Related link: https://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/27/1326226.shtml

Slashdot is discussing an Interactive Week article suggesting “that P2P is a wonderful thing, the direction the Internet is going … and utterly breaks ISPs’ business models, to the extent they may raise their monthly rates.”

Related link: https://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,22394,00.html

Vivendi Universal / Sony are to launch “Duet”, an alternative to Napster. The new service sports monitoring of what’s downloaded and listened to, better sound quality, subscription service, and pay-per-listen options. “We hope to license 50 percent of the world’s music.”

Related link: https://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/02-21-200…

Dug up by Tara Calishain: At 1:19am, Napster put a press release out on the wire making public the business plan they’ve been building for the past six months. “The proposal would provide guaranteed revenue of $1 billion to the major labels, songwriters and independent labels and artists over the next five years.”

Related link: https://news.cnet.com/news/0-1014-201-4880236-0.html?tag=tp_pr

Ray Ozzie talks with CNET about taking P2P to corporate America. “In the popular imagination, P2P has become inextricably connected with Napster–free publicity, to be sure, but bad news when you’re trying to sell corporate America on the merits of a technology that challenges the concept of centralized control.”

Related link: https://news.cnet.com/news/0-1270-210-4848960-1.html?tag=bt_pr

“Wi-Fi [802.11b] has all the makings of a disruptive and explosive technology: huge growth, a strong value proposition, multiple and expanding uses, industry standardization, and global standardization.”

Related link: https://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-4853049.html?tag=mn_hd

Macromedia’s Flash is quickly becoming the defacto GUI for interactive content both on the Web and off. Its feature-packed Flash 5 release sports server interaction, greater browser integration through ActionScript/JavaScript, and XML support. Already reaching 96% of Net surfers, CNET.com is reporting that Flash will soon be following the money from PC to the handheld, bundling its Flash Player with Microsoft’s Pocket PC. Also, expect to see much-anticipated announcements of Flash 5 for Linux and Solaris.

Members of the Rapid Prototyping Mailing List (RP-ML) routinely exchange patterns for 3D models that can be output on
digital fabricators. At the O’Reilly P2P conference on Friday, Marshall Burns, the president of Ennex Corporation said that by 2010 it’s likely there will be affordable fabbers in offices and high-end homes, able to accept digital patterns off the Net and output simple products, such as scuba fins. More complex products will come later with more advanced fabbers, leading to ones capable of using nanotechnology to create complex devices or even living tissue. See
Ennex’s site for more details on fabbing.

Related link: https://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41850,00.html

Today’s Web is a great, big, glorious mess. Spiders, robots,
screen-scraping, and plaintext searches are the order of the day in a desperate attempt to draw sometimes arbitrary distinctions between needles and hay. Does P2P threaten to throw straw and needles to the wind? Read Wired.com’s coverage of The Post-Spider World at the O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference.

Related link: https://news.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-4825719-RHAT.html

Jim Allchin, Microsoft Windows Operating System chief: “‘I’m an American, I believe in the American Way . . . I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don’t think we’ve done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat.’” — CNET.com.

Related link: https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41810,00.html

“SAN FRANCISCO — A band of independent-minded upstarts at the O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference believes they are sitting on technology that could chart a new course for the Internet.” (Wired.com)

“After the Ninth Circuit Court Decision (on Napster), I feel that the only way to deal with law in cyberspace is to ignore it, wildly, flagrantly. I want everyone in this room to consider themselves a revolutionary and go out and develop whatever you damn well please.”

- John Perry Barlow
Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder
Speaking on a panel at the P2P conference, 16 Feb. 2001

Scene: A five minute elevator ride. Players: You, your idea, and a captive audience. The O’Reilly P2P Conference adapted the popular
Lightning Talks from
YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference). A sort of “Idea Karaoke,” each speaker is on the clock from setup to closing.

