Fortune Takes a Look at Bram Cohen

jackstack writes "Fortune has an interesting article about bittorrent creator Bram Cohen. 'Right now I'm the CEO because I don't trust anyone else to be the CEO,' Bram says. The article goes into some interesting detail about Bram's state of mind, his poor history in college, and gives a glimpse of what it's like to go from being an unknown, brilliant geek - to the CEO of an $8.75 Million startup company."

Comments

They neglected the important question

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did he change his name from Adrian Paul? Was he that ashamed of Highlander Endgame?

It's all about the community

[Red_Foreman]

It's all about the community - what Bram did was to unify the community into donating bandwidth through BitTorrent, and that's what makes it so special.

Bandwidth costs money, and offering, say, Linux ISO's is expensive. But, if people opt in (BitTorrent) each person is joining a community and helping out with the cost of bandwidth - especially those who are accessing via an ISP and not through work.

It's the same level of cooperation that makes OSS so special.

Re:It's all about the community

[rovingeyes]

Your first line should read - "It's all about the community - what Bram did was to unify the community into donating bandwidth & pornthrough BitTorrent...". He made it popular by offering pr0n. See he has some marketing skills in him. I think he is qualified to be CEO.

Re:It's all about the community

[Jherek Carnelian]

It's the same level of cooperation that makes OSS so special.

Bandwidth wants to be free, eh?

Re:It's all about the community

[dabigpaybackski]

What is remarkable about Bittorrent is the protocol, not the rather limited Bittorrent app. The polished and feature-rich Azureus rules the Bittorrent sphere.

Hear that, Mr. Cohen? There's a better than even chance you're reading this, so here's my advice: ditch your app, rebadge a version of Azureus, and make that the "official" Bittorrent application.

Re:It's all about the community

[Mozk]

BitTorrent runs like horse shit on my computer. I'm not saying it runs slow on all computers, or that Java is inherently slow, but one of the nice "features" of the official BitTorrent client is that it isn't overloaded with features.

Re:It's all about the community

[Anonymous Coward]

"feature-rich", now there's a term straight out of Redmond. Why does it suddenly smell like the field in a newly-built stadium?

Re:It's all about the community

[Mozk]

Replace the first BitTorrent with Azureus and there's my post.

Re:It's all about the community

[Wesley Felter]

The polished and feature-rich Azureus rules the Bittorrent sphere.

That says a lot about the current population of the BitTorrent sphere. I suspect that an "invisible" BitTorrent client built in to popular browsers (e.g. Opera) would have lots more users than Azureus.

This gives me a thought: Which has more users, Azureus or World of Warcraft? How "feature-rich" is the WoW updater?

Re:It's all about the community

[burris]

You are correct, the BitTorrent protocol is important. Too bad Azureus doesn't implement it fully or properly.

One mans feature-rich is another mans bloated.

Re:It's all about the community

[Ythan]

You sound like Trekkie Monster.

Re:It's all about the community

[thexgodfather]

You should have put a link to the torrent rather then the amazon listing! haha

Re:It's all about the community

[zerocool^]

Not to mention - the technology is so phenomenal, and yet executed so beautifully, that it takes the breath away.

For years, most of us have been thinking "The more people downloading the file, the slower it goes for every user", and have been trying to solve this delima.

Bram looked at the problem and said, "What if... the more people downloading the file, the faster it went?" And then he coded it.

I understand the technology, but I'm still in awe of its seeming ability to just shrug off the confines of the known universe in order to solve the problem. It's like someone walking into Boeing and saying, "Hey, instead of building these planes to carry people... what if gravity pulled people upward?" and then proceeded to make it happen.

This is the programming revolution of the decade, mark my prophetic words - BitTorrent and subsequent derivative technologies will be the biggest thing to happen to information technology this decade. If it doesn't awe you, you're just too jaded.

~Will

Re:It's all about the community

[Taladar]

So how exactly do you run Azureus on a headless Server? It is a shitty GUI app and it depends on Java in addition to that. It is in no way usable for large scale seeding OR downloading 24/7 if you don't want to run your desktop PC 24/7 due to much higher energy use (3D graphics card, ...)

Re:It's all about the community

[Agret]

Try utorrent, it's like Azureus but without the bloat of java.

# Typical memory use less than 4 MB
# Incredibly small: 96 KB

http://www.utorrent.com/

Only thing it's missing is uPnP and if you have that enabled you should be shot.

Re:It's all about the community

[blahplusplus]

"It's all about the community - what Bram did was to unify the community into donating bandwidth through BitTorrent, and that's what makes it so special"

Braham also shows the power of certain aspects of socialism, i.e. everyone doing their part to help everyone else, everyone does better when EVERYONE does better.

Re:It's all about the community

[Anonymous Coward]

W..T..F.. have you been smoking? The edonkey protocol has had nearly exactly the same transfer method as BitTorrent 2-3 years before BitTorrent came out.

BitTorrent gets slower if there are more leechers than seeders. Sum of Upload = Sum of Download. Rule of any p2p app.

Re:It's all about the community

[Kjella]

Only thing it's missing is uPnP and if you have that enabled you should be shot.

Well, you copied two off the "At a glance" list, but I don't think you read it very well. Full list:

Multiple simultaneous downloads
Smart bandwidth usage
File level priorities
Configurable bandwidth scheduling
Global and per-torrent speed limiting
Quickly resumes interrupted transfers
UPnP support (WinXP only)
Supports popular protocol extensions
Localized to different languages
Typical memory use less than 4 MB
Incredibly small: 96 KB

Re:It's all about the community

[cayenne8]

"So how exactly do you run Azureus on a headless Server?"

I'm new to bittorrent..trying to figure it out, and I'd assumed there was a CLI to do this, but, can't figure out how to do it. There is precious little documentation on the bit torrent site. I've gotten Azureus running, but, would prefer to do BT in a CLI manner..so I can script things. Do you have any links or pointers? I'm trying to run it on a Gentoo box...

Re:It's all about the community

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong

With bittorrent every user has to donate the same bandwitdh as they leech. Its part of what makes it so great!

Give and u shall receive

And it's free!!! (OSS) licence - again - give and u shall receive

Re:It's all about the community

[EmperorKagato]

What the? ::eyes moderation::

Anyway, the BitTorrent Protocol follows a "give and shall receive rule." I don't know what you've been smoking. With Azurueus I constantly ride an average of 249 D / 25 U on my Cable modem with seeds beyond 1 seeder.

Do you see the label "Available Bandwidth"(Azureus) If it is below 100 K/Bs, your download is going to be slow. However, you can have 2 seeders, 450 leechers, file availability at 2.849 with over 300kb/s bandwidth in the pool, the person who shared the most has higher priority two receive from the 2 available seeders. Eventually he/she will become a seeder.

Re:It's all about the community

[drinkypoo]

I dunno about azureus, but using the real bittorrent you can use btdownloadcurses.py.

Re:It's all about the community

[rdoger6424]

remember to update your java. Otherwise, azeureus will be crippled.

Ummm

[cached]

I don't mean to troll, but given that he has Asperger's Syndrome, should it not be in his best interest to give the job of CEO to somebody who is more charismatic (in the sense that he can communicate exactly what people will want to hear), in an attempt to gain extra customers?

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important to note that it's a self-diagnosis, not a medical one.

Re:Ummm

[nkh]

I've read that his syndrom was self-diagnosed. Whatever the truth is, AS does not seem to be a huge communication problem for him if you compare him with other aspergers.

Re:Ummm

[DigiShaman]

Why should he hand over his title to some facist punk that will bank on his hard earned work. He's the brilliant guy that came up with this, he should run the company as he sees fits. Sometimes it's not about profit, but about ideals and vision.

Re:Ummm

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

but given that he has Asperger's Syndrome, should it not be in his best interest to give the job of CEO to somebody who is more charismatic

The job of a CEO is to provide direction and strategy for an organization. I would say that maybe he needs a PR person. He seems to be doing quite well as the CEO.

The other thing that has me thinking - who diagnosed his illness?
I've met quite a few people who said that they had various illnesses. When I asked them about the diagnosis and what the physician (or some other qualified expert) said, they don't say anything about an expert diagnosis: just something vague. I don't know about him, but I think a lot of folks use popular illnesses as an excuse for their own shortcomings or as an excuse for not doing something that they're not interested in doing.

Forgive my spelling, but I have spellexia.

Re:Ummm

[AsmCoder8088]

Asperger's Syndrome, for those who don't know what it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger's_Syndrome

Re:Ummm

[eln]

Asperger's lies on the Autism Spectrum. However, the Autism Spectrum is extraordinarily vast, ranging all the way from barely impaired to completely nonfunctional. Most geeks are probably somewhere on the spectrum, they just aren't severe enough to consider getting tested. Since this guy is self-diagnosed, it's impossible to tell where on the spectrum he is. Most Asperger's people have perfectly normal lives, and can learn to be great communicators with training.

In my Management class last semester, we had a few CEOs of local companies come in. One said he had always been extremely introverted and technical (Asperger's? Possibly), but had learned to overcome it to an extent. As long as he could have his required periods of downtime by himself, he could handle the day to day CEO duties, including the public and social aspects.

A person with Asperger's is not necessarily retarded, and in some ways can be profoundly gifted. In my mind, someone with the analytical frame of mind that most Asperger's people have is the perfect candidate for a CEO position, which is concerned mainly with long-term strategy.

Re:Ummm

[m50d]

The other thing that has me thinking - who diagnosed his illness?

He diagnosed himself, and is certainly not qualified to.

Re:Ummm

[trewornan]

It might be interesting to see how a company does when it's run by somebody who tells his customers exactly how things really are without any sugar coating, rather than a typical lying bastard. I for one would be delighted to find myself dealing with a company like that.

Re:Ummm

[thesandtiger]

Why should he hand over his title to some facist punk that will bank on his hard earned work. He's the brilliant guy that came up with this, he should run the company as he sees fits. Sometimes it's not about profit, but about ideals and vision.

Yeah - because when someone has ideals and vision and doesn't care about profits, they DEFINITELY wanna hook up with venture financing people. I hear those big money guys are all about dreams and couldn't give a fuck about profits.

Re:Ummm

[MoggyMania]

Aspergers isn't an illness -- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum. It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.

