I just ran into this today trying to use abcde on debian to rip a cd and getting album name and song titles of the cddb.com "unlicensed software" url. whatever. Just point your programs to use http://freedb.org/cddb/cddb.cgi instead.
If cddb wants to shun non-paying clients, go for it, we haven't paid for our clients.
Presumably they are getting money from microsoft so that future versions of windows will still use them or something equally stupid. (win98+ came with some cddb support in its player AFAIK).
Also, if anyone has a player that does work with cddb, they should update it to submit all entries to freedb.org if freedb doesn't already have them.
All ISPs should be interested in running their own set of "P2P servers" themselves and they'll come out ahead without needing to raise prices.
A perfect example is mojo nation: if an ISP runs several boxes with mojo brokers covering a large or full part of the mojo data address space then both the ISP and its users will benefit. Users mojo brokers will naturally prefer the ISPs mojo brokers because they have a much lower latency and a higher reliability compared to brokers elsewhere on the net (outside of the ISPs internal networks). That means less overall outside/internet bandwidth usage directly by the users due to the caching the ISPs brokers effectively perform. It's a very large content neutral distributed caching system. In the end is saves the ISP money!
People misunderstand "P2P" in its buzzword hype. ISPs are Peers too!
By using an internal microcredit/payment system (called mojo) and localized reputations Mojo Nation aims to do exactly that. Better connected brokers (peers) will naturally become more "server like" due to having a better uptime, lower latency and a lower mojo cost overall for other brokers (peers) to use.
The resources in the system are allocated dynamically. No strict heirarchy needs to be defined, it will establish itself appropriately for each individual peer as it is needed.
p2p stands for Pier To Pier. It's a really cool concept. You take a big seaworthy freight ship and fill it with DAT tapes of CD-Rs at your closest Pier and send it on its way to your destination Pier. It's the highest bandwidth data transport solution there is.
It's been around forever for use with people and boxes of cheap goods, I'm surprised to see people just finding out about it.
It abuses the filesystem with one file per message in the same way that mh folders do. Unless you're running a decent btree structured filesystem like XFS, ReiserFS or JFS, expect a performance hit if you get thousands of messages in a single mailbox.
You can rightfully argue that filesystems shouldn't be so pitiful but that still doesn't change the fact that today's most popular ones are.
mbox uses a large flat file that takes even more processing to read, index and search. how braindead is that? but it works up to a point on todays stupifiyingly fast hardware.
Yes, there is a centralized token server. It is relatively easy to spread it out across multiple machines so that its not a single point of failure.
It also has no idea about what goes on within the system that actually causes tokens to be exchanged, including being completely unable to know who is giving tokens to who.
As the actual workings of the system use a credit/offer system, settling differences with tokens when they're large enough for an autonomous agent to care about, the system can continue to operate for a while even when the token server becomes unavailable.
BSD /usr/ports system can solve real problems
on
An RPM Port Of APT
·
· Score: 1
I really love apt on linux, but I -technically- love BSD's/usr/ports system more. Ports -always- builds the software from source, gotten off of one of its many home sites on the net. It also allows for distribution specific patches (for security, bug fixes, portability fixes, etc.) as well as specifying *compile time options* (the specific rant mentioned above) for each package.
Granted it is always up to the port package maintainer to determine how many compile time options they'll throw support for in the ports package Makefile, the option is always there. A good example is the editors/vim port, which by default builds the whole rediculious thing with X support via libgtk and all that brings in. However with a simple make option, X support can be disabled at install time and your dependencies go way down.
Do you want binary distributions to avoid building from source? Ports can do that as well, but you'll lose the ability to choose what you want built in. It will always be that way unless people want to make a system with subcategories within a particular package. (gross)
The only drawback with ports is that there aren't as many up to date available packages. This is simply due to the number of monkeys out there creating them.
An extension to autoconf or an autoconf like tool that could auto-generate ports, rpm, deb, and plain tar.gz packages from a single config file would be nice.
Signed code support merely extends the stupid Verisign Monopoly! They are -not- a good trusted party.
