Anti-Technology Technologies? 146
shanen writes "A story from the NYTimes about metering internet traffic caught my eye. I thought the exchange of information over the Internet was supposed to be a good thing? Couldn't we use technology more constructively? For example, if there is too much network traffic for video and radio channels, why don't we offset with the increased use of P2P technologies like BitTorrent? Why don't we use wireless networks to reduce the traffic on the wired infrastructure? Such technologies often have highly desirable properties. For example, BitTorrent is excellent for rapidly increasing the availability of popular files while automatically balancing the network traffic, since the faster and closer connections will automatically wind up being favored. Instead, we have an increasing trend for anti-technology technologies and twisted narrow economic solutions such as those discussed in the NYTimes article, and attempts to restrict the disruptive communications technologies. You may remember how FM radio was delayed for years; part of the security requirements of a major company includes anti-P2P software, as well as locking down the wireless communications extremely tightly — but there are still gaps for the bad guys, while the main victims are the legitimate users of these technologies. Can you think of other examples? Do you have constructive solutions?"
Control (Score:5, Informative)
Understanding the workings of an entire swarm is is not easy.
With a swarm it is harder to differentiate for "elite" customers who pay to get that extra bandwidth.
Where you are in the swarm will matter just as much as which connection you're paying for.
Bittorrent is the problem :( (Score:5, Interesting)
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Greed is the problem (Score:2)
Re:Bittorrent is the problem :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no we can't have that.
~Dan
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ISPs promising what they can actually deliver!!! ZOMG!!11one!11oneoneone!!!!11!111one
In the corporate world, this shit doesn't fly. You get less for more money, but it's guaranteed. What if ISPs just sold us connections that they could actually deliver, instead of jacking up the numbers to look good?
This issue can be argued from many angles, and I think it's pointless to throw mud back and forth -- the article asked for CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions, and I see neither of you have provided one. Let's stop reha
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This would lead to decreased energy effi
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Everyone is first sold a standard cable connection, unless they state specifically that they require otherwise, and can demonstrate or explain why. Other than that, after the first 3 months of a new contract with an ISP, your usage statistics are provided for you to view, and the cable company shows you the list of connections available to you, with the one you would most likely benefit from using being highlighted. Users of 10% would be recommended a
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One case in point is the Ubuntu distributions, where their servers basically go nuts when a major release goes out.
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Re:Bittorrent is the problem :( (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the result would be significantly lower than 100%. For one thing, 100% of people will never use any one technology. For another, even those who do can't possible saturate their connection 100% of the time unless they're on dialup. I have fifteen megabit cable with a realized throughput of around 13000 kbps to the continental US, and can easily get 1.6-1.7 mega-bytes- per second on downloads. Even at just 1 MB/sec, I have to buy another 80GB hard disk a day to fill this line. Heck, I'd run out of content I'd even want to download.
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One person suddenly says, "If you actually use your X mbit/s download, how much do you think it would cost the ISP?". That is of course ridicioulus, because who actually use their download 24/7?
There are three things that limit most heavy users (exception for compulsive hoarders)
* Consumption Time - You only have X amount free time.
* Quality Material - There is only so much good material.
* Upload - Heavy users often run servers or upload to p
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Using a connection 24x7 is easy and filling both the upload&download stream is plenty easy.
Offer seeds of the popular linux distros and the latest helix iso.
Put up a Tor router
Or maybe a game server or irc relay
Just three examples off the top of my head that could fill a pipe 24x7.
Gimme the bandwidth, I'll use
Re:Bittorrent is the problem :( (Score:5, Interesting)
My statement stands. You have to try extremly hard to get even close to filling your download on an ordinary residential connection. Even if you go for something like downloading Blueray ISOs, you still have to find a place where you can get them without trading your upload bandwidth for it. There is probably some theoretic case where it is true, but not in practice.
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Queue up your downloads and away you go; use nntp if you don't want to bother with "tradi
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You know hard drives are rewritable? After watching that HD version of %latest_crappy_movie% you don't actually have to keep it on your hard drive for the rest of your life.
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With a swarm it is harder to differentiate for "elite" customers who pay to get that extra bandwidth.
But does this justify delaying its introduction? Must we wait for any new technology until someone figures out how to squeeze every last dollar out of the rich folks?
This is the whole point of technological advancement: To provide goods and services of higher quality for lower price than what was available in the past. If someone happens to be making a living providing the low quality, expensive crap to a small market niche and some innovation undercuts their business model, that's just tough.
There appe
The oldest solution... (Score:1, Insightful)
USENET
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Also the net neutrality is about the "average" user, I really doubt that the "average" can differenciate between Google Groups and plain ol' Usenet. I'm guessing that maybe >1% of modern traffic is because of Usenet.
Oh and, to fulfill the cliche requirement for all comments, "the first rule of Usenet is?"
Monitoring contributes to the problem (Score:1)
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Good technology =/= good business (Score:5, Insightful)
What we're making now - Cost to implement bandwidth controls - Loss of customers that get ticked off
is greater than
What we're making now - Cost to implement good technology that handles bandwidth more efficiently
most companies are going to choose the former. It makes more business sense.
I'm reminded of a passage in "Becoming a Technical Leader" (great book btw - a commenter on Slashdot mentioned it). Anyway, it's about making the transition from techie to management, and analyzing the differences in thought processes. The author tells a story where a company was designing a system, and the requirements were "Make sure it can recover from one error per day" (or something similar). Anyway, the technical people involved with the project thought it would be better if they could get it to "Make sure it can recover from any error, ever, immediately", as they thought it was a more interesting technical problems. Turns out it cost the company something like $4 million, and in the end they had something that a) the customer didn't really need and b) they basically couldn't sell to anyone else. The moral of the story is that just because there are interesting technical problems, doesn't mean that solving them makes good business sense.
Bad Math (Score:2)
It does not take into account the effect improved technology will have on future markets. Successful businesses focus just as much on the future as the present. Sure the present is important, you botch that and whatever your future plans are, they're worthless. On the other hand it is idiotic to ignore the future. Succe
So is this... (Score:1)
Only reading the first few lines of TFA (which I suppose is more than some people would). But it seems that this Internet metering stuff is the same as what has always been in NZ -- 5GB monthly bandwidth +$10 for extra 5gb, etc... Not till about 1~2 years ago did we have 1gb limits and shittier overage 'consequence' - go over and pay 1c/MB, or speed capping back to ~56kbps (we were already on 256kbps~2mbps dsl). Then we increase
Popstar technologies != great ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a case of technology being held back by non-technical reasons, but please look beyond popular technologies when you make an assessment about desirable technologies.
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BitTorrent (and P2P in general) is a kludge. Multicasting is a solution. BitTorrent is an inefficient protocol (from a whole network load point of view.) It bounces the same data around the net in unicasts.
Only when it comes to incredibly popular files. However most torrents have maybe a few hundred peers or up to maybe a few thousand, spread over a huge part of the earth Multicasting does little good in a such a situation.
Multicasting is basically about taking you back to the old paradigm where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. (ok, you can save things so people can watch it later, but it is still the old)
Bittorrent could probably benefit some from pairing peers that are locally close to eac
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Long-term planning? (Score:1)
The other side of things is that bandwidth usage isn't a constant-- much like TV, there's a definite 'prime time' when the networks are under heavy load, and laying new cable or provisioning new wireless devices just to cover those periods is not cost-effective.
There's also the real cost of bandwidt
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Widening backbones and massive rollouts are not cost effective in the short run or the long run. Just ask Verizon about FiOS, assuming they will actually tell the truth.
Smaller rollouts and increasing the backbone in small increments is cost effective and is what is happening. The problem is the usage is increasing faster than the net work can be grown in a cost effective manner.
Re:Long-term planning? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, in 2008, Priuses (and Corollas and Yarises) are common on the road in my city, while many of the short-sighted US manufacturers are trying to retool from building 18 mpg SUV's.
The interview mentioned a Japanese business term that has no translation in English; I forget the word, but it meant something like "the faith that building products that people need and selling them for a fair price, long-term, will be profitable, long-term." That might be less true now than it once was, but it's interesting to note that Japanese companies do tend more toward the "Build useful stuff; sell it for cost + profit" model, and American ones toward "Make whatever we can market and sell it for whatever we can convince people to pay".
The main exception to this that comes to mind immediately is Sony, who can go die in a fire. They've got their hands in lots of markets and are thus successful in that regard, but they don't seem to be market leader in any of them. I follow the camera market fairly closely, and Sony's main market in the US seems to be
1) people buying point-and-shoot cameras that didn't do their research, and wind up paying >$100 more than the equivalent Canon or Panasonic that performs better;
2) digital SLR's, which aren't really Sony's; they're rebranded Konica-Minolta stuff who Sony bought out.
As an example of Sony's failing, their top-end bridge camera still doesn't offer any sort of processing controls: you're stuck with a JPG with one compression setting, one saturation setting, one contrast setting, one (excessive) noise reduction setting, etc. There's no RAW mode. The lens is *very* prone to chromatic aberration.
