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Ikr? Same with HotBot, and InfoSpace and Lycos and Metacrawler and WebCrawler and Dogpile and Looksmart and so on...

I get these confused ALL THE TIME with Google!

I don't see this monopoly (virtual or otherwise) in search that you are talking about. Care to provide examples?

In that case, allow me.
This is just a small sample of how wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong and hella wrong you are.

That list is far from complete, and is mostly USA-centric. In other countries, not only are there more search providers, but Google does not even rank in the top lists. Or just look at China, where Google is made fun of similar to AOL is in the US today.

If that is what you label a monopoly, I really want to know what you call companies like Microsoft regarding desktop operating systems - or the phone company - or patents/copyrights for that matter.

Don't worry gramps. Hotbot is still going strong.

You are just another shill.

GIT cher search engine HEeeeyaaAA!

Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"

The dollar is quite the temptress and very deceitful. Following the money has led many to the path of destruction. The record companies have tried to collude and through artificial scarcity kept CD prices way above reasonable. Sales have fallen as a result of completion even though i Pod sales skyrocket.

Google has command of the advertising market. If they follow the temptress and try to follow the money, then Google will become just another search engine.

It would be sad to see Google become another ad-laden site with no special attraction to the users. Is Google stupid enough to ditch tons of eyeballs to get a slightly higher price per ad?

Others are ditching the overburdening pages and imitating Google's success. Most of these pages now don't load their page with banner advertisements anymore and for good reason. They lost major market share to Google because of it. They have modeled Google.

http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US
http://search.yahoo.com/
http://www.hotbot.com/

If Google gets tempted by the money, they may find themselves quickly in the company of almost dead search engines that they stomped. They know how the other search engines dropped to obscurity. Why are they even interested in putting on that well known way to the bottom of the search engines.

So buy a cheap Motorola phone with real keys, use a standard USB cable (with the mini plug on the phone end) and Google for instructions about using it as a modem.

Here are search results pertaining to my old Motorola v180, which at the time I bought it was the second-cheapest phone T-Mobile sold.

The Top-10 Alternatives to "I googled it" (note the lower-case 'g'):

• 10 "I AltaVista'd it" (potential ad campaign: "Hasta la vista, Google!")
• 9 "I Yahoo!'d it" (Good luck with that lawsuit; it's been in the official motto of several states for decades!)
• 8 "I Asked it" (AKA "I just axed it", since they "axed" poor Jeeves...)
• 7 "I HotBot'd it" (She's not all that hot these days...)
• 6 "I WebCrawler'd it" (Crawl being the operative word; no speed records broken here!)
• 5 "I Accoona'd it" (Possibly illegal to admit in several states)
• 4 "I Lycos'd it" (Not to be confused with "I Pecos'd it" from the 1950's...)
• 3 "I Netscaped it" (That's netscaped not netscraped)
• 2 "I AOL'd it" (Roughly analogous to "I screwed it up")

• 1 "I Dogpile'd it" (Imagine Cartman in the "red rocket" scene...)

Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is.

Exactly! That's why Google became the number one search engine on the planet. In the early days of search engines (when sites like Altavista and HotBot were king) pages were ranked soley on their own content. The idea of analyzing the links between pages was absolutely revolutionary. Prior to that the best measure of a search engine was the number of pages it indexed - a number that was proudly displayed on the front page of most search engines of that time.

Lots of pages indexed meant lots of results. You often had to wade through up to 10 pages of results to find what you were looking for. Although all the results contained the correct keywords the actual content was often wildly irrelevant. Relevance was gauged by factors like the number of times a keyword appeared on the page, encouraging the creation of pages full of crap (such as tiny white text on white background repeating popular search phrases tens or hundreds of times).

Enter Google. The relevance of results increased dramatically. It became common to find what you were looking for on the first page of results. Hell, the results were so good they introduced the I'm Feeling Lucky button to take you immediately to the first result. That's why today most people don't search for information anymore, they google for it.

It's true that PageRank has it's own problems, and that content spamming has been largely replaced by link spamming. Still, things are much better these days than before Google came around.

