Joke: Soviet style sharing

Seems the Soviet Department of Information Services (Ministry of Propaganda) was out in the field, taking "The Revolution" to the people: explaining the fundamentals of Socialism to the populace to bolster popularity.

A member of the Department was out talking to a farmer in Siberia.

Official: "So you see, comrade, dat it iz de way Marx explained: ' From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' You understand?"

Farmer: (confused) "Nyet..."

Official: "OK. Iz like dis: Say a comrade has two cows. Ve take one cow from him and give it to comrade that has no cow. Dat is de Rewolution. You see?"

Farmer: "Da, Da! Iz good!"

Official: "And if a comrade has two tractors, ve take one of his tractors and give to man who has no tractors. Da?"

Farmer: "Da! Da! Is WERY good!"

Official: "And if a comrade has two cheekens, ve give one cheeken to man who has no cheekens. Da?"

Farmer: "Nyet! Iz not good!"

Official: "Vhy?"

Farmer: "I have two cheekens..."

Comparison of apps that allow sharing of large files

When you have precious files, photos that have a lot of emotional value, and other similar information on your machine, making sure that you have copies of them is very important. Computers can get spoiled, hard disks can get corrupt, so you need to have an option of having a backup, ideally with the minimum effort. A lot of applications (both commercial and personal) are available that help in this process, and here is a comparison of some of them (link)

So why would you use an file-sharing app anyway? Actually for many reasons: for larger files, for privacy, multiple files, file format support, and more.
In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services. I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . .
Most of the services suggested require no registration. None of them will ask you to download anything to your computer, and all of them are easy to use, and worth using. It is actually great to see services, such as Yousendit, MailBigFile, and Rapidshare, that are still relevant and are good choices, but if I had to pick one it would be Mediafire.

Fined a huge amount for downloading songs

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been fighting a battle against people indulging in music-sharing across the internet. For the past many years, the music industry has seen a reduction in the number of music sales through the physical medium (CD's, DVD's, etc.) and this reduction is being blamed on the amount of file swapping that happens (file swapping gained prominence with Napster, and when the RIAA shut down Napster through a court case, other, more difficult to control file sharing methods such as P2P and torrents have gained prominence).
The music industry and the RIAA have been fighting against these, although fighting against a much widely dispersed enemy in the form of torrent sites and servers is more difficult. The music industry also started attacking the actual users, getting their details from ISP's, and then serving them notices with huge amounts of damages. The RIAA also had some hugely embarrassing mistakes, suffering from targeting people such as single mothers, children, and so on, all of which were huge Public Relations disasters. In some cases, they have successes, with people settling with the RIAA out of court. However, in another case, they have won huge damages (link to articles):

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs. Jammie Thomas-Rasset's case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said. Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.
This was the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. The judge ordered a retrial in 2007 after there was an error in the wording of jury instructions. The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.

Not sure about whether this will be a success, given that the accused is a single mother who works for an Indian tribe. Also, the RIAA has mostly given up fighting these cases, so this would be one of the few such cases that are still existing.

TightVNC Software

TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer. TightVNC is:

* free, GPL-licensed, with full source code available;
* useful in remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes;
* cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.

Does not currently work on Windows Vista.

Read more and download from this link.

issuu.com - free online publishing service

Issuu is a free online publishing service and a creative community dedicated to publishing.
Issuu is pronounced 'issue' and can be used both as a noun and as a verb. It means something interesting that is published and put into circulation. This is exactly what we do: Help people publish their documents and spread them to a targeted, worldwide audience.
With Issuu anyone can automatically convert their documents into interactive online publications. It only takes a minute and it's free. After this you can view your document in a neat magazine-style viewer, that other people can bookmark, share and comment on. Finally, you can also post (embed) your Issuu documents on any external site, profile or blog.
We support the PDF file format only and the most commonly used language is English (US/UK). People are using Issuu to upload magazines, portfolios, photo catalogs, comics, art catalogs, books and articles, and much more.
An Issuu document (or simply 'an Issuu') is our way of showing your PDF documents on the screen. When you upload a PDF file to Issuu, it will automatically be converted into an interactive web page that is designed to make your document look fantastic and do new things.
The Issuu document is presented in a way that looks similar to a magazine. You can easily flip through it, using the arrow buttons, page numbers, the 'dock' below it, or the index. You can also flip the page by clicking in the far left or right area of it. You can comment on the document, bookmark it, add it's author to favorites or subscribe to him/her in a newsreader (RSS) (you must be logged in to do these thing). Clicking the author's picture under the document, opens his/hers profile.

Read more at the http://issuu.com/ site

SlideShare - share your presentations with the world

SlideShare is the best way to share your presentations with the world. Let your ideas reach a broad audience. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to create a webinar.
SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations & slideshows. You can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote or PDF files, tag them, embed them into your blog or website, browse others' presentations, and comment on individual slides. What's more, the transcripts of your presentation will be indexed by internet search engines and show up in search results. It's a great way to share your ideas with others, or to learn from other people. And it's completely free.
We currently support PowerPoint (ppt, pps)and OpenOffice (odp). We also support the PDF format, so if you have PDF presentations, you can upload that as well.
Maximum allowed file size is 30 MB.