I had the pleasure of moderating the Technical Lightning Talks which included pitches by Applied MetaComputing, OpenCola, Roku, PeerMetrics, NeuroGrid, Porivo, OverX and iMesh. Presentations were followed by both technical and business/VC analysis by
R.V. Guha of Alpiri and Barry Taylor of
Warburg Pincus. While the overall usefulness of the session was questionable, the audience were overwhelmingly in favour of a repeat performance at the upcoming fall
P2P conference in DC.

soundmosaic
The runaway favourite was a fellow named Steven Hazel and his creation, soundmosaic. Soundmosaic borrows from the the photo mosaic, those posters of Vader, Einstein, et al constructed from countless tiny photographs. Soundmosaic applies this principle to sound, building an approximation of an audio sample out of bits and pieces of other samples. Steven’s demonstration was a classic clip of The Beatles introducing themselves (”I’m John and I play the guitar…”) featuring samples of John Coltrane’s performances. While still quite choppy, Steven believes with enough computing power (read: distributed computing), these sound mosaics will, at the very least, make wonderful audio effects in his music.

I sat down with Steven for a little while after the session to ask the obvious: Why? Steven is foremost a musician with an interest in sound effects beyond what is currently possible with a small circuit (eg. flange, wa-wa pedal). But he’s also playing with the line between fair-use and copyright violation. At what point does a recording replaced bit by bit with samples of other sounds cease to be the original recording? As both a programmer and musician (not an uncommon combination, mind you), Steven finds himself on both sides of the current music industry / Napster furor. With the viability of contemporary intellectual property concepts in question, Steven and folks like him are looking forward, experimenting, and testing the limits.

Freenet
Steven’s attendance at the conference is as a
Freenet
developer. As both content-producer and programmer, “Freenet really raises issues close to home.” Yet he’s not using Freenet in the distributed architecture behind soundmosaic since Freenet’s focus is anonymity which is just not needed for the project at hand; given this, he’ll be using something faster and more reliable. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that Freenet’s particular slant can indeed be a hindrance in its use in P2P projects.
Asked why, then, he’s so actively involved in the Freenet project: “Every individual feels that they are the person keeping Freenet from sucking!”

I (and everyone else at the session) look forward to hearing more from Steven at the next conference.

During Thursday’s P2P panel discussion on collaborative journalism, Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News characterized journalism over the last 50 years as a lecture. I had never thought of it that way.

If he meant lecture in the sense of a one-way monologue, however, I agree with him. But now, thanks to technology, journalists must open their office windows and listen to what is being said about their writing.

I remember the most painful writing job I ever had was for the campus paper in college. Why? Because I was so accessible to those who read my column. If I wrote something stupid, then I heard about it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The dumbest thing I ever wrote during that stint was a music review of Boston’s first album. I commented that this new band depended way too much on technical wizardry instead of focusing on compelling arrangements.

Boy, did I get an ear full after that published. And rightly so — Boston’s first album became a mega hit. In fact, because of the student revolt I created on campus, I was relieved of my music review duties.

The point of the story is that it’s much easier to get away with writing dumb stuff when you’re not directly accountable to your audience. Now, thanks to the maturing network, there’s no longer anywhere to hide.

According to Gillmor and others, new tools such as weblogs and moderated forums are moving journalism from lecture to conversation. Writers have to deal with the nearly instantaneous feedback that their readers deliver. My guess is that some journalists don’t care for this change.

The irony is, that people have always thought we were idiots when we wrote dumb things. The only difference is that now they can tell us.

Related link: https://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/15/1711222.shtml

The air is thick with P2P, both at the O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference and elsewhere. Slashdot is featuring one of the many of peer-to-peer submissions its received today: The ALPINE Network, a flat P2P network sporting low overhead, high concurrent connections, and adaptive configuration.

Related link: https://weblog.mercurycenter.com/ejournal/2001/02/14

Rohit Khare, known to us for his work with the W3C, dropped out of his PhD program last year to found KnowNow with Adam Rifkin. At a presentation on the first day of O’Reilly’s P2P conference, Rohit unveiled some of the details of his project. One interesting aspect: a persistent connection between the browser and the server, enabling a javascript-based mini-server to operate at the client end. Dan Gilmour of the San Jose Merc has more details.

As P2P conference photographer, I covered ever inch of the Westin St. Francis today … at least twice. After a while, people began to ignore me and just go about their business. That’s exactly what I wanted.

A theme began to emerge as the day unfolded. The first red flag was that speakers weren’t dashing for the lounge after their talks. In fact, they were actively loitering in the halls.

“What the heck is going on here?” I wondered. These guys are actually hanging around talking to anyone who’ll stand still. Maybe there’s something in the water. Afterall, this is San Francisco.

Then I overheard Bob Young, Red Hat Chairman, chatting away outside the Colonial Room. He said something to the effect, “This is really great. I’m as excited about going to the sessions and listening to what’s happening as I am about participating in the panels myself.”

