Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American Article: Internet-Spanning OS
Hell O'World writes: "Interesting article on Scientific American outlining what they call an Internet-scale operating system (ISOS). 'The Internet-resource paradigm can increase the bounds of what is possible (such as higher speeds or larger data sets) for some applications, whereas for others it can lower the cost.'"
Judging from the photo it seems to be a new form of 3d tetris.... This shall definitely shape the future!
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
This sounds like (among other things) a larger-scale Seti@Home project - sharing your unused cpu cycles to solve larger problems. I'm not sure how well this would be received, especially given the recent concerns over what these clients are actually transmitting.
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
I personally don't like the idea of my OS being spread across multiple machines, or other people being able to use my computing power. If I'm not using my computer, I don't want others using it, reducing it's lifetime. I like knowing that everything I do is controlled by me, on my system. It's a little unnerving to think that my files would be distributed all around the world on other machines. (can we say security?) No thanks, I'll stick with how I'm setup now.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
This would be most efficient if nations would universally implement a data network as broad and all-encompassing as the phone system. The state in question could offer access for free in exchange for cycles from users' computers, creating an enormous computer at federal/municipal disposal. Offer opt-out at a price, and it seems to me that this would be perfectly friendly to all.
Pax Digitalia
I mean I get enough junk e-mail as it is, without unethical crooks having an entire OS dedicated to the task...
...Oh, you said spanning OS.
Nevermind.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
You think booting up your computer takes forever now, just wait until you have to download all the .dll's over a 28k line!
.NET rip-off, and that it works out alright.
Eh, enough trolling. I seriously hope this isn't some pathetic
The speed of time is one second per second.
Extraordinary parallel data transmission is possible with the Internet resource pool. Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem.
I suppose that's great and all, but what if Mary is on a 56k modem? Doesn't really help all that much. I do understand the point they're making though.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
how they talk about Mary's computer decoding an mpeg for someone in Helsinki and sending it to her -- and then her telling her to computer to stop (presumably, our Finnish friend just got screwed out of a key part of his movie.)
This is all very cute -- but some of it is laughable. The rest of it, decoding DNA sequences, sharing movies (the binary, not the decompression of) -- it already exists.
In short: Big deal.
With license v6 by M$, if you install it on your network, and run any other M$ product on that network (even back to Win 3.1), then the license is upgraded to v6 for all of those machines. Where is the boundary? If I do a VPN across the internet to another machine on another LAN, does that mysterious license switch occur? If I am globally connected to many machines on the internet, does the license switch occur on all of these machines?
Kickstart
Wow, 3 years on Slashdot and this is the first time I've caught a duplicate story before anyone else. What do I win? :) A free Kuro5hin.org account? :)
Group 1>>People who already devote cycles to folding proteins, looking for E.T., or factoring primes.
Group 2>>Those who don't.
Now, for the people in group 1, they are already using something similar to an ISOS, only they are dedicating their computer to something they deem worthy--and I don't think a woman watching a movie in Helsinki is worthy..
Group 2 chooses not do devote their spare cycles for some reason. There are many reasons, but for some people, it is paranoia (of other's data on their computer). To take it a step further, to the ISOS--it's one thing to be looking at nekkid pix of your girlfriend on YOUR hard drive...but what if it was actually being stored on someone's computer in Orem, Utah (which raises some interesting jurisdiction and local ordinance laws)...nekkid pix, mp3s, divx movies of Hilary Rosen, whatever....(of course, your mp3s of metallica's music might partly be stored on Lars' computer or something....wouldn't that be a hoot)
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Imagine how long it would take to defrag the whole Internet!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
That's what I thought it said until the 3rd readthrough. Interestingly, the description holds either way.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Yes, the exact same article was posted as a /. story here about three weeks ago (under almost the exact same title!) and I could swear it was mentioned in a comment in this story (posted by timothy!), although I can't seem to find that comment right now...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
well,
for starters, someone shoot the guy that said 'it's called windows.'