They just kissed netscape's ass enough in the beginning to get them to be the sole key signer in the first major SSL web browser thus granting them a multi-billion dollar natural monopoly as long as people think that key signing actually means squat.
All it really means is that someone forked over $$$ for a "stamp of submission to the man."
Anyone working for a federal institution should know better than to save their logs for more than a month. A better question is why was the school logging anything int he first place? They are not required to.
if a laptop doesn't burn my legs, that's a feature
on
Crusoe and Benchmarks
·
· Score: 1
keeping your laptop on your person at all times if it contains sensitive information is. That means it goes to the bathroom, bed, order counter to pick up your meal, pub, or you name it. How much is that information worth to someone other than you? would you really leave that amount of money lying on a table? get real people. If your cio had their laptop full of valuable data stolen without being personally threatened, it's as much their fault as any enterprising theif!
The use of a patch like this is only on systems with ECC ram for moving data out of pages which had non-catastrophic memory errors so that the system can keep running without using the flakey bits until that DIMM can be replaced.
bad ram is just that, bad, and is likely to have more failures over time.
Peer-to-Peer working group meets this
week to define how to share unused CPU,
storage capacity across nets.
By APRIL JACOBS
Network World, 10/09/00
Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and a slew of start-ups
will meet this week to set up the structure for a
working group that would give corporate customers a
new way to harness the collective power of
networked PCs, workstations and servers for
computer- and storage-intensive jobs.
Instead of purchasing more hardware and software
and hiring the IT staff needed to set up and support it,
an emerging technology called peer-to-peer (P2P)
computing will let users access valuable resources
when they aren't being used. The result: Users could
save millions of dollars by tapping unused processing
and storage resources.
P2P basically sets up a virtual supercomputer by
allowing the exchange of data among multiple
computers connected via a network. The software
that powers Napster and Gnutella is often held up as
the best example of the power P2P can harness.
In addition to next week's meeting, at least two firms,
Porivo Technologies and Mangosoft, will soon
announce P2P products aimed at corporate network
customers. Intel is testing a new peer-to-peer
application that the company says will save WAN
bandwidth and deliver applications and data more
quickly than existing technologies.
Porivo will roll out Peer, a secure, Java-based
application designed to let users harness spare PC
computing capacity, says Will Holmes, CEO at
Porivo. Porivo's Peer client, which resides on a user's
desktop, works with the company's PeerPlane
management software, which can reside on a
dedicated server. PeerPlane essentially aggregates the
computing resources of PCs connected to corporate
networks, letting users distribute work among them.
Mangosoft next week plans to announce Mangomind,
which it is billing as the first multiuser, Internet-based,
file-sharing service that provides real-time file sharing
for secure business communications. The new service
is a secure way for multiple users to access, share and
store files. Mangomind will let users work on their files
offline. When users go back online, Mangomind
automatically updates and synchronizes their files.
In the Groove
Another member of the working group - Groove
Networks - plans a highly anticipated Oct. 24 rollout
of its P2P technology, which will be aimed at
collaborative computing. Groove's founder Ray Ozzie
created Lotus Notes.
P2P could take many avenues in meeting the
computing needs of end users, much as the Web has
become more than a tool to deliver simple page
requests, says Andrew Mahon, evangelist at Groove.
Mahon declined to provide specifics about Groove's
product (for more on Groove, see 'Net Buzz, page
98).
One company interested in Porivo and other P2P
technologies is United Technologies Research Center
- the research arm of United Technologies. Paul
Kirschner, a senior project analyst at United
Technologies, is looking at how his company can
harness the power of computers across the company
to do production work.
What Kirschner likes is the idea of being able to do
massive compute jobs that might otherwise mean
buying more expensive hardware and software.
"Obviously, if you look at the number of desktops
across the company, there are tens of thousands," that
could potentially be tapped, he says. "To use what is
just sitting there doing nothing quite a bit of the time is
what makes this attractive because if you looked at
replacing that power with another box, another
cluster, that would represent a significant investment."
