatically going for wikipidia?org when u want to know about anything? Are you amused by the top bunks that wiki occupies in Google search results? If yes then u need to understand the dual nature of information presented on wikipedia.

Lets first understand how Wikipedia get all that information? It is an open community encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone? Other then the rules of well formed structure, it does not tell us what not to write and how to define things. So it becomes very possible that a user writes or edits a topic on which he is not an expert or the user thinks that he has the correct information. Since there is no authority to validate that information, it becomes a very real possibility for the published information to be incorrect. But from the view of a user of that information, the popularity and enormity of the wiki foundation makes it easy to believe that the contained information is correct. Thus, the information looses credibility and becomes contradictory with the concept of citation. For a primer here are a few excerpts for the web-

History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
By NOAM COHEN Published in New York Times, February 21, 2007

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department at Middlebury College had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

Referencing Wikipedia? Use Caution
By Kevin Garcia (The Brownsville Herald ) January 24, 2007

To many, Wikipedia is a godsend. It's a way to find information on any topic quickly and easily. What some fail to realize, however, is that nothing on the Web site can be taken at face value. Anyone, from age 8 to 80, from a high school dropout to a rogue scholar, can edit the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia can actually be a good source of information. It can lead people to any number of ideas that they might never have considered. That's the beauty of mass media. What Wikipedia is not, however, is a credible source.

When it comes to Computer Science, don't reference Wikipedia
by Christopher Diggins written July 31, 2005

This is not the first time a Wikipedia computer-science definition has made me want to pull my hair out. In the end I don't care, as long as people don't make the mistake of taking Wikipedia definitions seriously. Just remember that in Wikipedia the definitions are written by random people, and edited by random people, not experts.

• It is not all bad, wiki is a very good source for information about any topic. But considering it’s use as a credible source of information is not good. There are many more such articles that advice people not to use Wikipedia for citation and every user should try and find a credible source for information for such purposed.

A take on C++ by its creator Bjarne Stroustrup

Wow, I mean simply wow. Today a friend(Amardeep) IMed me a link to a leaked interview(taken on 1st Jan 1998 and never published), supposedly with Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of then C++ programming language. The language that changed the world of programming and software engineers. When I was in college I was attracted to the world of computers and c++ gave me the way to actually contribute to the IT world. It created the base for me to understand how a computer works and how I can customize it to my liking.

In this interview with Stroustrup, the reporter thought he would get a retrospective view of the revolutionary programming language Stroustrup had created but instead by the end of the interview he was boggled. Stroustrup, unfortunately, had a very different take on his effort and went on to say that c++ was actually the result of a scheme he conjured up one day because he thought that the present programming languages were actually demeaning the importance of programmers by being too easy to learn!

Stroustrup thought that in the beginning programmers were royalty and had huge salaries but since earlier programming languages were easy enough to be learned by anyone, it resulted in too many programmers thus dropping the status of programmers as a 'demi-god'. So, he went on to create a programming language that was so insanely complex that most people would not be able to learn it and the few who did would stay high up in the software industry food chain.

To better explain his point of view here are a few quotes by Stroustrup from the interview-

"Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty."

"Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity."

"Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would."

"It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient."

Later he goes on explaining the 'illogical and un-important' features like operator overloading, executable size, typedefs, inheritance etc. Oh and did i say what he felt about C++ when he finished working on it he said, "Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree? But when the book royalties started to come in... well, you get the picture."

To tell u the truth I really hated this kind of response from Stroustrup, who was one of my computing childhood heroes। How often has it been said that never come face to face with your childhood hero if you want them to say an inspiration। In the end I would like to believe that this interview is not true but a search on Google says otherwise and that you should not believe everything you read.

See full interview here or here.

(Vista & XP)Share saved games between multiple OS

Introduction

With the release of vista I was excited and noticed that the era of multiple operating systems had returned। Just as when XP was released Computer enthusiasts had both 98 and XP installed. Similarly since the launch of Vista a lot of people now have vista as well as XP installed.

