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Usenet Audio
Carel writes "Everybody who has done some streaming knows the downside: as soon as you're getting popular the costs are getting sky-high. While there have been some efforts in the P2P area these didn't have the impact they need. Enter Usenet Audio, a project that uses the existing, distributed and proven Usenet as its medium. Check the site for details and for the beta-versions of the software (which is available for Linux, OS X and MS platforms)."
Usenet Audio joins an esteemed coterie of previous spectacular endeavors including Usenet Porn, Usenet Warez, Usenet Fashion Magazines, and Usenet Moderated Nonviolent Underwater Images.
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Download link "Not Found"
But nobody using Windows reads usenet.
http://mediagoblin.org/
Also, searching google for "El-Katabi Investment" or "Nim services BV" (mentioned in their press page) returns no results. Those plugins likely just say "April Fools" over your speakers (if the plugins really exist: one online mirror has none of the files and the other says the limit of 500 users has been reached.)
The goofy idea of streaming over usenet aside, this sounds like YAAFJ (Yet Another April Fools Joke) to me.
Trolling is a art,
I assume this would apply to songs written by or mentioning Nazis?
The less usenet's capabilities are publicized, the better. Do we want the RIAA/MPAA/etc pressuring ISP's for people that download from specific groups? Or pressuring to have those groups removed entirely? Keep it quiet!
Damnit Michael, just stop. They just aren't funn- oh wait, this isn't a April fool's article. Carry on :)
PS: The moderation you're looking for is "funny", and not "troll"
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
...messaging functionality! Imagine that! USENET used for messaging! Who needs flying cars?
"You light up my life, you give me hope, to carry on."
Namaste
These stories are lame. Therefore, rather than spending time working productively, playing with the kids, or having meaningful dialogue with my spouse, I am going to spend my time closely monitoring /. today so that I can rapidly post whiny comments every time a new (lame) story is posted.
Did I mention the stories are lame?
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
But I think a neat idea for streaming audio would be a BitTorrent type protocol, where if you listen to the stream a client will help distrubute it to other listeners using your bandwidth. There could be some issues with it I suppose, but I think it could be a reasonable idea.
Buckethead
You do realise that the browser you are currently using can be pointed at pr0n when /. gets boring, don't you?
Man, you people who CAN'T FUCKING GET A JOKE are really starting to piss me.... Oh. Nevermind.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
April Fools aside, there is no chance of this ever happening. Usenetters are obsessive about not wasting bandwidth, this protocol would never work because the creators would be flamed out of house and home in microseconds. Even worse, the website uses HTML, and thats just plain anathema in Usenet! For shame!
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
How about contracting with an ISP that supports Multicast UDP? Multicast is not broadcast, though it offers similar bandwidth savings.
You send out one packet and pay for it once, the routers split it as appropriate as it spreads. Any router that doesn't support multicast gets one packet for each recipient that must be routed through that node; therefore all ISPs can save money on bandwidth by enabling multicast.
The only downside is that packet storms that bring down whole sections of the internet become available. But, since its UDP and therefore the application should be packet loss tolerant, a simple throttling mechanism can be used.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!! this was the last domain that the plebian masses didn't know about. now they're goign to ruin hands down the best source out there.
napster was great and all but if your mom hadn't heard about it then we'd still be downloading from it.
(which is available for Linux, OS X and MS platforms)."
/. editor for not doing your homework.
I _always_ surf usenet with my 286, 2400bps modem, and DOS. It is available for DOS as well.. Thanks
Mod +5 Drunk
and we gotta endure a whole 24 hours of these posts over and over?
Ugh, shoot me now...
You're new here, aren't you?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
You should have called it 'Andromedia' :)
This looks like a joke, but I did this back in the day. I checked out a number of bands by getting .au files UU encoded in usenet over my 14.4 connection to AOL. It took about 12 hours to get a song. And yes, I did buy the album later.
For great justice.
