An unconfirmed report by a NASA staffer claims that the computers responsible for the successful extension of the International Space Station solar panels are, in fact, controlled the the Hurd kernel and GNU software in general.
Not only does this demonstrate the stability and reliability of GNU software in a 'mission critical' context, it also is the first instance of the Hurd, shot around the world.
They're not hypocrites or fanatics. They're businessmen. There is a market for this stuff.
And hey, if you can fleece a bunch of control freaks and right-wing anal retentives in the process of making a living... Well, that's just another one of the perks of the IT industry.
More power to them! Where do I apply?
I'd love to work on a well funded, morally respectable, high-profile known-Death-March project. I'd love to laugh all the way to the bank while doing it in the name of the children...
Wouldn't care if they answered the phone in person, and sang the song to me LIVE, or held the receiver up to a RIAA lawyer reciting Copyright Statutes to the beat of Constantinopole.
The Linux quip was there as a self-deprecating jab at my own excitement over someone else (that I was not aware of) believing in the free distribution of music.
Get over yourself. Nobody here is as serious as you think they are.
Thanks for the correction. I didn't know that.
Actually, I've never seen the phrase written, so my mistake is phonetic. 'despite'... 'to spite'... In any case, now I know better, and it makes more sense.
First off, they can not. No more than Wal-Mart security can raid your closet on the suspicion of you being a shoplifter. But...
They can litigate, and cost you more in legal fees than the price of the software. Then the State/FBI gets a warrant and searches your systems, and if you are guilty, you're made to pay.
Just like the MPAA and the RIAA, the members of the BSA are cutting the branch whereupon they sit. They are alienating their consumers, and trying to make a buck quick, since they KNOW that they are on their way out. The simple solution to this problem is to switch to Free Software.
Yeah, yeah.. Free Software is only Free if your time is worthless.. Well, what is the TCO of Commercial Software: purchase, upkeep and license management included? How about we add the potential of litigation to that cost? Still cheaper than Free software?
Can you imagine what an Iron Fist they would have if there were NO free alternatives? I can see it now: Terminator 95 - the new Microsoft Pictures movie in which Bill Gates goes back in time to kill RMS and Linus comming to a DVD near you!
Let's try to consider this in terms of the impending Presidential Election.
What WOULD happen is by some freakish twist of Fate, Nader WON... And then just walked away? What if he cussed out the political system, and all those who supported him in the process...
What would Washington do? How would his supporters feel?
The following are not absolute statements, but they seem to hold true more often than not.
* European cars are built with safety in mind.
* Asian cars are built with efficiency in mind.
* American cars are build with football in mind.
Cases in point: Only Honda and Toyota have petro-electric hybrids on the market at this time. Only Volvo and Mercedes offer solid roll-cages and side-airbags as standard equipment. Only the Ford Pinto explodes on impact.
This actually makes a lot of sense, if we think about it. The attitude behind the products of each of these cultures reflects the history and constraints of that culture.
Europeans have had war after war, century after century, roll back and forth across the continent. They (individual countries at least) insist that the lives of their citizens are important, and after years of industrial progress, safety is a requirement. After all, if all their citizens die in car crashes, there won't be anyone left to fight in the next ethnic war to come along.
Asians live in overcrowded conditions where optimal use of resuorces, especially for the Japanese, is of remarkable importance. People are plentiful, steel is expensive - so hoods and fenders are made thinner and lighter. It is not honorable to put ones self before the community, and so a car that flattens into a pancake is more respectable than one with pollutes the community air.
Americans like car races, big explosions and the individual pursuit of happiness. The faster happiness can be pursued, the better. If that means shoving someone else off the road with the running board of a big SUV, then so be it... If you can't keep up with the Joneses, or ride off into the sunset then you are weak and deserve to die in a fiery crash.
Man, don't you just HATE it when the power goes out? I swear, it just sucks. My TV remote stops working and everything..
Hopefully, due to the distributed itch-scratching of OSS, someone will figger out a way to fix a black-out in software.. Cause, as it is now, every time the power goes out, my neighbors can hear me screaming and yelling at the damn TV, and know that "The &^%$ed PLAYBOY channel went off in the middle of a great f&^%$fest cause the *(&^&^%ing power went out! Fsck!" And I don't want them to even know that I have cable...