Ever since the Inktome engine (which allowed one to search for files by extension) disappeared from HotBot that I've been looking for a replacement service. Thumbs up for Yahoo for this achievement, they have really beaten Google to it this time.

Uh, no. Anyone with with half a brain and decent programming skills can create a search engine to compete with Google. Here's Wikipedia's explanation. The existence of a powerful competitor such as Goole does NOT mean that someone else can't do exactly the same thing as Google. And, hundreds of HotBots or Vivisimo's will eventually chew away at Google's share.

Name the search engine that doesn't follow the convention of a search field surrounded by links? Yahoo!, Altavista, Hotbot ; it's all the same dumbass.

This could be done in any other web search engine, not only google.
Here are hotbot results. The first result is a webapge with links to most of the cams...

Besides searching for a part of the URL is a very old trick in search engines, any search engine theortically should do the same thing.

Go ahead, click me.

I had exactly the same problem, but had a couple bookmarked:

Ended up using All the Web.

There's also HotBot

Before it got slashdotted I mirrored it here. ;)

1. Magnosphere
2. Atmosphere
3. h2o
4. populate
5. Profit

I've reminisced before on slashdot about the beautiful geeky girl that introduced me to hotbot. Glasses, long blond hair, full breasts... cute sandals, short skirts... those silk panties.

Fuck WebCrawler. hotbot.

I've reminisced before on slashdot about the beautiful geeky girl that introduced me to hotbot. Glasses, long blond hair, full breasts... cute sandals, short skirts... those silk panties.

Fuck WebCrawler. hotbot.

Go to hotbot.com, click on "Advanced Search", check the "MS Word" box under "Page Content". Then search for whatever you're interested in.

For example, checking this box and then searching for "sco" returns 4600 web pages containing a link to a .doc file relating to SCO. One wonders what facinating goodies might be hidden in metadata in SCO documents...

Perhaps it's a publicity stunt. Someone isn't waiting for the Freedom of Information Act, though.

I found some of the underground documents here.

Yeah, bandwidth and hardware are rather limiting in building an large search service. There is Nutch, a project to start an open source search engine.

Until that gets off the ground, if you're woried about Google, you can use different searches as well. Someone like Hotbot lets you chose the engine from the standard search page.

Really, with all the different engines out there, it's not like you have to use Google, it's just been the best for relevant results for a while.

If I'm remembering correctly, HotBot provided a single interface to search yahoo, altavista, lycos, and excite simultaneously back in the day. "Back in the Day" being 1994-1996. I do know that submit-it.com provided a single interface to submitting URLs to multiple indexes/search_engines/portals as far back as 1995. I know this because at the time I knew
Scott Banister founder of submit-it.com. (My reaction at the time was, "Big freaking deal. It's just a perl script and copy-and-pasted HTML.")

I don't really understand why there is this need to surpass google. The article says that Yahoo will try to "look more like the clean, simple style of Google". Redundant? I think so. I also read about HotBot in a Scientific American (i think) ad. Using "search4 technology" they want to steal some of googles thunder, when the concept behind it is the very same old meta-search. Some might disagree, but what I think we really need is more comprehensive directories like googles, so that you can search for something more complicated than "Microsoft", and still recieve relevent results.

Yahoo -was- the boss... there chance of getting a second run is gone. Who the hell was sleeping at the wheel when they started losing hits?

Ditto

But if you look at Altavista in 1996, before the big portalization, you'll still see a bit more clutter than you see on Google. And, Excite in 1996 is far from clean. I can't remember Excite any earlier because I don't think I ever used it much. I was a devoted AltaVista user until they stopped/slowed indexing new sites, portalized it, and just made it not worth using. Then I found Google, and it became my new home page.

You can not deny, however, that Teoma, HotBot, AllTheWeb, AltaVista and WiseNut have all been influenced by Google's successful design. You don't need to invent something to make it popular.

Inktomi's current customers

Yahoo would be well-served building a cross-reference ranking from Google + Inktomi's results. Most of my searches are quite pointed anyway though, so I'm not sure how this could be improved.