According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time, because the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...

A LOT of stuff that comes nowhere near the neurotypical experience, and that we're aware is different long before we can name it.

Speaking as the moderator of three of the largest online discussion groups for adults on the spectrum, plus having been heavily involved in the community for four years now, I can pretty much verify their claim. Out of the many hundreds of people that have joined thinking that they're AS, I can only offhand think of one clearly that was obviously wrong, and two or three where I was uncertain.

Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't. It doesn't get us out of anything that isn't obviously a meltdown-inducing problem (plus rarely even then), we're subject to constant criticism based on our differences or what we are... I'm proud to be autistic, but I hate the prejudice I encounter.

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Insightful.

Re:Ummm

[Moofie]

Since he is a grown-up, don't you think he's capable of making his own decisions about who he wants to have running his company?

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA?

Re:Ummm

[che.kai-jei]

funny how in today's society we think it odd that someone who is not naturally pre disposed to lying and mis representng the truth is unsuitable for leadership and fiscal resonsbility.

che kai jei

Re:Ummm

[vertinox]

I don't mean to troll, but given that he has Asperger's Syndrome, should it not be in his best interest to give the job of CEO to somebody who is more charismatic (in the sense that he can communicate exactly what people will want to hear)

Balmer, Fiona, or Gates were neither charismatic nor said things I wanted to hear...

Re:Ummm

[Hachey]

There are reasons to think that Asperger's Syndrome has some good to the bad.

Don't forget the list of famous people who could have been (are?) autistic. I don't see it holding any of these people back.

Re:Ummm

[larry bagina]

Forgive my spelling, but I have spellexia.

Which physician (or some other qualified expert) diagnosed you?

Re:Ummm

[f0dder]

almost wrecked google?

Re:Ummm

[Jozer99]

Sometimes fame outweighs charisma. If Linus hadn't invented linux, do you honestly think he would be a spokesperson for Transmetia?

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't."

You'd be surprised.

While it may not be present (or at least prevalent) in your circles, it's rather "popular" for teens to claim to have some kind of disorder. Whether it's Aspergers, dyslexia, bipolar, depression, schizophrenia, OCD. I've seen threads on sites like deviantART dedicated to things like "What kind of mental problem do you have?" and the post numbers are in the thousands, with people claiming to have all sorts of problems but offering no information when asked about diagnosis. Some even claim to have combinations of disorders that would be impossible to have in reality. I'm guessing it makes them feel "special" or "different." Like this one.

Re:Ummm

[RocketRainbow]

You're just the person to buy my second-hand volvo 244. It's not sexy, but with all the diseases going around, who wants to be sexy?

Volvo: Boxy but good.

Re:Ummm

[still_sick]

For a while, whenever a similar story would come up - there would be a myriad of posts ala "I like technology and am socially awkward, therefore I must have Aspergers!".

Why would they make the claim? Probably it gives them an "excuse". It's no longer "their fault" that they're clueless when talking to people.

Of course one post on Slashdot does not equate to seeking out and joining one of your groups. I have no doubt that your claim is true.

Re:Ummm

[CaptainUberJimmy]

I think it's really just that a lot of people don't want to admit that it's their fault but in the case of people that actually have Asperger's it is very different in that it is a neurological condition and that they are different themselves.

Trust me when people claim you I have ___ and they don't it pisses me off!

but asperger's is very much real.
Very Much so.
I have it and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
Just like being bi or any other part of me.

Re:Ummm

[Usquebaugh]

You don't have spellexia you're just lacking empathy.

Now go and look up dyslexia you ignorant fool.

Re:Ummm

[dfetter]

Aspergers isn't an illness -- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum. It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.

According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time, because the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...

Speaking as somebody who's spent a fair amount of time with Bram in person, watched him juggle skillfully and heard him carry on quite coherent conversations while maintaining eye contact, I assure you that he has none of the afore-mentioned characteristics. I hate to knock you off your favorite hobby horse, but allegations about Bram's alleged autism-spectrum disorders just plain don't hold any water.

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Asergers is a feature, not a bug after all.

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

He was joking. Geeze! Get a grip.

Re:Ummm

[Quattro Vezina]

having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)

Wait a minute here...what does synaesthesia have to do with autism? They're two completely different things.

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

He's empathy impaired or empathy challenged, you insensitive clod!

Re:Ummm

[Bogtha]

It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.

Uh, no. Just because you can do some things better that normal people, doesn't mean Aspies have no shortcomings. You've listed a bunch yourself, look:

...the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

You've seen Balmer's famous "Developers! Developers! Developers!" video and you still don't think he's charismatic?

Re:Ummm

[timeOday]

Why would they make the claim? Probably it gives them an "excuse". It's no longer "their fault" that they're clueless when talking to people.

What else does "syndrome" mean? It's the word for a bag of symptoms, with or without implying any particular cause.

Re:Ummm

[spuzzzzzzz]

I don't know about the parent, but I prefer hanging around with people who have the drive, desire and ability to have fun, to be friendly and to have exciting, interesting and fulfilling goals.

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

"..coherent conversations while maintaining eye contact.."

If, like me, he suffers from CAPD along with the Aspergers, he may have "good eye contact" because he is actually reading lips..

I was hyperlexic from the age of 15 months. I started speaking in full sentences, and to this day I am always coherent, literal and precise in speech.

Not many think I have Aspergers because of it, but I assure you that I was officially diagnosed at the age of 40.

Re:Ummm

[Unleashd]

So you're telling me ... there's a chance! ;-)

Re:Ummm

[Stoopid-Guy0]

Autistics often are very good at hiding their "bad" traits, to the point where they count the seconds they're maintaining eye-contact so they stay within the 30%-70% range.

Re:Ummm

[flazz]

The parent could not be more right, it is the fruits of the ideals and vision that attract the interest (including money).

Sadly the only legal responsability he has is to turn a profit, if and when it goes IPO (is it public already?). It is a twisted system that says if a company is allowed to be traded it must put profit as the highest priority.

It would be very cool if you could put a "share license" that could state upfront to the potential shareholder that a company might have other motives than that prescribed by traditional business practices and the SEC.

Re:Ummm

[idlemachine]

I'm guessing it makes them feel "special" or "different."

That's the impression I got from the way EVERY article that even remotely touches on Cohen feels compelled to linger on the issue.

It disturbs me - esp. in TFA - because it seems to be included purely to propogate the myth that 'real' innovation/creation comes from 'special' or 'different' people...

Re:Ummm

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this one.

Man, that girl is pure emo comedy. Have you read her profile? The bolds are mine:

EDIT AS OF SEPTEMBER 15TH: im sick... my mom is like dying or something (not literaly, i know its depressing) and she is getting me sick because she keeps on calling me into the deathroom (her bedroom) and i feel like shit. and i have to pee...... im so over people. high school kids are idiots and i hate them all... i have five paintings that i need to take pictures of and post them... and i have a bunch of prints i need to post... amd a few photos... i have so much work to do...

Re:Ummm

[emilper]

Since when is the Asperger's sindrome an illness? Spending a lot of time in front of a computer is an illness in some countries ... and since when are the CEOs supposed to lie ("communicate exactly what people will want to hear") the customers?

Re:Ummm

[justins]

Why should he hand over his title to some facist punk that will bank on his hard earned work. He's the brilliant guy that came up with this, he should run the company as he sees fits. Sometimes it's not about profit, but about ideals and vision.

Ownership and management authority are two entirely different things. If he hires a CEO, who says he needs to give any ownership of the company over to him? In fact he probably would give the CEO some stock, but that is absolutely not the same thing as selling out to a venture capitalist firm and having their management team come in.

It would be entirely reasonable for Bram to take the title of Chairman and create a board consisting of owners of the company, hire a CEO who seems to "get it", and focus more on the technology and what he's good at. It's not only reasonable, it's basically inevitable if the company is successful.

Re:Ummm

[Astin]

Bill Gates is suspected of having Asperger's Syndrome. His nervous ticks, inability to sit still, lack of social graces, etc., point to this.

There's also been an article or two recently (including one on Slashdot I believe) about how many executives are socio/psychopaths.

Re:Ummm

[Deluge]

"Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't."

Oh, that one's easy. To make people feel sorry for you, obviously. Look at how much of a hero our friend Bram tries to make himself out as - it's not enough for him to be, like Justin Frankel for example, simply a guy who spent loads of time coding a pet project, became a success, all the while not having any problems with his supposedly diminished social skills; he's married, has a kid, can negotiate business deals, etc.

I also don't understand why any deviation from the majority, or "normal people", has to be labelled a disorder or a syndrome of some kind or other. On one hand we're all supposed to celebrate our uniqueness, but the minute we don't fit the mold we're either ADHD or Asperger's or obsessive-compulsive and we're getting drugs shoved down our throats.

Leave the diseases for people who are truly sick and can't function without assistance.

Re:Ummm

[ccp]

Balmer, Fiona, or Gates were neither charismatic n

Wos Fiona?

Not long now.

[LordSnooty]

Hmm, if Bram = CEO = bittorrent.com = $8.75 Million startup company, then the search box on that site cannot be long for this world.

Loved and hated

[Vvornth]

I can picture all the recorded media company execs getting together in small cabals, swapping stories on ways they'd like to kill Bram Cohen.

Re:Loved and hated

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not the Messiah he's a very naughty boy..

Re:Loved and hated

[Anonymous Coward]

They do hang out with the thugs and pimps in the Old Pink Dog Bar on the lower South Side of Han Dold City...

bittorrent as a business???

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be a good way to share files, but I'm afraid the investors are throwing their money away. It's like trying to make money off of FTP.

Re:bittorrent as a business???

[alc6379]

I may be a good way to share files, but I'm afraid the investors are throwing their money away. It's like trying to make money off of FTP.

you mean like these people do?
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=%22ftp+client% 22&btnG=Search+Froogle
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=%22ftp+server% 22&btnG=Search+Froogle

People make money all the time by selling client/server software for FTP. I venture that some websites even make money by offering downloads of content via FTP. Maybe Cohen is going to offer some kind of licensed/authenticated Bittorrent protocol, or something along those lines, to give people a reason to pay him for his work.

Re:bittorrent as a business???