Anyhow, on a more realistic note, This is an excellent idea. I've often wondered why clustering is limited to computers owned by one individual or organization, why not a worldwide, scalable, cluster. I guess the biggest concerns are security (who gets to see my data, who gets to copy my data, who can put data on my machine, who can execute code on my machine?) In a utopian society this would be easily resolved with trust. Fact is, if everyone uses the same setup, eventualy, someone will find a way to exploit it, I forsee alot of problems with designing a working, usable ISOS. However, there may be a simpler solution w/ similar if not same results. Why start at the OS level? why not a platform independant application with a lightweight encryption algorythym, redundancy would be a must (if someone kills there computer while it's working on your data there should be several backups to failover to). Also, more importantly, selectivity of what processes, files, etc... get migrated, and what ones don't. I'm no developer, so I'm sure I've made many errors in this reply, but it's just my opinion, I'd love to hear others.
Blocsync
I was reading the screen fast, without my glasses, and thought the title was "Internet Spamming OS".
Phew!
Got Wisdom?
they'll sell their customer's hard drive space and processor time? Let's say I give CompanyX the right to process gene sequences on my machine. What if they sell that right to other companies? A little freaky, but a good idea though.
c-hack.com |
Guess there is nothing new under the sun.
This was posted to /. maybe a couple of weeks ago (although I can't seem to find the reference).
--Dave Storrs
From the supposed real-life example in the article:
"Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it's part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki."
I wonder how upset this individual in Helsinki would be if Mary decided to format her hard disk in the midst of his movie... Oh, but you say that the same information is distributed on other workstations as a redundancy precaution. I wonder how much bandwidth that cost to prevent this 'just in case' scenario?
While I can certainly appreciate the added value of distributed processing power and multilocational data sources, exactly how is having these massive amounts of data running over the net affecting bandwidth availability?
In my opinion, the lack of a truly distributed ISOS is a bit trivial until we achieve a higher grade of internet connectivity for everyone!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
about 15 years ago. Down to the gee-whiz! Jetsons prose.
Has Scientific American become nothing but a speculative fiction and PR site for political movements and corporations.
Untill the bandwidth/price ratio available for internet connections grows significantly higher, at present there are only a few exceptional cases where the cost of the data distribution is low enough to make internet distributed computation feasable.
The same applied to clustered storage, with the added problem of the latency to access such storage.
This is not, unfortunately, a tool for helping the average computer consumer. It may, however, be useful for SOME scientific computational problems (ie: ones doing heavy analysis of easily paritionable data), but those are certainly in the minority.
Unfortunately the speed of light over any significant distance soon brings a halt to the scalability of most problems over a widely distributed system, producing a minimum latency which causes the scalability of the system to stop. As computers get faster and storage gets larger this point of decreasing returns gets lower.
Now if we throw in the legal aspects... Can you see the ISP's liking this? how about companies whos equipment is used without their knowledge, and who do we blame for the illegal pr0n being stored unknown to the user on their equipment?
We should not be trying to find ways of consuming bandwith, as it is going to become a more and more valuable resource as computers get more powerfull, instead we should be looking to minimise the bandwidth consumed for given services.
If computers were not still scaling at the rate they are, this may be a useful idea, but that won't happen for some time.
Sorry for going off-topic, but I just have to grieve any time I see anything about my former favorite magazine. Before computers, walking around reading one of these was how you knew who the real geeks were. Where once you had Nobel Prize winning contributors writing articles that took a week to digest, now you have watered down fluff comparable to Discover or Newsweek. Next time you come across an issue printed before 1985, pick it up and learn something.
This quote sounds like it came straight out of an article about linux. The only differance being that linux is not restricted to the limited set of applications it is capable of running.
If linux is struggling (up to this point) to get mass acceptance and use, I can't see an ISOS getting off the ground for a long time yet or ever.
As other posters have pointed out this is a duplicate article. But hey, turn this repeat to your advantage! Go read the previous posting and repost all the +5 posts as your own, then watch the karma roll in! :)
(Yeah, its a little off-topic. I'm sure the mod's will see the funny in it.)
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
This article makes one fatal assumption: Consumers will always purchase more powerful equipment than they need.
.NET and dotGNU waves are likely to make thin clients much more realistic.
