Quick, literal translation of the Norwegian story for all who are interested:
Use of BitTorrent - numbers and costs
We can conclude that our experiment with BitTorrent has been a success. Most importantly, according to the comments from our users, this is something you really like. We have read more than 500 comments, and it's the first time we have seen an event with this much publicity get this much positive feedback. We have tried a lot of crazy things on the net: we've had stories on both Digg, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, Engadget and Metafilter. In these places, trolls always show up: the guys who only whine and give negative feedback. In the discussions around the fact that we as a large public broadcaster uses BitTorrent, the feedback has been almost 100% positive. Something we have never seen before in stories this large.
We can't base a new strategy for NRK on one or two comments, but when we get hundreds of them and many like this one:
You should all get medals! Marvellously ingenious. Publish more content through torrents. I'll gladly pay the license. I actually think you could increase your licensing with a 1000kr [Norway-bucks, corresponds to something like 170$ from a conversion rate of 1NOK->0.18USD] a year. The quality is excellent. Keep going!
...it would be insane not to apply this to our strategy. Using big words: you who are posting here on NRKbeta are forming NRK's strategy for digital distribution.
In addition to this, the test has been a technical and economic success. To get this material up quickly and painlessly, we chose to use Amazon S3 both for storage and tracking. This means that we pay the bandwidth out of Amazon's S3 servers.
Some numbers
Note: Du to lacking statistics from the tracker itself and the fact that we use our S3 account for more tests, all these numbers are estimates.
Number of downloaded torrents so far: about 91000.
Due to problems with the first episode and adjustment for those who likely downloaded torrents without getting all the episodes, we subtract 11000 and end up with a number that tells us about 10000 people [likely a typo, I assume he meant 80000] downloaded all of the 8 episodes.
This means that we have distributed about 80 000 x 630 MB = 50 TB of data.
If we had paid for this through Amazon S3, it would have cost 50 000 GB * $0,16 pr GB = ca. kr 41 000.
The way it looks now, we have paid about 1700 kr for all distribution related to Nordkalotten 365. If I was a knife salesman, I'd kall this a 96% discount...
This is all good, but the most important part is that relating to the distribution itself, BitTorrent gives a fantastic user experience when it works as well as it did in this experiment. There is an automatic safety net in the fact that the load is distributed over the net. In contrast to other experiments we have done where servers have gone down, this system has handled the load and delivered the files with unusally high speed to the audience.
Once again, thank you to everyone who downloaded, shared and commented! You will see more exciting things like this in the future. Our experience of recommending Miro http://getmiro.com/ to those who don't have experience with BitTorrent or the video formats we used, was very positive.
Miro is an open and gratis solution for multiple platforms. The philosophy of the "Participatory Culture Foundation" fits well with the role of NRK as a general broadcaster in the new media world. So far, I can reveal that we have had meetings with Holmes Wilson from Miro/PCF to discuss an extended partnership. Stay tuned...
...which is why we should create a decentralized file storage system which can easily be read-accessed from the web. These limitations on Freenet et. al. are purely implementation problems - if Freenet could easily and transparently be accessed through a website front-end, anyone interested in making sensitive information publically available could create a web portal to the network. Such a system couldn't be compromized through DNS blocking (another poral would just pop up, and most people reach their websites through a search engine anyway, which updates automatically) or any number of security problems which plague centralized systems.
The reason Bittorrent is so popular is that there are so many nerds using it - but if you could access it through web forms, it would be a hell of a lot _more_ popular.
I disagree. I own a 30" 3007WFP, and it is a wonderful monitor. Perhaps swiveling of heads will be a problem if you have poor eyesight, as the gargantuous resolution comes with a rather high DPI-factor. I just move my eyes when I need to, and use a good chair with a headrest. Ergonomics couldn't be better, as there is far less mouse-wrestling to shuffle windows around. You can easily have an IDE or two open on the left half of the screen, with a whole page of a PDF spec on the right. And you will still have more pixels in each window than if you did full-screen with a smaller monitor. More space is good. How does four Firefox windows at once sound? I would like a monitor with three times the horizontal dimensions of this one. Except then it would have to curve around my chair.
A 30" monitor beats two 24" monitors any day.
You're raising an important point, but there aren't any practical technologies that can replace rockets today. SpaceShipOne's approach doesn't work to get into orbit.
The main problem with chemical rockets isn't the efficiency of the rocket, but the fact that most of the fuel you carry is required to carry the rest of your fuel up to the altitude where it is to be burnt. There is a hard physical limit to how efficient (and hence cheap) the method of launch by chemical rockets can become.
There are other, more efficient approaches in development. The most promising are nuclear-powered rockets (using a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen propellant) and laser-illuminated heat-exchanging rockets, where a ground-based huge multi-megawatt array of lasers illuminate a heat-exchanger on the spacecraft, which in turn heats the liquid hydrogen propellant. Both methods save weight, propellant and energy by not carrying oxidizer in the launch vehicle, the vast majority of the fuel for chemical rockets is in fact oxidizing material like liquid oxygen. And both these approaches could lower the cost to orbit by more than an order of magnitude, but sadly progress in spacecraft propulsion moves at a glacial pace. There are huge up-front development costs to almost every approach. What is needed is a bigger governmental budget and some visionary leadership. Real visionary, not pretend-visionary.
As for exotic approaches like space elevators, fountains and the like, these methods are either too close to fundamental engineering limits, too expensive and fragile, or both. It is my opinion that the R&D money should be spent on more promising ideas. The laser-illuminated thingie in particular looks very promising.
Hope at least the parent poster reads my comment, I always read Slashdot comments a day after the story is posted because I hate to dodge the unmoderated trolls.
Yes, I would love to hear in what ways Alien Arena surpasses Tremulous. Tremulous is one of the most interesting team action games I have ever played, far surpassing Counter-Strike and its cronies. I have never played AA, and the article is very low on details. Some of the innovations of Tremulous include wall-walking, strategy elements and a balanced two-class system reminescent of Starcraft. The aliens play like nothing you've ever tried before, except maybe that they are somewhat inspired by Alien vs. Predator. These stats are quite an opponent to match, but nothing would be better than the sorry state of Free Software gaming getting better.
A lot of the more interesting free software games are in fact based on the GPLed Quake 3 engine. There is a pattern here...maybe we could improve things by liberating more commercial gaming software? It's either that, or someone with authority has to take a lot more responsibility in designing tools for creating open-source games. I'm thinking something along the lines of procedural content generation, the major problem is creating all the models we need for a real game. There are many awesome things happening in academia on this subject right now, for example http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/PaperBuildings from SIGGRAPH 2006. We all agree that most free software games don't work out, right? For all the interesting aspects in Tux Racer, it isn't nearly up to the standards of commercial software, and masterpieces like Tremulous are the exception in OSS.
I'm afraid I have to go off topic for a moment. But this is a thing I have been thinking a lot about lately, and I haven't heard it discussed in here before. I promise it is highly relevant to the task at hand.
The Mozilla Foundation is swimming in money from its Firefox ad programs, and I have seen little information indicating that they are using the money for the good of the entire Free Software movement. In fact, I have heard little information at all indicating what they are doing with all of their millions, except for the obvious team of programmers that are working on Mozilla software. This is one arena where the Mozilla Foundation could be much more active in participating: donating money to ransoming out commercial software. I am certain there is a lot of valuable code out there that could do good things for the open-source gaming environment. Firefox is unique in the free software world in being able to bring in huge amounts of revenue, so in my opinion the Mozilla Foundation has an obligation to help out and be more generous with their cash reserves. Firefox is free software, and its benefits should belong to all of us. We are all on the same team here!
Any thoughts? I feel that these things aren't talked about nearly as loudly as they should be, these are all important problems to both the Free Software movement and to nerds in general. Are there any big Mozilla players in here who might have some good answers?
According to Wikipedia, the HiPER project (which is currently in the initial design stage in Europe) looks very promising with regards to breaking even on energy out vs. energy in. They are looking at using laser diodes instead of Xenon flash lamps to generate the energy for the lasers (increasing laser efficiency by a factor of ten), as well as using a secondary laser to provide energy densities in the fuel high enough to ensure ignition, not relying on the shock wave alone. Problems that still seem open are transporting the generated energy out of the fusion chamber, as well as managing the intense neutron radiation that will result. Other experimental facilities have jotted down some considerations/ideas for solutions to these problems, but nothing conclusive yet. Another obvious problem is of course the need to perform frequent firings to get any decent energy output, which as of today is not possible due to the cooling requirements of the flash lamps.
