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.

Comments

"gives copyholders this right to be intruders"

[mcSey921]

"and its representatives were level-headed enough during discussions of the Anti-Terrorism Act to offer an amendment that specifically gives copyholders this right to be intruders"

Anyone know the status of this amendment? Did it get tacked onto the bill that passed a few days ago?

Surprised it's taken this long...

[mystery_bowler]

Peer-to-peer, like many other technologies, has it's advantages and disadvantages. For some purposes (not just file-swapping), it's absolutely ideal (OK, OK so I'm a fan of SETI@Home :) ).

I just find it rather surprising that academia has taken this long to embrace p2p. It's not as if p2p has been an unknown or undiscussed topic in the realm of computer science. When I was in college, it seemed that the university was eager to stress the importance of object-oriented programming and relational databases...well, as soon as the market stressed their importance. :) As I was taking my mandatory networking classes (which I wish I had paid more attention during), we discussed p2p quite a bit. By my senior year (Waaaaay back in...'98 :) ) there had already been several groups of students who created p2p final projects.

Is the market the core of the issue? Do colleges only adapt to teaching new technologies quickly when the market demands it? If that's the case, it would seem like more CS degress would be the equivalent of training at a vocational/technical school.

Article mentions Bandwidth issues

[underpaidISPtech]

I have often thought of P2P as being similiar to neural networks or the brain. Nodes that are structurally similiar and carry info to and fro.

Do our brains have bandwidth issues? No, because supposedly we only use 10%. Gnutella is always ridiculed because of it's overhead though. But Napster and the rest don't really count though because they are centralized, so how does our brain not get overwhelmed and how can this be applied to P2P.

Re:Article mentions Bandwidth issues

[cavemanf16]

Just imagine if we could implant fiber optics into our spine and major nerves! We'd have the fastest reaction time ever!

Actually, our brains/nervous system do have 'bandwidth' issues - which is why the doctor does that little 'smack you on the knee with a tiny hammer' test. It's like pinging your brain for a response, and how long does it take for your brain to respond appropriately.

P2P networks are the next Big Step in computing if you ask me. Free neighborhood wireless networks will probably be the next step in networking too. We've had global community with wire-based networking, now it's time to bring community back TO the community.

Excellent point.

[andres32a]

"I'm not surprised that colleges would complain about Napster bandwidth requirements because I hear the same wringing of hands over education in general. I hear there are too many applicants to top colleges. Excuse me, but wouldn't it be good to educate more students? Instead of saying there are too many applicants, why don't you work on increasing the availability of high-quality course offerings? I know you don't have tenure-track positions for all the people awarded doctorates, but it's not your job to offer everyone a position; it's your job to educate them."
Excellent point.

Most P2P should be banned.

[aspillai]

First off, academic bandwidth should be used for academic purposes. Sure, limited personal use is fine but its main purpose isn't entertainment. That being said, I know my university doesn't care if you run SETI@Home but do care when you run Kazzaa or other file sharing software. I think that's a good stand by the administrators. My university doesn't force anyone to use their network services. (They actually encourage you to get @Home.) If you want to use P2P software, get @Home or DSL and do whatever you want.

I'm not sure in the States, but in Canada Universities have very small budgets that are being cut yearly. I'd rather the University had a decent network and focus spending on research rather than worry about supporting P2P stuff.

Re:Firewalling universities a big problem

[frank_adrian314159]

I see this also as a serious threat to the development of new Internet services. If you look at most of the existing Internet technologies (http, nntp, smtp, bind...), they were all created in universities as "gray research", often by students. In a tightly firewalled Internet, they might never have made it out.

As much as I agree that universities should keep their networks open, I have to disagree with this point. Why? Because initial "gray" work can (and probably should) still be done on an isolated network. Not only does it make sure that projects don't accidently kill the campus or departmental network, it also makes debugging a heck of a lot easier. And, once the prototypical work is done, you can usually convince some professor to beat IT into submission for you. Most departments have a couple of spare boxes lying about (heck, back at my school twenty years ago, there were usually anywhere from 2-3 midicomputers lying about totally unutilized at any time). Hubs are cheap. Linux makes a relatively stable development platform for gray work. So, in the end, I don't see "sealed tight" campus networks as a huge impediment to self-motivated research (unless it's cultural research into the latest works of Limp Bizkit).

P2P is about more than hoge files

[Anonymous Coward]

P2P is more than swapping files efficiently, sweating about copyright and bashing the RIAA. at P2PQ for example they are doing somehting that uses P2P but which is unrelated to filesharing. This is a perfect example of P2P put to a pure academic purpose. If all the people holed up in dorms in colleges around the country used it as much as they use file swapping P2P, we would not hear so much of the tired arguments against P2P being trottedd around whenever those three characters are strung together.