Slashback: P2P, OS X, Blinkenlights

Slashback tonight with more updates, responses and corrections on scalability in P2P networks, TV shows which may not actually be cancelled, tentative wireless service in the Mile High City, and what exactly OS X is. Read on below for these and more.

The difference between theory and practice ... Paul Harrison writes: "I see your theoretical discussion of a scalable gnutella, and raise you a working, open source implementaion! Details in this linux.conf.au talk."

I was in Berkeley at a party, and then things got hazy. In response to the recent story on fixing the UNIX configuration mess, jbloggs writes: "OS X is not on top of NetBSD, but rather is a BSD compatibility layer on top of a Mach kernel. Its closest BSD-lite would be FreeBSD, which is used as a reference platform."

The problem with unstated motivations. Reader app writes "Tim O'Reilly responds to the BountyQuest piece on Salon and featued here. Tim makes some interesting points and clarifications -- especially where he refers to theodp as a crank."

You can't watch, and neither can they. UberOogie writes: "Who didn't see this coming? The MPA shut down Movie 88 today. What should be noted by everyone is that they took no legal action: they just went to the ISP, HiNet, and got them to shut off the pipe. (Movie88 was legal through a loophole in Tiawan copyright law.) So much for process, even in Tiawan. Movie 88 vows to find another provider."

I hope they use the time to reconsider. Cynical_Dude writes: "David Cohen, one of the producers of Futurama, was interviewed on Cinescape. He says that Futurama is not really cancelled, but will run for another year or so ... at least that's how many episodes they've got more or less ready now. FOX hasn't ordered any additional episodes, but Cohen asks fans to "write those letters [...] in physical form, not email" to the FOX executives."

And in other TV News, Glitch Tybalt writes: "Working for Hot Topic has its benefits. We recieved an e-mail saying that Invader Zim will not be cancelled after all. It seems that it was getting no ratings whatsoever, because they kept changing the time slot for it. Once they had decided to cancell it, they left it in one slot to finish playing the remaining episodes out. Then, since everyone could figure out when it was on, it got great reviews. (plus, the Schweet Schwag has started selling like crazy)the Invader Zim petition must have been pretty convincing as well. I guess one of them stopped to read it before wiping his ass. Maybe there's hope for a megaconglomo like Nikelodeon after all..."

Won't someone start making money with unmetered wireless? tabbser writes: "According to Aerie networks, the folks that bought bankrupt Ricochet (www.richochet.com) tests are being conducted in Denver, CO with the support of the City and county of Denver's Office of information technology. Ricochet will test and evaluate the network as part of an initial step to reactivating the service. The full story can be found on Ricochet's web site news room at http://www.ricochet.com. Go Aerie!" Aerie announced this a while ago, but in these uncertain times it's nice to see it actually happening.

Ashes to ashes, little blinking lights likewise. spike666 writes: "Blinkenlights.de is coming to an end! The Blinkenlights project by the Chaos Computer Club will be ending its run February 23, 2002. It was exposed to /. back here They are having a big party, and we're all invited. One last chance for Taco to embarrass Kathleen ..."

Comments

In Asia, money talks

[Ryu2]

I'm from Taiwan, and have been to many Asian countries. Corruption is rampant -- Taiwan is relatively good compared to places like China, Thailand and Vietnam, but even so, if you pay the right authorities the right amount of money, you can pretty much skirt nearly any sort of law.

I wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA paid the ISP some "money" to do so...

Re:In Asia, money talks

[CDWert]

In ASIA ???????

You smoking crak or wearing blinder....its rampant EVERYWHERE , here in the states more so than ANYWHERE, we just put, civilized names on it , like 'soft-money' , Lobbying, etc.

You wanna talk about Sheer volumes of money sxchanged in pursuit of a single commercial goal, thats right the good ole' USA will win hands down every time.

I have a hope that the next major war wont be fought between countries with differing ideologies, but rather between the people and the corporations. But alas I am just an old crank....

I hope they do find another ISP soon, I have often wondered what ever happened to the Alternet idea ?

Re:In Asia, money talks

[CDWert]

Yeah, and health care costs are fucking unreal, some people have children dying because they cant buy patented medications that are the ONLY ones for their ill, my sons is $2000 a month, just for him to stay alive. Im lucky I have insurance, admittedley thaey hate me and would do anything to dump me, or how about all the adults dying of something like aids globally and the not being able to save them because US companies hold the patents and wont let go even to save fucking lives. How about all the corporations eroding the rights of citizens for their own profit ? How about a goverment that caters now to the corporations more than its citizens ?