The time of super fast home-PCs is likely to not last very long. The incoming
There is absolutely no reason for 'Mary' to have so much computing power since she doesn't need it. The only real limiting factor today is bandwidth which this article assumes anyway.
What is probably likely in the future though is a more distributed OS. One that is truely network transparent in every facet of operation. I believe there are some rumors floating around about MIT working on something to this effect...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Besides the above reasons as to why it wouldn't take off, if the person isn't getting paid more then it costs to leave the computer on there isn't any incentive for joe blow to just leave it on all day and contribute. For some people (the ones that are probably already using dnet or seti) this isn't a problem because they usually have it on, however most families aren't going to leave the computer on all day all the time, plus many computers go into a suspend mode which saves power.
Guess there is nothing new under the sun.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Formalising peer-to-peer filesharing in conjunction with a completely redesigned OS, the concepts of distributed computing and micropayments? Why not?... after all, then you can find some nifty acronym for the whole thing. Which turns out to have been previously used in this case by the International Seminar for Oriental Studies.
It's an interesting idea and handy in its own way, but taken to the extreme - would you want your system controlled by a central server, possibly owned either by government or by a consortium of some kind? And all of your files backed up somewhere else on the network, way out of your reach?
I am way too paranoid for this.
Also: Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem.
Doesn't this assume that Mary is not connected to the Internet by an antiquated modem? In which case, surely she can't download at 10 megabits a second either...
I was really worried for a second there, I thought the headline was "Internet spamming OS".
That's one variant of NetBSD we DON'T need developed...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I will pay for journalistic integrity.
[o]_O
Wouldn't a newly made distributed system either be sued out of existence by people in power, or controlled from its inception by them? I can't picture it working beyond a Distributed.net/SETI kind of thing.
The financial aspect of it is quite interesting though, information and media could be "virtually free" because of your essentially leased out idle computing resources.
As other posters have pointed out this is a duplicate article. But hey, turn this repeat to your advantage! Go read the previous posting and repost all the +5 posts as your own, then watch the karma roll in! :)
(Yeah, its a little off-topic. I'm sure the mod's will see the funny in it.)
Let's notate your Linux box as floodge(0), and ISOS as floodge(1). This higher-order OS would be floodge(2).
It gets better. Now consider an OS of order floodge(N), where N is an unimagineably large but finite number. This would harness the power of millions ** N computers! Truly outrageous horsepower; more teraflops than there are electons in the universe. Just think of how many extra-terrestial intelligences we could discover per second!
The sole reason it won work, what if the 3 computers with my taxes die or end up off like her laptop, and its April 14? i know it sounds easy, but even so, It seems risky........not to mention the privacy concerns... but those have already been covered.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
As other posters have pointed out this is a duplicate article. But hey, turn this repeat to your advantage! Go read the previous posting and repost all the +5 posts as your own, then watch the karma roll in! :-)
(Yeah, its a little off-topic. I'm sure the mod's will see the funny in it.)
"The second is distributed online services, such as file storage systems, databases, hosting of Web sites, streaming media (such as online video) and advanced Web search engines"
Yeah...sure... *coughDMCAcough*
I'm sure this would really fly. Plus, how secure can this really be?
Not to mention that the current internet infrastructure is not nearly fast enough to handle this.
"Extraordinary parallel data transmission is possible with the Internet resource pool. Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem."
Ok, but you're also effectively saturating 200 56k hosts... what if these people are downloading? Also...think of the unnecessary overhead of downloading from two hundred sources at once. I understand how this works.... similar to KaZaA, for example. You download fragments of a file from all over the place. You also see ten different versions of the same file, virus infected files, and inconsistent download speeds. One day you'll download a file at 100k/sec, the next you might be downloading it at 2k/sec. Also, does anyone else realize what havoc these p2p applications (which is really what this ISOS is) wreak on a filesystem? Do a weekend of downloading large files on any of the p2p networks and run a defrag analysis...you'll see exactly what I mean.
