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Peer-to-Peer for Academia
Andy Oram has a good speech online about peer-to-peer and universities. He discusses a variety of possible research topics under the p2p umbrella and urges university administrators to promote this instead of squashing it.
Meanwhile, you could possibly get some serious p2p going, at this catchy web address, if you are shrewd enough to follow some simple directions.
Have you seen these face scans, etc..., of the REAL .commIEs? I thought so.
I know this is OT but since it comes up so often I thought we would all benefit by knowing that the idea "We only use 10% of our brain!" is a myth.
The two points snipped from the article:
1.) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading Skeptical Inquirer, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2.) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
As the article says "For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the new book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind [1999]"
What is music when you despise all sound?
As I recall, there was an attempt made to tack on a provision that would allow these organizations to inspect your machine, but that the attempt was retracted. There are serious issues in enacting a provision like this - how do they know which are legal copies, for instance. There was a /. post about this a few weeks back. Any other readers may feel free to correct me on this, but I believe that was the 'state of the union' so to speak.
CFS and PAST are P2P readonly file systems a la Napster/Gnutella/Freenet. Both had papers in this year's SOSP. Both are based on log(N) P2P overlay routing/lookup substrates.
OceanStore seeks to be a more general (writable) global storage system.
And several P2P conferences have formed and will continue to form.
Some of these projects have been going on for years. So you shouldn't buy the "Academic networking/CS researchers are a bunch of P2P haters" line without a few grains of your favorite seasoning.
I agree with the others who said that there IS a lot of P2P research going on in Universities. I know because I am writing a paper on it and was forced to find journal articles on it. The phrase Peer-to-peer or P2P is not always used - sometimes its 'Serverless Distributed File Systems', etc, I think in part because P2P is so mis-used.
For more info check out these implementations:
Farsite, xFS, Frangipani, Intermemory, OceanStore, Eternity Service, India, PAST, Free Haven Gnutella, Freenet, Pastry, Tapestry, CHORD and CAN. (Not Napster!)