I took a few pictures, but continued to listen as I snapped away. That’s when it dawned on me: These guys were enjoying themselves.

Maybe there’s something to this “next big thing in computing” tagline being tossed around. It’s not for me to say. But I will say this … It’s been a long time since I’ve seen speakers, attendees, and vendors hanging around in hallways shooting the breeze about computing. A very long time.

Breakfast at the O’Reilly P2P Conference this morning. I noticed a fellow sitting at the table next to mine with a little paper sign reading simply “Gnutella.” In the lobby a few minutes later. A gaggle of Gnutellians huddled around a table bearing an identical “Gnutella” sign. “You do know one of your kind is sitting upstairs?” “Really? Where?” Back in the breakfast room. “Ah, I see you’ve found eachother; little trouble with resource discovery I expect :-\.” I’ve no doubt the Napster folks would have had no trouble finding one-another and be nattering away around a large table in the center of the room. What of Freenet? Of course whether or not they’re even having breakfast at all is hard to say.

I have to wonder… in this morning’s interaction, would I perhaps be considered a central server or so-called super-peer ;-).

Related link: https://slashdot.org/bsd/01/02/12/2250215.shtml

Wilfredo S?nchez, leader of the Open Source effort in Apple’s Core Operating System Group, has left Apple but will still be involved as an active Darwin developer.

Related link: https://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/top/docs/peer021201.htm

Related link: https://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/top/docs/peer021201.htm

If you’re gearing up to attend O’Reilly’s Peer-to-Peer Conference beginning on Valentine’s Day in San Francisco (better send your sweetie a card now!), then you might want bone up with Josh Kwan’s article, Peer-to-peer promises to reshape the Net. Not only does he do a nice job of explaining what P2P is, he lists some of the major players.

Related link: https://www.advogato.org/article/242.html

Is the *nix focus on the command-line selling GUI integration short? Perhaps X-Windows is more than just a frame around a terminal window or three.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

by Charles Petzold

Paperback, 400 pages, Microsoft Press, 2000

Whether you’re simply curious or a self-taught programmer wondering what you missed in Comp Sci class, Charles Petzold’s
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
is a treat to read. From flashlight Morse-Code to inner lives of computers, Petzold bridges the gap from electricity to arithmetic, 0s and 1s to Paul Revere to high-level programming languages.

Starting with the representation of information as a simple binary on/off, Code spins a tale of telegraphs and relays, logic and switches, gates, electronic arithmetic, memory and automation. We travel inside two early microchips, the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 — the brains behind the Altair 8800 and Apple II (actually the 6502), respectively — discovering the opcodes and instructions that manipulate and move our data.

Code is a remarkable mixture of vital background information, number theory, nitty-gritty details, and novel-like narrative. It’s sure to be a walk down memory lane for homebrew geeks and provide some insight for neophytes into what’s actually happening inside that humming beige box.

Bottom line: I give Code four out of a four possible Meerkats.

Related link: https://www.webtools.com/story/general_scripting/TLS20010206S0004

Byte.com’s Kevin Savetz surveys the RSS horizon.

A commonly cited example of how .NET will change software deployment is the office application. Instead of one big application on a CD-ROM, you’ll choose which parts of the application you want, and those parts will be delivered over the network.

In theory, you will be charged only for the components that you use. So, Microsoft Word could be a lot cheaper if you only use the spell checker and leave the thesaurus, organization chart, and that awful office assistant uninstalled.

Loose Coupling

All the components that make up a .NET application can be loosely coupled and may communicate using XML. So, the text editor part of your word processor could talk to the spell checker using an open standard.

This creates opportunities for alternative service providers. Dictionary publishers can bundle up their intellectual property as .NET services, and start crowding into the Microsoft Office space with fancy spellcheckers. Corel was handpicked by Microsoft to be a .NET early adopter. Corel’s Derek Burney has this to say:

From https://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,40401,00.asp:

“What’s even more exciting: Imagine that the APIs, or the calling conventions for those formulas, are made public. It means third parties can write formulas, shove them on their own Web site, and then Quattro Pro can call those. “

Just as there may be dozens of Black-Scholes option pricing plugins available for spreadsheet users, you may eventually have dozens of choices for spellcheckers. And so on for drawing components - wouldn’t it be nice to use Adobe Illustrator to create diagrams inside Word instead of the limited drawing tools that come with Word? Or how about a drawing component that lets you scribble on your Bluetooth-enabled handheld, simultaneously updating the drawing in your Word document?