[Wesley Felter]

If you read the article, it sounds like BitTorrent Inc. is trying to build a mostly-unrelated business (media-on-demand, similar to the iTunes music/TV store) that happens to use the BitTorrent technology and brand.

Worth

[squoozer]

How can this company be worth 8.75 million. What does it do that is worth that much a year? As far as I can see nothing. The only "product" it has it gives away for free. If it started charging a dozen open source versions would appear in it's place. Even if they didn't the system can be copied by others for virtually nothing. What is it with these really high value estimations?

Re:Worth

[LordSnooty]

Hey man, those PayPal donations sure mount up! Once you've paid the fees.

Re:Worth

[Jherek Carnelian]

What is it with these really high value estimations?

That's just the dollar value of how much capital investment the company has received. Obviously someone thinks the company has potential, just because you are not privy to their business plans doesn't mean that the plans are not feasible.

Re:Worth

[Wesley Felter]

The company is actually worth much more, considering that $8.75M is the amount that VCs have recently invested.

Re:Worth

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA and you'll see they have a deal with Ask Jeeves.

Re:Worth

[Thud457]

Stone soup.

He's the Russian soldier that comes into the village and coordinates everybody for the common good.

Re:Worth

[mochan_s]

How can this company be worth 8.75 million

When Fortune magazine runs a story on the CEO.

The name BitTorrent is alone worth that. This is a name millions and millions of people know - it would take more than $8.75 million dollars to achieve that through advertising.

Re:Worth

[Anonymous Coward]

Its possible that you're right, and that the business is worth next-to-nothing and its only a matter of time before Mr. Cohen makes several million dollars for himself after an eventual IPO; leaving a burned-out-husk of a vaporware company to rot on the internet.

However, its also worth noting that virtually the same criticism was leveled against Google at one time. It wasn't until they developed a solid advertising model (ad-sense) that they became profitable, and worth much more than a few million in VC.

Just because its not obvious how to profit from bitorrent, doesn't make it impossible (although you make a good point -- its pretty damn unlikely). This AC thinks that it really depends on the userbase and what they'll put up with.

Re:Worth

[Anonymous Coward]

"As far as I can see nothing."

that's why the guy has investors and you don't. He has a plan, and people think that it's a great plan.

Re:Worth

[winkydink]

If I've told you once, I've told you a billion times to not exaggerate.

I think millions and millions is really overstating it. Sure, everybody in the /. community knows about it. That does not consitute millions and millions.

Re:Worth

[chill]

BitTorrent has pretty much a lock on the "real large file" distribution market. What other way is there that you can easily and quickly grab files ranging in size from hundres of megabytes to gigabytes?

BitTorrent has the technology and the name recognition. Hollywood really wants to move to digital distribution method but has two problems: security and efficiency. BitTorrent mostly solves the efficiency part very nicely.

  -Charles

Re:Worth

[Anonymous Coward]

The name BitTorrent is alone worth that. This is a name millions and millions of people know - it would take more than $8.75 million dollars to achieve that through advertising.

While I agree with your post, this is like the "inventor of SMTP receiving $X million in financing" I don't see what Bram brings to the table. Its a standard protocol with some different implementations to get the social part working. Why that's worth more than $10k I don't know. Perhaps that's why I'm still working? ;)

Re:Worth

[DoorFrame]

What's the highest Slashdot UID these days?

Re:Worth

[asavage]

Right now there are 600,000 people running Azureus. There are probably over 3 Million active users. This is just one of many Bit Torrent Clients. I wouldn't say millions and millions is an exaggeration.

Re:Worth

[ThousandStars]

Well, the article says that 45 million people have downloaded Bittorrent. It doesn't cite a source, but I'd imagine it means the offical client downloads. Plenty of other people download clients from other sources -- Azureus from Sourcefoge comes to mind -- so the real number may be much, much higher. Still, even if it isn't, and 45 million includes a lot of duplicates, I wouldn't be surprised if a few million people know what Bittorrent is. Certainly at least a few of my non-geek friends, the same ones who would give me a funny look if I said "Slashdot", know what Bittorrent is, which indicates to me that it's penetrated the mainstream at least somewhat.

Re:Worth

[nooby_god]

How can this company be worth 8.75 million. What does it do that is worth that much a year? As far as I can see nothing. The only "product" it has it gives away for free. If it started charging a dozen open source versions would appear in it's place. Even if they didn't the system can be copied by others for virtually nothing. What is it with these really high value estimations? He doesn't have to sell Bittorent at all. Instead the company could start up a distribution network for Hollywood, the music industry and the TV industry to sell their stuff via the internet. The company could advertise "Download Season 1 of Lost with Bittorent!" Then everyone would be using that network to get the latest songs and TV shows. Bram could then take a cut of the profits or something.

That kind of company could make millions if not billions.

Re:Worth

[X_Caffeine]

re: The name BitTorrent is alone worth that. This is a name millions and millions of people know - it would take more than $8.75 million dollars to achieve that through advertising.

sure, after all, look at what all that name recognition did for Napster 2.0

Re:Worth

[evilWurst]

It's worth that for selling its services to other companies, plus the ever-important Branding bonus (from so many people knowing about BitTorrent).

They can be hired for expert support in embedding torrent functionality in other products... like automated patching for MMORPGs, net-enabled game consoles, and, I don't know, lots of other things. Any net-connected device that involves large numbers of machines needing big-ish chunks of data every now and then, which the provider doesn't want to front all the bandwidth for directly.

There's also a niche for just plain hosting files, like shareware and demos, where they might be paid a certain fee per day/week/month/year/whatever to seed files. For smaller companies, it'd be easier to write Cohen a check and add a link to their web page, rather than setting it up themselves. Of course, *other* torrent-based hosting companies could compete for these dollars, but, again, there is the power of Branding.

That won't get them near $9 million for a single deal (unless they score something really huge like doing it for iTunes), but doing lots of smaller deals adds up quick.

Re:Worth

[thrillseeker]

What other way is there that you can easily and quickly grab files ranging in size from hundres of megabytes to gigabytes?

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Fedex truck full of Blu-Rays.

Re:Worth

[bladernr]

just because you are not privy to their business plans doesn't mean that the plans are not feasible

I remember wondering out loud how furniture.com would ever make money. How big was the market for people that buy furniture sight unseen?

I was told that a) I didn't understand the "new economy" and b) I just didn't know their business plan, and, if I did, it would all make sense, because why would smart investors throw money at a bad idea.

furniture.com went belly-up. Sometimes the outsider's view is better.

Re:Worth

[Anonymous Coward]

Venture capitalists have absurd amounts of money to throw around. They typically don't even consider a company unless they can throw $3-5 million at it. Bittorrent the company actually falls on the low end of the VC scale.

Re:Worth

[Jherek Carnelian]

furniture.com went belly-up

That's funny because they look like they are alive to me.

Ironically, I actually did buy a living room set from them a few years back. They screwed up the order royally, but the exact same kind of error could have occurred with a b&m store where you typically place your order and wait a month for manufacture and delivery.

Re:Worth

[petermgreen]

people put down paypal for being expensive but disagree with this at least for small international transactions.

I enquired about direct transfers from my (UK) bank account to someone in germany and the MINIMUM charge was £14!

now admittedly that charge is flat for transfers right up to E4000 (btw why does slashdot still not support unicode) but it makes direct international transfers from my bank account unworkable for small transactions.

I've also used bidpay once (i bid on an ebay auction in the USA where the seller didn't take paypal and i had to pay him somehow) and not only were thier fees quite high (i think about $5 and bidpay charge the buyer not the seller) i had to pay a £1.50 charge on top of that for using my debit card on a US site.

Do you have any suggestions for payment handlers that are easy to use for INTERNATIONAL online transactions and have reasonable charges for small transactions other than paypal.

Good call on Bram's part

[MacFury]

He developed something unique and functional. If someone else takes over the company, they will probably just not "Get it"

Besides, CEO's of american companies are usually in it for the quick buck and end up screwing over the company they work for and all of it's workers. One CEO of a rather large company, forget his name...well...he presided over the company while its stock plumetted 20%, took a massive severence package and ended up making $54,000 an hour when it was all said and done. The average yearly salary of his employees...$35,000.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[GremlinDelirium]

Not to say I'm challenging you about CEO's. However you can't remember his name, but you can accurately remember all those numbers?? This I question.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[microwave_EE]

It was a recent Reader's Digest headline.
No link handy, though. Sorry

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[cbelle13013]

Michael Moore said it so it must be true.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[Anonymous Coward]

And this gets modded +5 insightful with zero references and what sounds like barbershop gossip. Guess what guys, the sun's core is made of solid gold. No need to back up my facts. Now do I get -5 troll or +5 insightful? Choose quickly.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[yoyhed]

I won't remember your name until I've met you 3 times.. but I remember almost every phone number I ever dial, I memorized 75 digits of pi in one math lecture.. it's both a blessing and a curse.

Maybe the grandparent poster is like me, or maybe the numbers are what's amazing, not the guy's name.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[ozmanjusri]

However you can't remember his name, but you can accurately remember all those numbers?

The parent poster is correct. The executive was Disney ex-president Michael Ovitz, who was paid $140,000,000 to leave the company after 15 months.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[heson]

The CEO is not working for the company, he is working for the owners. His work is to maximize the owners profit, nothing else.

Re:Good call on Bram's part

[pipingguy]

  CEO's of american companies are usually in it for the quick buck

I find it very difficult to disagree with this. It seems to be a game of one-upping each other or some sort of high-stakes golf game.

Re:Ummm - no! Not at all.

[King_TJ]

For one thing, I think Asperger's Syndrome is a very real condition, but the jury's still out on whether or not it just describes a variation of normal behavior, or whether it's something worthy of considering as a "mental illness" - implying a need for treatment.

The simple description of "a mild form of autism" leaves it pretty wide open to describe a whole spectrum of behaviors. But the condition interested me, personally, only because I realized that I probably have it myself after reading enough about it. In my case, I think I've partially "overcome" it as I've gotten older and forced myself to break myself of some of my older, more "anti-social" habits. But the side-effect? It seems pretty unlikely I'll ever accomplish any brilliant or great projects anymore, either.

In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)

He's the one who created BitTorrent, so he's the best choice to head up any company trying to market the technology. According to the article, he already hired on a guy to communicate his product to the recording industry execs, realizing he wasn't able to do that so well himself. He's smart enough to get the right people for those jobs, as needed.

