Mininova torrent site tracked down and destroyed!

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Mininova, one of the biggest file sharing torrent sites, has recently been broken down by various legal agencies.

Following a court procedure, the owners of the Mininova website have been ordered to take down all trackers that are related to any copyrighted content or face a multi million euro fine.

Mininova has followed this procedure and has removed all illegal content. Just to make sure, I did a search through their site for various CDs to see if the rumours were really true. They are. Everything is gone, and the admins of Mininova say it is now a “content distribution” service.

If you want my honest opinion, this is a good day for many companies and vendors. This will have eaten into a large proportion of file sharing piracy, which is great, because I have always been against it. I find it really depressing that people don’t want to support the artists that make their music.

Anyway let’s not go onto a miserable topic about P2P and illegal file sharing…

Hopefully this is the start of the future. I really hope that eventually we can minimize piracy because it’s an awful thing. It’s exactly the same as shoplifting – and would you have the courage to do that?

Sadly, I don’t think piracy can ever be truly stopped, but the more we can close down on it, the better.

Spotify for Symbian out and available

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Yes folks, you are reading that right. If you are in possession of a Symbian mobile phone, you’ll be delighted to know that Spotify today launched Spotify for Symbian.

You’ll of course need a Spotify Premium subscription costing £9.99 per month, but I promise you it is well worth the money.

Sadly, I don’t have a Symbian phone so I wont be testing the new software anytime soon. However, if you have a Symbian phone, head straight over to m.spotify.com and you’ll be redirected to the right download. If you aren’t sure whether you have a Symbian phone or not, you can use that link anyway and the site will let you know whether you’re good to go or not.

This is good news for Spotify as the new release hugely broadens the market that Spotify can get to and will hopefully help the company to persuade more people onto their premium plan.

Office 2010 Beta – The review

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I’ve been testing Office 2010 for quite a while now, as I was part of the Technical Preview which Microsoft launched a little while ago. Now they’ve closed up the Technical Preview and replaced it with the Beta, which is now publically available for all to download and try out. I’m not entirely sure if Microsoft are limiting the amount of downloads, but if you want to be safe I suggest you download it now and give it a try.

Anyway, it goes without saying that Office 2010 is a huge improvement on Microsoft’s last attempt on an office suite – Office 2007. I’ve hated 2007 from the start. I thought the interface was clunky, confusing and time consuming. It was difficult to use, and anyone who was used to the simple menus of Office 2003 would have to learn how to use the programs all over again, from scratch. It’s like a car company saying we’ve made a new car, but to use it you’ll have to learn to drive all over again.

However, Microsoft have finally made a practical use of the futuristic design. The new menu bar is still there, but it is now usable. Here’s a little screenie…

Office 2010 Beta

Yes, it does take a little getting used to, but the basics are so much easier to access. All your common features are reachable at your fingertips.

I have to say that I like it. However, I don’t think this will be the case for everyone. I think it’s quite comparable to a car. If the car has a dashboard that looks like a small section of mission control, it becomes irritating and pointless. It’s the same for Office in that respect. If you’re typing out a document and you can’t find a feature hidden away in some submenu it is irritating and pointless – it’s exactly the same. I think Microsoft needs to think about this before launching a final version next year. I think they should maybe think about a “classic” mode, where people can use an interface which is comparable to older versions of Office.

Overall, I think it’s good and will prove successful. On the other hand, Microsoft needs to think about older users who are used to Office 2003 or even older versions. I think it’s really important that Microsoft holds on to it’s long term customers – letting them creep away now could be critical.

Google Chrome OS now available – only on VMware and Virtualbox

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Well it’s been all over the tech news over the last 24 hours – Google Chrome OS. Google finally announced it formally yesterday, and as far as I know it is now available to download and use.

Sadly, it’s only available as a virtual machine at this time. You can get it for VMware Player or Virtualbox now. The download is available free from GDGT.

I haven’t got round to trying it yet, but hope to do so sometime this weekend. I’ve just downloaded the Office 2010 beta and would like to review that shortly, so I’ll do that first – but afterwards I’ll give Chrome OS a go.

To be honest, I haven’t got the highest hope it will be a huge success. I mean it’s a really cool concept, but it’s basic – a bit too basic. It might take off with netbooks, but I think it will annoy people who are used to powerful computers.

We’ll see what happens – I’ll get a review in as soon as possible.

Using Windows Live Writer to manage your blog

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Over the last couple of posts I’ve written (including this one), I have been using Windows Live Writer. This is a free piece of software that is created by Microsoft. It can manage and sort your blog for you with ease, and means you don’t have to use any online dashboard.

For GEEK!, I use WordPress and Windows Live Writer takes WordPress in its stride. I simply tell WLW my login details, and it automatically works out what my blog looks like, what theme I use, and what my posts would look like.

It does this all very quickly, and within a minute or so it is ready to go.

It is really quick, efficient and professional and I really like its simplicity. It is a great concept that works very well. I really like using it because it is so much easier than logging into the WordPress dashboard, then getting distracted by plugins, WP upgrades – the lot. With this, I just write my post without any distractions at all.

Perfect! Another recommendation for GEEK! Recommends.