I work for a company that mandates UML and the RUP. Care to guess what the first thing to go out the window is? RUP. The last work-product to be generated? The UML design docs. It seems that these are mandated just so managers can puff out their chests at meetings, and brag about the modern 'tools' their people use - they're just pissing into the wind, since at milestone #1, they demselves order corners to be cut.
Don't get me wrong though, there is definitelly a place for SASD in the industry. I think that Mark's view is on the extreme left side of the issue. It doesn't work for him - fine. It's not likely to work in OSS at all, since OSS is voluntary and volunteers don't appreciate being ordered around. They simply walk away when told to do something they will not find enjoyable, or in a way they do not know.
The real problem with SASD comes in when management tries to use it as a 'silver bullet'. Quoth Fred Brooks: "There are no silver bullets." A structured, tracable, repeatable process will not compensate for the lack of good people. Good coders can bring order out of chaos, but SASD without inspiration, experience and discipline is like herding cats.
The real benefits of SASD are only realizable when you have a group of proficient developers working together. UML is a very good way to communicate ideas. CRC cards are a great way to flesh out object design. Formal requirement reviews are needed before coding can reliably progress, lest major needs are overlooked or flaws are 'designed in'.
You can give a 'green' carpenter's apprentice a powerful chain-saw, but he's likely to make only bloody sawdust with it. In the hands of a master carpenter, a powerful chainsaw makes a hard job much easier.
So the sophistication of the tools used should reflect the sophistication of the developer. If the master wants to code in 'vi', who's to stop him? If the punk intern wants to do all his work in Rational Rose, he's wasting time, and it's the project manager's responsibility to assign him to something small enough that he can learn good practice through practice.
Once good development practices become intuitive, then the tools that promise to do that thinking for you may be used. But not learning the basics manually, and replacing the brain with a third-party product/process only results in an army of VB-coding monkeys who become completely useless when confronted with a new version of their IDE.
If it was so obvious, why didn't someone do it three years ago?
This would be a good topic to discuss with Marc Andreesen, don't you think? I mean... The CAPABILITY for Mosaic was there all along, ever since Telnet, on which all other data transfer applications are built..
I never said that Napster wasn't clever. I just said it wasn't doing anything really new. Gopher, Veronica, Archie and FTP to NFS mounted drives were doing this sort of stuff over 10 years ago! But back then very few people were paying attention, and Metallica still encouraged bootlegging.;)
I suspect you have a narrow technical definition of what you think constitutes a revolutionary breakthrough.
Yeah, I thought that I had made that quite clear in my post. The slant of the original article is that P2P file-sharing is a new *technological* development. It is not. That's pretty much all I'm trying to say. I'm not putting P2P down in terms of business models, intellectual property challeneges and so forth.
I'm just making the point that P2P isn't any different, technologically, than tried and true networking fundamentals, and so the argument that it will fail on technical merit is completely flawed.
You are either completely ignorant of what you're talking about or a very well spoken Troll, or perhaps I've completely misunderstood you, I'm not honestly sure which, so I'll bite.
I suspect the last of the options.
Point 1: P2P differs from Client/Server: FALSE
By definition, a client requests data and a server provides data. In a peer-to-peer configuration, both peers serve as both client AND server. I'm sure that you realize the difference between 'server' the function and 'Server' the big box bought specifically to perform such a function. There is nothing wrong with being both the President of the Hair Club for Men, AND also being the Client.
Point 2: P2P logic is different than Client/Server: FLASE
What you describe as the innovative features of P2P networking is nothing more than simple network route finding protocols, used in the application layer with a twist (since the finding of a particular mp3 factors into the connectedness information that is considered). Once such a route is found, data is transfered between the two nodes on the graph - simple. The problems of flooding and 'broadcast storms' have been addressed (and dare I say, largely solved) in router hardware, many years ago.
Point 3: Routing is hierarchical: WAY FALSE!