I can see this happening some time, just not soon by any stretch. The article does talk about the other use for this technology -- distributed processing. This is actually a viable option....but...newsflash...it's been around for a few years now. See SETI@HOME, Distributed.net, etc. These projects require little dependence on the unreliable internet. Well...that's not true...but they don't rely on massive amounts of data transfer per host. They rely on processing power, which is controlled by the client, for the client -- without relying on the internet.
Anyways, enough of a rant. I just think that the internet as it is now would not be able to take advantage of this technology.
-kwishot
What needs to be done is the creation of a universal virtual architecture for the whole damn thing. I don't want to manage ten programs on twenty computers. I want there to be one program on the twenty computers that check in with another one to not only get work units / assignments but the cores too. So I can say to my controller box, computer 1 can run projects A,B,D,F,and Q, with weighted priorities of .1, .2, .4, .2, and .1 respectively. If no work is avalable, fall to next highest priority. Then have computer 2 work on A,C,E,and Q, randomly pick between A,C,E and only run Q if none of those projects have outstanding work (works for A,C,E being things like MOSIX).
The controller should also know the locations of the projects masters, so it acts as a data proxy unless otherwise allowed and can fetch newer versions of the cores in real time. Of course, the cores can just languish on disk until I sign them, should I chose to.
IOW, something like the now-abandoned distributed.net v3.
I'm wandering. Sorry.
_Knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
yes this has been featured in numerous other postings, but every time it is mentioned in a theoretical capacity. what i would like to see is a practical approach to this problem via transparent java clients.
I looked vigorously for a java based client that can be employed in a distributed setting. I found ONE person working on this about a year ago. But it was not maintained. I would love to see java code extended to a distributed.net client and then embedded inside certain web sites that support distributed.net.
For instance, you go to distributed.net and click 'contribute resources now' bam a java client kicks in and you're crunching keys.
The main barrier to parallel acceptance is in the ease of contribution. Many people don't want to install a client and configure it correcly. Java (even javascript) is now mature enough to handle parallelism inside the browser. Where is it?!
We don't want "The Network Is The Computer". Remember mainframes? Remember how we joyfully fled from them?
What we want is to really own our computer power.
We want a very clear sense of "This is my computer" and "This is my data". I can do what I like with it.
Think folks, what is all the fuss about security and file sharing? Ownership. This is my data to own (keep private) and my data to share (if I choose).
Complexity and installation difficulties steal our sense of ownership. When the computer is a burden, we don't want to own it. Complexity robs us of choice.
The correct fix is not an ISOS, or retreat to mainframe days. The correct fix is to simplify and make things easy.
I don't want my work computer to be my home computer. My employer and I definitely want a strong sense of separation on that front thank you.
Forget these silly pipe dreams, and concentrate on easing the pains of ownership so that we have strength to share.
All this is a silly confusion over....
Remove the confusion between the above items and the desire for silly things like "The Network Is The Computer", DMCA etc goes away.
I noticed both have posts about enron!!
This sig is a virus, take it and use it.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
I'm pretty sure that you could make "not for resale" part of the contract.
Wow, 3 years on Slashdot and this is the first time I've caught a duplicate story before anyone else. What do I win? :) A free Kuro5hin.org account? :)
Just type find with no arguments and you can see every file on every computer on the net...
There are still no simple ways to use a pair
of computers on the same desk efficiently, why not start there?
The future isn't what it used to be.
how hard is it to have a table in a db or a fsckn plain text file with all the previous links, and just "grep links.txt "or "SELECT * from "LINKS where link=''"?
just have something the scans the post for "a href" tags and put it in the list or table and check to see if it already exists. whenever there is a hit, someone should take a few seconds to see if it is a duplicate post...
I would not let my computer become a part of this unless I had control over who, either specifically (by name, IP, etc.) or generally (categories like Government or Biotech), gets to use it.
Liberty in your lifetime
The insight one gains from reading the article is, of course, not that all developers should drop whatever they are doing and rush to develop The OS Which Will Cure All The Ills Of The World. Nor would it be possible for the desktop user to make any money in the manner described: if computing became so cheap, the cost of processing the transfer of money would far exceed the value of the computing time contributed.
