Tell me more, seriously...
BTW I hold you personally responsible (the CS4 thread) for me upgrading to 64 bit, buying 8GB more of RAM and now I've made a striped disk just for scratch/page file/Bridge cache. Appreciate your advice there.
Probably won't work--hehehe. Really though, it is much more crisp and tight feeling. Plus you get the new ACR with all the tools LR2 has, except you don;t get dual up windows, before and after live view with ACR. Let us know what you think.
Newsgroups have been around I think before the "web" actually. They were around before AOL first launched. I would google "Newsgroups wiki" and read teh wiki file on them. It's thorough.
LINK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup Here is an excerpt:
How newsgroups work
Newsgroup servers are hosted by various organizations and institutions. Most Internet service providers host their own news servers, or rent access to one, for their subscribers. There are also a number of companies who sell access to premium news servers.
Every host of a news server maintains agreements with other news servers to regularly synchronize. In this way news servers form a network. When a user posts to one news server, the message is stored locally. That server then shares the message with the servers that are connected to it if both carry the newsgroup, and from those servers to servers that they are connected to, and so on. For newsgroups that are not widely carried, sometimes a carrier group is used for crossposting to aid distribution. This is typically only useful for groups that have been removed or newer alt.* groups. Crossposts between hierarchies, outside of the Big 8 and alt.* hierarchies, are failure prone.
So you can see that your information will be stored on millions of servers for up to 3+ months at a time. Find a newsgroup that isn't active, like alt.pears.salad and upload your files using RAR split into chunks of 100MG each. Password protect the split file so no one can get into it. Uploading to Newsgroups is an art, so you'll need to understand how it works. There are programs that can do all the preparatory crap for you. The problem is that New servers don't allow you to upload a huge file. They want it broken down into smaller files, and the size is relatively small for each chunk. With large files you literally end up with 1, 000s of small chunks, but using a news reader, you don't see all of that./ You just see the entire file. Anyway, good luck on that :0
You can, however, use the news servers (hosts) for your own file storage because there are literally no limits on newsgroups. As long as you are posting to a group that allows file uploads, you're ok. It's pretty much the wild wild west and last area that is totally unmonitored and "anything goes." Oh boy, you find some real winners on that format. Many of them so vitriolic that they can;t post anywhere else on the internet, so they find news groups to vent their hate and ignorance.
On the other hand, you can get some really good information that you will not get ANYWHERE else. A good example is war footage from Iraq. If you live in the US, our current administration has issued a black out of "negative" reporting on the war. So if you want to see what it's really like in Iraq when an IUD goes off and cremates a Bradley, you can find that stuff on Newsgroups--uncut, uncensored, etc. I don't remember the name of the American that had his head decapitated on TV, as he was sitting there under several terrorist, but of course you will never see any of that in the US. I saw the entire captioned file footage after finding the video uncensored on Usenet. It brought a whole new meaning to the word "violence" to my vocabulary, among other things, since it was no movie and very visceral . Once things states don't want in public view gets to the Usenet, it's there forever pretty much, as long as people keep "upping it" and your country doesn't start censoring information on the internet--such as China does by blocking specific pathways. In that sense, it's a really good service. Also, many corporations use Newgroups instead of or in addition too forums, since they are free and have no maintenance fee associated with them--or bandwidth fees. In fact, Adobe uses them, as does MS.