What's wrong with the file-sharing capabilities built in to most OSs?
Imagine you have 10,000 desktop PCs in your company, and you want to find a document about "freenet" and "locutus". You know that it is on someone's shared drive, but how do you find out where it is?
what's wrong with centralised file/document servers?
How much of the average knowledge worker's output gets uploaded to centralized file servers or websites? Over 80% of a corporation's data still resides on their employee's desktop computers - and as was demonstrated by Napster, P2P is very good indeed when it comes to searching desktop PCs.
Will we look back at these stories in a couple of years and think the same way about them as we now do with stories about...
...or 'Web to revolutionize the way we look for information' - hmmmm, perhaps some buzzwords do live up to the hype.
Think about it - how much time do most information workers spend looking for information? Some estimate about two hours per day, and over 80% of information in the Enterprise is located on user's hard disks - not on web or ftp sites.
This is the market Locutus is going after.
It never ceases to amaze me...
on
The Future of Money
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...how O'Reilly repeatedly price their conferences out of the range of most of the people that build, or are likely to build, the very software the conferences are about.
These conferences are primarily interesting because of the people that attend them, yet by pricing their conferences like that they are virtually guaranteeing that the only people who turn up are Sun and Microsoft's [insert conference buzzword here] evangelists, and a bunch of journalists.
As an Irish H1B Visa holder in the US, and recalling the pain an expense the INS made me endure, I can assure you that any American trying to get into the EU will be made to SUFFER - and SUFFER BAD!!! (if I have anything todo with it - which I won't).
Ah yes. I actually installed FreeNet a couple days ago, at the suggestion of another/.er, but couldn't get it working. I guess it just required more effort.
You should have emailed support@freenetproject.org, they are generally very helpful. Installing Freenet really isn't that hard these days.
It is worth mentioning that Freenet now incorporates a "redundant splitfile" mechanism (using FEC) that allows the reliable downloading of massive files. Some guy has made a bunch of 150MB ogg video files of Star Trek Enterprise episodes available, and they are all reliably downloadable (at about 40k/sec across a broadband connection) from Freenet.
To recap:
Reliable
Anonymous
Totally decentralized
More popular files are more widely distributed thus avoiding any/. effect
I find Freenet to be very slow. I try it out about once a year. Probably more now that it is fairly mature. I don't think I've tried since last spring. Need to try again.
You sure do - they have made huge advances since last spring.
How do I know which file is really LOTR-II without downloading it?
Because it is linked to from a freesite whose author has a good record for not posting bogus stuff.
You are right. From what I have heard on the grapevine, Rosen is privately very unhappy with the recording industry's response to file-sharing, even though she could never say this publicly. If she was not constrained in what she can say by her position, you might find that she agrees with much of what the RIAA's critics have to say.
The hot issue for many of us concerns the idea of Fair Use, copyright, and copyright enforcment. Government regulations have been changed and are changing in favor of the same kinds of large corporations that claimed huge damages against you during your less than ideal experiance with the Judidical System.
Oh come on - the guy may not have been able to access the Internet, but that doesn't mean that he hasn't been able to talk to people that have. You are treating the guy as if he has been deaf, dumb, and blind for all this time.
Freenet developers Oskar Sandberg and Scott Miller did a presentation about a year ago at a O'Reilly P2P conference describing how Gnutella (and probably other P2P networks) could be used to initiate DDOS attacks in a similar manner.
Perhaps someone familiar with the Gnutella protocol can say whether this has been fixed yet.
Apple has every legal right to do this, as it is a provision of the license which iCommune signed when they clicked through the iTunes license agreement, and really it is for our own benefit - since Apple (unlike, say, Microsoft) has its users best interests at heart - you can tell by the warm fuzzy widgets on the OSX user interface.
Now if Microsoft had done this, with their cold unfriendly pointy user interfaces, that would be a sin worthy of no less than torture and death for Gates and all his ilk.
Those who complain that the Slashdot editors and much of the readership have a double standard where Apple and Microsoft are concerned are clearly missing one extremely important fact:
...until I got an unexpected check for $10,000 from them after filing my last tax return - along with a nice note explaining where my CPA fucked up! Now they are my favorite government TLA!
The slashdot mention seems like a pretty transparent attempt by Salon to get slashdotted. This article isn't particularly amuzing or funny, so I guess they needed some kind of gimmick to boost their hit-rate.
I have been trying to point out this double standard for a while now, however inevitably Slashdot's wonderful moderation system ensures that Slashdot's readers aren't exposed to my disturbing non-groupthink.
People don't seem to realize that one of the reasons that Microsoft succeeded where Apple failed is that Microsoft was actually more open than Apple! Where Apple tried to force users to use their pretty but overpriced hardware, Microsoft left users free to pick and choose the components that went into the hardware that ran their Operating System.
Now, I am not saying that Microsoft are perfect, but if Apple had won the desktop war rather than Microsoft, not only would there be an Operating System monopoly, but it would be a hardware monopoly too!
I am not suggesting that everyone goes out and installs Windows, rather I am saying that all of the reasons that we should be encouraging use of Linux over Windows apply equally to using Linux over OSX, yet Slashdot's editors seem to have no problem with migration away from Linux to OSX.