Problem

With multiple OSes we definitely have problems like installing software twice. But a lot of Software and applications can be run from the same location. For example games. Say u were playing NFS MW in XP. You install vista and want to play MW, You have two options, ONE, do the tiresome job of either copying the saved games from the XP drive to the vista drive(and then back if u want to play from XP again) or TWO, restart the system to XP. It is very inconvenient.

Solution

The best solution i came across is to create virtual folders(aka Hard links, Special Folders. not Virtual folders feature in Vista). What we want to do is have the actual save game files in one location, like XP, and create a virtual folder linking it to them from vista.

Assumptions

1. XP installed in I:\Windows
2. Vista installed in C:\Windows
3. Games installed in D:\ (eg "e:\NFS Most wanted") (can be anywhere)
4. MW creates saves in XP "I:\Documents and Settings\%username%\my documents\NFS Most Wanted"
5. Req. virtual folder in vista at(MW creates saves here in vista) "C:\users\%username%\documents\NFS Most Wanted"
6. Substitute drive letters, directory and username to ur system specific
7. BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE MOVING FORWARD!

There are many options to do this like-

• mapping a folder to a drive then mapping that drive to another folder
• using DOS Commands like SUBST and FSUTIL
• Shell extensions(playing with objectID, BirthvolumeID etc and desktop।ini scripts)
• Windows Resource kit utility - linkd.exe

These options are messy, unless u r a 5 year veteran Linux admin। After a lot of very hard searching I found the utility called 'Winhardlink'. It does all the dirty work for You. You just have to specify the source directory/file and the target directory/file.

About WinHardLink - Homepage - Direct Download
Software License(free) - Size(563 KB (576,687 bytes))

Advantages of WinHardLink

• Works on vista
• Created Hard links work across OSes i.e. if u create it in vista it will automatically be available as a normal folder in the other OS even if this utility is not installed
• XP cannot differentiate between links and actual folders
• Vista shows a shortcut icon on the hard link but reports as a folder in properties

How-to (example using NFS MW and above assumptions)

1. Download and install WinHardLink in one OS(say vista)
2. Launch from start menu
3. Select Hard Link>New Virtual Folder. a windows will pop up
4. Click "..." against the 'Alias dir' to select the destination to "C:\users\%username%\documents\NFS Most Wanted" (You may have to create a new folder 'NFS Most wanted)
5. Click "..." against the 'Source dir' to select the location of the saved game to "I:\Documents and Settings\%username%\my documents\NFS Most Wanted"
6. Click OK.You are done.
7. Make sure the checkbox is checked along the folder in the main window of WinHardLink।

Testing

1. Browse to see that the folder exists
2. Create a new text file in either folder and put some text in it
3. Check the other folder for its existence
4. Cross check by editing both files and re opening from the other folder
5. They should behave as normal file folders
6. Start the game and see that the profile is loaded
7. Now u can play MW from any os without worrying about multiple सवेस

More Suggested uses

• consolidation of saved games। i.e. u can move the all save games to a central location like "d:\saves\[game-name]" and create virtual folders in both OSes where the games expect the saved games to be. Now u can format/reinstall etc without disturbing saves.
• When one drive is full u can move any folder to another location and just create a hard link for it in its place (see moving the whole MS office folder at the homepage above)
• Use in conjunction with 'saved searches (aka virtual folders)' feature of Vista to have the ultimate control over data accessibility

Tested with- NFS MW, NFS Carbon(but there is some compatibility problem in vista in loading saves created in XP), Just Cause, Battlefield 2 & 2142, Fifa 07, PES6, GTA SA, MS Flight Simulator X, Visual Studio Projects, Portable apps launch icons, NOT tested with network folders.

Cheers. If you like this solution then please leave a comment.

Make DVD iso from CD isos of Fedora Core

Allright people.. lots of ya all seem to be interested in this.

it is quite simple. Since things have gone multi-giga-byte now a days, handeling one DVD is way easier then poppin n jiggling six CDs one after the other.

