BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005
Word by Word
By Jerry Pournelle
February 14, 2005
(Word by Word
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Column 295
GoDaddy!
By now you will have heard that GoDaddy, the domain registration service that I use and recommend, had an advertisement during the Super Bowl. Actually, they had scheduled two, but apparently the NFL objected after the first one aired, and Fox pulled the second one. You can see the ad here. Actually you can see two versions of the ad, the one that was shown, and a longer and, well, more interesting one that never would have been shown. And no, I'm not touting porn: There was more skin shown by the cheerleaders than you'll see in these hilarious spoof advertisements.
It's sure to get GoDaddy talked about, which is no bad thing: When you register your domain with them the company tries its best to sell you more services, but you don't have to buy anything you don't need. I've moved all my domain registrations to GoDaddy, and I have never regretted that.
The Sky Is Falling. News Next Month
We have a pile of equipment for turning your PC into a TiVo. There's also the phenomenon of torrent file sharing. This all adds up to a revolution on how you watch television, and neither the networks nor the independents nor really anyone else seems to have much of a clue as to what is going on.
It's all far too large a subject for a short piece, so most of this will have to wait until next month. For the moment we've been using SageTV and Hauppage video input boards, and unreleased Meedio software. Installation is a bit harder than we expected. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, the Bit Torrent file sharing phenomenon is growing. If you want a head start on next month's topic, go to http://bittorrent.com/ and look around. Fair warning: while the Bit Torrent phenomenon results in media files rather than executables, and we know of no adverse effects from using this technology to get TV episodes and other videos, the file sharing programs Morpheus and Kazaa are known to be a major cause of infection by virus, worm, and zombie maker malware; and as the Bit Torrent phenomenon grows it will become increasingly attractive to bad guys.
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BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005
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