DNS sure is hierarchical, but routing tends to be dynamic. Especially if you look at how UDP packets are shuffled around. In fact, this is the KEY to the Internet's success - it dynamically re-routes around failure (excess congestion is a type of failure, BTW). Once the IP address of the 'other guy' is determined (hierarchically) then the address is used for routing, and at each hop, a 'best route' is chosen. This route varies (dynamically) in response to network conditions. Static routing is a special case, not a typical case, and special provisions have to be made to transfer data along a fixed route. Why? Because it goes very much counter to how the Internet is designed to work.
What is touted as an 'innovation' of P2P networking is a fugly imprementation of low-level networking algorithms at the application layer. It's new only in that it's been confined to lower levels before now (and rightly so). An equally 'innovative' approach, would be to use decimal or binary addresses of web-sites instead of their common IP or verbose counterparts, just to circumvent filtering software.
Is P2P going to fail? Hell No! Is it an ugly hack? Absolutely. Is it NEW? No! It's a reapplication of OLD. Is it wasteful of bandwidth? YES! Do the College kids and broadband subscribers who use it, really care about bandwidth? Umm... NO! And this is exactly why P2P isn't going to fail - no matter which 1960's routing algorithm they use to ferret out the latest N'SYNC mp3.
I'm not going to dodge - I'll admit I have not studied this enough to know where I stand. I certainly am against the monstrous profits going to studio chiefs, but I also want to make damn sure that poor writers are ripped off. Have to pass on this one.
I do hope that this was simply a typo. Otherwise, the 3rd party alternatives just don't seem any different than Bushgore.
First off, I DO understand the concept behind Napster, Gnutella and the like..
However, the whole idea that P2P is at all different than server-to-server is ridiculous. Just TRY to set up a P2P connection on the net without going through an ISP.. If you can, then you ARE and ISP. You are a 'server' - whether you have clients of not is irrelevant. Even major corporations today have to go through an ISP for their connection to the backbones. My little workstation has to make just as many hops to get to Mae West as Sony's data center.
There is no technical difference between gnutella and a couple of buddies running anonymous FTP servers on their home machines. There is no technical difference between that and IRC - except for volume of bits. Bits is bits is bits. The difference, the ONLY difference, is that there isn't a corporation extracting an additional toll on the data that's transmitted. There lies the 'problem' with P2P.
If Guntella and Napster were used to share vacation photos NOBODY would care. ISP's might jack up their rates based on how much pipe you use, but that's it. If the data transfered wasn't (arguably) someone's 'intellectual property', this would not even be an issue.
People have been running private FTP servers in a P2P fashion since before the WWW made server-to-server the defacto mode of operation. Before ISP's got on the band-wagon, is was all workstation to workstation, account to account, peer-to-peer.
Just because some kid slapped a web interface onto a hack of anonymous FTP doesn't suddenly make it a different technology. Just because he made it distributed doesn't make it anything more than simply 'convenient'. Searchable FTP has existed for a long time, also since before the www. Anyone remember the Archie tool? Indexing, and making it transparent is the next obvious step, not some revolutionary break-through.
P2P is nothing new, and it is nothing 'different' than what has always been done. Servers talk to each other as 'peers' too, don't they?
Just because a bunch of corporate-types label the same technology in two different ways, depending on wether they get a cut of the profits or not, does not make one way doomed and the other saved. Just because somone calls this 'piracy' and that 'a stable business model' does not make the two ways into different technologies.
P2P, S2S, B2B... It's all the same technology. It's the same protocols and algorithms. It's all the same bits. The difference is only in who is in CONTROL of THE DATA. He who controls the INFORMATION, controls the Universe.
As for P2P 'failing' due to low bandwidth at the 'local loop', well, that's just a hot, steaming pile of BS. Ye Olde Bulletin Board Systems (the ORIGINAL P2P networks) thrived on 2400 baud.. They thrived even more on 9600, then, when 14k came, the Internet had started to mature and began to offer more 'value', farther reach and more neat stuff. But the BBS's didn't 'fail'. Not due to poor performance or inequitable sharing of files within the communities they supported. In fact, the only times BBS's were put out of business (except for their owners personal choice) it was due to... (drum roll) PIRACY and kiddie porn.
Now Linux is SO GOOD, it can even run well on defective hardware. Let's see M$ do that one! Now who's the one chasing tail-lights? The only way for M$ to one-better Linux is to make an OS that runs on NO RAM, and we know where they stand on bloat..