As a result, Kirschner expects to have P2P
technology up in some capacity by year-end.
Kirschner likes Porivo's offering because the desktop
client works with Windows 95. Others, such as
TurboLinux's EnFuzion software, only support
Windows NT and various flavors of Unix.
But that doesn't mean he's ready to bet the farm on
P2P.
"The technology is new, and how it is going to play in
the corporate environment isn't certain yet," he says.
"People will not tolerate it if their machines crash, slow
down or get locked up, or if unusual things happen."
While EnFuzion may not fit into United Technologies'
infrastructure, it has found a home elsewhere.
TurboLinux announced earlier this year that J.P.
Morgan is using the software to help power the firm's
worldwide risk management system for fixed-income
derivatives.
Cheryl Currid, president of the Currid & Company
consultancy, says P2P's big draw for corporate
customers is processing power that companies don't
know they have. "What they can get from
peer-to-peer is low-cost, high-capability processing
and storage."
Currid says users can benefit from P2P to varying
degrees - depending on how much effort they put into
incorporating it into their infrastructure. While
engineering and scientific jobs are a logical place for
P2P, more commonplace financial applications are
what could put it in the spotlight. "Imagine if your
trades could come back to you three times faster
because your company was using P2P to process
them in real time, instead of having to do big periodic
batch jobs," Currid says.
Intel is in
Intel is also using P2P. The company made a lot of
noise recently when it talked about how it saved $500
million over the past 10 years using a P2P application
called Netbatch. The application lets Intel engineers
harness more than 10,000 workstations across Intel's
network to do compute-intensive jobs for chip design,
says Manny Vara, an Intel spokesman.
"Every time we were designing a new chip, we were
buying a bunch of new mainframes to get the job done
- and that was just one area," he says.
Vara says Intel is testing a new application that goes
even further. He says Intel will try out a system that
will detect when employees access the WAN to
retrieve video files. If another employee at the same
location has already downloaded it, the P2P
application will retrieve it from that system where it
has been stored instead of going over the WAN to get
it.
What network managers will likely debate as P2P
gains momentum is how to use it without slowing
systems. Currid says estimates are that 75% of the
average PC and 60% of the average server go
unused.
Busy signal
But what about when they are busy?
P2P software from companies such as Entropia,
another member of the P2P Working Group, let
customers set policies that govern when computer
resources can be harnessed. Using Entropia's screen
saver makes it fairly easy. The computer's resources
are only used when the screen saver comes on. The
moment it turns off, indicating the machine is going to
be used, the P2P processes are halted.
Many P2P questions will hopefully be answered by
the working group set to meet in San Jose.
The meeting will be more organizational than anything
else, according to Intel's Vara. The members will
organize into task-related groups that will determine
how to solve issues related to interoperability,
standards and security.
Other members of the working group include Applied
MetaComputing, CenterSpan, Distributed Science,
Dotcast, Enfish Technology, Engenia Software,
Flycode, Kalepa, Statis, United Devices, Uprizer and
Vtel.
Our meta tracker is under extra heavy/. load due to today's attention so you may experience problems finding other servers (or even running at all if you are behind a firewall and need to use a relay server) until we get this fixed. Hang in there and hop onto sourceforge for the mailing list and code.
(side note: un-centralizing the meta tracking into p2p gossip is also high on our priority list)
once we attach some reputations to the content tracker entries (on our todo list), things that don't download perfectly should start to fall out of the system naturally as software agents (or people) discover that they're no longer 100% available.
yes, code could in theory be written to refresh content that has already been published by reconstructing missing shares (assuming at the minimum are still available to reconstruct it from).
Everything that is published gets broken into pieces/chunks which then get broken into blocks. You only need 4 out of the 8 blocks of any given piece/chunk to reassemble the entire thing. (yes this does mean publishing stores things as 2x as much data, but disk space is plentiful!).
Also, there is additional redundancy in that multiple block servers should end up storing a copy of the same block, especially if it is popular. (This also means that the slashdot effect within mojonation should more widely distribute that particular bit of content rather than causing a central server to fall over!)
