Ubuntu has been the “Flagship Linux” distro for quite a while now. This is the distro most people judge Linux by (and the only one I personally work with). However, its visual style remained constant for a long time, and has been starting to look a bit stale. It’s difficult to convey “innovation” to end users when your product keeps the same look, version to version.
There’s been a lot of talk of changing this, and yesterday Ubuntu finally announced their new look for Lucid Lynx, dubbed “Light”. It includes a new logo (both light and dark), new theme (light and dark), bootsplash, and even logos for the Ubuntu forums, Xubuntu and other related projects. I’ve put up the theme and splash screen after the jump, and you can see more eye-candy on the announcement page itself.
More information [downloadsquad]
This man is tightening a mold in a Samsung factory in Kaluga, Russia. Inside that mold is a portion of what will soon be a television. Let’s take a tour of the rest of the factory.
Samsung opened this particular factory in 2008 and its been putting out products ever since. Aside from quality inspections, it appears that from the moment components arrive in gigantic sacks from Korea nearly everything is automated in this factory—from hot plastic being piped into molds to microcircuits being produced to the little logos being stamped onto panels. Humans mostly oversee the production and yes, occasionally tighten molds.
More information [Gizmodo]
Compared to a year ago the BitTorrent landscape has changed significantly. The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker last fall and a few weeks later Mininova partly shut down its website. However, with the fall of Mininova many new torrent sites emerged, with KickassTorrents being the most successful one.
It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.
Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.
#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG
#2 TORRENTZ.COM (RECOMMENDED!)
#3 ISOHUNT.COM
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET
#6 DEMONOID.COM
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET
#8 MONOVA.ORG
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM
#10 MININOVA.ORG
As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.
More information [Torrent Freak]
It’s possible to find information about the files indexed on many trackers by using ’scrape’. In the case of the TorrentQ tracker, the scrape URL is located at http://tracker.torrentq.com/scrape.php. So first off, go to this URL and you’ll get the option to download a file, in this case ’scrape.php’ – download it.
In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.
Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ’scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;
Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.
http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06
The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.
Every single one is flagged as a fake by commenters on Torrentz.com.
More information [TorrentFreak]
1) Big, Ugly Bezel.
2) No Multitasking.
3) No Cameras.
4) Touch Keyboard.
5) No HDMI Out.
6) The Name iPad.
7) No Flash.
and) Adapters, Adapters, Adapters?.
Update: Why stop at 8? Here are more things we are discovering that suck about the iPad.
9) It’s Not Widescreen.
10) Doesn’t Support T-Mobile 3G.
11) A Closed App Ecosystem.
12) And more…
More information [Gizmodo]