The car metaphor is flawed. It's more like Cadillac's 'limp home' feature that will run a V-8 engine on only 4 cylinders in the event of cooling failure, equipped with run-flat tires and bullet-proof Windows.
What I would rather see is a flash-upgradable hardware implementation of the JVM, on a plug-in coprocessor card, using something like Transmeta's code-morphing technology to execute the Java byte-codes on the hardware level.
Forget hooking the JVM into the OS of the platform. Make the JVM the HARDWARE of the platform.
import com.mon-sense.Grain_of_salt;
...
Grain_of_salt grain = new Grain_of_salt(HUGE);
The guys context of the phrase "open source" is completely off in the article. He keeps refereing to it as though it were a product, not a mode of release.
"We're not adverse to full open source [for Java]. It's really what is the right model for that open source and where that model is for that life cycle," Paolini said.
...
"I can say that open source for Java is our goal."
...
"We've really taken a simple program language to a platform very quickly."
Come on folks! This sounds like a script that seeds press-releases with the latest buzzword. This guy seems to not understand what 'open source' means, and by the last comment, seems to be a little confused about Java - the language, and the JVM as a concept.
Either that or he was only talking to a bunch of know-nothing MBA's.
Yes, reach 13.5 million stud^H^H^H^Hcustomers, just waiting for the next site to download. By becoming an N2H2 partner today, you can have YOUR advertisement seen by almost 14 million customers daily.
These customers have been preselected to be impressionable and easily convinced to give up their allowance and milk money for the latest gadget or service. Sign up today and get your advertisement seen by one of the only customer-bases pre-approved by the Federal Government, the Library of Congress and virtually every Board of Education in the U.S. of A. (The Land of the Free(tm) and the Home of the Brave(c) )
Act now, as supplies are limited and the economics of a Free Market(r) will dictate partnership pricing.
Private use may not necessitate v6, as long as we all have one IP address. But we don't.
Anyone with a cell-phone will need an IP address soon. Shortly thereafter, anyone with a pager. Then anyone with a car. Then anyone with a major appliance. It doesn't always make sense - is a networked washing machine really necessary? But as soon as there is someone willing to buy it, it will be made available.
Imagine, having a washing machine that can page you when it's done cleansing your tighty-whiteys? Now, unless you expect everyone in the world who wants a piece of this new technology, to set up their own wireless subnet, you'll have to agree that it's going to require a network which will support this sort of flexibility.
Personally, I'm all for a car that can self-diagnose, and wirelessly inform my mechanic/dealer of a problem. I'm all for email that will get routed to wherever I happen to currently be: work, home, cell, car..
The thing here is that v4 is running out of available addresses in a big hurry. A 32 bit address field just doesn't cut it anymore, and subnetting, masking, ghosting, shadowing, blah, blah and all other v4 hacks can only go so far.
v6 has a great deal to offer, but the acceptance curve is pretty steep. Not for technical reasons, but for financial ones. Networking hardware presents a significant investment, and well designed hardware happily continues to run when new technologies become available. It's very hard to justify the purchase of new hardware, if there is nothing 'wrong' with old hardware.
Incidentally, this is why very few offices are using fiberoptics, and so many are still on 10Mbps LANs. Stringing new wires (wires, nevermind routers, just wires) is a very expensive undertaking. Replacing old CAT-3 wires with CAT-5, to make 100Mb to the desktop possible (in an older office, for example) requires the office to be shut down, so workmen could gut the walls. Then you buy the switches and routers; and THEN you buy everyone a new NIC.
It's the COST, not the technical merit of the technology, that is keeping it out of our hands; and we are running out of v4 'tricks' very quickly.
That's very much like saying that a true color GUI is less efficient than a text terminal. It is true in the absolute sense, yes. But in the relative sense, it's the norm, and it's not really challenging to today's hardware.
Back when 10Mb LANs were the height of networking technology and 386-class machines did the routing, v4 took a lot of effort. Today, I can pump data to the desktop at nearly a Gbps (if I choose to pay for it) and I can have routers that approach Tb speeds. The hardware is there today to support 128bit addressing, IP-level encryption, quality of service and the rest of IPv6 features.