They often suggest Bill Gates had Asperger's too, and he seemed to manage to make a semi-successful company out of Microsoft over the years as C.E.O.

Going from P2P to P-NP?

[adavies42]

In the very last paragraph, it mentions Bram dropping by an old Bell Labs friend to talk about "satisfiability testing". If they're talking about 3SAT, does this mean he's working on P-NP?

Re:Going from P2P to P-NP?

[J.R. Random]

Well, he could simply be working on an exponential time algorithm with a lower exponent. There are academic hackers who work on that sort of thing. See, for example, "An Improved Exponential-Time Algorithm for k-SAT", by R. Paturi, P. Pudlak, M. E. Saks, and F. Zane in J. ACM, vol. 52 no. 3. A 2**0.5n algorithm would be practical for larger values of n than a 2**n algorithm.

enough with the aspergers

[circletimessquare]

there's always been smart people who can do complex topological analysis in their head but can't balance their checkbook

likewise, there have always been people whose minds always flit from one subject to the next every second- in other words, attention deficit disorder

but now we have these buzzwords, asperpgers and ADD and others, and people think its some miraculous discovery, and its all they talk about and they act like it explains all sorts of behavior

but it's just a fad, and meanwhile, the conditions have always been there, always will be there, and those who have these conditions are no more special or less special than the rest of us

cohen is a smart guy, and he can concentrate on a complex math problem, and he likes to do it, that's all, that's it

i'm just so sick of everyone jumping on the buzzword bandwagon, it doesn't mean anything

there once was a time in the 1800s when everyone thought phrenology was the end-all explanation of character and intelligence

it's long forgotten, like the racist pseudoscience it was

meanwhile, in a hundred years, when our language and our attention isn't controlled by the marketing department of large pharmaceutical companies, our hypochondriacal way of looking at our mental differences will have moved onto the next stupid fad

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch Slashdot fail again! Automatic +2 to someone who doesn't know what the hell they are talking about!

I don't see how classifying people that have a tendency to follow a specific behavior pattern is in any way ostracising them or being controlled by the "pharma-industrio" complex. Should we treat people that have mental and/or behavioral disorders on a case-by-case basis, discarding any prior research on the matter and start from scratch with each individual? Because, in essence, that's what you're proposing. Just because research might show that a particular drug can mitigate the symptoms of the behavior in 75% of the population that has the disorder doesn't mean we should use that research! Just throw it away, let people suffer!

OTOH it is patently ridiculous for any journalist or Slashdot editor to include a reference to whatever disorders Cohen may suffer from if it implies that he obtained some recognition or position because of said disorder.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[hkb]

Why is this marked as troll? Cohen goes on about his "SELF-DIAGNOSED" Asperger's in every single fucking interview about him. He's never been diagnosed by someone qualified, like oh, say a doctor.

God it was stupid and pathetic the first time, and each successive mention just compounds the stupidity.

He wrote Bit Torrent, he didn't create the world in 6 days.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. I couldn't be in more agreement with this. If I went to a pshrink, I'd likely be diagnosed with ADD and Tourette's Syndrome. Big deal. I just consider myself the type who likes to multi-task and happens to have some facial tics...like a lot of geeks actually. In fact, if you look at the geek population, it's probably the 'normal' people who are in the minority and ought to be getting labeled :)

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Spy der Mann]

Here's a testimony of a person suffering from AS http://www.well.com/~jerod23/bp/AspergersSyndrome. htm . From the link:
"An odd fact that has turned up in my brain scan and in studies of other autistic individuals across the spectrum is that our cerebellums are smaller than normal while other parts of our brains, and our total brain sizes, are larger than normal. This helps to explain some of the behavior explained above and to focus on which genes to hunt for abnormalities."

So there IS some proof that Asperger's syndrome is real.
There ya go. The problem with discrimination is that people don't understand those who are different, and reject them.

You know, you seem pretty ignorant - thinking a disease doesn't exist just because YOU can't find any evidence of it. Therefore, you end up thinking that all people with social problems have them because their own fault (reminds me of the guy who wanted to clean a negro and ended up killing him because he couldn't wash his blackness away).

Finally, let me say that while I don't agree with some buzzwords (compulsive eater, for example), that doesn't mean they aren't real. Some might not be, but some ARE real. Trying to generalize all mental diseases as buzzwords describing a normal phenomenon, is just plain nonsense.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[BorgCopyeditor]

Q: Where in the parent post is it denied that AS is real?

A: Nowhere.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[try_anything]

You have a point, but it's just the way doctors think and communicate. They don't do math; they're not scientists who deal with fields or probability distributions. They're trained to look at a patient, apply a set of labels, search through their medical school training for rules involving those labels, and then apply those rules. They investigate continuous phenomena by dividing the spectrum into discrete chunks, each with a label, and systematically creating rules involving those labels. That's why medical diagnostic systems are such a successful application of classical AI: once the doctors handle the subjective task of applying labels, the only difference between a doctor and Prolog is that Prolog can operate faster, more reliably, and using more rules than any single doctor.

Some researchers may come up with theories about continuous phenomena, but it's alien to the way doctors think.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[hkb]

Uhm, where did I say Asperger's syndrome didn't exist? Hint: fucking NOWHERE.

I seem ignorant because I don't trust his _unqualified_, _undiagnosed_, _self-diagnosis_?

And then you go on to cracked-out analogies about killing Negros. You're mentally stable.

Uh. Ok.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[RoboPimp_3000]

Wait a minute... He's the one who's insensitive, and yet you're the one who's still using the term negro?

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Anonymous Coward]

CTS, please write a book. I'd buy it.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Anonymous Coward]

What will you say when scientists actually discover how and why the brain works the way it does? I bet you'll complain that great thinkers and philosophers have had it right the whole time, etc. Of course, it didn't let them cure disease or create super-intelligent beings, something that scientific understanding of the brain is likely to achieve. Just because common people latch onto some buzzwords doesn't mean anything to science. Aspergers is real, likewise ADD, even if the labels are still vague. That we can begin to classify the basic functions of the brain is merely the progress of science.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Spy der Mann]

Well, i'm talking about the grandparent post. The parent poster complained about it being marked troll. In my post I exposed my reasons to leave it like that.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Fweeky]

Right, these clusters of behaviors and conditions that we've identified and labelled and which you even admit to existing, have no meaning. It's all just part of life's rich tapestry, and that's that.

Similarly, there's no such thing as planets, stars, moons, etc; there's just clusters of matter with various characteristics and states that tend to occur together throughout the observed universe -- the labels we've applied to them are meaningless buzzwords, and in 100 years we'll have moved on to the next stupid faddy names.

And of course since I've never met Bram, and know next to nothing about him beyond one bit of software he wrote and an interview or two he did, I can feel confident in saying that his behavior isn't worthy of a label, even if it might help him and everyone else cope with and understand his problems. They certainly haven't impacted his life in such a profound way that being able to talk about them might hold any importance to him or any of the similarly geeky people likely to be reading his interviews.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[MichaelSmith]

but now we have these buzzwords, asperpgers and ADD and others, and people think its some miraculous discovery, and its all they talk about and they act like it explains all sorts of behavior

Yep. Tabloid TV here in .au periodically runs an article about uncontrollable kids with ADD. The article invariable features a family in a quiet street in the suburbs with kids running riot and parents who obviously just want their kids to collapse in front of the TV. Its not going to happen. Those kids want to be in the country with trees to climb and people to rob (or whatever).

But our society expects people to sit still and take their medicine. Not all people can do that.

Re:enough with the aspergers

[jred]

Who can keep up with what's social acceptable to call African-Americans? So far as I can tell, and according to my ex-gf (who was of that race), AA is the only acceptable term to use. The problem with it is... well, it's too friggin long! Notice how I shortened it above? That's my biggest issue with it.

We should all focus more on the intent, rather than the actual words.

I think from now on, I'm going to call AAs "honky". Hell, I've never been offended by it, why should they?

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Deluge]

"a particular drug can mitigate the symptoms of the behavior in 75% of the population that has the disorder"

Uh, dude, if 75% of the population is a certain way, wouldn't the term disorder apply to the remaining 25%? After all, what is a mental disorder other than a deviation from the majority rule of "normal"?

And if the drug companies truly do want to convince a significant majority of the population that they're all suffering from a disorder and should therefore take their medicine, doesn't that just prove the parent's point about pharma-extortion?

Re:enough with the aspergers

[Anonymous Coward]

"he didn't create the world in 6 days"

No, he did not, but he made it a better place.

I think it's pretty obvious.

[nathan s]

I think Bittorrent is planning to team up with content distributors of all types, and develop "official" systems for various networks to deliver content to their subscribers. The value, I think, lies in the fact that Bittorrent can help content distributors secure their content, which is something that, AFAIK, free Bittorrent doesn't currently do well (short of obscurity). If Bittorrent can come up with a way to help film distributors deliver movies online without them being pirated, or do a better version of Steam, or push the latest albums securely (think iTunes maybe), there is a lot to be made for content providers AND Bittorrent itself.

Of course, I could be totally missing it, but it seems not implausible to me.

Re:I think it's pretty obvious.

[moro_666]

bittorrent's current network model is as secure as a bank with open doors and no guards.

actually, after investigating the software piece itself, i was pretty much disappointed. no magic ultra glitchy moves, lousy protocol based on lousy ideas. even no attempt to use the possibilites of udp. (unlike tcp, most firewalls allow udp outgoing connections to any port and later let incoming packages in (from the same socket) from anywhere in the network, thus efficiently enabling penetrating your firewall securely without any risks of other applications being affeected).

if he wants to use bittorrent for distributing official movies securely, he will have to rewrite the whole protocol part at least (at least some encryption to protect the content). and this would mean moving away from the current bittorrent applications and unless everybody is willing to upgrade to the new protocol, we'll have some half-way broken network all over the place. there are quite a lot of programs currently using the protocol.

if i was to buy it, i'd concider 5 cents to be the correct price for all of this.

if bittorrent should fall into hollywood's mean influence, i think other application developers will either fork from it all and stay where they are right now or create a new protocol at all. they aren't really that interested in supporting the californa billionaires who only make $100m from a movie that costed them $30m to make.

you could as well try to sell a gnutella client.

