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Evolving Swarms with Swarmstreaming
Orasis writes "Applications like Bittorrent have broadly validated swarming technology in the real-world. Now, the inventor of swarming has released a new technology called swarmstreaming that allows smooth progressive playback of content, skipping ahead, and random access without downloading the entire file. It's an HTTP proxy, so browsers, podcasting, and RSS apps should be able to use it transparently. "
Since when did you want to pause pr0n?
You must be doing it wrong... you are masturbating at the same time right?
...since it's Slashdotted after one comment. :(
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Think about what this means for pr0n!
Is it just me, or isn't that the default implication for any new video streaming technology?
Oh wait... You must be new here.
Does anyone have a Torrent link to download it?
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
If so... go back to the drawing board Justin...
So wait... you can pause bees in mid-air? Or are there bees in the pr0n that we're pausing? Either way this sounds dangerous.
"Skipping ahead" Will skip to a part of the clip that you may not have. This=lag
The technology to eliminate lag already exists and has been implemented. I have used it myself.
What's more, usually you cannot download one second of movie in one second of time, unless you have a crazy tricked out connection.
What nonsense. Have you ever downloaded a trailer from here? If the trailer starts to play immediately when you start downloading (i.e. the gray progress bar proceeds faster than the location marker), then you are downloading 1 second of movie in a time faster than 1 second. I can assure you that millions of people have a connection fast enough to do this.
This means that if you skip to a part you haven't seen yet, you will have to wait even longer for buffering.
Again, not necessarily. Buffering is when the streaming software requires that you download x amount of content ahead of the time you actually view it to account for inconsistencies in the stream or packet loss. If those can be eliminated, and connections made fast enough, there is no empirical reason why buffering must continue to be utilized.
SwarmStream Development Suite Features
* Object code for the entire suite of SwarmStream(TM) APIs, including WebRAID(TM), DirectCache(TM), Throttling, and THEX.
* Visualization tools to perform live inspections and demonstrations of what SwarmStream is doing during your application run time.
* One full license for WAN Transport(TM) Server (normally $2950), an HTTP server specifically designed provide advanced SwarmStream features such as self-healing downloads and automatic mirror discovery.
* One full day of developer training
* 20 hours of ongoing support
* One year of free upgrades for all of the above software.
* Unlimited right to use and implement SwarmStream technology for testing, prototyping, demonstrations, or creation of reference designs or applications. Production deployment requires an additional Deployment License.
* One-time fee: $25,000
When you download something via BitTorrent, it's downloaded in random order, as pieces become available. While this works, it means you've got a huge file on your hard disk, but it's completely useless because random pieces are utter garbage bytes. For example, unlike with a straight download, you can't start watching a video file that's still being saved to disk.
The only thing swarmstreaming changes is that it tries to download data in order, so you can use it more quickly, like any other conventional stream-oriented protocol (which is basically anything that uses TCP, along with various streaming media protocols). Now, the innovation is putting together streaming media with the power of swarming--imagine being able to feed a live TV feed from a single stream from the "seed". This is basically what multicast promised, but due to infrastructure problems, has yet to deliver.
Now, the devil is in the details. You're going to have problems with a distributed application that tries to deliver the same data to all nodes in the network at once, since you don't get all those nice properties of randomized distribution of different pieces. Some lossiness would definitely be desirable, meaning you don't really want to use it like a Web proxy. Furthermore, it's physically impossible to deliver data around the planet without many tens or hundreds of milliseconds of latency, so it's not good for interactive applications.
It might be a big win for TV-on-the-Web, though. Imagine if just anyone with a couple hundred kbps could serve a worldwide audience... all those Internet radio stations that are begging for donations to pay bandwidth costs could slash their total bandwidth needs, while upgrading service as well.
I'm not sure if this particular product is going to do the trick (swarmstreaming isn't a new idea, after all, and lots of people have been working on it), but anything that gets people thinking about it should help in the long run.
get with the times, its obvious the bees decided that killing him wasnt enough, hired a lawyer, and are now suing. They are claiming that they own the intellectual property associated with swarming and use of the word. The are joined in their lawsuit by wasps, flies, and locusts who have all jointly formed the SIAA (Swarming Insects Association of America).
in a statement issued by the SIAA they call humans who use swarming technology of violating copyright and tarnishing their image as insects by using swarming for illegal activites......
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series