The truth story of suprnova.org

In November 2004, the world’s largest bittorrent site got shut down permanently. There where a lot of rumours about what happened, but any official statement never came. Tonight, the owner of Suprnova.org has published the whole story. Read here

In case that site shut down, I copied original post.

For a year now, there have been many rumors why SuprNova.org was taken offline. Some have said that it was because of legal issues, some said it was because I sold out to eXeem project, or because I became a millionaire and did not want to bother with the site anymore, and the rumors go on.

Today, on the exact day, when SuprNova.org went offline, I decided that it is time for everybody to know the truth and that it is time for me to stop pretending like nothing ever happened.

On November 2004, I received a call from my ISP saying that all of my servers had been raided by the police. I received nothing from the police before or after the raid, nobody told me what was going on.

In early December, Reuters did an article on me, and many Slovenian newspapers jumped on the story. So I ended up reading about myself in Slovenian newspapers. And right about that time, I had a feeling something was wrong. I do not really know what the feeling was or where it was coming from, but I decided it was time to take SuprNova.org offline.

About a month later, after SuprNova.org had been taken offline, there was a door bell at 6:30 in the morning, saying it’s the police. Actually I was not expecting anything anymore, since SuprNova.org had been taken offline long before that. They showed me a court order to search my place and they did so. They took as far as I remember, two of my computers and lots of documents.

About a month or so later, I was called to the police, so that we or actually they, did a list of all the files that were on all of the computers that they took from my home and from the ISP.

Another month later, I was called to the police for my hearing. I and my lawyer decided, we wouldnt answer any questions. After this was over, the police told us they will give this to the prosecutor and he will continue the procedure. My lawyer told me, that I should expect a letter from the prosecutor after the summer holidays.

And that was true, nothing happened during the summer holidays and I had quite a wonderful time. Very relaxed.

And just when I was hoping that the prosecutor would forget about my case I received another letter. When I received the paper, that I had to go pick up the envelope at the post, I became completely depressed and sad. But anyway, I went to the post and picked up the document. It was from the prosecutor, saying by the law blah blah and blah blah the denunciation against Andrej Preston has been dropped. And I received all the CD’s and computers that they took from me. This happened on 18th October 2005.

Since then nothing happened, and I hope it stays that way. This has been a huge pressure on me and I think it left some permanent marks on me. I hope none of you will ever have to go through something like this.

What is written above is just a short story of everything that went on during last year. I also do not want to give out too much information, since it wouldn’t be wise.

Thanks to all of the friends that knew about this and supported me as much as they could! Its been a hard year for all of us.

Domain Name Playing the Traffic Game

This is a good big list of domain name sold for big prices:

- business.com sold for $7.5 million
- asseenontv.com sold for $5 million
- altavista.com sold for $3.3 million
- loans.com sold for $3 million
- CreditCards.com sold for $2.75 million
- autos.com sold for $2.2 million
- Men.com sold for $1.3 million
- wallstreet.com sold for $1.03 million
- forsalebyowner.com sold for $835,000
- drugs.com sold for $825,000
- cinema.com sold for $700,000
- Me.com sold for $460,000
- art.com sold for $450,000
- engineering.org sold for $199,000
- fruits.com sold for $160,000
- perfect.com sold for $94,000

Not only that big list, some other domain are selling too. eBay.com recently featured actual bids for as little as $400 for “netmotors.com” and $500 for “golegs.com” to as much as $20,000 for “arlington.com” and $25,000 for “drpepper.net” — and thousands more hovering anywhere in between.

Why? Why do these people pay that much just for a domain name? This is because more and more people would love to skip search engines and their plethora of irrelevant, misleading links to find exactly what they want. People try to guess where they want to go on the web when they no longer have the time for searching the Internet.

For example, let’s say you own a children book store on the Internet. On which of the following URLs would you click :

1. http://www.freehostexample.com/yourname/~childrens_books,
2. http://www.your-books-store-for-children-online.com,
3. http://www.YourChildrensBookStoreCompanyName.com
4. Or simply http://Childrenbook.com

Just think which one would you choose?

Over 23 million “.com” names have been registered, and over 22 thousand are being purchased every day. It means that you’re more likely to win the lottery than find a good domain name.

Nevertheless, a good domain name can help an online business become more visible, credible and accessible. And it can also help a person make a fortune. While finding one was very prohibitive, you can be a part of the gold rush, too.

In the final analysis, remember that your domain is the thing upon which you will build your online business. And like real estate, the location is just as important — being accessible.

Blogster.com really worth $100,000?

Blogster.com was bought by Tony Colan and Ed Harrison, for $100,000, making it the highest sold domain in 2005.

Tony and Ed claim to have a new and enhanced blogging software with better user-interface, superior hosting, and many templates, pretty much a knock-off of Blogger if you ask me, hope they know who they are competing with. Also I applaud them on their purchase of a domain name with a below average suffix, -ster, What the hell is that really supposed to mean? At least Blogger represents a person who is blogging, but Blogster, what is it supposed to stem from mobster or something?

Is Blogster really that good of a name…I mean $100,000…Blogster…What the hell?

Top Ten Alternative Search Engines

A few of the great alternative search engines out there on the Web.

Clusty is a metasearch engine, meaning it combines results from a variety of different sources
Indeed is a job search engine
Isohunt is a Bit Torrent search engine
FoodieView is a recipe search engine

Ditto is a free image search engine
Healthline is a medical information search engine
FirstGov is a search engine that gives the searcher direct access to searchable information from the United States government
AuctionMapper is a search engine that focuses only on eBay listings
Daypop is a current events/blogosphere search engine
Blinkx TV is basically a search engine that allows you to search for audio, video, and podcasts.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours.

People are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.

Let’s analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:

Learn: In 3 days you won’t have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won’t have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in that environment. In short, you won’t have time to learn much. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Pascal: In 3 days you might be able to learn the syntax of Pascal (if you already knew a similar language), but you couldn’t learn much about how to use the syntax. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using Pascal syntax, but you couldn’t learn what Pascal is actually good (and bad) for. So what’s the point? Alan Perlis once said: “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing”. One possible point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of Pascal (or more likely, something like Visual Basic or JavaScript) because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you’re not learning how to program; you’re learning to accomplish that task.

So go ahead and buy that book; you’ll probably get some use out of it. But you won’t change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours, days, or even months.

Original Article : norvig.com