Any statement that Microsoft has not and is not likely to enforce patents in these areas is just not backed up by the history, or by public statements by MS senior executives.
I said that Microsoft didn't have a history of abusing patents - I did not mean that Microsoft had no patents, nor that they had never enforced a patent - nor even that they liked Open Source.
Rather, I was referring to the particularly dastardly practice of "submarine" patents, encouraging people to code to a standard before springing a patent on the world and forcing those that have adopted the standard to pay up.
For example, Microsoft submitted.NET to the ECMA as a standard, something that Sun has not yet done with Java (they tried but couldn't agree). In the openness stakes, that puts.NET ahead of Java IMHO - and those that claim that Java is automatically more trustworthy than.NET have failed to make their case.
Hopefully Microsoft will succesfully be forced to integrate Java. The combination could help Java smother.net
I am getting really tired of Open Source zealots criticizing.NET just because Microsoft created it. I am very familiar with both.NET and Java, and IMHO.NET is a better architecture.
.NET will soon have at least one Open Source implementation, and Microsoft has actually supported these efforts.
People authoritively claim that Microsoft will use patents to kill these efforts if they become competitive, but there is no evidence to support this paranoia, and in-fact Microsoft does not have a histroy of abusing patents in this manner (unlike another company I could mention).
I was amazed when I first discovered Eclipse about two weeks ago, not so much because it is an extremely powerful piece of software, not because they have written a Swing replacement which looks amazing on both Windows and Linux, but because I went for so long without discovering such a product.
While Java is my main language, I have been doing some C# work recently using SharpDevelop, which is good, but still needs work. I can't wait to try out the C# plugin for Eclipse.
Slashdot Mirror
It shall be left as an exercise for the reader (who can actually be bothered to follow hyperlinks) to see why.
That is the problem that Locutus solves.
Please remember that this is a prototype. We are working hard to address issues like this.
This is the market Locutus is going after.
These conferences are primarily interesting because of the people that attend them, yet by pricing their conferences like that they are virtually guaranteeing that the only people who turn up are Sun and Microsoft's [insert conference buzzword here] evangelists, and a bunch of journalists.
As an Irish H1B Visa holder in the US, and recalling the pain an expense the INS made me endure, I can assure you that any American trying to get into the EU will be made to SUFFER - and SUFFER BAD!!! (if I have anything todo with it - which I won't).
You can limit the amount of bandwidth Freenet uses if you think it is using too much.
To recap:
- Reliable
- Anonymous
- Totally decentralized
- More popular files are more widely distributed thus avoiding any
/. effect
Install a recent snapshot of Freenet, then visit this freesite to check it out.You are right. From what I have heard on the grapevine, Rosen is privately very unhappy with the recording industry's response to file-sharing, even though she could never say this publicly. If she was not constrained in what she can say by her position, you might find that she agrees with much of what the RIAA's critics have to say.
Perhaps someone familiar with the Gnutella protocol can say whether this has been fixed yet.
When they imposed similar taxes on CDRs in places like Canada they didn't suddenly stop trying to prevent copyright violations using CDRs.
Now if Microsoft had done this, with their cold unfriendly pointy user interfaces, that would be a sin worthy of no less than torture and death for Gates and all his ilk.
Those who complain that the Slashdot editors and much of the readership have a double standard where Apple and Microsoft are concerned are clearly missing one extremely important fact:
Need I say more?...until I got an unexpected check for $10,000 from them after filing my last tax return - along with a nice note explaining where my CPA fucked up! Now they are my favorite government TLA!
The slashdot mention seems like a pretty transparent attempt by Salon to get slashdotted. This article isn't particularly amuzing or funny, so I guess they needed some kind of gimmick to boost their hit-rate.
People don't seem to realize that one of the reasons that Microsoft succeeded where Apple failed is that Microsoft was actually more open than Apple! Where Apple tried to force users to use their pretty but overpriced hardware, Microsoft left users free to pick and choose the components that went into the hardware that ran their Operating System.
Now, I am not saying that Microsoft are perfect, but if Apple had won the desktop war rather than Microsoft, not only would there be an Operating System monopoly, but it would be a hardware monopoly too!
I am not suggesting that everyone goes out and installs Windows, rather I am saying that all of the reasons that we should be encouraging use of Linux over Windows apply equally to using Linux over OSX, yet Slashdot's editors seem to have no problem with migration away from Linux to OSX.
Rather, I was referring to the particularly dastardly practice of "submarine" patents, encouraging people to code to a standard before springing a patent on the world and forcing those that have adopted the standard to pay up.
For example, Microsoft submitted .NET to the ECMA as a standard, something that Sun has not yet done with Java (they tried but couldn't agree). In the openness stakes, that puts .NET ahead of Java IMHO - and those that claim that Java is automatically more trustworthy than .NET have failed to make their case.
People authoritively claim that Microsoft will use patents to kill these efforts if they become competitive, but there is no evidence to support this paranoia, and in-fact Microsoft does not have a histroy of abusing patents in this manner (unlike another company I could mention).
How sad.
While Java is my main language, I have been doing some C# work recently using SharpDevelop, which is good, but still needs work. I can't wait to try out the C# plugin for Eclipse.