download Archives - The Story of David Kaspar https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/tag/download Online journal and ponderings about the Internet, gadgets and photography. Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:29:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://blog.davidkaspar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/chubby.gif download Archives - The Story of David Kaspar https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/tag/download 32 32 Apple eye candy for Windows: Konfabulator https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2004/11/apple-eye-candy-for-windows-konfabulator.php https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2004/11/apple-eye-candy-for-windows-konfabulator.php#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:29:21 +0000 https://davidkaspar.com/wp/2004/11/09/apple-eye-candy-for-windows-konfabulator/ Last year I noticed a Mac OS application that looked very sleek and I wished it would run on Windows. This month my wish came through. Konfabulator is an engine that runs in the background and updates various widgets placed on your desktop. These widgets display information about your computer or information fetched from the … Continue reading "Apple eye candy for Windows: Konfabulator"

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Last year I noticed a Mac OS application that looked very sleek and I wished it would run on Windows. This month my wish came through.
Konfabulator is an engine that runs in the background and updates various widgets placed on your desktop. These widgets display information about your computer or information fetched from the Internet.
The installation comes with 15 default widgets to update you about the weather, time, WiFi strength, CPU usage, photo frame and more. On the Konfabulator gallery page you will see that people from around the world have contributed with hundreds if not thousands of widgets to perform all kinds of tasks.
One common characteristic of the widgets is their design. It is pure eye candy combined with high functionality. Fancy transparencies, docking to the side of your desktop, eye popping icons and much more previously only seen on Mac OS.
My current favourite widget is the standard digital clock in float mode and very high transparency. What is your favourite widget?

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]]> https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2004/11/apple-eye-candy-for-windows-konfabulator.php/feed 1 Bittorrent – The new P2P in town https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2003/12/bittorrent-the-new-p2p-in-town.php https://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2003/12/bittorrent-the-new-p2p-in-town.php#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2003 17:04:09 +0000 https://davidkaspar.com/wp/2003/12/05/bittorrent-the-new-p2p-in-town/ The idea is brilliant; tap in to your users upload capacity to distribute your product across the Internet more efficiently. If you have a killer product that your customers are downloading, the distribution (bandwidth) costs will increase proportionally with the amount of customers. This may be ok if the product is commercial and you can … Continue reading "Bittorrent – The new P2P in town"

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]]> The idea is brilliant; tap in to your users upload capacity to distribute your product across the Internet more efficiently.
If you have a killer product that your customers are downloading, the distribution (bandwidth) costs will increase proportionally with the amount of customers. This may be ok if the product is commercial and you can transfer the distribution costs to the cost of the product.
If on the other hand it is a free-ware product, lets say an open source application, you may find it hard to finance the popularity of the project.


As mentioned above, Bittorrent uses the (free) upload capacity of your users to distribute the product. In effect, the users that have downloaded parts of the product will start sending those parts to other users and the load on your server will decrease.
How well does the network perform?

Bittorrent routinely supports about 1000 downloaders of files around a gigabyte in size. After current tracker scaling work, the next scaling bottleneck is expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of simultaneous downloaders. – (Bittorrent FAQ)

One characteristic of the Bittorrent network is that popular files that are being downloaded by many users are easy to get and with a high transfer rate (in contrast to other P2P networks). Older files that are not being downloaded by other users are not hard to get.
To get started, download a client that supports the Bittorrent protocol. I have tried various clients and have two favorites. As a lightweight client, I prefer TheSHAD0W’s EXPERIMENTAL BITTORRENT CLIENT.
I have had better results with the more feature packed Shareaza. It supports all of the following networks: Gnutella 1and 2, eDonkey and Bittorrent. The original client can be found here: Bittorrent software.
Any resource that can be downloaded will have a small file called a torrent that holds crucial information about the resource. Among other things it will tell you the name and hash of the resource making it very hard to fake resources and ensuring correct downloads. The torrent will also tell you the tracker for this resource.
Trackers serve as a central point for sharing information about the various users downloading the resource and what parts each user has downloaded. This means a file is never transferred via the tracker, only information about transfers is. If the tracker is down or is not available for some other reason, you will not be able to download the resource.
etree.org is a community for sharing the live concert recordings of trade friendly artists. Other large source of torrents is suprnova.org.
BitTorrent, its logo and its web site are all copyright © 2001-2003 Bram Cohen

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