Oh wait, im responding to a complete fucking moron with no grasp in the real world and who lives only in the census statistics !

Spend a day, or an hour if you can stomach it at a world class childrens hospital, Cincinatti , Boston, etc. Talk to the parents of the kids dying in the cancer wards, ask the parents that cant afford the cure for their childs ills, when they are available, ask a parent willing to do anything to save a child that needs an organ transplant, I have experience with my son in both of the above, visit a field hospital in Africa. When youve done those thing and are content that the corporations grace us with a 36,000 average income, you tell me all is roses.......

Idiot.....

Re:In Asia, money talks

[JabberWokky]

The best crooks throughout history have always been 'legit'.

If they are legit, then they are not criminals.

Saying that crime in first world countries is like that in the rest of the world is a very skewed view. The police beating of a Brit or American is front page news, and the details are dragged through - the cops go to jail. Yes, they do, I worked at the Public Defender's office for years, and they do go to jail. Even if they aren't convicted, they often are pressured out of their job.

However, the police force in China and Russia routinely beat people, even to death - without even having a reason for making an arrest. The stories go by word of mouth, and no public outcry is made - the people who would have spoken up have been killed. Russia is a morbid place to visit now, and friends who have moved to America universally use the term "escaped". China is nasty as well - I had a business partnership be reduced by one member when he didn't return from a visit home.

People like you are often "indy media" fans - consider the fact that just the concept of "media" has not spread to many parts of the world. Travel a bit, spend some time getting to know people, and ask quiet questions to yourself. You'll be surprised how nice your first world country seems with its "corruption for money" and "people going broke from Enron". In many places, people can't *go* broke - sustinence is the daily effort... and "corruption" involves dead bodies in doorways or dumped in a garbage heap.

--
Evan

Re:In Asia, money talks

[_ph1ux_]

BS.

Why don't you tell us then, how Ken Lay is providing a direct means for a product and profit.

It's nice to see that you have faith in the ideals of a capitalistic society - but reality is not quite so easy.

The people out there that should be able to get in on companies can't really get in on a really meaningful level as easily as you would have us to believe. The fact is that big money, old money and corrupt money are what run the world today. Even though a small percentage of new money is being made so as to help the previously "common folk" become a part of the classes that run the world via finances.

It is sickly apparent in every new scandal that comes about. The Bush and Kennedy families of the world have a strangle-hold on power through money - and these types of people will do anything to maintain that power and wealth.

However - from an outside and naive perspective we can say that the way to the top is through perseverance and hard work, and entreprenerialship (sp?) but the truth is more a factor of who you know - who you can pay, and how lucky you can be at making a killing off the expense of people, countries or corporations without getting caught (or at least not having to give up more than 30% of that profit in bribery etc)

The world of money and power is not ruled by the angles of PC-ness and good ol' pullin' yerself up by yer bootstraps to make an honest buck - rather it is a dark corrupt and sinister world of dog-eat-dog. You kill or be killed.
.

Futurama? How about Family Guy?!?

[Ryu2]

In case you didn't know, FOX is planning to pull the plug in it. Futurama is pretty good, but nothing compares to Family Guy!

http://www.damnyouall.net/savefamilyguy/

Possible antitrust?

[Ryu2]

Movie88 had posed an unexpected threat to studios' own video-on-demand services such as Movielink and Movies.com, which are still months away from commercial service.

The Taiwanese site was run on a video-store model, allowing people to "rent" access to movies for three days in return for a payment of just $1. The movies, which were streamed to a computer in RealNetworks' video format, could not easily be saved to a hard drive or downloaded.


So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos? (Yes, I know Real Video can be downloaded with some utilities, but then again, you could copy rental video tapes/DVDs with the right hardware too)

How is it different in concept from any video store for that matter?

And most importantly, how is it different than the movie studios getting into the act, except for where the money goes? (Do video stores like Blockbuster have to pay royalties to movie studios? Curious...)

Re:Futurama? How about Family Guy?!?

[svferris]

What I want to know is why we haven't seen Family Guy on DVD here in the U.S.? The U.K. has a Season 1 DVD, as well as a Futurama DVD. They even have an announcement for the Simpsons, Season 2 DVD.

Looks like I'm going to have to invest in a region-free DVD player.

When it's worth more...

