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RSS & BT Together?
AntiPasto writes "According to this Yahoo! News article, RSS and BitTorrent could be set to join in a best-of-both-worlds content management system for the net. Possible?" Update: 03/17 21:39 GMT by T : Thanks to Steve Gillmor, here's the original story on eWeek to replace the now-dead Yahoo! link.
Konspire2b looks like a better option than BitTorrent for distributing news. You could have a channel mapping to an RSS feed and just wait for the news to come to you. No polling intervals and low bandwidth requirements for the operator. With BitTorrent you still have to poll for updates and this removes that requirement.
The real problem isn't the polling intervals, is that most RSS readers/spiders do not respect HTTP 304 (Not Modified). RSS is ideal for Etag/Not-Modified-Since behavior, but no, most spiders are still too lazy to implement this.
.sig) creates dynamic RSS feeds, customized for each agent; I thought that was a great feature to give users, but it's getting overused by some spiders hitting the site every 15-20 minutes, w/o listening for 304s...
My newsbot (in my
1, BT lets you throttle your upload now. 2, if you do it, your download is also throttled. 3, if you want to modify btdownload.py so that it lies about how much it's uploading in an effort to get faster downloads, have fun. It won't help you because BT itself doesn't trust what the client says, it still sends only as fast as it's getting.
This is the first time I've heard FidoNet mentioned in... must be almost a decade. It's like the huge amateur network (which for a brief period outnumbered the Internet in raw node count, mind you) never existed.
:-/
:-)
Anyway, FidoNet was not without its share of problems. The killing bullet, I'd say today, was the social factor - there were too conservative forces clinging to backwards compatibility at the cost of anything. Anything had to work with the most basic piece of software; this effectively shot progress and evolution dead.
Not that there weren't attempts. There were. They just weren't successful.
Anyway, setting up echoes would have the same problems as FidoNet echoes. The number one problem was typical for Slashdot: DUPES!
Echoes were set up so that one node relayed a message in an echomail forum to its other connected nodes for a particular echo, effectively creating a star topology, different for each forum. However, since each sysop just wanted the echo linked, he would just hook up to somewhere, and forget about it. Then, others would hook up from him, and all of a sudden somebody had hooked up to two different valid uplinks.
The result? The star topology all of a sudden had a loop in it. Messages would keep circling (since FidoNet used dedicated dialup lines, latency between nodes was typically in the hours range) and dupe filters were created.
All of those filters and filter-enabling tags were optional, of course. After all, you couldn't mandate an operational node to change its behavior, you could just ask nicely.
Political play to no ends.
Anyway, there were many other funny effects with EchoMail. Crosslinking was another - when one echo got linked to another at a node, so that all messages in echo X would enter echo Y at that node and vice versa. The most exotic of these was when a religious echo got crosslinked with a fantasy humor one -- through crosslinked physical directories at a node (the FAT pointers for the different directories hosting the two echoes pointed to the same location on the disk). Anyway, much hilarious discussion ensued, and not many understood much what people were trying to say in the crosslinked echo.
/ former sysop and NEC in FidoNet