If ultimately too many blocks disappear, that content is effectively gone (techincally only that piece/chunk of the published archive is, but most people want the whole thing)
There are unfortunately a lot of old entries in the current content trackers running out there that have fallen to this fate during out bootstrapping period because the blocks have disappearred from the system due to low demand and earlier on software bugs causing them to be lost. This will hopefully not happen much to any newly published content.
We are also working on making content trackers more robust, including possible content tracker entry reputations or at least having content trackers use some of their earned mojo to verify that items in their database are still accessable. Those features are second on our list after speed issues, but keep your eyes open or join the sourceforge mailing lists to keep up on whats current.
The primary resource making the market is bandwidth. Disk space comes in second. Modules for reselling CPU time for specific tasks will spring up later but are not the immediate focus of the system (seti@home, distributed.net for mojo anyone?)
Also, for any newcomers to the software, we are expecting a major new release soon that should improve the download speed from mojo nation drastically. The current sucky speed issues are completely client side due to inefficiencies in the way its current downloading code is written. We are rewriting that.:)
Happy Mojoing!
Greg - mojo programmer
Re:mojonation does not do a centralized search
on
The Gnutella Paradox
·
· Score: 1
Mojo Nation does not centralize its searching functionailty. Currently it does have an annoying centralized "metatracker" (think of it as a root DNS server) at the moment for finding contact info of the many other brokers running within mojonation and the services they are providing, but there are plans underway to replace that with more p2p gossip style requests so that, like gnutella or freenet, you only need to know the contact info of a few people on the mojo net to get yourself going.
Searching is distributed, anyone can run a content trackers. The company doesn't run any content trackers.
Slashdot Mirror
I just ran into this today trying to use abcde on debian to rip a cd and getting album name and song titles of the cddb.com "unlicensed software" url. whatever. Just point your programs to use http://freedb.org/cddb/cddb.cgi instead.
If cddb wants to shun non-paying clients, go for it, we haven't paid for our clients.
Presumably they are getting money from microsoft so that future versions of windows will still use them or something equally stupid. (win98+ came with some cddb support in its player AFAIK).
Also, if anyone has a player that does work with cddb, they should update it to submit all entries to freedb.org if freedb doesn't already have them.
All ISPs should be interested in running their own set of "P2P servers" themselves and they'll come out ahead without needing to raise prices.
A perfect example is mojo nation: if an ISP runs several boxes with mojo brokers covering a large or full part of the mojo data address space then both the ISP and its users will benefit. Users mojo brokers will naturally prefer the ISPs mojo brokers because they have a much lower latency and a higher reliability compared to brokers elsewhere on the net (outside of the ISPs internal networks). That means less overall outside/internet bandwidth usage directly by the users due to the caching the ISPs brokers effectively perform. It's a very large content neutral distributed caching system. In the end is saves the ISP money!
People misunderstand "P2P" in its buzzword hype. ISPs are Peers too!
Get back to work slaves! [whip!]
Is it possible?
Yes!
By using an internal microcredit/payment system (called mojo) and localized reputations Mojo Nation aims to do exactly that. Better connected brokers (peers) will naturally become more "server like" due to having a better uptime, lower latency and a lower mojo cost overall for other brokers (peers) to use.
The resources in the system are allocated dynamically. No strict heirarchy needs to be defined, it will establish itself appropriately for each individual peer as it is needed.
PS a new version (0.950) was released today.
p2p stands for Pier To Pier. It's a really cool concept. You take a big seaworthy freight ship and fill it with DAT tapes of CD-Rs at your closest Pier and send it on its way to your destination Pier. It's the highest bandwidth data transport solution there is.
It's been around forever for use with people and boxes of cheap goods, I'm surprised to see people just finding out about it.
there's no such thing as a free ISP.
It abuses the filesystem with one file per message in the same way that mh folders do. Unless you're running a decent btree structured filesystem like XFS, ReiserFS or JFS, expect a performance hit if you get thousands of messages in a single mailbox.
You can rightfully argue that filesystems shouldn't be so pitiful but that still doesn't change the fact that today's most popular ones are.
mbox uses a large flat file that takes even more processing to read, index and search. how braindead is that? but it works up to a point on todays stupifiyingly fast hardware.
Disclaimer: I use and like Maildir.
1) Tagging/accounting is not possible. It is too easy to get around using encryption.
2) It gives ISPs the incentive to get around the tagging/accounting so that they are charged less and can bill less.
Devon doesn't appear to know about actual network protocols or information theory.
Yes, there is a centralized token server. It is relatively easy to spread it out across multiple machines so that its not a single point of failure.
It also has no idea about what goes on within the system that actually causes tokens to be exchanged, including being completely unable to know who is giving tokens to who.
As the actual workings of the system use a credit/offer system, settling differences with tokens when they're large enough for an autonomous agent to care about, the system can continue to operate for a while even when the token server becomes unavailable.
Via these links (assuming you have mojonation installed w/ the mojo proxy):
linux kernel source 2.2.18 (tar.bz2) [mojo id 68AieSMlQkDNSi3vaFUpwB9sbIk]
I really love apt on linux, but I -technically- love BSD's /usr/ports system more. Ports -always- builds the software from source, gotten off of one of its many home sites on the net. It also allows for distribution specific patches (for security, bug fixes, portability fixes, etc.) as well as specifying *compile time options* (the specific rant mentioned above) for each package.
Granted it is always up to the port package maintainer to determine how many compile time options they'll throw support for in the ports package Makefile, the option is always there. A good example is the editors/vim port, which by default builds the whole rediculious thing with X support via libgtk and all that brings in. However with a simple make option, X support can be disabled at install time and your dependencies go way down.
Do you want binary distributions to avoid building from source? Ports can do that as well, but you'll lose the ability to choose what you want built in. It will always be that way unless people want to make a system with subcategories within a particular package. (gross)
The only drawback with ports is that there aren't as many up to date available packages. This is simply due to the number of monkeys out there creating them.
An extension to autoconf or an autoconf like tool that could auto-generate ports, rpm, deb, and plain tar.gz packages from a single config file would be nice.
Signed code support merely extends the stupid Verisign Monopoly! They are -not- a good trusted party.
They just kissed netscape's ass enough in the beginning to get them to be the sole key signer in the first major SSL web browser thus granting them a multi-billion dollar natural monopoly as long as people think that key signing actually means squat.
All it really means is that someone forked over $$$ for a "stamp of submission to the man."
It only proves that someone/thing that had access to your secret key has signed it. This is an important distinction that most people fail to make.
Anyone working for a federal institution should know better than to save their logs for more than a month. A better question is why was the school logging anything int he first place? They are not required to.
amen.
Take a look at mojonation. you earn/spend a currency called mojo backed on your bandwidth/cpu/storage capacity.
"p2p" (i hate buzzwords) has a bright future!
keeping your laptop on your person at all times if it contains sensitive information is. That means it goes to the bathroom, bed, order counter to pick up your meal, pub, or you name it. How much is that information worth to someone other than you? would you really leave that amount of money lying on a table? get real people. If your cio had their laptop full of valuable data stolen without being personally threatened, it's as much their fault as any enterprising theif!
The use of a patch like this is only on systems with ECC ram for moving data out of pages which had non-catastrophic memory errors so that the system can keep running without using the flakey bits until that DIMM can be replaced.
bad ram is just that, bad, and is likely to have more failures over time.
Here's a link to the Java Airport Configurator for fully configuring and controlling an apple airport from any OS.
Peer-to-Peer working group meets this
week to define how to share unused CPU,
storage capacity across nets.
By APRIL JACOBS
Network World, 10/09/00
Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and a slew of start-ups
will meet this week to set up the structure for a
working group that would give corporate customers a
new way to harness the collective power of
networked PCs, workstations and servers for
computer- and storage-intensive jobs.
Instead of purchasing more hardware and software
and hiring the IT staff needed to set up and support it,
an emerging technology called peer-to-peer (P2P)
computing will let users access valuable resources
when they aren't being used. The result: Users could
save millions of dollars by tapping unused processing
and storage resources.
