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Public Software Fund's First Project

Posted by michael on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @05:39PM from the money-where-your-mouth-is dept.

Russ Nelson writes "The Public Software Fund's first project has been funded for two months worth of development. Tom Jennings (of Fidonet fame) will be writing software to do peer-to-peer file sharing of free software RPM packages, improving the existing free software packages up2date, /current/, and BitTorrent. This will keep new distro releases from being slashdotted."

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flash crowd? by ceejayoz · 2002-07-10 17:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

The "slashdotted" link has an interesting link about another name for the /. effect... the "flash crowd"

Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story "Flash Crowd" predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect).