On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Jeff Bone wrote:
> I think this is great! Finally, a business model that (maybe) makes
> sense for free ISPs! We give you free pipe, quid pro quo you let us
> harvest your (hopefully spare) cycles. Win-win! Now, if only the
> market exists to resell those cycles...
If only... If only... If only someone was willing to pay for P2P... Sure you
can run a consulting business helping people use P2P, but that's not gonna
make anyone IPO.
> This all seems very fair to me. Would I use it? No, but that doesn't
> mean this isn't just the ticket for millions of other folks.
There is something else larger below the surface here... the "let someone
else pay for it" is becoming more and more of a theme. From file-"sharing"
with it's "let AT&T (or other DSL/Cable) provide the bandwidth for our app
so we dont have to pay" to this latest "let the user do what we want with
their cycles" (which means BSOD@Home). P2P "companies" are desperately
working to make someone else pick up the tab.
You could try to argue that P2P filesystems make data distribution more
efficient, but you would lose, that's what caches are for (no not the fake
akamai kind). No P2P method I know of saves a byte of bandwidth on the big
picture, cause it's all random point to other point, moving towards random
with a server or 2 in the middle resulting in 2x the bandwidth because you
have to get about the NATs on each end.
You really think ISP's and the backbone people aren't fighting back? They
definately are, you may be able to hack around a NAT for now, but you cant
hack around 2 layers of NAT (coming soon to a provider near you) without a
fat server somewhere, and guess what, you get to pay for those. Noone is
gonna help you out for free, or offer their system so you can make a buck.
Folding@home can draw people in, but FillMyWallet@Home is never gonna fly.
P2P works when everyone benefits relatively equally, not when some company
is the only one to benefit. In other words, capitalism and P2P do not mix
because P2P is a socialist construct, just like open source.
I'm sure Microsoft is working as quickly as possible to get this text into
their licensing agreement for Windows X(P) tho :)
And when will people learn when the license says "not liable for anything no
matter what" the product is always crap, period. Do you really think
airlines would care about safely if you couldn't sue them? What about if you
couldn't sue alchohol or tobacco or herbal drug companies... oh wait...
Why are we talking about this anyway? Juno has like 5 months of burn left,
and the CEO is out looking for a buyer *laughs*.
- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
beberg@mithral.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:16 PDT