Go try the Hotbot or MSN searches yerself. This may well be the future rankings on Yahoo results.

As a trial, I searched for "Oklahoma Dry Spell" and although there was one coinciding match in the top 2, the rest were completely different. It seems Inktomi is a bit more relaxed for inclusions. (14,888 vs Yahoo's 12,800).

For one of the myriad of search engine reviews comparing (roughly) Inktomi and Yahoo/Google, see this page

mug

To add to the cookie privacy issue, every link on HotBot searches redirects through click.hotbot.com (example that goes nowhere). The redirect doesn't seem to be holding up well either with about 10% of the pages I've tried hanging for 5-15 seconds before forwarding. Google also does QA monitoring, especially if you opt in with the google toolbar, but I've never seen it actually hang going to a search result. Both privacy policies say that personal information is kept private, but Google's privacy policy has fewer cop outs than does Lycos.

Just for you, they kept it around as an option.

Let's just say HotBot is not the site you should be using if you're looking for p0rn.

Hotbot appears to have a more-strict sexual content filter than Google.com, so when you have both sites set to their default setting for smut-removal, virtually every keyword will see more striken results on Hotbot Google than plan Google. However, if you turn off the filter on both sites, you will recieve identical result counts.

Google search for "clown" leads to "Ouchy The Clown" whose site has been declared "Mature Content" by Google
Hotbot's Google search for "clown" skips the #1 hit to move to the site for Insane Clown Posse.

However, if you repeat the search with HotBot's "Block Offensive Content" feature set to its lowest setting, Ouchy The Clown is reinstated.

• Google with 130 results
• HotBot Google with 41 results

Hotbot uses it, it must be good. Go back to spending your unemployment on pot.

There was some sort of falling out before, but both sides takedown their disagreement and now HotBot uses openDK() function.

Pretty interesting.

The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.

Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.

They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.

Same thing. Looks fine here.

The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.

I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?

They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.

Uh..yeah? So?

From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.

I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...

They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.

The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.

They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.

This is true.

It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.

True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.

I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.

There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.

Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):

ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.

HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).

Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.

RCA. Rollover menus from hell.

Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).

BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.

Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.

So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.

There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.

Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top. :-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.

It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.

Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.

You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.

You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.

You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.

You use Javascript for normal links

Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.

On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.

Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs. :-)

>Excluding all other search engines would clearly be abuse of monopoly power.

Google isn't a monopoly.

If you really want to get into how loose and broad this law is, I can honestly say that half the internet would be banned from anything but .prn.

Sites such as fanfiction.net, a good deal of the planet sites(like planetquake), this website in itself,(for the foul language and ocassional mention of anything that might harm those poor minor's little heads) any search engine that provides results for other countries and/or websites under the .prn name...

You have to remember. Everything can be harmful to a minor. Anything from pencils to stories to videogames to power rangers. If something can harm a kid, it falls under the jurisdiction of this law, and is relegated to .prn.

If this law passes over the heads of anyone in our governmental system, I swear to god, I'm either going to revolt or flee the country - I don't think anyone wants to be ruled over by people this dense.

And what's worse? I can't believe Yahoo! of all places started using those things! I mean come on... Yahoo! is one of the originals. Been my home page for more years than I can count on one hand.

Oh well, I guess it is time to go to Google or HotBot. *sigh* I fear change. hehehe

www.hotbot.com/text

[All links pulled from google's first page for each letter - sick, ain't it?]

I'd love to put myself out of this misery, but my retinas just detached and I can't find my gun.

--

It's really annoying.

Sometimes hotbot.com is useful because it has some additional functionality that allows you to search particular domains or subdomains for your regular run-of-the-mill boolean search.

Still it does seem like a lot of the pages that exist on a particular website are Not catalogued by search engines!

I understand that they all have databases of what is currently out there and they are constantly rechecking to make sure that those links are still valid. I imagine it would take too much memory to index all of the pages on each website but then why do search engines often have the same page come up as two or more different hits! I don't get that one.