[mengel]

...to someone else to shut you down than it is to you to be online, a for-profit ISP is motivated to take a payment to turn you off.

I wonder if we'll start seeing ISPs advertising rates to shut down customers:

• Turn off a Normal Account $2000
• Turn off a Priority Account $4000
• Turn off High Bandwith Account $50000

You will be informed in 10 days whether the account has outbid you to re-enable service...

Sounds kind of like something out of a Gibson novel.

OS X

[Stenpas]

Since OS X is one of the topics of slashback, it might be worth mentioning that a new update to MacOS X was released. 10.1.3. Here's what it offers:

1.CD Disc Recording Peripherals: Expanded support for QPS, EZQuest, LaCie, Yamaha, MCE Technologies and Sony devices
2.Image Capture and iPhoto: Improved support for several digital camera models from Canon, Kodak and Sony
3.DVD Playback on external VGA displays on PowerBook G4
4.PowerBook video mirroring will be on by default when connecting to a new display
5.Improvements for iTunes when the full screen visualizer is used
6.Login authentication support for LDAP and Active Directory services
7.OpenSSH version 3.0.2p1
8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication
9.Mail includes support for SSL encryption

Get it via Software Update. If you're a bit hesistant, might want to wait for what xlr8yourmac.com says. And MacsOnly does a variety of speed tests for every version released. I'm sure they'll put up new benchmarks shortly.

Sorry, Paul, no cigar

[Salamander]

The previous Slashdot article was about n-dimensional cube or torus topologies. Paul Harrison's "Circle" network (slashdotted - Google cache) is...wait for it...a simple circle. Sort of like Chord, it seems, but less sophisticated. It's not at all clear why a reasonable person would expect Circle to scale particularly well, especially in an environment with high node turnover (lots of potentially circle-breaking join/leave operations).

There's nothing wrong with Circle. It just doesn't seem to meet the promise of being a fully functional network that scales better than Gnutella.

Re:Futurama? How about Family Guy?!?

[JayAndSilentBob]

Amen about the clerks, brother. Me and Silent Bob loved that show. We were raking in the mad money. That shit was better than selling smoke! But that wasn't like us at all, all cartooney and shit. But we do miss the phat cash. I gotta get out of here before that tubby bitch breaks out that fuckin' Amy story again. Snoogans.

Flat search network that scales

[PureFiction]

Circle is cool, but it is really a subset of Chord, with searching kind of hacked on top of a hashing index system (i.e. search is implemented by tying keywords to hashes and distributing this hash space.)

This means that high peer churn rates, hot spots in popular keywords, spamming keywords, etc, all make this a rather vulnerable and fragile implementation of searching. It probably is better than gnutella, but that isnt saying much, and it certainly does not mean it is 'infinitely scalable'. The real world is a harsh place...

If you want a scalable, distributed search/discovery mechanism for large peer networks here is your recipe:

1. Build on a base of juicy lightweight UDP messaging. This allows you to send messages directly to peers, circumvent NAT's, and handle many thousands of virtual connections.

2. Sending queries to many thousands of peers is still a large task, even if only small packets are sent directly. Must optimize this.

3. Optimize by using a social discovery mechanism to keep track of which peers are good at answering your queries. Query them first and more often than other peers. Call this peer ranking the 'relative quality' of the peer.

4. Optimize further by halting the query once a sufficient number of matches are found. This way you only need to query a handfull of peers (maybe 10, maybe 200) to complete a query.

5. Finally, perform transitive introduction using the high quality peers in your group. This way you use peers with a high quality to find new peers, and it is highly likely that they will be high quality peers as well.

This is how the ALPINE Network works, and it scales. The number of connections any peer may have is solely up to their discretion, based on bandwidth and memory resources. All communication is direct, and every peer is in direct control over his own resources, which makes for a very robust environment.

There are a number of details, the above simply a 30,000ft description. If you are interested you can read more in the ALPINE Overview and the ALPINE FAQ .

One last comment, this stuff is no longer vaporware :-)

Re:Liar, liar, pants on fire!

[Golias]

On top of that, Apple only bought NeXT because they couldn't cut a deal with BeOS for their system.

Actually, they could. BeOS was available for them to buy, and would have been much cheaper than what they paid for NeXT. They had a choice, and chose NeXT.

Bottom line, Apple believed that Be simply was not worth over $200M, but NeXT was worth over $400M. I suspect the reasons for that difference could be summed up in five words: Steve Jobs and Avi Tevanian.