The problem seems to be that the relative cost of all that extra logic makes customers reluctant to buy them, and knowledge of this fact makes manufacturers like Cisco, Bay and the rest reluctant to produce them in quantity. IPv4 is still a "better bargain", and we all know that the Accountants, not the Network Engineers make the purchasing decisions.
There are two ways to look at the roll-out problem:
1) Nobody wants to bite the bullet first, since if things go wrong, then they'll be the ones giving everyone else free lessons.
2) IPv6 should be able to replace v4 very seamlessly, and we might not hear about it being done until it's our turn to switch or lose service.
This is something that will proceed top down, from the major back-bones to the desktop. Conveniently, the two protocols can tunnel through one another, so until a complete layer/network is ready to make the switch, we're not likely to see anything happenning at all - unless we're directly involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only does this demonstrate the stability and reliability of GNU software in a 'mission critical' context, it also is the first instance of the Hurd, shot around the world.
(sorry. I had to)
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
And hey, if you can fleece a bunch of control freaks and right-wing anal retentives in the process of making a living... Well, that's just another one of the perks of the IT industry.
More power to them! Where do I apply?
I'd love to work on a well funded, morally respectable, high-profile known-Death-March project. I'd love to laugh all the way to the bank while doing it in the name of the children...
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The Linux quip was there as a self-deprecating jab at my own excitement over someone else (that I was not aware of) believing in the free distribution of music.
Get over yourself. Nobody here is as serious as you think they are.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
They're giving their music away? Sure, it's over the phone, but still.. It's not a 967 number..
Would they be willing to stream over the net, using a Linux box with free mp3s?
Let me run right out and buy a few of their albums!
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Actually, I've never seen the phrase written, so my mistake is phonetic. 'despite'... 'to spite'... In any case, now I know better, and it makes more sense.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
They can litigate, and cost you more in legal fees than the price of the software. Then the State/FBI gets a warrant and searches your systems, and if you are guilty, you're made to pay.
Just like the MPAA and the RIAA, the members of the BSA are cutting the branch whereupon they sit. They are alienating their consumers, and trying to make a buck quick, since they KNOW that they are on their way out. The simple solution to this problem is to switch to Free Software.
Yeah, yeah.. Free Software is only Free if your time is worthless.. Well, what is the TCO of Commercial Software: purchase, upkeep and license management included? How about we add the potential of litigation to that cost? Still cheaper than Free software?
Can you imagine what an Iron Fist they would have if there were NO free alternatives? I can see it now: Terminator 95 - the new Microsoft Pictures movie in which Bill Gates goes back in time to kill RMS and Linus comming to a DVD near you!
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
here,
here,
and my personal favorite,
here.
I love it when people spout that without even thinking.
Yeah, me too.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
What WOULD happen is by some freakish twist of Fate, Nader WON... And then just walked away? What if he cussed out the political system, and all those who supported him in the process...
What would Washington do? How would his supporters feel?
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
How many covalent bonds does it take to get to the chewy center of a Buckyball?
C-C: 1
C=C: 2
CHOMP! Three!
Three.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
* European cars are built with safety in mind.
* Asian cars are built with efficiency in mind.
* American cars are build with football in mind.
Cases in point: Only Honda and Toyota have petro-electric hybrids on the market at this time. Only Volvo and Mercedes offer solid roll-cages and side-airbags as standard equipment. Only the Ford Pinto explodes on impact.
This actually makes a lot of sense, if we think about it. The attitude behind the products of each of these cultures reflects the history and constraints of that culture.
Europeans have had war after war, century after century, roll back and forth across the continent. They (individual countries at least) insist that the lives of their citizens are important, and after years of industrial progress, safety is a requirement. After all, if all their citizens die in car crashes, there won't be anyone left to fight in the next ethnic war to come along.
Asians live in overcrowded conditions where optimal use of resuorces, especially for the Japanese, is of remarkable importance. People are plentiful, steel is expensive - so hoods and fenders are made thinner and lighter. It is not honorable to put ones self before the community, and so a car that flattens into a pancake is more respectable than one with pollutes the community air.