For the last several months, I've been working on my own MP3 player project which is similar to yours. It was mentioned here on slashdot a few months ago. My design uses a 8051 microcontroller to control everything, Xilinx FPGA to move data around quickly, and the STA013 chip to decode the mp3 data. The design uses a 72-pin SIMM to store data, though I'm only just now getting code to effectively manage caching megabytes of data. My code is open-source (GPL), and you can download firmware source code here. I'm hoping to make an initial release with the completely re-writen FAT32 and IDE drivers in just a few days.

I've spent many many long hours and many dozens of all-night sessions hacking on this little project, and I think I can safely say from experience that FAT32 makes sense for a hard drive based MP3 player project. I'll explain, in the context of just a brief history of my filesystem hacking... there's a very detailed project history on-line.

My first attempt at the player was this old design, which I started in December 1999. You can read about it at the web page, but filesystem wise, it didn't use one. I wrote the MP3 files directly onto the sectors of the drive with a little perl script (redirected to /dev/hda). It actually wrote a little table at the start of the drive (where the boot sector and partition table would normally be) so I could make next/previous track buttons.

It is very easy to do this non-filesystem approach, so as a student project, you should certainly try to do this first. Many student projects run out of time, so I'd really suggest you do raw sectors and get some sounds coming out, and then if you have time, try for a real filesystem.

The old design worked pretty well, but it did have limitations. The raw sector approach and perl script meant that all files had to be copied to the drive at once (because the script packs them one after the next.... and the firmware just plays sectors one after the next and doesn't even worry about which ones are what tracks, until you press a button). The 8051 microcontroller wasn't fast enough to play 256 kbps (14.7 MHz, standard slow 1:12 cycle architecture). I've seen several other projects on the net using a 20-some Mhz Dallas high-speed 8051, most notably Anton Verheijen's SoundBastard player. I wanted even better performance than that, but at low power with a large DRAM buffer, so that I could play from batteries.

Well, my new design does it the hard way. I stayed with the slow 8051, and cut the clock speed in half (lower power). I added a Xilinx FPGA chip, which I used to make a custom DRAM and DMA controller. The DMA allows the IDE drive to be read pretty quickly (2.45 Mbyte/sec is damn fast relative to the power used), and the DMA allows large blocks of MP3 data to be sent to the STA013 chip with very low CPU overhead... which is necessary since it's so slow.

Getting back to the subject at hand, filesystems, I used a very simple firmware approach with this new fancy hardware. The simple (and limited) firmware is still more or less the current rev, but I'm getting darn close to a near total rewrite that will be really cool. But, the point is that there are some simple and not-to-hard ways to read FAT32 filesystems. I'll ramble on a bit about it, even though this post is getting long enough that it probably doesn't all appear unless you click for more.

The first thing I did to simplify the FAT32 code was to require that the drive be fully defragmented. The thought was that it's not too hard to run defrag before you shut down and pull the drive from your PC. Even if you don't like having to run defrag, consider that it's taken me quite a while (probably longer than you project's deadline) to write the more complex code, so starting with a fully defragmented requirement is probably a good idea. If you have lots of time or you're really good (and fast) you'll always be able to improve the code and remove the requirement for defrag later. (BTW, does anyone know of a linux based FAT32 defrag utility)

Microsoft's defrag doesn't defragment directories, so you've still got to deal with following the cluster chains for directories, but the good news is that to play a file, you get its starting cluster from the directory (somehow... I'll get to that), turn the cluster number into the sector number (LBA is much easier than CHS, if you didn't already know), and then just read sectors and play them, one after the next as you decrement a counter for the file size (which also comes from the directory).

Now, in the interest of keeping things simple, so you can get something working before you student project deadline is up, I'd suggest you use a pretty large cluster size, and make all the filenames fit short msdos names (8.3 sucks, but you can improve things after your initial success). If you use short names, each file will only consume 32 bytes in the directory, so a 16k cluster size will be able to hold about 512 filenames.

For for your very first FAT32 attempt, you'll read the volume ID to learn a few critical numbers, which includes the first cluster of the root directory and a couple things you'll need to turn cluster numbers into sector numbers. The official FAT32 specification from Microsoft tells you which bytes mean what and what formulas to use. As you read it, their frustration with lots of poorly-written FAT code shows though...

