From: Mark Day (markday@cisco.com)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 16:03:55 PDT
> --- Still-Not-Freenet: Ian Clarke turned the world on its head with the
> development of Freenet, a decentralized, anonymous information-sharing
> application which would dwarf Napster in its ability to connect users.
> What is in doubt is when, or if, the open source programming will ever be
> finished and usable by a mass, mainstream audience living in the
> point-and-click, AOL world. "Designing Freenet is like asking a political
> scientist to design a system of government that has no central system, but
> still operates efficiently," said Clarke during his fireside chat at the
> conference with author Bruce Haring. "Fortunately, computers act better
> than people, but it still took about eight months just to design the core
> framework."
> If Clarke can integrate Freenet into Microsoft Explorer and Netscape
> Navigator as he is trying, users would have simple access to any
> information on the Web.
Yeah, and if pigs had wings they could fly. ;-)
Can someone explain to me how this free-info-sharing stuff scales?
Everything I read about it has the breathless, technically-incoherent,
borderline-loony quality I associate with perpetual-motion machines, cold
fusion, and the like.
Is there some really awesome systems paper I can go read where Ian Clarke
(or someone else) explains how they solved or redefined the hard problems of
big distributed systems? Or is it the baloney that it appears to be?
--Mark
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