.NET Component Aggregators

Who is going to help you choose the components that will make up your office application? How will you know which components suck and which ones rule? Or more importantly, which option pricing plugins have portfolio-threatening bugs?

This is the same challenge that faces Linux users… which shell, which C compiler, which editor, and which desktop? These are all questions that the makers of Linux distributions help you answer. Sure, a given Linux distribution may come with dozens of desktops you can choose from, but only one of those is enabled by default. Novice users are going to stick with the default - they will let the distributor decide for them.

Office Fragmentation?

In the .NET future, when you can combine components from hundreds of suppliers to create desktop applications, who will you turn to when you need to choose your components? Some companies may choose a high-priced consultant, but perhaps the rest of us will turn to a component aggregator.

A .NET component aggregator would be a lot like a Linux distributor - they would provide an installation program that pulls these components together in a unified, integrated, and well-tested whole. Maybe lots of users will like the service that these aggregators provide, and we’ll start seeing hundreds of Microsoft Office distributions on CD-ROM, all slightly different!

Microsoft has knocked Linux for having so many distributions. However, the variety of distributions is a function of the fine-grained choices that can be made when assembling a Linux system - if there weren’t so many choices, there might be only one distribution.

When the .NET vision is realized, these sorts of fine-grained choices may be available to Microsoft’s users. But Microsoft needn’t worry, since they can always turn to the Linux community for a distribution model :-)

The old saying goes, “There are only two types of people: those who have had hard drive crashes, and those who will.”

Well, I’m now a member of the former category.

I confess, I really like the iMac DV Special Edition I have sitting on my desk at home. I use it for everything from cutting digital video to balancing my books.

But suddenly one evening the hard drive started making this clanking noise that sounded like a tin ball bouncing around in a spray paint can. Then, a big thud was followed by eerie silence. I had just witnessed a death.

Of course my first emotion was denial. “Must have just been something weird,” I said to myself as I hit the restart button. But denial was quickly followed by anger.

“The damn thing is dead!” I exclaimed as the cats scattered from the room nearly colliding with one another as they raced for the door.

My last full back-up had been nearly three weeks earlier. That’s the problem with 13 GB drives: you can’t exactly fit everything on a Zip disk, so back-ups are more laborous. It appeared that I was in danger of losing about 4 GBs of video and photos.

Fortunately (I guess), I discovered that if I let the drive rest for 24 hours, it would fire up again and run for 3 to 5 minutes before launching back in to its ball in a paint can impression. So, over the course of the next two weeks, I extracted the rest of my work megabyte by megabyte. It was painful.

But here’s the kicker … my boss, Dale, stopped by my desk one afternoon during my ordeal and remarked that his daughter’s iMac DV SE had just had a hard drive failure. He and I had bought these Macs about the same time, in late 1999.

I’m wondering if we have a third party vendor problem here. If you’ve had a similar experience with a 13 GB iMac hard drive that’s over a year old, please drop me a line at:

derrick@oreilly.com

I’d like to hear your story.

The tone for Sun’s “The Net Effect: To Services and Beyond” rally was already well set before anyone took their seats. A handout entitled “Humble (Cow)Pie: 15 Questions that Microsoft asked Sun” read:

We are enormously flattered by Microsoft’s .NET. After all, it’s recognition of a vision that we’ve had since Scott first uttered the phrases, “The Network is The Computer(TM)” in the late 1980s; and “the service-driven network” in 1996.

And so began Sun’s non-reaction to Microsoft’s .NET Web services initiatives. Taking the stage in a packed press/industry analyst rally in San Francisco, Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy reminded us that Net services are what Sun has been doing all along — it’s all they know how to do.

Assumptions
The assumptions underlying Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) are:

• Scalability — the design center is billions; we’re not talking local area network here
• Webtone — the reliability of your Net connection is as expected as dial-tone on your telephone
• Openness — integratability and extensibility using open Web standards

The idea is to get all your various devices on the Net and talking to one-another all the time in a reliable, open architecture.