So, you'll grad the MBA (first sector, LBA=0), read the partition table to find out where the FAT32 volume starts, and then read its volume ID, and your two goals are to learn the first cluster number where the root directory starts, and the info you need to be able to turn that cluster number (and others) into the LBA number so you can fetch them. When you use the formulas from Microsoft's FAT32 spec, don't forget to add the offset due to the start of the partition, as their formulas don't include that (as I found out the hard way).

Now if you've used short filenames, big clusters, and only a couple hundred files, then the entire root directory will fit into that one cluster! You read the directory to find the filenames, and for each one you get the two critical numbers you need, the first cluster and the file size. To play each one, turn the cluster into LBA, and divide the size by 512 (round up) for a count of how many sectors to play, and just start reading the sectors in order and send them to your decoder until you've done them all. Repeat for each file.

Now that does have quite a number of limitations, but it completely avoids having to read any FAT sectors. With a fully defragmented drive and the entire root directory in just one cluster, you should be able to very easily get something working where a standard PC can write the drive (without the ugly perl script).

My current code (0.5.1, available for free download, including GPL'd source) does follow cluster chains for directories, but not for files. It is pretty simple, though there is the added complexity of reading the FAT sectors. As I mentioned earlier, I'm very close to releasing a near-complete rewrite of the project, which will use the FAT for both files and directories, and it includes a malloc/free that's used by the FAT32 code to cache both FAT sectors and clusters. When you're ready to try something more complex, this free code may help you (assuming you can live with the GPL), but initially you should keep the project simple.

Also, early in my project I wrote this page with detailed how-to instructions for interfacing an 8051 with a IDE drive. I recently wrote this how-to page about using the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, which may help if you're planning to use the STA013.

I hope some of my on-line material and code helps, and I hope your project turns out to be a success.

• yahoo.com: Yahoo! directory + Google search engine
• google.com: dmoz directory with PageRank technology + Google search engine
• hotbot.com: dmoz directory + Inktomi search engine (the engine Yahoo! used to use)

OP could have just been saying "dmoz is better than Yahoo!'s directory."

Yeah, it is. I got the first iMac when it came out, and haven't used floppies since.

Someone came out with a free webservice where I could up/download my work (3mb limit at the time). iMacFloppy.com -- he planned to come out with PCFloppy.com, not sure if he did. However, it's not Mac-centric anyway, only in name.

This was a great alternative. I'm a CS student, a relative newbie MF/PC/Web coder, so I had to use it quite a lot.

I also used some of the free website space at HotBot.com for this -- that's not what it was meant for, but it served my purpose.

Now I either e-mail the data, or FTP it up/down to/from my domain account.

As far as Zips, someone said people don't use them. I got one in my G4 almost a year ago, and still have good intentions to back-up my critical data to the zips...

Owned & Operated is an excellent example of a non-RIAA affiliated label. The label is based in Fort Collins, CO and is run by Bill Stevenson (ALL, The Descendents, Black Flag) and Joe Carducci. They have put out consistently high quality punk-pop music for about two years, the highlights being New Rob Robbies "Pure Whore" and The Pavers "Local 1500".

Load balancing? Easy to write, hard to make work well. You need to compare the cost of migration to the benefits of balancing, and you need to make decisions based on partial and outdated information. Many early systems thrashed because everybody would migrate to the idle processor, which then became overloaded, so everybody migrated somewhere else, etc.

Speaking of migration, it's a mess. The only system I know of that implemented migration fully was Locus, out of UCLA. The trouble is that whenever a process has a dependency on or a hook into its environment, that connection must be migrated too. Open files, working directory, sockets, controlling tty, signals, process parent/child relationships, and many more details must be handled. Not fun, and the benefits turned out to be mostly minor (though I do recall writing a cool version of "find" that migrated itself to the machine that stored the current subtree as it ran).