Usenet giraffes. It's obviously the next logical step, isn't it? Once you've got text, audio, pr0n, and so on, the next thing to do is clearly to find a way to quickly and efficiently transfer giraffes via usenet. Once that technology's available, then we shall truly be in giraffe nirvana, and there shall be free giraffes available for everyone, and all shall be happy.
The sad part is a lot of people submit incredibly clever stories, but they get rejected in favor of stupid things like "Usenet Audio." Look, it's not funny to slap two things together and call it a joke. Just like someone else posted here, it'd be like "HP Sells Toilet Paper," like it's automatically funny because it's HP, and they're selling toilet paper.
At least when Taco is at the helm on April Fool's, better stories get posted. I remember some of the really clever April Fool's days of Slashdot's past, where the fun part was guessing which was real and which was fake. It was always hard to tell.
"Remember that 2nd terabyte server we were going to put in for the newsgroups archive search? HURRY!!!"
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
another good 4-1 submission!
But here's a *real* project, StreamerP2P, that could use some coders to help out porting to linux and making packages that work.
hint fedora hint
and I was aiming for a +5 funny. Darn.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
Usenet is a text-based medium; music is binary. To attempt to move music, or any binary data via Usenet would be a hack on top of a kludge. Usenet is 7-bit, music is 8, so it would have to go through some kind of awkward encoding/decoding process to even survive the delivery. Furthermore Usenet is notoriously unreliable, so get ready for lots of missing data. Usenet also blindly sends posts all over the world. This is fine for small text messages, but to send large binary files to a server where nobody may want them would be a huge waste of bandwidth.
There are far, far better ways to move music around. Streaming audio, P2P, even FTP would be far better choices. These guys must be mad to even consider this.
Or, of course, ISPs could just multicast-enable their networks.
Right now they have little incentive - because enabling multicast for anything but distribution of their own "content" is perceived by ISPs as an added cost that provides them with no new revenue. So ISPs have an incentive not to enable it (or not to enable it generally even if it's on for themselves) while independent net-casters are stuck buying fat pipes to separately transmit streams to each customer - limiting their potential audience to the few they can afford to feed, and thus limiting their load on the ISPs.
But consider what happens with a broad adoption of a cooperative, peer-to-peer, flooding-protocol broadcast workaround:
- The listeners are now using their otherwise unused uplink to forward and fork the stream.
- The broadcaster's potential audience is no longer limited by the size of his feed - so it can expand without limit, just as if multicast were enabled.
- The load on the ISP is the same as if the broadcaster had to give each of his customers a separate unicast feed - but FAR higher than if multicast were used. (And it's harder to manage because it originates diffusely, both throughout the ISP's customer base and incoming from multiple external sources.)
Now the ISP gets the NxUnicast load ANYHOW. This gives him a strong financial incentive to enable multicast - even for external originators - and try to move his users to it.
If the application can detect, and automatically use, multicast when/where it's available, it will provide an INSTANT reward to the ISP for enabling multicast. Even if the program originated outside his network, the peer-to-peer links within it would be multicast, producing a drastic cut in his traffic. (The application could easily have multiple multicast islands connected by unicast links - and even adjust the routing to merge multicast islands and minimize back-and-forth unicast routes connecting them.) The forward-looking ISP gets lowered costs, his competition still pays. Market advantage. So once one adopts it, the rest either stampeed with him or get hit in the pocketbook and left in the dust.
Turning on multicast is a win-win for the ISP (who gets lower costs and better system utilization) and his customers (who get much lower latency when the stream is delivered by multicast than by many unicast hops.) This gives the application authors an incentive to include opportunistic-multicast and the users to prefer a multicast-capable solution over a unicast-only first cut.
= = = = = =
The original article may have been an April Fool joke. But it has pointed out a solution to one of our big problems. A peer-to-peer streaming broadcast application, combining the usenet flooding algorithm and voluntary-link-subscription approach with dynamic configuration ala Bit Torrent and opportunistic multicast will provide:
- a useful service under current ISP policies
- a built-in, seamless and automatic, migration path to a better solution, and
- an evolutionary selection pressure on ISPs to implement it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way