It is worth noting (and it is also mentioned in TFA) that this development advances the field of Inertial Confinement Fusion, which is an area that has not traditionally been considered the most likely candidate for commercial fusion power generation. ITER and all other experimental tokamak reactors are of the other variety (magnetic confinement fusion), where a magnetic field is used to keep the plasma in place during the reaction. During ICF, each fusion reaction has a duration short enough that it isn't necessary to hold the plasma back against the forces of gravity. Hence the need to produce a "spark" quickly and efficiently, as many consecutive reactions are necessary to produce any significant amount of power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_ fusion
It is many years since computers got introduced in aviation, and I have never heard of the computer crashing an airplane. In fact, autoland systems for use in a category III ILS approach need to have a failure ratio less than the order of one in ten million to be certified for use in "safety of life"-situations. And in situations of very low visibility, standard procedure is for the computer to land the airplane, simply because the computer does a better job than a human in these conditions. If you have ever flown with a 747-400 in heavy fog, odds are you have been on an airplane landed by a computer. However, the aviation industry is held to _much_ higher standards than the desktop computing industry, or even the automotive industry. The fact that airline travel so safe is a testament to this.
Personally, I would love to ride in a car with an automotive computer designed to such standards. Have any of you flown a good flight simulator, or flown a real aircraft? These systems are beautiful! Only in the weapons industry are there systems with better user interfaces. Having the responsibility of someone's life really does something to designers.
But Microsoft has a poor track record of making good applications for the mass market, so I wouldn't count on them producing anything worth using in a car. Which is a real shame, because a well integrated computer system in a vehicle makes your life a lot easier. I know of little more beautiful than interacting and cooperating with a complex machine in real time, and computers do belong in such a setting.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, until the day the US refuses to sell military equipment to Sweden. Economics doesn't count for very much in these decisions.
Use of BitTorrent - numbers and costs
We can conclude that our experiment with BitTorrent has been a success. Most importantly, according to the comments from our users, this is something you really like. We have read more than 500 comments, and it's the first time we have seen an event with this much publicity get this much positive feedback. We have tried a lot of crazy things on the net: we've had stories on both Digg, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, Engadget and Metafilter. In these places, trolls always show up: the guys who only whine and give negative feedback. In the discussions around the fact that we as a large public broadcaster uses BitTorrent, the feedback has been almost 100% positive. Something we have never seen before in stories this large.
We can't base a new strategy for NRK on one or two comments, but when we get hundreds of them and many like this one:
In addition to this, the test has been a technical and economic success. To get this material up quickly and painlessly, we chose to use Amazon S3 both for storage and tracking. This means that we pay the bandwidth out of Amazon's S3 servers.
Some numbers
Note: Du to lacking statistics from the tracker itself and the fact that we use our S3 account for more tests, all these numbers are estimates.
Number of downloaded torrents so far: about 91000.
Due to problems with the first episode and adjustment for those who likely downloaded torrents without getting all the episodes, we subtract 11000 and end up with a number that tells us about 10000 people [likely a typo, I assume he meant 80000] downloaded all of the 8 episodes.
This means that we have distributed about 80 000 x 630 MB = 50 TB of data.
If we had paid for this through Amazon S3, it would have cost 50 000 GB * $0,16 pr GB = ca. kr 41 000.
The way it looks now, we have paid about 1700 kr for all distribution related to Nordkalotten 365. If I was a knife salesman, I'd kall this a 96% discount...
This is all good, but the most important part is that relating to the distribution itself, BitTorrent gives a fantastic user experience when it works as well as it did in this experiment. There is an automatic safety net in the fact that the load is distributed over the net. In contrast to other experiments we have done where servers have gone down, this system has handled the load and delivered the files with unusally high speed to the audience.