Read more about SlideShare

Docstoc - find and share professional documents

docstoc is a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents. Find free legal documents and free business documents. Upload your documents for all the world to share.
Find a vast quantity of high quality legal, business, technology, educational, and creative documents for free. docstoc allows users to upload their documents for all the world to share.
In addition, users can store their documents in their own personal online folders for anytime, anywhere access.
Currently are supporting the following file types: .doc, .pdf, .xls, .ppt, .ppt, .txt

Does docstoc provide online file storage, how much?
Yes, when logged in, from the profile tab, users can create their own personalized directory of folders, much the same way you do on your “my documents” folder on your home or business computer.
Users can add as many sub folders as they want and can drag and drop their documents into these folders. You can use docstoc to keep all your documents online for anytime, anywhere access.
Currently users have unlimited file storage on docstoc, that may change in the future, but probably not anytime soon.

Read more at this link.

Scribd - free, web-based, document sharing

Scribd is a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds. E-books, presentations, essays, academic papers, newsletters, photo albums, school work, and sheet music are just a few of the different kinds of documents you can publish and share on Scribd.

Scribd provides:
- A simple yet powerful method of publishing and distributing your own electronic books and documents in a variety of formats - for free.
- A vibrant global community of eager publishers, readers and collaborators that offer great content and constructive feedback.
- A massive, perpetually growing library of open, community-generated content.
- A secure, flexible private document managment system.

Features:

- Upload documents in many different formats, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, plain text, HTML, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenOffice, JPEG, and more!
- Embed your documents in a blog, Facebook profile, or other external website with your fonts, images, and formatting fully intact
- Host a document at Scribd with its own unique URL
- Unlimited storage - upload as many documents as you like
- Your choice of one of four uploaders that best suits your needs
- Fast indexing by Google and other major search engines will ensure that your content is easily found by just about everyone!
- Keep certain documents private or share with a limited number of friends
- Automatically convert published content into PDF, Word, and plain text
- Analyze your viewers by location, Google referral, and more
- Find documents similar to yours
- Receive feedback and comments from Scribd's community
- Retain full document copyright or make your documents available under Creative Commons licenses
- Create a profile and make new friends and fans
- Explore the hundreds of thousands of documents that have already been uploaded by Scribd's community - browse by category and tags, use our full-text search tool, or just browse by what's popular - it's up to you!

Read more at the Scribd website and the Flash based iPaper viewer

reactable - collaborative electronic music instrument

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The reactable intends to be:

- collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
- intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
- sonically challenging and interesting
- learnable and masterable (even for children)
- suitable for novices (installations) and advanced electronic musicians (concerts)

Sounds great; learn more at this site

Tribler - file sharing client for Internet TV

From the site, software for video file sharing that has a basic understanding of human friendships, of user tastes in content, and of Internet connectivity between users. Tribler is based on Bittorrent. The Bittorrent protocol designed by Bram Cohen works great and currently dominates the traffic on the Internet backbone, but it lacks many features that may be very useful. We are improving this protocol with over a dozen people with such features which go way beyond the original. We are extending the code from the ABC project. Note that we are not officially connected with the original author of Bittorrent.
Integrated keyword search (torrents, youtube, liveleak) & browse for newest content, most popular, recommended and much more. Fast downloading, play while downloading, integrated video player.
The name Tribler stems from the word Tribe, referring to the usage of social networks in this P2P client. The first version of Tribler was a small enhancement on the ABC (Yet Another BitTorrent Client), leaked out on the web on February 26, 2006.

Download from this link.

Want to create your online photo galleries ?

Well, here's a free tool to do that.
Web Photo Album offers the easiest way to create photo galleries for the web. We made it ultimately user friendly and highly usable to ensure that even new users will be able to create a web album in a couple of clicks. Attractive interface, built-in wizard, context sensitive help make creating a professional looking web gallery a breeze.
Web Photo Album users can easily share their photo albums by publishing them on our free online photo sharing service. No additional hosting is required. Sharing your albums is as easy as hitting the Publish button in the program toolbar! Links to your albums can be shared via e-mail, blogs, instant messengers.
On uploading, Web Photo Album generates a code that lets you replace an ordinary link with a picture looking like a preview of your album. Common HTML code and UBB compatible code are supported.

Download from this link.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta

A tool by Windows to share and organize photos, and working on the latest Windows Operating Systems - Microsoft Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
Show off your photos on the web by simply publishing them to Windows Live Spaces. E-mail as many photos as you’d like to friends and family with ease. Display your photos with cool screensavers and slideshows.
Import your pictures from your digital camera, and the Windows Live Photo Gallery will automatically organize them into events based on date and time. Keep your images organized by name, date, rating, and type. Locate similar pictures with tags you add.
Create a cool panoramic view by combining multiple photos. Capture the moment by adding captions. Enhance your photos by adjusting things like color and exposure. Improve your photos with simple crop and red-eye fixes.
Available on this link.

ThreeMany.com - Share personal messages

ThreeMany.com is a website that promises to let you share personal messages with friends, family and loved ones. These are video messages that you shoot with your own webcam.
The website claims that these message will be safe, only be able to be viewed by the intended people, and creating an account is free.

Wixi - Share your media online

Currently, there are no easy ways to share rich media online such that friends and family can access them easily enough. If you have large images or videos, then it is very difficult to send them via email, and most of the photo or video sharing sites do not offer much space to share a large amount of files, and the whole process of trying to share these images or videos takes too much effort.
So, here is an effort to try and make this whole workflow much easier. There is this site called Wixi that is now allowing you to save upto 3 GB of rich media on an online location and send it to the friends and family whom you chose.
Wixi is a private, invitation-only social network. Beta members will be offered premium accounts with unlimited storage. Regular members will have access to 3 GB of media storage for free - or can opt for one of our premium servces, which offer ad-free, unlimited storage.