Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Orange Devil Bat"]The days of free usenet access for downloading binaries of any significant size are over. If you're planning on downloading from usenet regularly, do yourself a favor and get a pay account somewhere. Giganews is good, Usenetserver is good, Supernews is good. These places contain massive drive storage capabilities. Put it this way. Your average ISP, if they even free usenet access at all, usually has such terrible retention rates that things that get uploaded are gone within a matter of days. My ISP got so bad that when downloading a movie, the first few RAR files would start disappearing before the last ones were done uploading. If you are getting into usenet for the conversations, cheap or free usenet accounts may still cut it. If you're getting into them for downloading binaries of any length (games, movies, music, etc.) forget about it. The pay places have excellent retention. I think Giganews now boasts a two year retention rate, which is pretty impressive. Also, the pay usenet services have unbelievable speeds. I have a 50 megabit download speed limit and Giganews pegs my connection. Most pay usenet services allow multiple connections. I can download an mp3 album in, oh, 15-20 seconds usually. Also, most of the pay providers support encrypted SSL connections, because hey, if you want to download pictures of chicks with dicks, that's between you and the chicks and nobody else. You can download binary files one of two ways. The first is, you can use a program (I use NewsBin), add a newsgroup (alt.binaries.chix-with-dix) and start downloading. The program will download all the headers (filenames) and you'll be able to sort and browse and flag files to be downloaded. The other option is to use a search engine, like the one you posted a link to. Those search engines (there are dozens and dozens of free ones) scour usenet and catalog files. You can flag the files you want and download the list as an NZB file, which is really just an XML list (you can open one in Notepad and look at it and see the file names). Any binary newsgroup program will support NZB files. Just open the file and your program will go find all the files and download them all. I've always said Napster was like a store that carried everything, and usenet is more like a garage sale. You're kind of at the mercy of what other people have uploaded, but with a 2 year retention, there's a pretty good selection. Most modern programs and movies end up there almost immediately. You can get UFC fights about an hour after the pay-per-views end. The best part of usenet is, no one can see what you are downloading. People upload files (hopefully anonymously) and you download them. If you're paying for a service you can download whatever and however much you want (I pay $15/month for unlimited, and justify that as well less than the price of a single Xbox 360 game). [/quote]