Canon and Panasonic's competitors are cheaper, use superior optics, and offer control over the processing; Panasonic's versions have RAW, and Canon's
But, as a marketing matter, you can't sell stuff like this to Joe Sixpack by saying "Look! Good optics! Controllable processing! RAW mode!", so Sony didn't even bother trying to do this stuff.
Re: Japanese Proverb (Score:4, Informative)
"The interview mentioned a Japanese business term that has no translation in English; I forget the word, but it meant something like "the faith that building products that people need and selling them for a fair price, long-term, will be profitable, long-term."
The translation is "Fast Bucks vs. Slow Dimes". America likes This Quarter's Sales. Japan does likes Next Decade's sales.
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Actually, I do speak a fair bit of Japanese, but his description did not bring any kotowaza (folk sayings) or yojijukugo (four-character slogans) to mind. He did remind me of kaizen, but his explanation went rather beyond that idea, which is often translated as 'continuous improvement'.
Short version (Score:3, Insightful)
"I want everyone in the world to behave in a precise (but poorly defined) way to suit my personal sensibilities. Why don't they? Any ideas on how to make it happen?"
Have you tried saying "please"? Other than that, I have no ideas. Maybe try to help people and solve problems instead of worrying about whether things are done exactly your way.
upsetting the apple card (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the problem ?
IMHO, it's the "last mile". Legislated limited monopoly controlling access with an interest in keeping that position. so there's a high barrier to access put in place.
Some of the other problems is what may work in a high density area will probably not work in a low density area. A wireless mesh may work in cities and towns but completely fails in rural. Another issue - making data retrieval a crime. "you're" responsible for someone else's actions and that kills any open public access. Some one has to pay to connect to the backbone.
If I had a solution that would work in all cases - I'd be rich
Here's a lynchpin that needs to be remove - the last mile monopoly and its bundling with "providers". Here in the Northeast (US) the power line is a separate charge on your power bill than the generation. Break that up. Internet access "line" charge $0.02 per month. ISP charge $x. Anyone should be able to send data over the lines without the big guys restricting access - for the same cost. NO AT&T ISP should be able to send data cheaper than another ISP.
It may be time for $TOWNs to own the lines, bid repair out to another party and anyone to sign up to an ISP.
BUT it won't work. See any telcom endevor.
The Duck
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UTOPIA (utopianet.org) is an attempt to do exactly that - and you wouldn't believe the dirty tactics Comcast and Qwest have been using to fight it (ok, so you probably WOULD believe the tactics they've been using, but still...)
i once invented anti-technology technology... (Score:3, Funny)
What about... (Score:2)
Users that don't know much about internet, are those thinking they just look emails, now, what kind of emails? I've seen people (still) sending 40MB files attached to emails.
A virus, popups and advertisement, download flash animations that people would believe they can't be charged for. How do the companies will deal with the "advertisment" issue, given that most of the advertisement these days is heavy and flash based? Moreover, how do they
Re:What about... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Us FreeBSD people that like to use the ports tree to be current will be screwed too.
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A solution for this would be to charge for traffic, but charge the broadcasters, not the consumers. Home users would pay nothing for bytes received, but would be charged for every byte they send -- which is negligible for most home users but would cost prolific file-sharers and people running web sites on their home machines. (As a side effect, this woul
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Rather a poor joke, but I blame Al Gore, even though I admire and respect him. He kept telling them not to worry about money--he'd worry about that part for them. Okay, so it led to faster progress that way, but they s
All right, that does it (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not that on server or site is overloading. The problem is that the provider's network, including things like routers and gateways, have a finite bandwidth and these applications, regardless of source, are using up most of it.
Ever hear the phrase "You can't put 10lbs of shit in a 5lbs bag"? Ever wonder why they put in new water mains and increase the size of water mains when the build more housing developments? Or why the widen roads with more housing? It is because the total volume has increased.
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Re:All right, that does it (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem for most users is the amount of available bandwidth at peak hours. If some guy is sucking up tons of bandwidth at non-peak hours, then he is not hurting anybody. It is not like we can take the unused bandwidth from non-peak hours and use it during peak hours.
The telecoms have not been able to follow through on their bandwidth promises during peak hours and they have managed to push the blame onto someone else. Now that people have bought into that excuse, they are going to try to make a few extra bucks off of it.
Quite honestly, I have no problem with people who use more of a service getting charged more, if that is your business model. The phone companies have been charging for long-distance by the minute for years. But if we are going to start charging on a per bit basis, then shouldn't I, as a person who sends fewer bits, get a lower price? Or at least get to carry my bits over to another month? See, they want to treat each customer different based on what benefits them the most, and if it were not for their monopoly positions, they would not be able to get away with this.
