Author Archive

iPad Wrecking DRAM Industry

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

Bloomberg has a fascinating story about how the rapid growth of the iPad is disrupting the DRAM industry. Apple has made the iPad very efficient in its memory usage in order to extend battery life. And by reducing the amount of DRAM used, less power is needed to keep it alive.

And since the iPad has taken market share from traditional notebook computers, DRAM manufacturers are stuck with billion-dollar facilities, and barely enough sales to pay their business loans.

SuperNZB and External Disks

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

We don’t recommend using SuperNZB with external disk drives or NAS drives (network attached storage).

SuperNZB is designed to be as fool-proof as possible from a novice user’s perspective. For example, suppose that the power goes off while SuperNZB is downloading an NZB file. When you re-start SuperNZB, it will look through your parts folder, and your downloads folder to see what’s there. It will then show all of those file totals on the Queue window, and you can resume downloading right where you left off. With a large NZB file that contains many thousands of files, such a feature can be a little time consuming. And if the files are not on your internal disk, it will take even longer.

SuperNZB is designed from the ground up with this kind of functionality, and as a consequence it is very resilient when things go wrong. And since NZB files are made by humans, there are plenty of things that can and will go wrong. So, SuperNZB is constantly reading and writing to-and-from your hard drive saving data, assembling parts, decoding, PAR-ing, RAR-ing, doing database look-ups, etc.

SuperNZB is very input/output intensive, so run it with your internal hard disk. Chances are that your internal drive is rather gigantic.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to store data on external devices. And we will keep this issue in mind even though SuperNZB itself cannot be easily redesigned for these scenarios. We have an as-yet unannounced NZB downloader in development aimed at advanced users, and we have support of non-internal drives as a design goal.

Steve Jobs Coming to a Theater Near You

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

A lost interview with Steve Jobs has been found, and will debut in theaters on November 16th. Technology journalist Bob Cringely interviewed Jobs at NeXT Computer headquarters in 1995.

NZBsRus.com is Back Online

Monday, November 7th, 2011

NZB indexing site, NZBsRus.com, is back online. The site had been offline for 10 days due to a legal issue. Now it looks like they have moved their servers from the United Kingdom to the Private Layer data center in Switzerland. This is public knowledge as you can see in the “Server Stats” tab on DomainTools.com.

News-Service.com Shut Down

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

The world’s largest Usenet provider, News-Service.com of Amsterdam, has closed down. click the screenshot below to read their statement:

While you probably never heard of this company, that’s only because they didn’t sell to the public. News-Service was a wholesaler and provided the Usenet service for many ISPs and resellers. More Usenet data traveled through their servers than any other Usenet company. See the stats on this site.

Apparently, The Netherlands does not have anything like the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act like we have here in the USA.

It’s not clear if users have been effected. Outsourcing ISP’s and resellers, of course, can just switch to another wholesaler. However, it’s not clear if the rest of the industry has the capacity to absorb News-Service’s massive client base so quickly after the judge’s order to shut down (just 30 days ago).

So, if your Usenet provider is having problems, this could be the reason why – especially if you are in Europe. For some options, see the Usenet providers on this page.

NZBsRus.com is Offline

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

NZBsRus.com went offline on Friday, October 28, 2011 due to legal problems. However, there are many alternatives to NZBsRus.com. To find another NZB search engine, see this list of NZB search engines.

The owners of NZBsRus.com are posting updates on their Twitter page.