The issue of supporting distributed applications is generally considered to be separate from writing a truly distributed OS. Most of what a distributed application needs can be provided by a good communications library. To some extent, we're still learning exactly what such a library should have. What about SETI@home is specialized to it, and what's universal? I don't think we've completely figured it out.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of major concerns and design issues that must be addressed in a distributed OS. We have fairly good solutions to some, but most have not yet been solved:

• Process control. How much process migration is a Good Thing? How do you decide what machine to use to start a process, and when do you decide to migrate it to another?
• Communication and synchronization. What facilities does a distributed application need? How do we make those easy to use?
• Reliability. How do we deal with the inevitable machine failures?
• Replication. What processes and data should be duplicated on different systems? Are you doing the replication for performance, for reliability, or both? How do you manage updates to replicated data? How do you keep replicated process synchronized?
• Lack of global knowledge. How do you make decisions based on partial information?
• Naming. What names to things have. Do you have a shared global namespace, or a private one? How do you resolve names? What do you do when people and objects move?
• Scalability. How does the system behave when the number of computers/users/programs jumps by a factor of 10 or 100? (This is a place where Napster doesn't do real well.)
• Compatibility. How do you support existing software? Do you run on only one kind of hardware, or many?
• Security. Who gets to run on what machine?

Finally, I should note that the list of projects at U of Arizona might appear to be complete, but it omits a lot of important projects. Four that jump to my mind are Locus and Ficus from UCLA (though the latter is more of a distributed filesystem than an OS), Coda from CMU (again a DFS, rather well-known to Linux folks), and of course the extremely important Network of Workstations work out of UC Berkeley, which led to Inktomi and Hotbot.

I agree that typosites should not be allowed.
A friend of mine had a little linkpage, in where he was supposed to link to hotbot.com, but a little typo made it hotbox.com. I thought it was very funny tho ;)

But I wonder, is Sting, as he uses the name, some sort of trademark? Can he register it as a trademark and get some leverage from that?

I would guess that they would not consolidate the web sites. Each probably has loyal fans that would frown upon a change. Something similar happened to HotBot (www.hotbot.com) and Lycos (www.lycos.com). They are both online search engines, but it is obvious that they are owned by the same company (Lycos), yet each has maintained their original look and feel.

What's even more annoying is when you try going to a respectable porn site, such as www.hotbox.com and you make a little typo, and end up at some trashy search engine site. (like this one)

As some above have said, (and I'm not trying to be redundant) there are many other places to get MP3s, most of which existed before Napster.
Oth.net used to be an amazing source for them by listing searchable FTP sites full with albums and singles. There's always other less dependable websites like AudioGalaxy.com and LycosMP3. There are all BIG, well-known WWW sites, which, although not quite 100% reliable are well established. This does not cover the thousands of pages you can find if you go to Hotbot and search for 'mp3'.
Then, of course, there's IRC. Here again, there are hundreds of communities across dozens of servers all working on one thing: getting/trading MP3s. (My recommendation is to try some of the IRC servers on the Eris Free Network).
Then of course, you've got other Napster-like clients like GNUtella, FreeNet, and Globalscape's CuteMX (most of these share more than MP3 files).
And college students will always have the trusty, reliable LANs where students share their large collections.

Ok, so you knew this already. Bottom line: MP3 is not going away, not now, and especially not at the hands of the RIAA. If they are only half as smart as their lawyers are blockheaded, they would work with some of these companies, as well as organizations like the Frauenhoffer Institute to develop a replacement for the MP3 file format. One that maybe sounds twice as good for half the file size, so you can get 320kbps encoded songs for 3MB or so. New technology is the way to fight MP3. If enough people think it's worth it to pay $0.50 for a song that sounds twice as good and can be downloaded in half the time, guess what? They'll be more likely to get that song as opposed to an .mp3 file. Relatively secure encoding already exists. The band Phish released MP3s that you could listen to for free three times, then a window popped up that reuqired you to enter a credit card number and pay some small amount of money to continue listening to the song (apparently, an executable was appended to the WAV file before it was encoded... You couldn't remove this prompt, or extract a WAV file with WinAmp).

If Lars is reading this, spend money on getting new media developed, not on paying your lawyers. You may win against Napster, but not against MP3.

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