P2P basically sets up a virtual supercomputer by
allowing the exchange of data among multiple
computers connected via a network. The software
that powers Napster and Gnutella is often held up as
the best example of the power P2P can harness.
In addition to next week's meeting, at least two firms,
Porivo Technologies and Mangosoft, will soon
announce P2P products aimed at corporate network
customers. Intel is testing a new peer-to-peer
application that the company says will save WAN
bandwidth and deliver applications and data more
quickly than existing technologies.
Porivo will roll out Peer, a secure, Java-based
application designed to let users harness spare PC
computing capacity, says Will Holmes, CEO at
Porivo. Porivo's Peer client, which resides on a user's
desktop, works with the company's PeerPlane
management software, which can reside on a
dedicated server. PeerPlane essentially aggregates the
computing resources of PCs connected to corporate
networks, letting users distribute work among them.
Mangosoft next week plans to announce Mangomind,
which it is billing as the first multiuser, Internet-based,
file-sharing service that provides real-time file sharing
for secure business communications. The new service
is a secure way for multiple users to access, share and
store files. Mangomind will let users work on their files
offline. When users go back online, Mangomind
automatically updates and synchronizes their files.
In the Groove
Another member of the working group - Groove
Networks - plans a highly anticipated Oct. 24 rollout
of its P2P technology, which will be aimed at
collaborative computing. Groove's founder Ray Ozzie
created Lotus Notes.
P2P could take many avenues in meeting the
computing needs of end users, much as the Web has
become more than a tool to deliver simple page
requests, says Andrew Mahon, evangelist at Groove.
Mahon declined to provide specifics about Groove's
product (for more on Groove, see 'Net Buzz, page
98).
One company interested in Porivo and other P2P
technologies is United Technologies Research Center
- the research arm of United Technologies. Paul
Kirschner, a senior project analyst at United
Technologies, is looking at how his company can
harness the power of computers across the company
to do production work.
What Kirschner likes is the idea of being able to do
massive compute jobs that might otherwise mean
buying more expensive hardware and software.
"Obviously, if you look at the number of desktops
across the company, there are tens of thousands," that
could potentially be tapped, he says. "To use what is
just sitting there doing nothing quite a bit of the time is
what makes this attractive because if you looked at
replacing that power with another box, another
cluster, that would represent a significant investment."
As a result, Kirschner expects to have P2P
technology up in some capacity by year-end.
Kirschner likes Porivo's offering because the desktop
client works with Windows 95. Others, such as
TurboLinux's EnFuzion software, only support
Windows NT and various flavors of Unix.
But that doesn't mean he's ready to bet the farm on
P2P.
"The technology is new, and how it is going to play in
the corporate environment isn't certain yet," he says.
"People will not tolerate it if their machines crash, slow
down or get locked up, or if unusual things happen."
While EnFuzion may not fit into United Technologies'
infrastructure, it has found a home elsewhere.
TurboLinux announced earlier this year that J.P.
Morgan is using the software to help power the firm's
worldwide risk management system for fixed-income
derivatives.
Cheryl Currid, president of the Currid & Company
consultancy, says P2P's big draw for corporate
customers is processing power that companies don't
know they have. "What they can get from
peer-to-peer is low-cost, high-capability processing
and storage."
Currid says users can benefit from P2P to varying
degrees - depending on how much effort they put into
incorporating it into their infrastructure. While
engineering and scientific jobs are a logical place for
P2P, more commonplace financial applications are
what could put it in the spotlight. "Imagine if your
trades could come back to you three times faster
because your company was using P2P to process
them in real time, instead of having to do big periodic
batch jobs," Currid says.
Intel is in
Intel is also using P2P. The company made a lot of
noise recently when it talked about how it saved $500
million over the past 10 years using a P2P application
called Netbatch. The application lets Intel engineers
harness more than 10,000 workstations across Intel's
network to do compute-intensive jobs for chip design,
says Manny Vara, an Intel spokesman.
