Slashdot Mirror
Public Software Fund's First Project
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."
If I'm not mistaken, N'Sync has a little-known song named "apache.tgz". Also, Brititany has done "kernel-2.4.19.tgz".
;)
Oh, well...it was a nice idea while it lasted.
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).
Before everyone starts screeming, "Why only development for Redhat!" you may note that John Gilmore (evidently a Redhat guy) donated the money for this project. I don't know why Redhat didn't just hire the guy.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)
/. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).
He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier
We are currently running a BitTorrent load test at:
http://66.139.73.165/
If you would like to help out an open source content distribution network we would greatly appreciate it!
The mean-spirited and outright nasty comments that have gotten attached to every post mentioning Gene Kan's death remind me of why I cringe every time Slashdot announces that someone has died. Although it would be nice for Slashdot to provide a place for those of us touched by this tragedy to pay our respects, I'm actually relieved that they haven't. It would be painful to see all the trash that some of the miscreant AC's who hang out here would post.
Goodbye, Gene.
OMG. It really is porn. I figured it'd be a huge advertizement for them or something. Thumbs (yes, thumbs) up to BitTorrent for actually putting some truth in advertizing.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
My experience, (as of a few minutes ago.)
.torrent links, click "Advanced", navigate to, and select the executable. Click OK. Then choose "Open using", browse, select the executable again, OK, click the "Open using" radio button again, (some kind of bug makes the final "OK" deselected somewhere.) And click the final OK. Everything seems to be configured.
The installer simply says that "BitTorrent will now work under Internet Explorer", or words to that effect. No status screen, no readme, no "install to directory". Just a simple dialog box. Well, it turns out, BitTorrent is automatically installed to "%programdir%\BitTorrent" with the executable named "btdownloadprefetched.exe". So, click on one of the
Interesting algo. Lots of interesting side effects. Accurate download stats for who and how many times. Upstream connections only during a flash crowd, (or so it seems).
As soon as people start downloading from me, my incoming connection grinds to a halt.
This is a good point, especially with highly asymmetric systems like cable connections (asymmetry can be as high as 1:40 on these beauties). Some of the uplink capacity is needed for TCP protocol acknowledgement packets. If the uplink becomes congested, the downlink clogs down as well.
Isn't there any way to make P2P software play nice with the connection and only use the unused outgoing bandwidth?
It's possible but it requires support from the OS. A quality-of-service implementation like DiffServ can help solve the problem. Packets belonging the P2P traffic could be assigned to the lowest service class so that precendence is always given to other traffic.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
BitTorrent works absolutely perfectly.
Somebody has more money than sense. Just reward the BitTorrent author, if you want to splash money around.
If you want the original authors to make money, donate money and specify who you want to do the work.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that up2date in its current form is hopelessly married to Red Hat's services, and not a generally applicable piece of software. If I am correct about this, I can hardly see it as a free software victory when development money is going to improve such a limited and vendor specific program. The most obvious effect of this development would be to take the demand off of RedHat's servers, and put it on those of its users. A shrewd technique, but not exactly a public service. BitTorrent development from this project might well be a great help to the community, however.
If you donate $10 to this project, all of it goes to paying Tom to work that much longer on it. Even $10 will help.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Another complementary project in progress is the Open Content Network
The OCN provides an important piece of the puzzle with its metadata proxy servers. These servers automatically generate the verification information (SHA-1 hashes) necessary to perform secure P2P downloads.
It would be nice if this project leveraged the significant amount of work going into the OCN to provide a standard way to securely delivery any open source content across peer-to-peer networks.
Check out the OCN specifications here.