snowdeal.org

“The scalability of a Gnutella network to accommodate more users performing more searches is limited by the lowest bandwidth links prevalent within the network. Usage of the public Gnutella network has grown to the point that a “Dial-Up Modem Barrier” has been hit, with the result that network usability has degraded considerably.”

“From millions of measurements of the public Gnutella network taken by Clip2 DSS over a period of months, we have become intimately familiar with the technical issues facing Gnutella networks. Our reports on these issues have been read by tens of thousands and generated considerable discussion. We are now proud to announce the availability of the Clip2 Reflector, a pivotal application that can simultaneously address some of the problems on which we have reported and expand the possible uses of nutella.

The Reflector is a super peer, the first of an entirely new species of Gnutella application. The Reflector can shield a network against unnecessary traffic from the public Gnutella network, bringing relief to network administrators frustrated by the bandwidth costs of allowing their users to run Gnutella. Using the Reflector as a cornerstone, anyone can set up an efficient filesharing system in minutes, either isolated or connected to the public Gnutella network. Public-access Reflectors connected to the public Gnutella network can simultaneously provide a better user experience for users on slower connections and improve overall network performance. Technically, the Reflector enables a brokered peer-to-peer model for Gnutella while co-existing with Gnutella’s pure peer-to-peer structure. Best of all, it is fully compatible with the majority of the installed base of end-user Gnutella software.”

“I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it’s a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.

Haven’t you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you’ve never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren’t in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your … faith?

Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?

Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place.”

“What would you say if I told you that you can create your own diagnostic tools using nothing more than commonly available software you can download over the Internet and some simple CSS? You’d probably say I was crazy. You might be right, but so am I. You really can save yourself a lot of time and headaches with a combination of a browser and some fairly simple CSS.

How? As we’ll see, simple user stylesheets can be used to:

• See exactly how tables are structured
• Figure out how table cells are aligned
• Quickly see which images on a page still need ALT text
• Point out where you still have FONT tags lurking in your markup
• Expose the overall page structure

“

“Adar and Huberman argue that the anonymous nature of Gnutella is a key
factor in its apparent demise. “In order for distributed systems with no central
monitoring to succeed,” they conclude, “a large amount of voluntary
cooperation is required, a requirement that is very hard to fulfill in systems
with large user populations that remain anonymous.”

While Gnutella may indeed be suffering from a tragedy of the commons, I don’t
believe that removing anonymity would make much of a difference. Leaving
aside the obvious legal implications of adding user identities to the Gnutella
network (wouldn’t the RIAA just love that), it’s not the ideal architectural
solution to the Gnutella problem. Even if there weren’t legal repercussions to
logging on as Michael Sippey and sharing that bootleg copy of Kid A that I
happened to get my hands on, I’d still just log on, point my Gnutella client to
an empty directory on my hard drive, and search away. After all, the incentive
of people knowing that they swiped Kid A from me isn’t enough to encourage
me to share. And conversely, the disincentive of people knowing that I’m
searching without sharing isn’t enough to encourage me to point my Gnutella
client to a richer directory.

A more appropriate solution to the Gnutella problem would be a market-based
approach, where the content itself is used as currency.”

“Home-brewed currency, or “Mojo,” lies at the core of this new
world. Users cannot simply take and give as they do with
Napster and every other file-sharing service. Rather, those who
download the free, open-source new release in November
must use Mojo to buy and sell content for prices that they
themselves determine.

This is how it works: Download a free Mojo Nation “agent”
and set it loose. The 2,000 users who are testing the beta
version earn 1 million Mojo just for signing up, but new
members can earn currency only by sharing what they already
have — unused computer power on their desktop. Mojo
Nation will pay users Mojo for letting the network “rent” their
computer’s disk space, processing power or whatever else the
system needs. The prices change according to the rules of
supply and demand: The more people want of what you’ve got,
the more you can expect to earn. ”

“Common sense dictates that you shouldn’t stick anything in your ear, not even your finger – unless you want to make a phone call with the latest innovation from a Japanese telecom researcher.”

“To hear incoming calls, the wearer puts a finger in one ear. The caller’s voice is converted to vibrations, which travel through the hand, the finger and into the ear canal. The wearer talks back via the wristband’s microphone.

That’s not the only sleight of hand necessary. To answer the phone, called Whisper because incoming calls cause the wristband to vibrate, the wearer taps their thumb and index finger together.”

“In an earlier work (Buxton, 1986), I speculated on what conclusions a future anthropologist would draw about our physical make-up, based on the tools (namely computers) used by our society. The
objective was to point out that these tools reflect a very distorted view of our physiology and the motor/sensory skills. For example, the near absence of pressure sensors reflects a failure to exploit a
fundamental and well-developed capability of the hand. The impoverished use of sound reflects a waste of our ability to use audio to make sense out of our environment.

The paper dealt primarily with the domain of the visible and tangible. Nevertheless, things have changed very little in the intervening years. Furthermore, it can well be argued that things are even more distorted
if we look at how the technology reflects less visible human traits such as cognition, or social interactions.

In what follows, we use a technology-as-mirror metaphor. One intent is to provide some human-centred criteria for evaluating designs. Another is to help foster a mind-set that will lead to improved designs
in the future. ”

“Our metaphor is one of three separate mirrors, each reflecting one of these levels. In order to be judged acceptable, designs must provide an acceptable degree of fidelity in how they reflect each of these
three aspects of human makeup and activity.”