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."
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.
BitTorrent works absolutely perfectly.
Somebody has more money than sense. Just reward the BitTorrent author, if you want to splash money around.
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.