"Every time we were designing a new chip, we were
buying a bunch of new mainframes to get the job done
- and that was just one area," he says.
Vara says Intel is testing a new application that goes
even further. He says Intel will try out a system that
will detect when employees access the WAN to
retrieve video files. If another employee at the same
location has already downloaded it, the P2P
application will retrieve it from that system where it
has been stored instead of going over the WAN to get
it.
What network managers will likely debate as P2P
gains momentum is how to use it without slowing
systems. Currid says estimates are that 75% of the
average PC and 60% of the average server go
unused.
Busy signal
But what about when they are busy?
P2P software from companies such as Entropia,
another member of the P2P Working Group, let
customers set policies that govern when computer
resources can be harnessed. Using Entropia's screen
saver makes it fairly easy. The computer's resources
are only used when the screen saver comes on. The
moment it turns off, indicating the machine is going to
be used, the P2P processes are halted.
Many P2P questions will hopefully be answered by
the working group set to meet in San Jose.
The meeting will be more organizational than anything
else, according to Intel's Vara. The members will
organize into task-related groups that will determine
how to solve issues related to interoperability,
standards and security.
Other members of the working group include Applied
MetaComputing, CenterSpan, Distributed Science,
Dotcast, Enfish Technology, Engenia Software,
Flycode, Kalepa, Statis, United Devices, Uprizer and
Vtel.
Note to all:
/. load due to today's attention so you may experience problems finding other servers (or even running at all if you are behind a firewall and need to use a relay server) until we get this fixed. Hang in there and hop onto sourceforge for the mailing list and code.
Our meta tracker is under extra heavy
(side note: un-centralizing the meta tracking into p2p gossip is also high on our priority list)
once we attach some reputations to the content tracker entries (on our todo list), things that don't download perfectly should start to fall out of the system naturally as software agents (or people) discover that they're no longer 100% available.
yes, code could in theory be written to refresh content that has already been published by reconstructing missing shares (assuming at the minimum are still available to reconstruct it from).
Everything that is published gets broken into pieces/chunks which then get broken into blocks. You only need 4 out of the 8 blocks of any given piece/chunk to reassemble the entire thing. (yes this does mean publishing stores things as 2x as much data, but disk space is plentiful!).
Also, there is additional redundancy in that multiple block servers should end up storing a copy of the same block, especially if it is popular. (This also means that the slashdot effect within mojonation should more widely distribute that particular bit of content rather than causing a central server to fall over!)
If ultimately too many blocks disappear, that content is effectively gone (techincally only that piece/chunk of the published archive is, but most people want the whole thing)
There are unfortunately a lot of old entries in the current content trackers running out there that have fallen to this fate during out bootstrapping period because the blocks have disappearred from the system due to low demand and earlier on software bugs causing them to be lost. This will hopefully not happen much to any newly published content.
We are also working on making content trackers more robust, including possible content tracker entry reputations or at least having content trackers use some of their earned mojo to verify that items in their database are still accessable. Those features are second on our list after speed issues, but keep your eyes open or join the sourceforge mailing lists to keep up on whats current.
The primary resource making the market is bandwidth. Disk space comes in second. Modules for reselling CPU time for specific tasks will spring up later but are not the immediate focus of the system (seti@home, distributed.net for mojo anyone?)
:)
Also, for any newcomers to the software, we are expecting a major new release soon that should improve the download speed from mojo nation drastically. The current sucky speed issues are completely client side due to inefficiencies in the way its current downloading code is written. We are rewriting that.
Happy Mojoing!
Greg - mojo programmer
Mojo Nation does not centralize its searching functionailty. Currently it does have an annoying centralized "metatracker" (think of it as a root DNS server) at the moment for finding contact info of the many other brokers running within mojonation and the services they are providing, but there are plans underway to replace that with more p2p gossip style requests so that, like gnutella or freenet, you only need to know the contact info of a few people on the mojo net to get yourself going.
Searching is distributed, anyone can run a content trackers. The company doesn't run any content trackers.