Ok here are the steps.

What u need:
1. The CD isos of Fedora core ofcourse(the 1st five only, as sixth is rescue)
2. Magic ISO to edit images. or any other free alternative
3. An editor.
4. A Dvd Burner.
5. Daemon tools(makes life easier and lessens the free space req.)
6. 4 Gb free HDD space(+ the space the CD isos are taking up)

HowTo:
1. Copy the CD1 to a temp folder.(there should be 4 GB space on this drive)
2. Open Magic ISO and browse for the file.
3. From the root of the image see for a file named ".diskinfo"
4. Right click and extract on desktop.
5. Open a command promp and type "edit"(notepad doest work with this nicely, u can use textpad too)

6. Browse to the ".diskinfo" file. it will look like this:
1142397842.393345
Fedora Core
x86_64
1
Fedora/base
Fedora/RPMS
Fedora/pixmaps

7. Edit the file to look like this, basically append ",2,3,4,5" after "1" in line 4.
1142397842.393345
Fedora Core
x86_64
1,2,3,4,5
Fedora/base
Fedora/RPMS
Fedora/pixmaps

8. Save the file.

9. Drag and drop it to the open iso in Magiciso.

10. Right click on daemon tools in the taskbar and goto virtual CD/DVD-ROM>set no of deviced>4 Drives.

11. After the drives have been created left click on daemon tools again and select "Device 0" and Browse to the 2nd CD image to mount it.

12. Repeat the above step for Cds 3 thru 5. (and select device 1 thru 3 respectively). You should have cds 2 thru 5 loaded in virtual drives. check thru My computer.

13. Next, for each drive(mounted image) go to Drive:\Fedora\RPMS and select and drag and drop all files onto the magic iso window under the folder Fedora\RPMS.(alternatively add then thru magic iso, whatever, just add all). You will be asked to over write a file "TRANS.TBL" each time u drag and drop. just select yes(for explanation see page 3 of this thread).

14. After you have added all rpm files. select File>save under magiciso. rename the file to DVD from CD.

15. You are all done. Now Burn and enjoy!!!


Clean UP:
1. Left click on deamon tools and select unmount all.
2. Right click deamon tools and goto virtual CD/DVD-ROM>set no of deviced>1 Drives
3. Delete the CD isos if u want to free up space(1st check the DVD Image to be sure)
4. Delete ".diskinfo" from desktop

SHORTCOMING: This media will NOT pass the media check. so do no test it. If u are paranoid'nf then load a virtual machine and emulate the linux setup and "media-check" the individual cd isos there. To make it pass the media check u need to regenerate the checksums. which is beyond the scope here and worthless for home users. others google.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT: src2206 and aditya.shevade were interested in the reverse i.e. DVD to CD iso...
(this is a painfull method)

1. Go to the fedora website hosting the CD isos.
2. Directly mount the CD isos one by one in deamon tools via the webaddress(suppose drive x)
3. Run "CMD" and execute the following commands:
4. Change directory to drive x by typeing "x:"
5. type "copy .diskinfo c:\cd1.diskinfo"
6. Type "tree > c:\cd1.txt"
7. Load the next iso in deamon tools and repeat the two commands above but keep changing the 'cd1' to cd2 and so on(in both commands).
8. Now after u have all the directory structure u gotta get working. load the DVD iso in deamon tools
9. Now using explorer create five folders named CD1 ... CD5
10. See the directory structure but running CMD and using the edit utility.
11. Now for each folder duplicate the contents by copying the files from DVD according to the CD structure.
12. Rename each "cdx.diskinfo" file to ".diskinfo" and place in respectibe CD folder
13. Make iso using magiciso or nero.
14. Varify the file size.
15. Any files u dont find in the DVD, copy them off by loading the CD iso
again in Deamon tools directly from the web.

I sincerely dont think u will go thru the above painfull process.
I am not aware of any simpler processes except downloading the ISO images.
Just think of my effort to write this procedure and try it. give feedback.
I havent tried the above so no promices but logically it should work.