Americans like car races, big explosions and the individual pursuit of happiness. The faster happiness can be pursued, the better. If that means shoving someone else off the road with the running board of a big SUV, then so be it... If you can't keep up with the Joneses, or ride off into the sunset then you are weak and deserve to die in a fiery crash.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Hopefully, due to the distributed itch-scratching of OSS, someone will figger out a way to fix a black-out in software.. Cause, as it is now, every time the power goes out, my neighbors can hear me screaming and yelling at the damn TV, and know that "The &^%$ed PLAYBOY channel went off in the middle of a great f&^%$fest cause the *(&^&^%ing power went out! Fsck!" And I don't want them to even know that I have cable...
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Don't get me wrong though, there is definitelly a place for SASD in the industry. I think that Mark's view is on the extreme left side of the issue. It doesn't work for him - fine. It's not likely to work in OSS at all, since OSS is voluntary and volunteers don't appreciate being ordered around. They simply walk away when told to do something they will not find enjoyable, or in a way they do not know.
The real problem with SASD comes in when management tries to use it as a 'silver bullet'. Quoth Fred Brooks: "There are no silver bullets." A structured, tracable, repeatable process will not compensate for the lack of good people. Good coders can bring order out of chaos, but SASD without inspiration, experience and discipline is like herding cats.
The real benefits of SASD are only realizable when you have a group of proficient developers working together. UML is a very good way to communicate ideas. CRC cards are a great way to flesh out object design. Formal requirement reviews are needed before coding can reliably progress, lest major needs are overlooked or flaws are 'designed in'.
You can give a 'green' carpenter's apprentice a powerful chain-saw, but he's likely to make only bloody sawdust with it. In the hands of a master carpenter, a powerful chainsaw makes a hard job much easier.
So the sophistication of the tools used should reflect the sophistication of the developer. If the master wants to code in 'vi', who's to stop him? If the punk intern wants to do all his work in Rational Rose, he's wasting time, and it's the project manager's responsibility to assign him to something small enough that he can learn good practice through practice.
Once good development practices become intuitive, then the tools that promise to do that thinking for you may be used. But not learning the basics manually, and replacing the brain with a third-party product/process only results in an army of VB-coding monkeys who become completely useless when confronted with a new version of their IDE.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
This would be a good topic to discuss with Marc Andreesen, don't you think? I mean... The CAPABILITY for Mosaic was there all along, ever since Telnet, on which all other data transfer applications are built..
I never said that Napster wasn't clever. I just said it wasn't doing anything really new. Gopher, Veronica, Archie and FTP to NFS mounted drives were doing this sort of stuff over 10 years ago! But back then very few people were paying attention, and Metallica still encouraged bootlegging.
I suspect you have a narrow technical definition of what you think constitutes a revolutionary breakthrough.
Yeah, I thought that I had made that quite clear in my post. The slant of the original article is that P2P file-sharing is a new *technological* development. It is not. That's pretty much all I'm trying to say. I'm not putting P2P down in terms of business models, intellectual property challeneges and so forth.
I'm just making the point that P2P isn't any different, technologically, than tried and true networking fundamentals, and so the argument that it will fail on technical merit is completely flawed.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
I suspect the last of the options.
Point 1: P2P differs from Client/Server: FALSE
By definition, a client requests data and a server provides data. In a peer-to-peer configuration, both peers serve as both client AND server. I'm sure that you realize the difference between 'server' the function and 'Server' the big box bought specifically to perform such a function. There is nothing wrong with being both the President of the Hair Club for Men, AND also being the Client.
Point 2: P2P logic is different than Client/Server: FLASE
What you describe as the innovative features of P2P networking is nothing more than simple network route finding protocols, used in the application layer with a twist (since the finding of a particular mp3 factors into the connectedness information that is considered). Once such a route is found, data is transfered between the two nodes on the graph - simple. The problems of flooding and 'broadcast storms' have been addressed (and dare I say, largely solved) in router hardware, many years ago.
Point 3: Routing is hierarchical: WAY FALSE!