Once again, thank you to everyone who downloaded, shared and commented! You will see more exciting things like this in the future. Our experience of recommending Miro http://getmiro.com/ to those who don't have experience with BitTorrent or the video formats we used, was very positive.
Miro is an open and gratis solution for multiple platforms. The philosophy of the "Participatory Culture Foundation" fits well with the role of NRK as a general broadcaster in the new media world. So far, I can reveal that we have had meetings with Holmes Wilson from Miro/PCF to discuss an extended partnership. Stay tuned...
...which is why we should create a decentralized file storage system which can easily be read-accessed from the web. These limitations on Freenet et. al. are purely implementation problems - if Freenet could easily and transparently be accessed through a website front-end, anyone interested in making sensitive information publically available could create a web portal to the network. Such a system couldn't be compromized through DNS blocking (another poral would just pop up, and most people reach their websites through a search engine anyway, which updates automatically) or any number of security problems which plague centralized systems.
The reason Bittorrent is so popular is that there are so many nerds using it - but if you could access it through web forms, it would be a hell of a lot _more_ popular.
Let's get hacking.
I disagree. I own a 30" 3007WFP, and it is a wonderful monitor. Perhaps swiveling of heads will be a problem if you have poor eyesight, as the gargantuous resolution comes with a rather high DPI-factor. I just move my eyes when I need to, and use a good chair with a headrest. Ergonomics couldn't be better, as there is far less mouse-wrestling to shuffle windows around. You can easily have an IDE or two open on the left half of the screen, with a whole page of a PDF spec on the right. And you will still have more pixels in each window than if you did full-screen with a smaller monitor. More space is good. How does four Firefox windows at once sound? I would like a monitor with three times the horizontal dimensions of this one. Except then it would have to curve around my chair. A 30" monitor beats two 24" monitors any day.
You're raising an important point, but there aren't any practical technologies that can replace rockets today. SpaceShipOne's approach doesn't work to get into orbit.
The main problem with chemical rockets isn't the efficiency of the rocket, but the fact that most of the fuel you carry is required to carry the rest of your fuel up to the altitude where it is to be burnt. There is a hard physical limit to how efficient (and hence cheap) the method of launch by chemical rockets can become.
There are other, more efficient approaches in development. The most promising are nuclear-powered rockets (using a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen propellant) and laser-illuminated heat-exchanging rockets, where a ground-based huge multi-megawatt array of lasers illuminate a heat-exchanger on the spacecraft, which in turn heats the liquid hydrogen propellant. Both methods save weight, propellant and energy by not carrying oxidizer in the launch vehicle, the vast majority of the fuel for chemical rockets is in fact oxidizing material like liquid oxygen. And both these approaches could lower the cost to orbit by more than an order of magnitude, but sadly progress in spacecraft propulsion moves at a glacial pace. There are huge up-front development costs to almost every approach. What is needed is a bigger governmental budget and some visionary leadership. Real visionary, not pretend-visionary.
For an explanation of the latter approach, see http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/897Kare.pdf. I wouldn't bet my money on nuclear rockets being allowed anytime soon, they are after all _nucular_. For a general description of these hypothetical technologies, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion.
As for exotic approaches like space elevators, fountains and the like, these methods are either too close to fundamental engineering limits, too expensive and fragile, or both. It is my opinion that the R&D money should be spent on more promising ideas. The laser-illuminated thingie in particular looks very promising.
Hope at least the parent poster reads my comment, I always read Slashdot comments a day after the story is posted because I hate to dodge the unmoderated trolls.
Yes, I would love to hear in what ways Alien Arena surpasses Tremulous. Tremulous is one of the most interesting team action games I have ever played, far surpassing Counter-Strike and its cronies. I have never played AA, and the article is very low on details. Some of the innovations of Tremulous include wall-walking, strategy elements and a balanced two-class system reminescent of Starcraft. The aliens play like nothing you've ever tried before, except maybe that they are somewhat inspired by Alien vs. Predator. These stats are quite an opponent to match, but nothing would be better than the sorry state of Free Software gaming getting better.
