This past June The Pirate Bay torrent site's headquarters were raided by Swedish authorities. Afterwards, the site quickly rebounded and it has been in near constant operation since. The site's operators were accused by corporate interest groups like the MPAA and RIAA of being at the center of the rampant piracy which was being conducted with impunity by the users of The Pirate Bay.

While there is little argument over whether or not illegal activity was taking place, representatives of The Pirate Bay and others claim that Bit Torrent technology is used (by tracking sites like The Pirate Bay) simply to track users, establish and maintain connections between the appropriate users and then wrangle the complex algorithms necessary to get complete files distributed to the entire swarm.

The full article awaits after the jump!

  

Hewlett Packard have laptops that could cater to the needs of a simpleton or to the needs of an imeldific character...well, a practical imeldific (is there such a thing) that is. What I mean is that, whatever your needs are, HP would get you covered. Diversity is the name of the game in the HP camp as they unveil two of their latest innovations which feature AMD's Turion 64 X2 and NVIDIA nForce Go430 chipset with NVIDIA graphics. I am talking about tthe two notebooks that will amp the Pavilion line-- the Pavilion dv6000z and the Pavilion dv9000.

To kick things off, let's start with the more high-end dv9000 (left thumbprint). This one is being paraded as HP's latest 17" notebook which comes fully equipped with AMD's latest mobile platform and NVIDIA's chipset & graphics. This could sort of pass as a gaming laptop since it is blessed with a more capable NVIDIA Go 7600 with 256MB dedicated DDR2 RAM. The G0 7600 could play recent games although you'd have to lengthen your patience as this may produce lower resolutions. The 17" display comes in three choices - WXGA+ (1440x900) BrightView, WXGA+ Ultra BrightView, and WSXGA+ (1680x1050) BrightView.

Your garden variety USP ports are also in there along with multimedia features, and the optional ExpressCard TV Tuner for the TV addicts. Another characteristic that makes this baby stand out is that it has dual hard drives option which could give this baby a 240GB using proper RAID configurations. Weight starts at 7.8lbs and is 1.0" thin. Optional integrated webcam is available. Prices start a bit higher at $1,349 and the dv9000 will be available mid-July.

Too pricy for you? Then maybe you oughta consider the 15.4" Pavilion dv6000z (right). It also houses a competitive NVIDIA nForce Go430 chipset with discrete 256MB Go 7200 graphics, plus you have a choice between an AMD Mobile Sempron or a Turion 64 X2 processors. You can't play recent games with this one, but if gaming ain't your thing, then this may be for you. Prices range from $1000-1300, depending on configuration.

England based computer company, Evesham, has released a new contraption dubbed as the Quest Nemesis. It is blessed with a 17-inch SLI notebook that is aptly designed for gaming on the go.

The notebook runs on AMD's Turion 64 dual-core processor to provide high-speed gaming. It features a 17-inch WSXGA widescreen display, a 1.3MP camera, and a top-of-the-line Dual NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GPU.

The features do not end there. Aside from that, this baby is also amped with a 2.1 speaker system which aims to provide a high-quality audio experience while dual HDDs with RAID technology provide 160GB of storage. As for the connectivity factor, the notebook has Bluetooth, Wireless Mini PCI 802.11bg LAN, and a Media Card reader.

Upgrades are also available for those who really want to maximize their gaming experience with this one. Upgrades such as a WUXGA (1920 x 1200) screen will cost you around $92 (£50), while 2x512MB graphics is available for $275 (£150 UK Pounds). Can't wait to get this one? Well, it's a good thing that you won't have to wait long for this thingamajig. Beginning this July, the Quest Nemesis will be on sale for a whopping $2,742 (£1499)with a 2-year on site and 1-year RTB warranty.

RAID, If you aren't familiar with it, stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is a system that uses multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. The benefit of RAID is one or more of increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity compared to single drives, in its original implementations. Its key advantage was the ability to combine multiple low-cost devices using older technology into an array that offered greater capacity, reliability, speed, or a combination of these things, than was affordably available in a single device using the newest technology.

With that, some of the guys working in the IT Department of Carroll College who had some idle time on their hands decided to do a USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID project. Equipped with an iBook (G3/700MHz, 384 MB of RAM and Runs OX 10.4.3), 13 VST Floppy Drives, and 6 USB 1.1 Hubs, they started flirting with the project.

So how did they do it? According to these guys, here are the steps that they've gone through just to complete the project:

1. Collected all the hubs, USB cables, and floppy drives we would need
2. Realized that it's harder than you think to find enough floppy DISKS for all those drives
3. We connected it all up to Windows XP SP2, and although it saw all the drives and disks, we weren't able to RAID them using any software we could find
4. Gave up on Windows
5. Fired up ye olde iBook
6. Connected all the USB hubs and drives to the iBook
7. Put floppy disks in all the drives and zeroed all of the disks and set them as Mac OS Extended format
8. We then added the disks to a new RAID that we decided to call Mega Floppy 06
9. Our RAID was formatted as Mac OS Extended and we let it sit and create
10. It successfully created and mounted our new RAID and we danced a dance of joy
11. Testing commenced

That's quite a feat (although the setup of everything on the table is quite disorganized)! Now, maybe we should just look forward to the group's next conquest. They would need a colossal project to top this one so good luck with that!