Re:I think it's pretty obvious.

[nathan s]

I don't really foresee any changes of that sort to the Bittorrent we all know and currently use. What I expect to see is HollywoodNet or RIAANet or whatever, where there is a secure version for distribution of content by those organizations to their subscribers. If you think about it, part of Bittorrent's strength is that it works even with smaller numbers of users. So if only 20 people around the globe are downloading Mirrormask or the latest 50 Cent album, there is still a net bandwidth savings for the provider and some modest speed advantages for the downloaders.

I don't think these networks will replace Bittorrent itself though. I think Bittorrent proper will continue to plod alongside as the same unsecured network we're all familiar with.

I hate to point out the obvious

[BewireNomali]

... but an undereducated, socially-crippled, obsessive-compulsive, uncouth geek found a fertile, viable woman to not only marry him, but bear him child thricefold...

dude is just getting his license. this is far more amazing than bittorrent and deserves its own thread.

does anyone know if she's hot?

Re:I hate to point out the obvious

[antdude]

... or cute?

Re:I hate to point out the obvious

[vertinox]

does anyone know if she's hot?

When a developer says "free as in beer" he means he needs lots!

Or maybe she does...

Re:I hate to point out the obvious

[Error27]

He lives in Oakland. Lots of people in Oakland don't drive. Over half of my friends don't have a car.

Re:I hate to point out the obvious

[BewireNomali]

It wasn't meant to insult the guy. I live in New York. We don't drive either.

Re:I hate to point out the obvious

[QuantumRiff]

What on earth are you talking about? I've been to the bay area doesn't of times.. if there is one thing I have definately noticed, its that you can live under a bridge, but you sure as hell better have a Mercedes! Californian's without cars? Thats like Oregonians without rainjackets! (yeah, we rust, not tan)

Re:I hate to point out the obvious

[Audax_23]

As an Oakland resident who commutes daily around the Bay Area, I'd like to point out the existence of a very advanced technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle
It uses gears to commute energies that are intrinsicaly present wherever the user is (provide they're metabollically prepared) to propel them forward at great speeds.
Given the combined utilty of this elegant technology and the Bays' extensive public transport system a car can be easily viewed as more of a liability in terms of cost and convienence when the factors of parking and gas prices ( ~ US $3.00 'round here) are factored. In my group of friends and aquaintances a good half, if not more, do not own cars. The brute force approach to transportaion (ie. internal combustion) seems to me a poor method for general use when the energies spent are overwhelmingly directed at transporting the system itself rather than it's passengers and payload. I was in Berlin last year where it is very common to see people using large hand carts to move heavy loads about. That is also a large cosmopolitan city where cars can be extremely inconvienent for everyday use. I'm no luddite, but the perception that combustion engines are a technical advancement over alternatives like sails on boats or gears on feet always seemed strange to me.

Congratulations and ENCOURAGEMENT for all of us

[Work Account]

Bram Cohen, congratulations on your accomplisments.

May you continue to live a productive and happy life and continue offering innovative and hopefully open source software.

Let this serve as encouragement to all of us: with desire, dedication, brains, a computer, and Internet access, anything is achievable.

Do what you do best; for most of us this is coding!

Re:Congratulations and ENCOURAGEMENT for all of us

[Anonymous Coward]

Let this serve as encouragement to all of us: with desire, dedication, brains, a computer, and Internet access, anything is achievable.

Until you type in 'slashdot.org' into the address box. It's all downhill from there.

Re:Congratulations and ENCOURAGEMENT for all of us

[Anonymous Coward]

that kind of positive message doesn't fit in here.

Or the Web.

[PCM2]

I mean, after all, anybody can set up a Web site. How could a company possibly make money doing that??

Re:Or the Web.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, after all, anybody can set up a Web site. How could a company possibly make money doing that??

Congratulations on picking out the lone exception to his statement. Of course, I could be wrong, but if I am then I look forward to reading your book, "Think and Grow Rich Using GOPHER".

Re:Or the Web.

[mrscorpio]

Anybody can make lemonade. How could anyone make money selling that?

Re:Or the Web.

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't know lemonade was an internet protocol. Learn something new every day.

Re:Or the Web.

[hunterx11]

Most didn't.

Re:Or the Web.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you said is more along the lines of "how can anybody make money setting up a bittorrent service?" versus actually making the protocol. Your analogy is pretty screwed up, my friend.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Fortune = Barbara Walters of Businesss Mags

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah. The Barbara Walters of business magazines. You want a puff piece, read Fortune. You want news, read Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or even the Economist.

I wish him luck

[SimplyBen]

As a founder of a funded startup myself I hope he suceeds, but statistically he won't. Maybe i'm alone here, but i'm having a hardtime envisioning the business model of such a company (and doubt his ability to lead it to profitability). Sure bittorrent is a neat technology: but its just that a technology, and an open one too. It appears to be a long shot, and thats why funding came from venture capitalists. From most slashdotters POV i'm sure that sounds awesome until you realize what accepting venture capital is typically about: 90%+ stock takeovers with rider clauses allowing the investment firm first dibs on any money withdrawn from the company. I hope he hires someone to run the company that can translate whatever products he comes up with into something that can actually be sold.

Re:I wish him luck

[i7dude]

so...i dont want to sound like i'm arguing, cause i'm not...but could he base his entire business model around maturing a technology with the expectation that it would get bought from him at a price far beyond the value of the startup capital given to him?

yes, its oversimplification; but it seems like something that is possible.

dude.

Re:I wish him luck

[thrillseeker]

Sure bittorrent is a neat technology: but its just that a technology, and an open one too.

It would take a dozen good programmers, oh, about a week to set up an auction site. But do you think it'd take the "market" away from Ebay? Nope.

First to market, with name recognition, etc. will be what makes or breaks this effort.

Re:I wish him luck

[MichaelSmith]

having a hardtime envisioning the business model of such a company

His software distributes stuff more efficently than centralised systems. It therefore saves bandwidth (and consequently) money.

World wide, distribution is a huge business. How about if MS give him a contract to distruibute software updates. A person could make money off that.

Obligatory Library of Congress reference

[hugesmile]

Shame on me for R'ing TFA, but:

The first real world test of whether the principles would work on any large scale came in 2003, when open-source software company Red Hat released its Red Hat Linux 9 operating system. Demand for the product was so strong that downloaders crippled Red Hat's servers. Eike Frost, a computer science student at Germany's University of Oldenburg, however, had managed to get a copy. He ran it through BitTorrent, then posted a link to popular tech site Slashdot, inviting folks to come and get it. The swarm was immediate. Within three days the Red Hatters traded 21.15 terabytes of data--equivalent to more than all the books in the Library of Congress.

The technical article in Forbes is complete... I can stop reading at page 4 - where it references the universal unit of measure.

Re:Obligatory Library of Congress reference

[hugesmile]

oops, I mean Fortune. Well, 1 Library of Fortune Magazines = 1 Library of Forbes Magazines....

you made a mistake when you said the word

[circletimessquare]

"doctors"

everything after that is a mistake

i'm talking about personality, not medical conditions, and the way society talks about each other

if we were in a hospital, talking about patients with liver disease or cancer, you would be 100% right

but we're not, we're talking about this hychondriac way people talk about simple personality differences

the world i am after is a world with more tolerant of more ranges of personality differences

as cohen is a ready example of, it is not all negative to have a quirky personality

but in a world you are living in, where anyone vaguely outside the norm is diagnosed with a medical system, we are talking about a world that is promoting sameness and conformity

at the loss of what?

at the loss of people like cohen!

so that is why i find it disgusting that anyone, including cohen (we're all hypochondriacs... read any psychology text book describing mental disorders and i defy not to say at one paragraph or another "hey! i've felt like that before!"), should think that just because he can concentrate hard and can't tune into what people are saying that great, is someone with a medical disorder

same with ADD

what if ritalin and prozac and other drugs are destroying the cohens of this world?

is ADD all negative? well, is asperger's all negative? what great writers, comedians, directors, etc. have been destroyed because they were treated with drugs, someone with an ability to focus on other things than the here and now- that's all negative? well i can describe asperger's in dire negative ways... but cohen is a shining example of why its not all negative!

so how about LESS medicalization of personality types, and MORE tolerance and acceptance of a range of quirks?

because the only people who win in the world you describe- the medicalization of personalities, are pharmaceutical companies, who want to prescribe us a pill for every perceived quirk of character that someone can pin down

it's disgusting, it will turn us into a society of robots so that some pharmaceutical company has some more cash in its bottom line

well how many riches are lost when our picassos and shakespeares and einsteins and cohens and hitchcocss are medically treated into personality sameness?

Re:you made a mistake when you said the word

[try_anything]

You are worried about a future where difference is pathologized and everyone is medicated into sameness. You want "MORE tolerance and acceptance of a range of quirks."

Yet you object to an article that presents Asperger's Syndrome as a normal, liveable condition that involves advantages and disadvantages and can lead to unique contributions to society.

How is this supposed to make sense? My interpretation that you were objecting to the arbitrary discretization of a spectrum was the only sensible reading I could see, so I went with it.

bit torrent

[hutchy]

Anyone that tries to "monetize" an open source application, should be put up against a wall and shot!

Re:bit torrent

[Tidal Flame]

Isn't the concept of open source designed so that it can be a viable financial strategy while retaining the consumer's rights? Right now OSS is almost synonymous with "free software," but I don't recall there being any rules about OSS not being able to generate revenue.

Besides, if Cohen and his company can actually pull this off, it might be really good news for the open source movement. I know you don't like it - I don't really, either - but the world pretty much revolves around money. Open source software isn't going to gain much ground with corporations until it can be proven to be financially viable. However, if someone can show that open source really can work in a business environment, who knows where things will go? Perhaps more and more businesses will start adopting the open source philosophy and it will lead to the open source utopia that so many Slashdotters dream of.

Correction:

[game kid]

I can picture all the software company execs getting together in small cabals, swapping stories on ways they'd like to fucking kill Bram Cohen. (And Google.)

Hard to believe

[game kid]

According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time

It's hard to believe any clinical studies when Ali G is involved.

