[Pipet Devel] Gnutella: To the Bandwidth Barrier and Beyond

[COFFMAN Steven]

The way I see it, Piper is much more analagous to a web browser than to a
file trader. Just as the overwhelming majority of people who browse the web
will not have any original HTML or image files on their hard drive, the
majority of Piper users will not have public, useful XML data that they (or
others) would care to share. However, piper content repositories (servers)
may behave amongst themselves more similarly to file trading systems such as
Freenet, or Gnutella proxies with cacheing/aggregation, or napster for that
matter.  Designing the system so that casual, dial-up users are treated as
equally viable sources for XML as persistant repositories is a mistake, in
my view.

Further, non-persistant connections are useless repositories if the
information does not behave in a freenet-style, demand mobile manner.
Freenet behavior allows highly demanded content from non-persistant
connections to travel to persistant repositories, where it will be more
reliably accessable.

What sorts of data files do you think will be highly demanded of Piper users
across the internet? I can't think of any which is not time-dependent (news,
weather, stock, etc.) which must come from a maintained server. All of my
other examples are of purely local interest (internal company, family,
etc.).
-Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: J.W. Bizzaro [mailto:jeff at bioinformatics.org]
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 2:55 PM
To: pipet-devel at bioinformatics.org
Subject: [Pipet Devel] Gnutella: To the Bandwidth Barrier and Beyond


Here is another article about Gnutella and "the problem with P2P":

    http://dss.clip2.com/gnutella.html

A few months back we discussed centralization vs. decentralization (P2P) for
Piper and have considered Napster and Gnutella, respectively, as models of
each.  I think we reached a general concensus (at least among the founders
of
the Piper project) that decentralization was the way to go.  So, it is
interesting to read about some of the "problems" with Gnutella.  Is the
discussion moot?

And, as usual, there are SOME good comments about this on Slashdot:

    http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/22/1432219.shtml

Cheers.
Jeff

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