DNS sure is hierarchical, but routing tends to be dynamic. Especially if you look at how UDP packets are shuffled around. In fact, this is the KEY to the Internet's success - it dynamically re-routes around failure (excess congestion is a type of failure, BTW). Once the IP address of the 'other guy' is determined (hierarchically) then the address is used for routing, and at each hop, a 'best route' is chosen. This route varies (dynamically) in response to network conditions. Static routing is a special case, not a typical case, and special provisions have to be made to transfer data along a fixed route. Why? Because it goes very much counter to how the Internet is designed to work.
What is touted as an 'innovation' of P2P networking is a fugly imprementation of low-level networking algorithms at the application layer. It's new only in that it's been confined to lower levels before now (and rightly so). An equally 'innovative' approach, would be to use decimal or binary addresses of web-sites instead of their common IP or verbose counterparts, just to circumvent filtering software.
Is P2P going to fail? Hell No! Is it an ugly hack? Absolutely. Is it NEW? No! It's a reapplication of OLD. Is it wasteful of bandwidth? YES! Do the College kids and broadband subscribers who use it, really care about bandwidth? Umm... NO! And this is exactly why P2P isn't going to fail - no matter which 1960's routing algorithm they use to ferret out the latest N'SYNC mp3.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
I'm not going to dodge - I'll admit I have not studied this enough to know where I stand. I certainly am against the monstrous profits going to studio chiefs, but I also want to make damn sure that poor writers are ripped off. Have to pass on this one.
I do hope that this was simply a typo. Otherwise, the 3rd party alternatives just don't seem any different than Bushgore.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
However, the whole idea that P2P is at all different than server-to-server is ridiculous. Just TRY to set up a P2P connection on the net without going through an ISP.. If you can, then you ARE and ISP. You are a 'server' - whether you have clients of not is irrelevant. Even major corporations today have to go through an ISP for their connection to the backbones. My little workstation has to make just as many hops to get to Mae West as Sony's data center.
There is no technical difference between gnutella and a couple of buddies running anonymous FTP servers on their home machines. There is no technical difference between that and IRC - except for volume of bits. Bits is bits is bits. The difference, the ONLY difference, is that there isn't a corporation extracting an additional toll on the data that's transmitted. There lies the 'problem' with P2P.
If Guntella and Napster were used to share vacation photos NOBODY would care. ISP's might jack up their rates based on how much pipe you use, but that's it. If the data transfered wasn't (arguably) someone's 'intellectual property', this would not even be an issue.
People have been running private FTP servers in a P2P fashion since before the WWW made server-to-server the defacto mode of operation. Before ISP's got on the band-wagon, is was all workstation to workstation, account to account, peer-to-peer.
Just because some kid slapped a web interface onto a hack of anonymous FTP doesn't suddenly make it a different technology. Just because he made it distributed doesn't make it anything more than simply 'convenient'. Searchable FTP has existed for a long time, also since before the www. Anyone remember the Archie tool? Indexing, and making it transparent is the next obvious step, not some revolutionary break-through.
P2P is nothing new, and it is nothing 'different' than what has always been done. Servers talk to each other as 'peers' too, don't they?
Just because a bunch of corporate-types label the same technology in two different ways, depending on wether they get a cut of the profits or not, does not make one way doomed and the other saved. Just because somone calls this 'piracy' and that 'a stable business model' does not make the two ways into different technologies.
P2P, S2S, B2B... It's all the same technology. It's the same protocols and algorithms. It's all the same bits. The difference is only in who is in CONTROL of THE DATA. He who controls the INFORMATION, controls the Universe.
As for P2P 'failing' due to low bandwidth at the 'local loop', well, that's just a hot, steaming pile of BS. Ye Olde Bulletin Board Systems (the ORIGINAL P2P networks) thrived on 2400 baud.. They thrived even more on 9600, then, when 14k came, the Internet had started to mature and began to offer more 'value', farther reach and more neat stuff. But the BBS's didn't 'fail'. Not due to poor performance or inequitable sharing of files within the communities they supported. In fact, the only times BBS's were put out of business (except for their owners personal choice) it was due to... (drum roll) PIRACY and kiddie porn.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Now Linux is SO GOOD, it can even run well on defective hardware. Let's see M$ do that one! Now who's the one chasing tail-lights? The only way for M$ to one-better Linux is to make an OS that runs on NO RAM, and we know where they stand on bloat..
