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Bram Cohen's Response to Microsoft's Avalanche
An anonymous reader writes "Bram Cohen has reduced Microsoft's proposed file-sharing application--codenamed Avalanche--to vaporware, dubbing its paper on the subject as "complete garbage". "I'd like to clarify that Avalanche is vapourware," Cohen said. "It isn't a product which you can use or test with, it's a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn't even a fleshed-out network protocol. The 'experiments' they've done are simulations.""
The question is: is it GOOD vaporware? Can the proposed algorithms deliver the results we want? That Microsoft has the manpower to turn it into real software is a given.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Sharing of illegal material keeps P2P networks going. Obviously MS can't have illegal material on anything with their name on it. How does MS propose to turn this into a profit-generating venture?
What Cohen and other /.-heads don't get is
that Microsoft Research
is not Microsoft. Sure, it's owned by
the evil Redmond company, but it's the
research arm.
.NET, but pure 100% theoretical
language theory research.)
Basically, it's one of the coolest places to work. It is not a product development arm of microsoft. They are one of the largest employers of theoretical computer scientists around. (Theory compsci jobs are hard to get in industry--usually only labs hire them, or academia.) If theoretical CS is what you do, the MSR (and not MS) is even better to work at than Google. (One of the other fields MSR dominates in is compiler research--not VC++ or
So, of course the proposes program is just a bunch of simulations. That's what they do, moron!
Sounds like Bran either needs to read more or adjust his ADHD medication.
RTFA! It's still there people! But if you haven't RTFA and want to spout off something please keep in mind the following: He invented Bittorrent, and his biggest problem is this "research" is based on massive misunderstandings of how Bittorrent actually works.
I was hoping that Bram would address that article claiming that BitTorrent is being used to distribute spyware instead of this Avalanche crap. I think it's more important to keep people from being afraid of using BitTorrent than it is to deal with misconceptions about a program that isn't even out in beta form yet.
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Actually, even as a research paper, the paper falls rather short. There has been prior work on P2P using forward error correction (FEC). FEC also means that you don't have to get every single chunk, but that you can reconstruct missing chunks from data you already have.
The authors should have demonstrated that their approach is better than FEC-based P2P protocols, but instead, they only compared it to simple P2P protocols. So, their protocol may actually not be better than the state of the art at all, and may actually be harder to implement in practice.
Yup. Bram's blog makes it clear that MS's approach to P2P is to reverse engineer an outdated version of his protocol. The result will probably be similar to MS's effort to reverse engineer the Macintosh: Windows 3.1 -- meaning that it will be buggy, slower and vastly more popular.
Keep reading Bram's blog. How far do you get before it starts going over your head? The dude has skillz that dust 98% of the wannabes here on Slashdot.
And as for motives, in my experience with autistics, it's common for those with Asperger's Syndrome to be quite guileless. They speak and act without consideration for other's "feelings". As a result they are more frank and honest than most people are comfortable with. Sorta like if Mr. Spock insults your work. He's not doing it to hurt you, or out of jealousy, he's saying it because it is the most logical observation.
his understanding of their coding scheme. He states:
"The central idea here is basically 'Let's apply error correcting codes to BitTorrent'"
and even admits that perhaps they are not strictly error correcting codes. But he does not understand simple linear algebra apparently. Reading the paper shows a useful method to generate new blocks without specifically being sent the data. And mathematically it does work, and the algorithms are very efficient computationally. He complains that they did not do rough calculations and says this is a flaw, but he shows no "rough calculations" to show their method won't work.
Anyone with some knowledge of solving linear systems and how efficient it is over finite fields will see that the proposed method is indeed fast and useful.
Cohen should rethink his rant.
Bram mentions that a malicious user would be able to poison an Avalanche based system by uploading bogus data. BitTorrent gets around this by precomputing checksums on each chunk of data and storing them in the .torrent file. Why would this approach not work for Avalanche? You would have to precompute the hashes on the FEC codes instead, but I don't see where it is fundamentally different than BitTorrent.
I read the internet for the articles.
He's calling it vaporware for two reasons:
1) It doesn't exist yet, early or not, which is a point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
2) As stated, it's not going to work as far as he can tell, which is the second point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
In other words, vaporware does not depend on how old the vaporware is. Microsoft can announce vaporware five minutes from now based on an idea still in in someone's head, with no papers or anything, and it's still vaporware until you get to at least an alpha test product.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
i have my doubts about some (but not all!) of the research that people undertake in the academic world of computer engineering/systems. from what i have seen, some academics will rush to publish for the sake of having a paper, even if it means cutting corners on an otherwise interesting idea or application. while i won't say that this is the norm at the very best institutions in the world, things on the whole can seem less than perfect.
h tm
i imply nothing about the individuals in the paper that Bram attacks, since i haven't interacted with them firsthand. however, it might be interesting to note that the primary author is a grad student at Georgia Tech. according to his web page, his stint at MS research was just a ~6 month period, 2/04-6/04 & 7/04-8/04:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gantsich/biography.htm
the call for papers for this 2005 conference set a deadline of 7/7/2004:
http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2005/call_for_papers.
this does not leave a huge block of time for one student to brush up on the research background, flesh up the practical aspects of the idea, implement (and validate?) a simulator, complete a preliminary set of data runs, and write a paper draft worthy of acceptance. let's not forget any downtime that might arise at the start of an internship (moving over the pond, getting acclimated, etc.).
here, i assume the not unrealistic situation where the official research scientist principally serves as a primary investigator. he brews the idea, perhaps working out some more theoretical aspects of the problem, and handles all the headaches related to funding/approval/propaganda. this entrusts a good deal of the grunt work to the student. i tend to see this sort of behavior in the ivory tower, but it is entirely likely that research in industry is much more balanced!
time should not be an excuse in any case, but it does raise an eyebrow toward the paper-happy nature of some research these days. you make the call on what you believe is reasonable concerning those flaws in methodology that Bram has so derided in his blog.
does anyone have a clue about the timing of the media's spin on things? The Register's article from the first slashdot posting is one of the first according to Google News...