Re:Hard to believe

[CaptainUberJimmy]

It's Ali G's older brother
He is a doctor though at Cambridge Simon Baron-Cohen
not Sasha Baron-Cohen
That's Ali G
Heard their proud of each other though..awww

When your big, bandwidth finds you.

[IpSo_]

"In mid-October, Apple unveiled its long-rumored video iPod and started making some TV downloads and Pixar shorts available through its popular iTunes service. Navin says that the Google and Apple moves are both competition, but that BitTorrent's market will offer much more than just movies and TV shows. Plus, he speculates that Apple is paying "an astronomical price for bandwidth."

For anyone big, bandwidth becomes more and more of a non-issue. Only the little guys actually pay a significant amount for it.

Having worked for a web hosting company that went from small, averaging only 50mbits/sec in total, to over 800mbits/sec their overall bandwidth costs actually went DOWN. Why? Because once they started pushing over 100-200mbits/sec they could sign free, or next to free peering agreements with major Tier 1 providers. As long as you don't piss them off, and the agreement continues to be mutually benficial you get "free" bandwidth.

I'm sure Apple and any other big players pay fractions of a cent on the dollar for bandwidth.

I still believe Cohen's company can help out the little guys sell their wares, at least until they push enough bandwidth that it becomes cheaper to host the content themselves. I doubt you'll ever see Apple or the MPAA paying him money to host content though.

Re:When your big, bandwidth finds you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is not an ISP.

Re:When your big, bandwidth finds you.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of bandwidth went down because of over supply, a friend who installed all the land line communications for Iridium via sprint went on to install,
over a billion in Lucent gear, we visited a mini ma bell and the exec asked him why did you in stall billions of fiber optic cable, when the system was only at best 10 percent, the reason is they were given massive credit ie: Lucent gave them billions to install... Long story short, the reason for massive price changes in telecom, is that there is a a massive communications surplus.

cheers,

Re:When your big, bandwidth finds you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Less internet congestion is always welcome and BitTorrent decreases those bottlenecks.

except that

[circletimessquare]

you talk about personality in medical terms

look at your original response:

You have a point, but it's just the way doctors think and communicate. They don't do math; they're not scientists who deal with fields or probability distributions. They're trained to look at a patient, apply a set of labels, search through their medical school training for rules involving those labels, and then apply those rules. They investigate continuous phenomena by dividing the spectrum into discrete chunks, each with a label, and systematically creating rules involving those labels. That's why medical diagnostic systems are such a successful application of classical AI: once the doctors handle the subjective task of applying labels, the only difference between a doctor and Prolog is that Prolog can operate faster, more reliably, and using more rules than any single doctor.

if your position is now that asperger's is not something valid to be talked about in medical terminology, that it is a normal personality type with pluses and minuses like any other, with nothing medical implied in any way whatsoever, then i thank you for backtracking

because in your original response, you are just as guilty as those who medicalize something like ADD: because a kid doesn't want to or can't pay attention to multiplication tables we should drug him into a stupor so that the parents and teachers can have an orderly classroom?

that's what we are doing right now in society?

and if we do that, if we say that personality quirks that lead to social issues as odd and seemingly self-destructive as the ones described in the article as cohen describes are conditions we should medicate, then we are talking about a world where people as brilliant as cohen have to drugged until they aren't brilliant any more

that social obedience and conformity is more important than having a different kind of focus, a kind of focus like ADD or aspergers, a kind of focus that doesn't serve you well socially, but serves you well in other ways, that serves SOCIETY well in other ways, like great art and great scientific advances and great technological advances like cohen's bittorrent

we currently live in a world where the pharmaceutical industry has a pill it is marketing right now for shyness, FOR SHYNESS for crying out load

the pillmakers call it "social anxiety disorder"

the pillmakers say you should take paxil

the pillmakers are very happy selling pills to healthy people

because apparently, to us, it is more important to be a perfect stupid silly chatterbox at a party, then it is to have a fear of socializing because you have a focus on something different in life than chattering at a party

what is that other focus?

could it be something like bittorrent?

in a world with paxil and prozac and all the other treatments for medicalized PERFECTLY NORMAL personality issues we will never know what is lost

just for the sake of what exactly?

what is lost, and what is gained?

things like bittorrent is lost

perfect sheeplike conformity is gained

excuse me when i say that there is something wrong going on here

Re:except that

[try_anything]

if your position is now that asperger's is not something valid to be talked about in medical terminology, that it is a normal personality type with pluses and minuses like any other, with nothing medical implied in any way whatsoever, then i thank you for backtracking

Talking about something in medical terminology doesn't implicitly deprecate it. "Medical" does not mean "pathological" or even "abnormal," as you seem to think it does.

dude

[circletimessquare]

look at your original statement

medical or doctor is in every sentence

and yet you are talking about personality issues!

how does that happen?

if you came up to me and told me about lions and hyenas in africa and i said to you in turn

"You have a point, but it's just the way hunters think and communicate. They aren't predators; they're not animals who deal with stalking or dominance hierarchies. They're trained to look at a target, wait for the right moment, think about the terrain and what might happen, and then shoot..."

now i could say that hunting isn't evil, you could say that it is, we can have a glorious argument about that, BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT

that's not even the subject matter!

likewise with the inherent pathology or lack thereof of medical terminology... who cares?

WHERE ARE WE ARE TALKING ABOUT MEDICINE HERE?

NOWHERE!!!!!

the point is that you are injecting a language into a subject matter that doesn't apply

or more precisely, hypochondriacs and pharmaceutical companies are introducing a way of talking about quirky personalities that does not apply

WHY, please tell me, WHY do we need a PILL for SHYNESS???

WHY do we need to talk about personalities in this medical terminologistic way???

WE DON'T

unless making money for pharmaceutical companies by selling pills to healthy hypochondriacs is your goal

and what is lost by treating personality quirks with amphetamine derivatives?

things like bittorrent is what is lost

we have STOP the medicalization of personality

in psychology, with manic depression and schizophrenia, the language is perfectly appropriate

but with personality?

with SHYNESS (paxil) for crying out loud???

Re:dude

[try_anything]

we have STOP the medicalization of personality
in psychology, with manic depression and schizophrenia, the language is perfectly appropriate
but with personality?

Okay, I finally get it. You think that the study of human mind and behavior is split into two separate disciplines: a "medical" branch called "psychology" (not psychiatry?) that concerns itself with pathologies and a "personality" branch for things that aren't bad and nasty. Thus making value judgements a compulsory and fundamental part of studying human behavior. No wonder you're upset.

Actually, the study of personality is usually seen as a branch of psychology, the medical branch of psychology is called psychiatry, and whether to classify Asperger's Syndrome or homosexuality as pathologies, as they were regarded by the first people to refer to them as such, is up to the individual and is not inherent in the words. Psychologists are not professionally bound to disapprove of everything they study. Even psychiatrists disagree about what does and does not constitute a pathology, and in practice, it's common to allow the patient to decide which behaviors need to be modified and which behaviors the patient is happy with.

WHY, please tell me, WHY do we need a PILL for SHYNESS???

WHY do we need to talk about personalities in this medical terminologistic way???

Now I also understand why you think these two things are connected. Indeed there is a misconception, often exploited by unscrupulous doctors and businessmen, that every medical term (or psychological term, by your language) refers to a pathology that must be treated. There's even a whole set of jokes about it (most of which are probably funnier than this one):

Doctor: Mrs. Wilson, you have something called an "aorta" that originates at your heart and branches out to several other parts of your body.

Mrs. Wilson: Oh my gosh! Is it serious?

But that's nothing more than a misconception, and a fading one at that. When my dentist refers to my "upper bicuspids" I don't conclude that he's out to cure me of them. When a bodybuilder uses the word "hypertrophy," would you assume he's opposed to having bigger muscles?

It's a comical and hopeless point of view that elevates one way of seeing the world to such a position that its mere ability to speak grants it complete authority over a topic. You seem to believe that the legitimacy of the medical or psychological perspective *must* be denied, because otherwise right and wrong becomes the domain of medicine or psychology. This is exactly the kind of thinking that leaves people at the mercy of doctors who create demand for treatment by defining more and more pathologies.

"You seem to believe that the legitimacy of the

[circletimessquare]

medical or psychological perspective *must* be denied"

yes, 100%... when it comes to PERSONALITY, only PERSONALITY

because there is no legitimacy of the medical field when it comes to personality. so all of your exciting allusions about aortas and muscle builders simply doesn't apply: they have to do with THE BODY. what is the legitimacy of the medical field when it comes to religion? what is the legitimacy of the medical field when it comes to economics? what is the legitimacy of the medical field when it comes to politics?

none

let me ask you this: what is gained by calling shyness "social anxiety disorder"? what is gained by calling inattention "attention deficit disorder"? who gains? pill companies gain

how do sell pills to healthy people? how do you convince hypochondriacs they need to take a pill? you MEDICALIZE a perfectly NORMAL but QUIRKY condition

do you understand me now?

you continually divert from my main attention. you are saying i am trying say medicine itself is illegitimate. you are either purposely or cluelessly diverting yourself from what i am actually saying into some weird discussion of the semantics of terminology. you are completely, willfully or naively, missing my point

i am talking about MEDICALIZING that which isn't about MEDICINE

this article doesn't hit on exactly what i am talking about (personality) but maybe if you hear the same thing i am saying from another mouth, maybe you will finally stop diverting the argument into territory i am not addressing (emph mine):

newsweek article

Aug. 2, 2005 - There are few Americans these days who aren't popping pills to treat a complaint, or to prevent one. From headache medicine to cholesterol-lowering drugs to sexual-dysfunction aids, there seems to be a remedy for every disorder out there--and even some we didn't realize existed (until we saw the ad, that is). In their new book, "Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients" (Nation Books), Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels examine how the drug industry has transformed the way we think about physical and mental health and turned more and more of us each year into customers. NEWSWEEK's Jennifer Barrett spoke with Moynihan, a medical writer for the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York and a regular contributor to the British Medical Journal, about how--and why--drug makers have begun targeting people who aren't sick. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: You write that drug makers now aggressively target the "healthy." Why?

