Direct Connect ++

If you conduct a survey to find out what we would least like to part with here at BITS Pilani, the overwhelming majority would vote for DC++. For the uninitiated (or for those outside the campus), Direct Connect is a free peer-to-peer file sharing software which we make optimum use of. The institute has Ethernet based LAN on which this software runs. The precursor of this software was the age-old IP Messenger, which was quite prevalent till our first semester. I still don’t get the reason why our seniors realized the value and ease of DC++ so late despite the fact that it was freely available way before 2006.

IP Messenger (for the benefit of future batches at BITS Pilani who might only hear about it in folklore) is basically a messenger service over the local area network (LAN). So for instance if you wanted a movie or a song, you had to either buzz a friend or if you did not care a fig about other people’s right to live peacefully, you would spam by flooding your request to all those who are signed in (though at the risk of getting memorable greetings from those on the other side). What people generally did was that they kept a movie list.doc which they would exchange among friends. Such a process was obviously tedious but did not act as a deterrent for mutual exchanges.

When you are residing in a place like Pilani, you don’t have much scope for entertainment that our peers in the urban areas take for granted. All this translates into no decent places to hangout. Talking about malls or multiplexes in such a place would be considered blasphemous. Hence the few popular sources of entertainment, besides hanging out with your friends at C'Not, would be attending lectures of some select professor of your department (I’m sure every department has at least a couple of them.) or making optimum use of your processor! But as we value the fact that attendance is not compulsory at our college, we generally stick to the second source (though for the last few semesters, I have made good use of the first source as well!).

From a humble beginning of just over a 1 TB, the popular hubs today boast of a share size ranging between 20-25 terabytes and enjoy patronage of hundreds of its loyal users. If there is something that keeps us going strong despite our incessant test series and tutorials, it has to be DC++. It is our source for the latest flicks, songs, games, sports and what not! Though most of us generally don’t watch television here, we don’t miss it much either. A lot of what we want to see can be easily tapped from DC within a few days of it being aired. Similarly, new movies are put up on DC within a few days of its release. There have been some cases where movies were put up even before its official release date! That speaks volumes about the efficiency of our hub and the people who contribute in its smooth running.

One cannot justify this post without giving due credit to these people who untiringly work behind the scenes ( & their screen names ) to make the hub bigger and better with every passing day. Using primarily Bit-Torrent along with download accelerator (fill me in if you guys use anything else. I am no Tech freak as my grades in CP would vouch.), these facilitators download the stuff and share it on our local hub. Kudos to them for being so large hearted. May God Bless Them! It is because of them that even in a godforsaken place like Pilani, time flies and before you know it another semester is down. Over the years, DC++ has truly earned its epithet of being the lifeline at BITS-Pilani.

P.S.:The next time some one says something vitriolic about the hamlet you live in, throw back the share size at him and watch his/her face turn red with jealously( unless your friend is at another college which boasts of a similar share space)!