The message is that P2P could indeed be the killer app for the desktop that linux is waiting for; world domination is indeed possible if only we are a little more inventive. What OS is best equipped to support massively distributed computing? *nix, of course. Windows users already have a hard time protecting their machines from the internet. What we need is more robust P2P protocols designed with security and scalability in mind.
In the meantime, check out distributed.net
As the cliche goes, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. This would work wonderfuly if all the other technology on the horizion stand still. Specificly, Quantum Computers. I understand nothing about them, but all I've heard their usable for is breaking encription. Acctually, they will render all current encription worthless. I don't worry about my data being decryted because it's on my box, but if it's spread out everywhere...
For the last two years, we have been working
...
on something extremely similar:
Jtrix
Technically, Jtrix has micro-kernel-like agents (nodes)
running on host machines. Applications consist of
code fragments that can be executed on the nodes.
There is a mechanism for binding to a remote service,
and that's pretty much all you need as a basic
platform. Of course, it's convenient to have some
support services (eg. file storage), but that's
already in userland (as it should be).
A lot of this is implemented and working.
We have got one problem though: we need a killer
app to get people running thoses nodes
You couldn't have a beauwolf cluster of these, now could you.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
This article reminded me of some of the things I've been thinking about lately.
A couple of years ago I thought I should try and write and operating system, just to learn some of the concepts. Initially I figured I would just do some kind of basic vanilla windows 3.1-like system with no security, no memory protection, etc.
Then I realized just how nice memory protection was. So I figured I'd do that. I read something about the HURD and then I thought microkernels were the way to go, (even though what I read could be just as easily done with a monolithic system). Then I learned C++, and despite the fact that it's a hideous language, I realized that object orientation was kind of a natural way to abstract things. Then I read more about microkernel systems like QNX that use IPC so heavily, and realized this could lead to some interesting and powerful stuff.
After rolling around ideas in my head for a couple of years, I've finally started sketching up some ideas on paper, and even made a web page. I'd be very interested if people would check it out. (http://www.sperklabs.com/sperkos) Perhaps some of the ideas would inspire somebody smarter to start another operating system project. I'm starting to actually code stuff, and I still have a LOT of stuff to ponder and design, so intelligent feedback would be cool.
Hi all, one of the reaons that seti@home and the united devices cancer project are so succesfull is that: - people choose a project to which they whish to contribute and - there is a limited number of distibuted projects going on. i'm pretty sure that if anyone can start large distibuted computing tasks, the so called OSIS will be swamped with tasks that no-one except their creator would find anything other that a waste of bandwidth/CPU, like calculating the value of pi to 2^128 decimals, or finding a cure for anthrax(there is one, but if you really think that dying from anthrax is more likely than dying from cancer.... knee-jerk anyone?) anyway i'm pretty sure that: - the whole thing will congest after a month or so. - my computer would be filled with warez since none of us would buy hardware that enforces the DCMA and what if i am working on a very resource intensive task? i don't want a guy from helsinki having access to my resources if i need them too. it is still my computer. but he desperatly needs mine because on my harddisk is his much needed data, and the backup on somebody elses computer is lost because of format, and the third copy is not available...
what they describe is not an OS, but simply an application. It's not much different from current P2P programs currently out there.
loz
Sounds to me like Plan9!
I love that little bunny.
/.-ed twice? Yet more proof that p2p is a hype technology.
I still remember talking to a Mojo developer at a con about what really happens with distributing file slicing:
Me: "So what if all the peers with my file are down?"
Developer: "They won't be. You'll still be able to get your file."
Me: "How?"
Developer: "You'll still be able to get your file."
?!?!?
Rather telling, actually; it's been 2+ years since gnutella. The number of novel p2p applications out there is slim. The number of platforms is even slimmer, which is really disappointing. P2p was supposed to revolutionize everything, not just vaporware.
There is a promising platform for running p2p services at PeerMetrics. Another one is JXTA. Both come with source. I was looking forward to World OS, but it appears to be dead. Most p2p endeavors are still unreleased, like Ocean Store.