Ray Moynihan: The book opens with a quote from a former Merck CEO that it was a shame he wasn't able to make Merck more like the chewing-gum maker, Wrigley's, because then he'd be able to "sell to everyone." I think that does drive the marketing machinery of the drug companies now. Drug companies target lots of sick people and make fabulous drugs that extend lives and ameliorate suffering. But the so-called preventives are where the big money are: like the bone-density drugs or the cholesterol [-lowering] drugs. Increasingly we're seeing the marketing shift to those types of drugs. People talk about the "worried well." There are many ways in which the drug companies target those people.

---

Aren't there enough sick people that the drug companies can target? Why try and convince others they're sick?

The marketing people and the sophisticated PR people who work for them are doing what shareholders demand of them. They're looking for ways to maximize markets. One way is to redefine more and more people as sick. There's an informal alliance between the drug companies and aspects of the medical profession and aspects of the patient advocacy world who all seem to have interests in defining more and more people as ill. We look at this condition by condition in the book, and what you see is a similar formula or process at work. Every time a panel

Re:"You seem to believe that the legitimacy of the

[try_anything]

are you listening to me now? or do you want to continue to talk about a subject matter i'm not talking about?

I'm not sure what you're talking about. You deny that psychology can legitimately speak about personality, and you deny that medicine has anything to say about human behavior. Doctors study and treat human behavior (Hans Asperger himself was a pediatrician), and you say that manic depression and schizophrenia are medical pathologies, so I don't understand how you can maintain that the medical perspective is irrelevant to personality. You have never explained your distinction between "personality" and "psychology" -- is it mind/body? Pathology/non-pathology? I'm not holding my breath to find out.

I'll repeat one last time: I agree that people are keen to pathologize anything they can sell a treatment for. We don't disagree about that. I don't agree that attacking medicine and arbitrarily declaring "personality" to be a domain distinct from "psychology" helps anything.

Denying medicine a voice merely because corporations exploit misconceptions about medicine is just silly. Medicine is just one avenue for ripping people off, and declaring psychiatry illegitimate just herds the ignorant and vulnerable toward a different set of quacks. After all, when it comes to pathologizing and "curing" behavior, medicine is still the new kid on the block compared to religion.

Just ask Tom Cruise.

-- and I'm out of here

my problem is with the medicalization

[circletimessquare]

of aspects of personality that don't need to be treated medically

when you talk about "social anxiety disorder" instead of shyness

or you talk about "attention deficit disorder" instead of inattention

the next thing out of people's mouths is "how do i treat that?"

the language you use to describe something has meaning

watch fox news: instead of calling it suicide bombing, they call it homicide bombing

i don't really care about suicide bombing/ homicide bombing, i'm not trying to make an ideological point about that here, i'm simply trying to drive home to you the point that the LANGUAGE you use matters when describing something, it has meaning, the words you use matters

why prochoice versus prolife?

why not prochoice versus antichoice?

why not antilife versus prolife?

do you understand how it matters?

why speak about personality in terms of medical terminology?

newsweek

Aren't there enough sick people that the drug companies can target? Why try and convince others they're sick?

The marketing people and the sophisticated PR people who work for them are doing what shareholders demand of them. They're looking for ways to maximize markets. One way is to redefine more and more people as sick. There's an informal alliance between the drug companies and aspects of the medical profession and aspects of the patient advocacy world who all seem to have interests in defining more and more people as ill. We look at this condition by condition in the book, and what you see is a similar formula or process at work. Every time a panel of experts come together, they want to nudge the boundaries a little further out, whether it's mental illness, cholesterol or high blood pressure.

Re:Ummm - no! Not at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

"For one thing, I think Asperger's Syndrome is a very real condition, but the jury's still out on whether or not it just describes a variation of normal behavior, or whether it's something worthy of considering as a "mental illness" - implying a need for treatment."

I believe the classification that it is on the "Spectrum" (even if its causes are different) are right on. The thing with Aspergers is (and I am one of them btw) they LIVE in their head, many withdraw COMPLETELY from the world into their rooms and live in their rooms all day for years on end with parents/relatives, or alone in their appartment, doing their non-functional, non-paying hobbies, or if they do have a job, all they do is go to job, then go home and focus on their obsessive interest. Many have no interest in broadening their social horizons (i.e. people, dancing, clubs, etc) and their brain matures MUCH slower in many areas, and MUCH faster in others so you have a wildly unevenly developed person, who is emotionally immature, but is insanely intense in their rational or irrational indeavors.

You know an Aspergers person when they are typically:

-Extremely isolated / extreme depressed from a young age
-Overly sensitive to the bad things around them (pain, disasters, etc)
-Hate being around people/don't understand people (we try to work with simple models, i.e. when they learn something one size fits everyone in application, they dont understand contexts well, they have to learn it ACADEMICALLY, its not natural for them, they can't
really get it by osmosis, they have to have a combination of totally focusing and observing, and others that can make them have those intellectual realizations, frequently is TOTALLY disinterested in oneself, i.e. fashion, bad hygene when depressed, always extremely over-reactive in self criticism, hence fueling the cycle of depression/suicidalideation, etc)

-Have no idea how to sense out the 'vibe' of what a person is feeling without having to focus all their energy on a person and even then they are usually clueless, unless that person is extremely exagerrating their feelings / expression.

-Does not understand how to socially interact, i.e. weak voice control, poor multitasking ability in converting spontaneous thoughts into language unless it is their special interests. Many are visual thinkers completely, they have no internal dialogue when they are socially interacting, other then trying to think of what to say in a conversation, they have no "running commentary/hidden talk/opinions of others".

I can look at a person and talk to them mostly only if I'm talking about one of my interests or we have some sort of by luck instant rapport, I can't just 'meet new people' I can only meet people 'on my level' of maturity in different areas, deciphering anyone else I have to do it academically, i.e. like studying them intently for a time with all my energy and focus to the exclusion of all else. I naively lent my best friends girlfriend thousands of dollars, and then I got shafted as they never paid me back, I got
their promise in writing but I've never taken them to court over it as I was so naive in believing they were my 'real friends' I would let friends abuse me that badly because I thought trying to maintain friendship was one of the 'rules' to follow, instead of having a backbone and cutting the relationship I want to naively get along everyone to my own downfall.

-Huge fear and anxiety about doing/saying the wrong thing, paralysis by analysis, social perfectionists (although they are very often a lot of the time totally oblivious or unaware they off on these perfectionist tangents, and they have no idea of learning by trial and error, they try to find the 'optimum' solution and apply it to every situation, instead of learning contexts, etc)

-Frequently things about doing things but never gets out of the THINKING stage, i.e. once again paralysis by analysis

-Indecisive

-Underneath the 'faux' rational mask they show to the outside world

So, is she hot or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone please answer the guy's question?

(Friggin' stoopid /.ers.)

YES, SHE'S DEFINITELY A MILF

[Anonymous Coward]

If she wrote a *nix kernel, it would be called BABE*LUX

short sighted

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy is short sighted. If he'd thought more about the overall design he'd probably have figured out what a "torrent" can do to a small ISP and to its customers. I use a small ISP in a rural area, oversold as must be to afford the infrastructure. Torrents are fine for folk with enough headroom for all, but they sure suck for the little guy. The IGMSFY attitude on the Internet will kill it. Film at 11.

Re:short sighted

[Tidal Flame]

Sorry, but how is it his fault that your ISP can't handle the amount of data that its customers are trying to access? I'm trying not to have an "IGMSFY" attitude, but honestly, I don't see the logic in your statement.

Re:short sighted

[Anonymous Coward]

IGMSFY?

I have a hunch about the last three, but the first three are mystifying.

Re:short sighted

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the design of BitTorrent is such that it behaves as a distributed denial of service. BTW, I'm the one who got to configure the cisco edge routers to bandwidth limit and prioritize torrents (and P2P in general) rather than just blocking them completely as the ISP management gut reaction suggested. Better bandwidth limitation by the client rather than just by the server might have solved this without draconian measures. Now do you see any of the logic?

Re:short sighted

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, "I Got Mine So Forget You," of course ;-)

Good summary, but still....

[King_TJ]

I'd have to say your list of symptoms allows for a pretty wide spectrum...

I won't address *all* of those points of yours one by one, but I can comment on a number of them selected at random to try to illustrate my point.

1. Thoughts of suicide? Yes, I spent most of my first couple years of high-school thinking about "just ending it all" practically every day. I was extremely unhappy and depressed, yet most people probably never had a clue I really felt THAT bad. Most of them were either too busy just having fun at my expense (Hey guys, let's steal his shoes again and run off with them so he goes bezerk trying to get 'em back! .. and that kind of thing.), or the few people that were close to me just saw the "other side" of me, where I was much happier, being around my friend with similar interests and all. Still, I "solved" this problem on my own, by convincing my folks to pull me out of the private, all-boys' school I was attending, and switching to a public school where I felt like I had a chance to make a "fresh start" in a much more "normal" social environment.

2. Codependent? I suppose, but not *extremely* so. I lived at my parents' house a lot longer than some people I knew, but by the time I was 21, I did move out. Screwed up with my first apartment and roommate due to not finding a decent job to pay my share of the bills, and had to go back to mom and dad for another stint... But I finally did buy a house and move out on my own. I guess this was partially the "fear of the unknown" thing plus a bit of laziness, but I didn't have parents that were pushing for me to leave either. In fact, my folks still cried the day I moved out - and called all the time wanting me to come back to help them with any number of misc. things they'd come up with.

3. Social interaction? I definitely had problems in this area. To this day, keeping eye contact with someone while talking to them is really difficult for me and always feels very uncomfortable. I've learned to force myself to do it in situations where I know it's expected of me (job interviews and such) but I'm very bad about doing it with someone I care about (a lover, a good friend, etc.) because I'm comfortable with them and don't feel the need to force myself to do it anymore around people who have already fully accepted me as a friend. I used to be very shy around people too, and I can't imagine ever just striking up conversations with strangers at a dance club or bar, to this day. But I'm very talkative when I'm in a small group and can chat one-on-one with people about anything of interest.