“Not Yet”
While Microsoft plans its .NET rollout over the next few years, McNealy spoke to the existence of technologies by Sun and friends that is already enabling Web services. The platform is Solaris; the services are EJBs, and iPlant Integration, Application, and Web servers; policy and process are the stuff of (LDAP) directories; and sitting on top of this foundation are “Smart” Web Services powered by the Sun ONE Webtop and others.

“Integrateable, Not Integrated”
While Microsoft’s focus is on integrated solutions, Sun describes its solutions as “an integrateable stack of software” used to build smart network-based services. Of course they’ll be glad to supply you with a full solution, but you can also pick and choose what suits your purposes. McNealy compared this with the Microsoft model where you “pick one, you get a whole bunch of others; it’s not integrateable, it’s welded shut.”

“Standards-R-Us”
“Every component of this Sun ONE architecture is
interconnected by open, publically available, Web-adopted protocols” — meaning the usual suspects: XML, UDDI, SOAP, LDAP, WDSL, et al, were all given a brief “magic happens here” mention.

The Webtop
The Webtop plays a prominent role in the user’s view of the Sun ONE vision, allowing productivity sofware and other services without need of complex installation, constant maintenance, and interoperability issues. A personal portal taking into account the user’s particular needs and tasks-at-hand provide a common yet adaptive interface to Net services from the Web browser, thin client, Palm Pilot or cellphone. I must say I was rather impressed by a simple demonstration of a document viewed within a full-scale word processor as browser plugin, then as a simple HTML page, and again in a lightweight Palm application delivered over modem connection.

Focus
A final theme running through McNealy’s spiel was that of focus. Sun is “happy being an infrastructure systems supplier.” No Website (a reference to MSN), set-top boxes, game machines, and certainly no competing with their customers.

The day concluded with break-out sessions, Q&A, and coctail party cum product showcase. All in all, the event was as expected: 70% infomercial, 20% Microsoft bashing, and 10% solid infrastructure overview.

The best example of how LinuxWorld NYC had changed from the previous year was the position of Slashdot’s booth. Last year, Andover Net’s booth dominated the main entrance to the exhibit hall, where Slashdot founders CmdrTaco and Hemos held court over a few dozen hackers tapping away on laptops in bean bag chairs — the center of the revolution.

This year, Slashdot’s space was in the back of the hall, on the back side of a space shared by Linux.com and other parts of the Open Source Developers Network.

In Slashdot’s old space: IBM showing how to run Linux on big iron. It had also tossed down a few bean bag chairs, but no one seemed to be having much fun in them.

In fact, no one anywhere at the show seemed to be having nearly as much fun as last year. There were fewer 25-year-old millionaires this time around, but also a more relaxed acceptance of the fact that Linux and BSD will be an ongoing part of the IT pie, not a fluke. The positive spin on the slowing economy was that it will lead more companies to look at open source as a cost saving solution.

A few other notes:

• Helix Code has changed its name to Ximian, although it wisely kept its great monkey logo. Its interface seems much more like Eazel’s Nautilus than it did the last time I saw it (at LinuxWorld in San Jose last August), packaged with more more features to update and install software.
• Red Hat has launched an e-commerce division that includes a couple of companies it has acquired: C2Net, which makes the Stronghold secure Apache server and publishes Apache Week, and Inkopia , which sells open source e-commerce software called Interchange, which some of you may remember as minivend. Interchange and its main competitor, Zelerate (until recently Open Sales) are both e-commerce applications built in Perl to run on the LAMP or a similar platform.

  Red Hat also announced it would bundle Eazel’s Nautilus with an upcoming release, possibly 7.2, although the final release of Nautilus seems to keep slipping.

• LAMP. No one had heard of it but, as often happens, once we explained it, many smiled as they realized they run on LAMP. Baiju Thakkar, the editor of
  PerlMonth.com and LinuxMonth.com, told me a discussion of LAMP came up on the NYC Perl Mongers mailing list on Wednesday evening, because someone in the group had picked up a “Best of
  ONLamp.com” booklet at the O’Reilly booth.The only person I talked with who didn’t seem interested in the concept was Marc Fournier, a lead developer on PostgreSQL. Maybe LAPP for him.

Related link: https://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4689725.html?tag=rltdnws

The Juno Virtual Supercomputer Network is borrowing a page from the likes of Popular Power,
SETI@home, and
distributed.net, as it hopes to subsidizes its free service by borrowing users’ spare CPU cycles to crunch bioinformatics data. An emerging business model in the P2P space for free services?