Limit The Power of Corporations (Score:1)
And there is little we can do about the nature of government but the second player is big business. We can and should limit the power of corporations and punish them when the work against public interests by doing such things as limiting the flow of the internet. People have rights. Corporations should not enjoy the same rights as people do, For example the directors of
Simple reason (Score:3, Insightful)
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You must be new here (Score:3, Insightful)
To many people, progress is a scary, dangerous thing. Money, on the other hand, is a sultry lover that drives their every passion. Us folks on slashdot may prefer cheap plentiful bandwidth over money, but we're a tiny little minority in the grand scheme of things. The average Joe doesn't understand technological evolution, and most certainly does not see where it is all headed... it is far easier for Joe to stay ignorant and pay up.
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I actually think the ultimate solutions call for local accounting and a lot of resource sharing. Essentially your computer may request shared resources, but the neighboring computers should 'compare notes' before deciding how much help to give. If you've been playing fair, for example, by hel
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You are wrong, a MAJORITY of folks on
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Seriously, offer me a raw pipe to the net with a
bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
It is. And that's why it's a good thing if my neighbor is discouraged from eating up 99% of the bandwidth with hundreds of simultaneous connections while I'm trying to work over ssh, or if he is at least made to pay for the necessary upgrades to our shared wire.
Why don't we use wireless networks to reduce the traffic on the wired infrastructure?
Let us know if you come up with something that works. Having suffered throu
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Reducing relative to what? Heck, USENET is a more efficient distribution mechanism than P2P.
If you make the assumption that the cost of bandwidth grows nonlinearly,
Using 'em big words again without knowing what they mean, eh?
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I think he meant that P2P reduces the load on the original distributor of the information, which is definitely true as compared to hosting something on a website. It's good for the distributor, bad for everyone else (though faster with a decent swarm). Your counter about Usenet is true as well, Usenet is actually pretty efficien
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Let him. Just make sure the router and switches prioritize traffic per-user, based on the number of packets they've sent/received in the last hour or 24 hours. You'll neither notice nor care if that other 99% is totally utilized or not used at all because your trickle of SSH packets will always zip to the front of the queue ahead of of your neighbor's
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That's not sufficient because the same bottlenecks occur all over the network, so this kind of logic needs to be deployed in all routers. In addition, some people are willing to pay for sustained 50 Mbps, so you need traffic classes. And to make it all work, you need more than the current TCP/IP protocols. So, although you may not be aware of it, you'
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Not only does it fly, it's the usual way business plans are sold: by connection speed and monthly traffic volume. It's also how the ISPs do business with each other.
Your government should shut this down (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody should make your ISPs sleep in the bed they made.
I also notice that the TFA appears to reference only cable companies. Cable internet shares bandwidth to the endpoint, a pretty bonehead move if a significant number of endpoints are going to be using it. Maybe this is simply the end of that technology's ability to improve. DSL and FTTH vendors could then capitalize and crush those companies, improving internet access for all. What is stopping this from happening (besides laziness)?
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technology (Score:2)
If I use technology to build a missile, and then use technology to build a laser to shoot it down, is one technology and one anti-technology? No, both are simply the application of the techniques learned and taught.
Furthermore it would be difficult to know which is the technology and which is the anti technology. If I can't go about my work because kids are downloading pron 24/7 and clogging the pipe, even though the attempt is made to balanc
"exchange of information" (Score:2)
Only if that information has been properly sanitized by the government and you pay a licensing fee to consume it.
Otherwise, its evil.
FM (Score:2)
FM radio was delayed for years because the enormous amounts of money being generated by RCA's investment in AM broadcasting was funding the development of the infinitely more disruptive technology of television.
Then there were the minor setbacks of World War Two and Korea.
FM doesn't come into its own until the Hi-Fi craze of the mid to late 50's. The LP. Magnetic Tape. Heathkit for the budget-minded hobbyist. H.H. Scott, Marantz and McIntosh for the audi
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The "they" who were little interested in TV were the people who were writing about the history of FM radio.
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Business models tend to evolve for perfectly intelligible reasons.
The AM station of the Thirties and Forties had a strong local and regional identity and a national network affiliation. That is a fairly good reflection of the much less homogenized American society and culture of the time.
It shouldn't be surprising to discover that the 40 year run of the Midwest's National Barn Dance originated out of Chicago and WLS - then owned by Sears, Roebuck. "The World's Largest Store."
Duh (Score:1)
Australia has had metered plans pretty much since inception. Most are of the "XXgb then shape to 128kbps" variety. There have been companies offering unlimited, but they either go under, or oversell at a horrendous ratio.
