Agreed. I think an even bigger question is "what applications will be the ones that really drive P2P usage"? It goes well beyond music/file sharing. My take...

... I will bet that there are actually _few_ applications that do this. Note that Napster is not a file-sharing tool but a copyright avoidance tool, and that...

On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Clay Shirky wrote: [snip] ... And what is the fatal flaw with Mojo Nation? ... The only failures that I see with DNS are political, not...

... Enforced symmetry. ... You can't change DNS records in real time, so anyone with a dynamic IP address is locked out of the DNS system. Napster, among...

... At the root level (simonstl.com), where the registrar bureaucracies rule, this is true, but I'm seeing more activity in the lower layers toward dynamic...

... Do you mean that you have to pay to play? The real world has a similar symmetry... ... As long as you ignore Dynamic DNS, this is true. There is no reason...

... Right, but its precisely in shedding real-world disadvantages where the net excels. We know from usenet that in distributed systems the ratio of people who...

... Furthermore, Mojonations model is based on the assumption that I would actually want to download something from a particular user. As a consumer, thats not...

... I think that Akamai or even Usenet should be proof enough that distributed system can offer far better performance than a centralized server. -Justin...

... Yes, but this is with caching or replication, and your statement in this case is one I wholeheartedly agree with. Mojonations revenue model is based on a...

... I don't think you have used Mojo Nation. When searching & downloading, users don't even come into the picture. Files *are* downloaded from the ...

... No I havent, actually. But how do you compensate the storer of information then? Or do you compansate only the producer. Or is it that you compansate the...

... Exactly. (After all, it's doing the work of storing the data and serving it to you.) Wesley Felter - wesf@... -...

... Well, we disagree about what's fundamental then. To me the fundamental thing is that DNS _is_ harder than Napster, whether there's any good reason for it...

... Agreed. But this is why all the mappings are likely to come at the app layer. Will there be a mapping which comes in at a lower level? Is it good to have a...

... Ah, I see what you're getting at. I am not convinced that bandwidth is abundant enough to support a system like Napster with decent QoS. I can't find about...

... will be the ... music/file sharing. ... I'll go even farther, I dont think there are ANY "p2p" apps that make any sense or do anything productive at all....

... It would be the end of the story if it applied to the web as well as to email, but it doesn't. It won't be confusing to users if you say "You read email;...

... Does your Yahoo not say "get your webpage at geocities" like mine? Does your AOL not have the "my web page" menu item? Users have a million ways to write...

... Sure, but this is different than your email example. I take pictures of my nephew, and instead of letting my mother come get them from me, I have to put...

... Mum may get the email, but you had to direct the communication, my slant on P2P is its specifically undirected in its ability to discover information /...

... Like naming a certain type of post-war American painting "Abstract Expressionism" (instead of "The American School" or "American Action Painting" or any of...

... For lack of a better word, I've been saying 'node'. For a while I thought about saying server+client (instead of client/server) but that seemed way too...

Node works. Then fork from there, and identify the different kinds of nodes. I see two: Workstation and Cloud. I don't like the word client, that's inherently...

... about ... I'm trying to focus on request initiation and response fulfillment, rather than 'client' and 'server' roles, but the terminology is ugly. ... ...

A person has ears and a mouth. If he chooses not to use them, that's fine. Only when he doesn't have ears (or rather the capability to hear) do I call him...

I've been calling them 'peers'....

I resonded to Lucas, but thought I'd mention it here too; we've adopted the term "peer" to represent the combination of a client GUI and a server&networking...

I like this. The biggest problem I have with 'node' is that it's scary to non-techies. 'peer' sounds less intimidating. -Lucas...