A lot of the more interesting free software games are in fact based on the GPLed Quake 3 engine. There is a pattern here...maybe we could improve things by liberating more commercial gaming software? It's either that, or someone with authority has to take a lot more responsibility in designing tools for creating open-source games. I'm thinking something along the lines of procedural content generation, the major problem is creating all the models we need for a real game. There are many awesome things happening in academia on this subject right now, for example http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/PaperBuildings from SIGGRAPH 2006. We all agree that most free software games don't work out, right? For all the interesting aspects in Tux Racer, it isn't nearly up to the standards of commercial software, and masterpieces like Tremulous are the exception in OSS.
I'm afraid I have to go off topic for a moment. But this is a thing I have been thinking a lot about lately, and I haven't heard it discussed in here before. I promise it is highly relevant to the task at hand.
The Mozilla Foundation is swimming in money from its Firefox ad programs, and I have seen little information indicating that they are using the money for the good of the entire Free Software movement. In fact, I have heard little information at all indicating what they are doing with all of their millions, except for the obvious team of programmers that are working on Mozilla software. This is one arena where the Mozilla Foundation could be much more active in participating: donating money to ransoming out commercial software. I am certain there is a lot of valuable code out there that could do good things for the open-source gaming environment. Firefox is unique in the free software world in being able to bring in huge amounts of revenue, so in my opinion the Mozilla Foundation has an obligation to help out and be more generous with their cash reserves. Firefox is free software, and its benefits should belong to all of us. We are all on the same team here!
Any thoughts? I feel that these things aren't talked about nearly as loudly as they should be, these are all important problems to both the Free Software movement and to nerds in general. Are there any big Mozilla players in here who might have some good answers?
That's a genuine +5 insightful post. You are already at +5, so I'll take the opportunity to say thanks instead.
According to Wikipedia, the HiPER project (which is currently in the initial design stage in Europe) looks very promising with regards to breaking even on energy out vs. energy in. They are looking at using laser diodes instead of Xenon flash lamps to generate the energy for the lasers (increasing laser efficiency by a factor of ten), as well as using a secondary laser to provide energy densities in the fuel high enough to ensure ignition, not relying on the shock wave alone. Problems that still seem open are transporting the generated energy out of the fusion chamber, as well as managing the intense neutron radiation that will result. Other experimental facilities have jotted down some considerations/ideas for solutions to these problems, but nothing conclusive yet. Another obvious problem is of course the need to perform frequent firings to get any decent energy output, which as of today is not possible due to the cooling requirements of the flash lamps.
It is worth noting (and it is also mentioned in TFA) that this development advances the field of Inertial Confinement Fusion, which is an area that has not traditionally been considered the most likely candidate for commercial fusion power generation. ITER and all other experimental tokamak reactors are of the other variety (magnetic confinement fusion), where a magnetic field is used to keep the plasma in place during the reaction. During ICF, each fusion reaction has a duration short enough that it isn't necessary to hold the plasma back against the forces of gravity. Hence the need to produce a "spark" quickly and efficiently, as many consecutive reactions are necessary to produce any significant amount of power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_ fusion
Try pressing Ctrl+down instead.
It is many years since computers got introduced in aviation, and I have never heard of the computer crashing an airplane. In fact, autoland systems for use in a category III ILS approach need to have a failure ratio less than the order of one in ten million to be certified for use in "safety of life"-situations. And in situations of very low visibility, standard procedure is for the computer to land the airplane, simply because the computer does a better job than a human in these conditions. If you have ever flown with a 747-400 in heavy fog, odds are you have been on an airplane landed by a computer. However, the aviation industry is held to _much_ higher standards than the desktop computing industry, or even the automotive industry. The fact that airline travel so safe is a testament to this.
Personally, I would love to ride in a car with an automotive computer designed to such standards. Have any of you flown a good flight simulator, or flown a real aircraft? These systems are beautiful! Only in the weapons industry are there systems with better user interfaces. Having the responsibility of someone's life really does something to designers.
But Microsoft has a poor track record of making good applications for the mass market, so I wouldn't count on them producing anything worth using in a car. Which is a real shame, because a well integrated computer system in a vehicle makes your life a lot easier. I know of little more beautiful than interacting and cooperating with a complex machine in real time, and computers do belong in such a setting.