Pirated-Sites.com showcases side-by-side comparisons of web sites that are suspected of borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code without permission.

Thank god there is a site for exposing this problem. If you look over their archives, the stuff is incredible. People pass off other’s work as their own… over and over and over!

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Having tired of the problems users face with Torrent search sites, a former Torrentz.com developer has created a website he promises will provide a better customer experience, Defiant.

Finally a place to download torrents that is open about the crunch from the MPAA.

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Here’s a great article at Tom’s Hardware about the process Data Recovery Services go through in order to get data back off of hard drive even if it won’t power on. Very interesting.

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To address Gregd’s recent post “I love Digg but it’s slow!”, we have just purchased 3 Sun Fire V20z Dual Opteron servers. We hope to have these installed and live within the next 2-3 weeks. Also get ready for Digg v2.0, packed with tons of new user requested features we know you’re going to love.

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Here are a few calculations on what GMail’s current and forecasted user storage limits will be:

(from www.wesbran.com)

Gmail storage is currently rising at 1/1000 MB every 25 seconds. This means that:

• It takes a little over 6 hours 56 minutes to increase one MB
• Every day storage increases by 3.456 MB
• By next April 1st, Gmail users will have about 3300 MB
• It takes 289 days to increase 1 gigabyte
• By the turn of the next millenium, Gmail users will have 1,257,183 MB of storage, enough to store about 100 million emails
• Every .003125 seconds, Gmail users get one additional bit of storage, enough to store either a 1 or a 0

I’ve added to a few of the sections on the site. The Design section of the site has taken the most abuse. I decided to put up a history of my web development career, which is a first. There is one site I created before anything that is listed there, it was the original www.the8thdimension.com but I lost the files when I switched site hosts, so that design is lost in oblivion.

As for all the other sites, they are still fully functional and are hosted on Brinkster servers. Brinkster was my old host before I switched to x10hosting. Hopefully I’ll remember to keep that old account active so they don’t delete my stuff.

History lesson : It all started when I was teaching a HTML course at a summer camp in 1999. The students needed a example to see, so I whipped up an old, very dark, www.the8thdimension.com. That site, as I said, doesn’t exist anymore, but it was later transferred to a new host and redesigned.

I kept that site for about a year, after which I was employed by a friend to create a website for his new business. Well, his business never made it off the ground and I was stuck with an empty layout. I decided to sell my design services and created Xidell Systems. That gradually changed from a entrapenurial site to a whatever-the-hell-I-felt-like site.

Of course Xidell Systems is an odd name for a personal site, so I redesigned it to Eightcubed. You can search the sites for what that means, but I kept that moniker for a while. It lasted through 3 designs.

There was then a Version 2 which I developed and relied heavily upon ASP to do so. The layout is based off another site I had seen on the web, and liked. That design was a success and I kept that site the longest.

Eventually, I thought I wanted to redesign the site so I made a couple layouts that flopped as replacements but one I decided to keep and jointly maintain as a blog of mine. That would be Eightcubed Blog. :-0 That started out as a soapbox, turned into a wailing wall, then finally into a normal this-is-stuff-I-care-about blog.

I inevitably got tired of that and realized that I was in need of a new host. Brinkster was good, but didn’t have PHP(without paying for it). And I really wanted to start developing in PHP. I stumbled across x10hosting and found my savior. The site you are currently looking at was created completely from scratch and designed and coded by myself. I decided to try a themed website with a blog system incorporated into it. I settled on WordPress and got to modifying the existing code into a WP Theme. So, the end result is what you are looking at. WordPress wrapped in a custom theme. I doubt all the bugs are worked out, so it may be a little bit before it’s perfect, but hey! WHO CARES!?!

Oh, P.S. I was doing a little late night browsing yesterday and stumbled across some pretty nifty stuff:

Macquarium Fun!
Not Pr0n Puzzle