I hope more people get to put in some dev cycles on p2p platforms. Applications like The Circle are cool, but as a standalone app the code isn't really leverageable. We need more shared effort. The economy aside, I believe it's taking forever because p2p is harder to write for than expected.
Hopefully this isn't true, and in the next year we'll finally see some real progress. Either way more p2p hype storms are a sure bet.
This 'Internet Operating System' is exactly what Rebol are aiming at now -- there are documents on their website...
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
There's enough spam in this world without someone writing a dedicated OS for the task.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
This distributed operating system sounds great! I will never miss those spare cycles on my newly-acquired (and blisteringly fast) 486DX2/66.
My only concern is that projects like this will encourage average (non geek) people to want to be "online" ALL THE TIME (!) and this may well cause the World Wide Web to become much more commercialized.
J Random Karmawhore
Windows 95? No thanks, I love my Yggdrasil!
(satire by graspee)
The cancer cure thing apparently works under Wine, though I haven't tried it.
I treat it as a game- watching my "score" (position) go up. I'm currently ranked about 39,000.
graspee
Why are all your comments at -1 ?
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I think the reality is closer than this article or the discussion here makes clear. See http://www.gridforum.org/ for example. The company I work for certainly has this tagged as a 'next big thing'.
catch (ModDownException mde) {post.modUp("Interesting")}
Oh my God!! You want to put thousands of computers to factoring a large prime ?
For the record, grandparent probably meant either factoring a large candidate prime that has been tested a few times against Fermat's little theorem, or factoring a product of a small number of large primes.
Will I retire or break 10K?
as Internet SpaMMing OS -
I thought it was another Microsoft article.
because to have an effective OS, you would need to have trusted access to those resources....raise your hand if you are going to trust some stupid OS that you have no control over to use your spare Proc cycles, memory space, and Hard drive?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Here's what I don't get: Distributed processing is fine, because the CPU is idling most of the time on most computers. What does this have to do with storage? Is most of the capacity on people's drive's unused? Not in my experience. A distributed backup of everyone on the network to everyone on the network would require everyone to double their storage capacity, and that's without any redundancy.
But they're not giving anything away for free. As her PC works, pennies trickle into her virtual bank account.
Hmmmmm. i've got a bunch of boxes lying around - beef up the HD's, create a few accounts, let folks store their files on my machines and let the cash roll in!!!
YES!!
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Popular Power had a java-based client. It basically ran off a JDK it helped install on your system, not via the browser. (They ran out of money, dunno what happened to the code.) It would run when your screen saver turned on, which I think makes more sense than asking a user to visit a website.
You're missing the real problem with all these distributed approaches. There aren't many corporate commercial computing jobs that are limited by compute speed. High-end server applications are usually most limited by disk I/O rates, which none of these ISOS approaches effectively address.
ISOS is great for compute-bound problems, OK for network-bound problems, and lousy for diskIO-bound problems, while the application portfolio willing to pay for speedup is overwhelmingly the reverse, except for a few scattered niches.
RPM speeds on disk drives don't improve at Moore's Law rates. The CPU isn't the bottleneck, the database is the bottleneck.
--LP
P.S. Also, writing parallel-efficient applications remains mostly "hard."
The distributed file system thing is exactly what FreeNet already does. However, the key differences between local data and network data, which nobody seems willing to address fully, is what happens when the 'net' runs out of space? Some data gets replicated more than other data--typically by frequency of use--meaning data that's really really important to one person may not be available because too many people are watching Britney Spears movies, and they get replicated more rather than the so-called important data.
Replication of data has tremendous cost: bandwidth, time, and storage space. Its retrieval is also non-trivial. Local data is by far more manageable and secure, so much so that a fully distributed system just doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that people would prefer to carry their data with them.
Consider instead, a bootable business card CD burned with your favorite OS, and a key-sized multi-gig USB memory drive. Constrained to something that will fit in your pocket very comfortably, or even in a normal sized wallet, you can have everything the way you want it, anywhere you go. No need to add the complexity of network distribution at all.
Too often, visionaries put faith in a silver bullet to cure all ails. I prefer simple solutions to solve individual problems effectively.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.