shareaza 1.4 is out

[alphabeater]

http://www.shareaza.com/download/

enhancements:

- Partial File Sharing - more download sources, better downloads
- Real LIVE Upload Queuing - now busy hosts can actually be useful!
- New ultra-friendly Home tab - and many more UI improvements
- Library organiser - Shareaza now has the best file library manager around
- More stability, more compatibility - thanks to beta testers
- Merge search results - finer control for power users
- Preview/copy in-progress files - doesn't matter if they're in-use
- Filter by available source count
- Improved chat, with more to come
- New URI integration features, plus automated distributed upgrade system
- Lots more

this is as good as a gnutella-based program is ever gonna get imo.. it certainly beats slow spywarey limewire, buggy incompatible bearshare and overly basic gnucleus/morpheus and xolox.

that said, it's still not especially good.

technically, shareaza has many interesting features but when you try to actually use it for what it was designed for - that's downloading files rather than just looking pretty, it fails just as all other gnutella clients do. even on the insanely popular madonna files i always use for a test (20+ sources each generally) shareaza finds it very difficult to find anyone willing to actually let it download anything. which is all the more annoying considering that any gnutella client i use always has its upload slots filled straight away.

gnutella is what happens when filesharing becomes ip-to-ip instead of peer-to-peer. very few people care about anyone else on the network. they're just out for what they can get.

i know gnutella is very clever and it seems mean to criticise it (it's extremely doubtful that i could do better), but there are just so many protocols out there which scale better, are more personal and actually do what they are supposed to be doing, allowing p2p search and file transfers.

gnutella just isn't ready for day-to-day use (even die-hard xolox fans can't be using it for everything). until more people share and there is some sort of identity system in place, i'll stick with fasttrack, manolito (blubster) and opennap.

thanks for reading my rant - i expect (or at least hope) to be contradicted on the whole thing and hopefully given a more reliable way to use gnutella. well, i can dream...