If the cost of bandwidth, as a proportion of operating cost, goes up for the ISP, then something has to break. Either they introduce some
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That's fine, but then they have to be upfront about it. If they tell you you get so many bits per second, you should be able to expect to get that many bits per second. If they throttle your connection or send you extra charges if you generate more than some set limit of traffic, without having told you they would do so, you are not getting what you sig
Internet bandwidth costs money. (Score:2)
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They don't give access. They sell it. Now they're complaining that someone is using the bandwidth that been paid for. Now most providers provision X bandwidth and (Y x X). The problem is users are beginning to ask for the X they were sold.
They were not sold infinite bandwidth. (Score:2)
WTF? Nothing is unlimited. (Score:2)
FYI unlimited bandwidth does not mean unlimited bandwi
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When someone buys something that explicitly says is unlimited, but in actuality is capped, that is fraud, so these ISPs are in deep if that is what they have been doing. They are being forced to work on solutions never the less, and the article was all about those possible solutions.
Which brings me ba
Here's the rub (Score:2)
They could have beefed up their networks because let me explain, they knew what was coming yet they failed to plan for it.
Oh some did. Why else would Cox keep upping their net speeds? I note they're the one company that's been noticeably quiet about any kind of metered service.
And has Verizon tipped its hand yet? I know they're pushing hard to sell FiOS in many areas and metered woul
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I take it you're new to the internet. USENET is still a point-to-point protocol from A to B, and this is where the problem comes in. You have a significant amount of traffic going over that single point.
With torrent and peer-to-peer distribution, you have smaller amounts of traffic coming from many different points.
Load Balancing, Clustering, P2P--are all technologies favored by the IT industry. If your distribution node goes down, nobody cares because you have others. There's no single point of failure
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Running a news sever allows the ISP to download all the messages once from remote news servers and then only distribute them to customers within their own network.
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Blueyonder had a very good newsgroup setup which fortunately still works after Virgin Media inherited it.
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You fail to address the situation that newsgroup access is "A to B" distribution. In the event that A dies, then B has nowhere to get the file from. Sure, you could cluster A1, A2, A3 and if A1 dies you still have A2 and A3 to deliver to B. But in the event the route between A and B dies, A1-A3 now cannot deliver to B.
Then you still have the situation of A to B being limited on bandwidth. A to B might be fast, but A to B & C immediately cuts the bandwidth in half. You have to hope that B and C use
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However, a dedicated news server can take advantage of the fact that some parts of the network are faster than others. My line is limited to 8Mb/s. Even assuming I could upload at that speed, I can only send data at 8Mb/s.
Since the ISP owns and has set up the network, they can set up the news server so that it h
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One of the really odd things about p2p technology is that it also distributes the cost of distribution. Whereas you could say the ISP could add more, add more this, add more that--in some and many cases this becomes cost prohibitve to have to keep up that infrastructure, especially if the cost is burdened by one entity.
By using peer to peer technology, that cost is distributed across all of the users simiarly--not equally, but similarly
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P2P does distribute the cost over all users. You can only distribute as fast as your connection allows it and you will receive in proportion to how much you distribute. However, the ISP is still having to pay for the bandwidth you actually use (since they sell you "unlimited" access but usually pay their provider by the gigabyte).
Lets consider two systems (bittorrent a
Re:The oldest solution... (Score:5, Informative)
BT is a major problem the ISPs need to deal with - if you download something over usenet or FTP once it's done it's done. On BT unless you actively kill the connection it'll continue sucking bandwidth... that contributes to something like 60% of average ISP traffic being P2P, and why it's increasingly being blocked.
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This puts the onus on the authors of BitTorrent clients to build reasonable defaults in. Maybe something could be done with the protocol, too?
Seems to me that it's possible that a lot of people haven't got their heads around the concept of sharing yet; they aren't thinking about what happens to stuff after they download it. It's a bit like litter
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The very fact that you stated "Bittorrent is slower than other methods" of file distribution shows that you have very little grasp on file distribution and limits to bandwidth.
I've had to deal with it directly, as a content producer.
There is not very much more efficient distribution out there than a peer to peer model.
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An alternative way to consider it is if you were trying to design an optimum local caching strategy to minimize distant transfers. Bit torrents essentially make every copy into a local cache. How can you get high
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Not remotely true. With tv shows it generally doesn't matter when you've got it, as long as you've got it reasonably timely. (Well, if it took six months to download, I might as well just wait for it to be shown down here rather than pirating it, but any quicker than that and I'm in front. Of course for those who live in countries where these media actually come from, presumably it's quicker than waiting for a rerun or
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Also, try to remember the first rule.
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It may contain information, but it may not.
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