The car metaphor is flawed. It's more like Cadillac's 'limp home' feature that will run a V-8 engine on only 4 cylinders in the event of cooling failure, equipped with run-flat tires and bullet-proof Windows.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Forget hooking the JVM into the OS of the platform. Make the JVM the HARDWARE of the platform.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
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Grain_of_salt grain = new Grain_of_salt(HUGE);
The guys context of the phrase "open source" is completely off in the article. He keeps refereing to it as though it were a product, not a mode of release.
"We're not adverse to full open source [for Java]. It's really what is the right model for that open source and where that model is for that life cycle," Paolini said.
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"I can say that open source for Java is our goal."
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"We've really taken a simple program language to a platform very quickly."
Come on folks! This sounds like a script that seeds press-releases with the latest buzzword. This guy seems to not understand what 'open source' means, and by the last comment, seems to be a little confused about Java - the language, and the JVM as a concept.
Either that or he was only talking to a bunch of know-nothing MBA's.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
These customers have been preselected to be impressionable and easily convinced to give up their allowance and milk money for the latest gadget or service. Sign up today and get your advertisement seen by one of the only customer-bases pre-approved by the Federal Government, the Library of Congress and virtually every Board of Education in the U.S. of A. (The Land of the Free(tm) and the Home of the Brave(c) )
Act now, as supplies are limited and the economics of a Free Market(r) will dictate partnership pricing.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Anyone with a cell-phone will need an IP address soon. Shortly thereafter, anyone with a pager. Then anyone with a car. Then anyone with a major appliance. It doesn't always make sense - is a networked washing machine really necessary? But as soon as there is someone willing to buy it, it will be made available.
Imagine, having a washing machine that can page you when it's done cleansing your tighty-whiteys? Now, unless you expect everyone in the world who wants a piece of this new technology, to set up their own wireless subnet, you'll have to agree that it's going to require a network which will support this sort of flexibility.
Personally, I'm all for a car that can self-diagnose, and wirelessly inform my mechanic/dealer of a problem. I'm all for email that will get routed to wherever I happen to currently be: work, home, cell, car..
The thing here is that v4 is running out of available addresses in a big hurry. A 32 bit address field just doesn't cut it anymore, and subnetting, masking, ghosting, shadowing, blah, blah and all other v4 hacks can only go so far.
v6 has a great deal to offer, but the acceptance curve is pretty steep. Not for technical reasons, but for financial ones. Networking hardware presents a significant investment, and well designed hardware happily continues to run when new technologies become available. It's very hard to justify the purchase of new hardware, if there is nothing 'wrong' with old hardware.
Incidentally, this is why very few offices are using fiberoptics, and so many are still on 10Mbps LANs. Stringing new wires (wires, nevermind routers, just wires) is a very expensive undertaking. Replacing old CAT-3 wires with CAT-5, to make 100Mb to the desktop possible (in an older office, for example) requires the office to be shut down, so workmen could gut the walls. Then you buy the switches and routers; and THEN you buy everyone a new NIC.
It's the COST, not the technical merit of the technology, that is keeping it out of our hands; and we are running out of v4 'tricks' very quickly.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Back when 10Mb LANs were the height of networking technology and 386-class machines did the routing, v4 took a lot of effort. Today, I can pump data to the desktop at nearly a Gbps (if I choose to pay for it) and I can have routers that approach Tb speeds. The hardware is there today to support 128bit addressing, IP-level encryption, quality of service and the rest of IPv6 features.
The problem seems to be that the relative cost of all that extra logic makes customers reluctant to buy them, and knowledge of this fact makes manufacturers like Cisco, Bay and the rest reluctant to produce them in quantity. IPv4 is still a "better bargain", and we all know that the Accountants, not the Network Engineers make the purchasing decisions.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
1) Nobody wants to bite the bullet first, since if things go wrong, then they'll be the ones giving everyone else free lessons.
2) IPv6 should be able to replace v4 very seamlessly, and we might not hear about it being done until it's our turn to switch or lose service.
This is something that will proceed top down, from the major back-bones to the desktop. Conveniently, the two protocols can tunnel through one another, so until a complete layer/network is ready to make the switch, we're not likely to see anything happenning at all - unless we're directly involved.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196