>I think you're rambling incoherently / trolling here. What you're trying to get at, is not at all clear.
...Is OK?
...Is OK?
...Is OK?
... ANYTHING else!
One person makes a suggestion contrary to popular sentiment and get's accused of trolling.
On SlashDot?? No way!
>by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21, @09:10AM (#12871306)
>Sounds like Windows.
>by buanzo (542591) on Tuesday June 21, @11:55AM (#12872763)
>Full of holes that will allow... people, to do cool [nasty, ok] things? yep., sounds like windows, then.
>by denelson83 (841254) on Tuesday June 21, @11:37AM (#12872592)
>Avalanche? That's actually what Microsoft will end up buried in, only it won't be snow, it might just be trash in a landfill.
Have a good day sir!
RE: "If you forget about all the stuff that makes it less productive, Windows is more productive than Linux."?
There are very few things in Windows that make it less productive than it could be. Not one will bring it below Linux.
I use FreeBSD on 4 servers ( DNS, Mail, NNTP ). Windows Server 2003 on 1 server ( intranet portal ). For their specific tasks they do EXTREMELY well
I use WindowsXP Pro on 12 workstations. For it's specific tasks as well as ancillary jobs it does EXTREMELY well.
I deal with people on outside networks that have trouble with HTML forms... I'm supposed to teach these people SSH?
What's productive in our opinion is irrevelant if we are admins of a network. What can my user base accomplish with the utmost ease of use and security?
That's all I care.
Forcing an operating system or other software on anyone based on personal convictions and loose assumptions is immortal, arrogant, and counter productive.
Yet, I see it here everyday!
I want my users to do their work easily, securely and quickly, with plenty of interoperability with many hardware devices without worrying about anything else.
- Cassius
The hardware is a single 350mhz P2 with 128mb ram and a 13GB hd. Aside from occasional minor slowness in Gallery, it is completely adequate for its purpose. I have no use or need for a GUI so X is not installed, but when it was I had no complaints about its performance.
Contrarily, I have a box running Windows Server 2003 as a domain controller for my family that also hosts a few ASP.Net pages and acts as a source control and build server. It's a 1.8Ghz Celeron with 256mb ram and 20GB hd.
The windows box is constantly pissing me off due to its slowness. Takes 30-45 seconds to log in, screen updates are slow and ASP.Net pages are painfully slow to compile (though once compiled they usually pop just fine).
If I could uninstall the GUI on the Windows box I would do it in a heartbeat.. Unfortunately, that's not an option. So instead I'm forced to by newer hardware or deal with less-than-acceptable performance.
In my experience, the only people who argue that Linux isn't "useful" on old hardware are people who have never tried it.
>SMTP/POP3/IMAP mail, web hosting (dynamic sites with Gallery and Drupal), DNS, IP routing, firewall, etc etc for 6 domains including 3 businesses
:
A professional webhost would look at that an be appauled!
But...
Your network and your specific needs. Not mine.
I never generalized anyone's needs and overcomplement an operating system based on an assumption. My post was a response to unrelated ( and mostly untrue ) remarks that strayed from Avalanche P2P. And as to how, when properly implemented, Microsoft can perform.
>Contrarily, I have a box running Windows Server 2003 as a domain controller for my family that also hosts a few ASP.Net pages and acts as a source control and build server. It's a 1.8Ghz Celeron with 256mb ram and 20GB hd.
Hence my remark on "specific tasks". But that doesn't matter now does it?
>In my experience, the only people who argue that Linux isn't "useful" on old hardware are people who have never tried it.
I HAVE used Linux ( countless distros and my own compiles ) for years. I've used it and been more frustrated with it than more times than I can count. I've used it for desktop, server and firewall. Again, with distros ( SmoothWall, IPCop, ClarkConnect etc.. as well as my own stripped down compiles ).
But the original post had to do with Avalance for which I saw people critisizing the Microsoft OS and its business practices! Completely unrelated, which is why I had to respond.
>The windows box is constantly pissing me off due to its slowness. Takes 30-45 seconds to log in
Again "Specific tasks"... Gee I wish people would follow their own advice on open minded ideals before removing posts.
>The windows box is constantly pissing me off due to its slowness
Guranteed misconfiguration. How many services did you stop from auto startup? I bet you did that in Debian.
My Windows server
800 Mhz 512Mb RAM.
ASP.Net portal I use with MSDE installed.
Even with the load of external network users connecting all the time as well as on the intranet, it has one of the fastest response times on the network.
>If I could uninstall the GUI on the Windows box I would do it in a heartbeat
You don't fix a broken leg with an arm cast.
You do it with a leg cast. The GUI isn't the problem.
>I have no use or need for a GUI so X is not installed
My users DO need a GUI ( kinda hard to do image editing without one ). And I wasn't talking about their server interaction, It was their desktops. Again "Specific tasks".
As in applications... As in the start of the thread with Avalanche.
>though once compiled they usually pop just fine).
Bingo!
That's why its there. For that purpose.
>They are also not useful nor insightful
I see this happening over and over again, and I guess it won't change.
Whenever some comment about particular purposes and their associating OS's are mentioned, no one wants to hear it if its in Microsoft's favour. When did SlashDot go from "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" to "You're not welcome to offer an alternative view"?
It matters to me and a hell of a lot of other people here.
- Cassius