4. Hyper-focusing. This is one of those areas where my "disorder" was surely an advantage, work or project-wise. I used to be able to absolutely absorb myself into a project - like writing and working on an early BBS system I put together. I made it into one of the most popular ones in town (and greatly expanded my social circle in the process) - but I was walking around in classes with the greenbar paper printouts of my code and editing things with a pencil during school whenever I could get away with it. It was an obsession, simply because it really interested me. Nowdays, I don't even get the opportunity to get myself into that "mode" because all the responsibilities of having a kid to take care of, a house to take care of, bills to pay, my own business to build up, etc. etc. removes that option.

yeah, i'm tom cruise

[circletimessquare]

if i'm against taking cocaine, and al qaeda is against cocaine, that doesn't mean i'm in al qaeda. so if you say something and i go "yeah, just go ask osama bin laden" it may make me feel good, but it doesn't mean anything. scientology is pure shit. besides, the crux of what you're telling me sounds surprisingly similar to "you don't know about psychology, i do" so don't be a jackass ;-P

now that we've got that out of that of the way:

we can argue about language and semantics until the cows come home, it's all very subjective, but i'll try a different tack- when you talk about "social anxiety disorder" instead of shyness, or you talk about "attention deficit disorder" instead of inattention, the next thing out of people's mouths is "how do i treat that?"

the language you use to describe something has meaning. watch fox news: instead of calling it suicide bombing, they call it homicide bombing. i don't really care about suicide bombing/ homicide bombing, i'm not trying to make an ideological point about that here, i'm simply trying to drive home to you the point that the LANGUAGE you use matters when describing something, it has meaning, the words you use matters

why prochoice versus prolife? why not prochoice versus antichoice? why not antilife versus prolife?

do you understand how the language matters? why speak about personality in terms of medical terminology? when you MEDICALIZE the terminology for personality aspects, what is behind that? why the need all of a sudden to do that?

psychology can very well do wonders for those with genuine psychological problems like schizophrenia, manic depression, etc. but what can it do for personality? it can study personality for the sheer joy of studying personality, and that's great, research is very valuable in any endeavour. but why are the medical terminologies for various personality types being blasted all over our television sets to sell pills?

when a pharmaceutical company tries to sell patients some heart medicine do they talk about the vena cava? do they talk about ischemia? no, they put it in plain language for a layman to understand. well, when they try to sell us paxil, how come they don't talk about shyness? why the particular language "social anxiety disorder"? does the hypochondriac in you wake up a little more when it hears seasonal affective disorder instead of shyness?

remember foxnews and its homicide bombers instead of suicide bombers? is the language choice a big deal? are you going to say the language choice doesn't matter? then why is fox news going out of its way to phrase things that way? it seems to be a big deal to SOMEBODY, right? it manipulates something, the word choice. so, am i attacking medicine and the validity of medical terminology? or am i attacking WHO is using WHAT medical terms?

here's another analogy: if i attack monsanto for what it is doing with genetic engineering, am i attacking biochemistry? or am i attacking monsanto? get it now?

when i question the use of medical terminology when used to describe normal but quirky personalities in tv ads, am i attacking medicine? or am i attacking merck?

so when you see morons attacking genetically engineered foods, or you see tom cruise rail on and on about psychology, who is wrong? the morons? no, morons are morons, that's a constant in life. the REAL wrong, the real malice at work is how corporations are using science in such a way that discredits science in the eyes of morons. not that anyone has a responsibility to morons or that you can control morons. but the morons are right about something being wrong, they are just blaming the wrong entity

did you ever see "one flew over the cuckoos nest?" what was the point of that movie to you? if you can articulate what you might have thought from that movie about psychology and personality and conforming and not conforming, you might begin to grasp what i am getting at here, what we are REALLY talking about. rather than think i am trying to discredit medicine. rather than thinking i'm some damn retarded scientologist ;-P

Re:yeah, i'm tom cruise

[Maian]

I'm not sure what your point is (and you're lack of capitalization in your ramble doesn't help reading either). The GP already agrees with you that the misuse of medical terminology is unfortunate. I'll go further and agree with you that the medical terminology itself can be misleading.

However, you seem to be saying that it's wrong to apply medical terms to personality traits. There's nothing wrong with that, since personality lies in the realm of psychology. What's wrong are how pharmaceuticals market those terms as pathologies, or if they generalize personality traits into disorders. You use the "shyness => anxiety disorder" example a lot. Shyness most definitely is not some anxiety disorder - it's just an emphasized fear of social rejection. But shyness is often a component of anxiety disorders, and this is something marketers capitalize on. Again, the fault doesn't lie behind trying to apply medical terminology to personality - it lies on those that exploit such terminology.

You say that "we can argue about language and semantics until the cows come home, it's all very subjective". Well, there's a simple solution: provide a definition. According to answers.com and what I feel, the definition of psychology is: "science that deals with mental processes and behavior."

Steal This Article

[Anonymous Coward]

BITTORRENT: THE GREAT DISRUPTER
Torrential Reign
Bram Cohen's BitTorrent software made it a cinch to pirate films on the Internet. So why is Hollywood on his side?
By Daniel Roth

For two years after the dot-com crash, Bram Cohen could almost always be found at his small dining-room table, first in San Francisco's Nob Hill and later in Oakland. His long brown hair would flop in front of his eyes, and he'd curl it back over his ears as he stared at the screen of his Dell laptop, writing line after line after line of code. Occasionally Cohen would take breaks--there was a club to visit some nights, a conference on coding to help organize, a trip to Amsterdam--but then he'd return to his wooden chair, his keyboard on his lap, his laptop propped up on some books, his back perfectly straight (thanks to posture classes he was taking), and he'd program some more. First he lived off savings from the handful of jobs he'd worked during the bubble. When that ran out, he lived off credit cards, following a rigid system for applying for and transferring debt to 0% introductory-rate cards. Friends would ask what he was doing. Why wouldn't he just get a job? Cohen shooed them away. He was determined to solve a puzzle that was consuming him.

Since the birth of the Net, programmers had been stumped by how to transfer massive files--movies, TV shows, games, software, whatever--without incurring astronomical bills or risking frequent failure. Cohen knew he could find a solution; all it would take was time, good code, and brute intellect. He had all three. The money would take care of itself. "I didn't have any clear plans when I first started," he says. "I wasn't worried, partially because what I was doing was really cool, and partially because I'm broken and can't feel anxiety."

Cohen is not being self-deprecating. He never is. The 30-year-old speaks in a disarmingly literal way about almost everything, including--and because of--his Asperger's syndrome. Often tagged as the "little-professor syndrome," the mild form of autism tends to give its sufferers superhuman abilities to concentrate on certain things but leaves them confused by very human social cues. "Even those individuals who have coped well with their handicap will strike one as strange," wrote one researcher. Cohen's condition is just bad enough that he has had to train himself to look people in the eye when they talk to him. But it has worked to his advantage, enabling him to obsessively turn over the downloading problem in his head.

What he came up with was BitTorrent, a deceptively simple program that has grown into the hottest way to download anything bigger than a music file--from the legal (like militaryvideos.net's amateur videos of the war in Iraq) to the infringing. It makes pirating a copy of the latest movie out of Hollywood a snap. All it takes is a free download of the BitTorrent software--something 45 million people have done--and anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. TorrentSpy, a site unrelated to Cohen that helps people find content available for download, averages more than 600 new BitTorrent files a day. A sampling: Microsoft Office 2003, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, episode two of CBS's Ghost Whisperer (in high definition, for serious Jennifer Love Hewittians), plus a file containing over 400 Amazing Spider-Man scanned-in comics. Those huge files have made BitTorrent one of the biggest forces on the Internet, accounting for more than 20% of its traffic at any one time. That's double the volume generated by the most common Internet activities combined: clicking on web pages, sending and receiving mail and spam, even streaming videoclips.

With great power, of course, comes great enemies, so you can probably guess how it ought to play out. When music-sharing networks Napster and Kazaa rose up earlier this decade, the record labels sued them into submission. Surely BitTorrent will be next--especially now that Hollywood is beginning to feel the pinch as well. Today there are roughly 1.7 million copies of Hollywoo

i don't know what to say to you

[circletimessquare]

...What's wrong are how pharmaceuticals market those terms as pathologies, or if they generalize personality traits into disorders... Again, the fault doesn't lie behind trying to apply medical terminology to personality - it lies on those that exploit such terminology.

you've just repackaged what i said in the post you are replying to and you think you are telling me something

do you know how to listen?

Re:i don't know what to say to you

[Maian]

Apparently not. As far as I can tell, all you're doing is stating the obvious: that medical words can be spinned, which is nothing new...

...You do realize that rambling on endlessly only obfuscates your point, right?

bittorrent protocol

[bram]

Bram rules :P

PS: it seems subjects need [a-z] in them

Solution

[ExCEPTION]

Find some guy from some soda company to be the CEO, he would be out of trouble in no time.

ADHD != multi-tasking

[Jetson]

If I went to a pshrink, I'd likely be diagnosed with ADD and Tourette's Syndrome. Big deal. I just consider myself the type who likes to multi-task and happens to have some facial tics...

Multi-tasking is when you switch your attention back and forth between concurrent tasks so that you maximize your efficiency by minimizing the amount of time spent waiting for things to happen.

ADHD is an inability to regulate your attention. In some cases that means you can't maintain a single stream of thought long enough to accomplish anything at all (hyperactivity sub-type), while in other cases it means your attention is so narrow that you lack awareness of your surroundings (inattentive sub-type).

Being able to multi-task is about as far away from ADHD as you can get.

Tourette's is more than just a facial tic, too.

Re:Ummm - no! Not at all.

[Deluge]

"In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)"

Marathon coding sessions are not a symptom of Asperger's. If that were the case you'd hear a lot more people whining about being afflicted with this condition.

If anything, Coen is a hypochondriac, because let's face facts, anyone who can get married, have a kid, go out and meet some bigshot CEO for drinks and actually make a positive impression, and who can actually go out and do something big with his little project, is someone with "all the right stuff", and not Asperger's.

Now, if his sob story included things like the inability to speak coherently in the presence of a woman or an audience focused on him, an inability to deal with people one on one without offending them with unintentionally offending gestures, or just not impressing them in the slightest, then I might have a bit of sympathy.

Christ, the more I think about it the more it pisses me off, here's a successful guy in pretty much every way and he goes and whines to the world about how sick he his and how much of a hero people should consider him for battling his horrible ailment. Makes me sick.

it's true

[circletimessquare]

i don't know when to shut up

that doesn't really bother me though, does it bother you? why? am i accountable to you somehow?

anyway, glad you agree with my point, which is all i really care about