Does Peer-to-Peer Suck? 150
In most of the world, inventors identify a need and wear themselves out creating innovations to meet it. On the Net, the creative process seems to work in reverse: you make cool and exciting stuff, and assume that somebody, somewhere will eventually want to use it. It helps to announce, in the process, that the new gizmo will change everything about the way we (take your pick) communicate, do business, go to the movies, have sex, get an education, acquire music.
On the cover of Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, there's a blurb from the respected Stanford Law Net guru Lawrence Lessig:
"Peer-to-Peer," he exults,"is the next great thing for the Internet."
If we've learned anything in the past decade or so, it's to run for your life whenever you hear anybody say that. The next great thing on the Internet usually turns out to be something like sex sites, instant messaging, free music or free Web pages. A couple of months ago, we were being told that TiVo was going to alter everything about marketing, but now digital replay recording sales are in the tank. Most people know the difference between something that's neat and something they need.
One thing you can take to the bank (if it's still letting you in the door): Peer-to-Peer is not the next great thing, on the Net or off. It's a great thing, a fascinating and fun thing, especially for the thousands of tech gurus and coders and free music hogs who design and use it. And it unquestionably has some seriously social implications, like rendering censorship or government regulation very nearly impossible, creating new kinds of anonymous payment systems, and giving individuals unprecedented, and perhaps even permanent access to data, communications, ideas and freedom of a kind.
P2P, writes Clay Shirky in a recent essay defining peer-to-peer, is a class of applications that takes advantages of particular resources -- storage, cycles, content, human presence -- that are available at the edges of the Internet, beyond the conventional reach of governments, institutions and businesses.
Because getting to these intensely decentralized resources means operating in a new environment -- unstable connectivity, unpredictable IP addresses -- p2p nodes must operate outside the existing domain name system and have total autonomy from central servers. That, says Shirky, an influential writer about society and the Net, is what makes p2p distinctive. (But even basic definitions about what p2p is aren't clear: One programmer read this paragraph and wrote me: "I don't quite agree. It would seem to me that you need to have very fault tolerant and abuse-tolerant systems that can handle nodes coming and going constantly. That's more the issue, not so much the unpredictable IP addresses. Basically, it needs to be a system that can handle having people connect and disconnect from it at random.")
Whatever. The Digerati and the idealistic are swooning over p2p. They say it's heralding a new age in the personal control of information.
Peer-to-peer, writes Andy Oram of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. in the introduction of this book, was the eyebrow raiser for the summer of 2000. Napster, SETI@home, Freenet, Gnutella, Jabber and .Net (Microsoft's big P2P gamble) shocked the computer world, and woke it from its long slumber, says Oram. (Was it, in fact, asleep?)
What's the excitement all about? "In various ways, they (these p2p) sites, return content, choice and control to ordinary users," Oram says. Tiny endpoints on the Internet, sometimes without even knowing each other, exchange information and form communities. There are no more clients and servers -- or at least, the servers retract discreetly. Instead, the significant communication takes place between cooperating peers. That is why, diverse as such developments are, it is appropriate to lump them together under the "peer-to-peer" rubric.
This idea is sweeping alternative media. Erik Moeller recently set up a mailing list for p2p journalism which suggests the direction some people believe p2p media might be taking us. "Collaborative journalism" or peer-to-peer-journalism," writes Moeller, "is understood as referring to weblogs and interactive communities where users submit and filter articles and/or comments. We are... interested in exploring new opportunities offered by decentralized networks, or Napster-like content sharing." But it's far from clear what those "opportunities" might be; how collaborative media will work, or what good it might do, let alone whether such media are economically feasible or able to reach any significant audiences. Like those falling trees in the forest, information needs critical mass. It has to be seen and heard by substantial numbers of people to have significance.
There is a utopian flavor about p2p -- freedom for everyone all of the time. Nobody embraces populism more than various political elites, even though there's no evidence that the masses are looking for decentralized info. The problem is that some of the best media has been organized, accountable and coherent in ways that may not be possible in a de-centralized information model.
There is a school of thought that says individuals don't want to control every aspect of everything to do with their lives -- electricity, water, sewage come to mind -- and that information technologies are already overwhelming and incoherent. At the moment, p2p raises more questions than answers or possibilities. Gnutella replaces Napster, which is important to many people, but that doesn't translate into the Net's next great thing.
In a chapter on trust, the authors write about open issues like the absence of a global Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to guarantee anonymity, something many programmers believe isn't possible and is never going to happen. As the writers correctly point out, this has enormous implications for the future of so-called "censorship-resistant" publishing systems, since there are so many ways to trace people and correlate their online activity that any promise of anonymity may be misguided. Which means the idea of a censorship-resistant technology itself may be doubtful.
Chapter Sixteen deals with the accountability of peer-to-peer programs, including one p2p's most touted potential applications, anonymous macropayment digital cash schemes. The micropayment systems discussed in the book offer strong security and anonymity, write the authors, but they come at a cost. "The computational and size requirements of such digital cash are much greater." And they operate more slowly. The writings on digital cash suggest these systems may be workable -- or might even come to pass -- but they have the ring of sci-fi about them, like hover cars; dazzling uses of technology that soar far above the heads, or perhaps even the needs, of most consumers.
Napster is the most widely-heralded example of the p2p revolution, even though, technically, Napster did operate from a central server, and...er...seems to be dying. (But it's peer-to-peer, writes Shirky, because the addresses of Napster nodes bypass DNS, and because once the Napster server resolves the IP addresses of the PC's hosting a particular song, it shifts control of the file transfers to the nodes.)
Shirky wrote the very interesting chapter of this book called "Listening to Napster," in which he writes that what makes Napster and Popular Power and Freenet and AIMster and Groove similiar is that they are all leveraging previously unused resources (mostly by using variable connectivity). This lets them make new, powerful use of the countless millions of devices that have been connected to the edges of the Net in recent years. Perhaps to make P2P clearer, Alexander Graham Bell is often cited, in this book and elsewhere, as an organizer of P2P, the phone a classic example of primal peer-to-peer technology.
The idea is that peer-to-peer is exciting because it harnesses all this unused space, power and connectivity, draws from the basic Net/hacker, free software/Open Source idea of reversing the flow of information, giving more power to individuals to control their own information lives, escaping government or corporation control and domination. Nodes of thought, conversation and data-sharing can flourish far from control of corporate lawyers, FBI agents or copyright snitches, and communications are more lateral and anonymous.
So peer-to-peer is being championed as a technology, a business opportunity and an investment, as well as a revolutionary new means of empowering people and protecting their civil liberties and sense of individualism. Sounds pretty good. In the book, Usenet news and its decentralized model of control is cited as the grandaddy of todays' peer-to-peer applications. Usenet, created in l979, uses no central control, and copies files between computers.
In the afterword, Oram tries to look ahead to the possible implications, to the fact that p2p technologies may challenge governments and corporations. Putting tools in the hands of individual users could have an enormous impact on business models, writes Oram. People might no longer buy a technical manual from O'Reilly & Associates; they might download it from a peer instead, or more creatively perhaps, extract and combine pieces of it along with other material from a number of different peers. This, Oram adds, could further weaken conventional notions of copyright.
Peer-to-peer is useful where "the goods you're trying to get at lie at many endpoints; in other words, where the value of information lies in the contributions of many users rather than the authority of one." It's obvious that this could be valuable in research and some kinds of business development. But the book offers precious few examples of the kind of information that might be valuable in that way to large numbers of people.
This all echoes, in the highest traditions of the hacker ethic, the idealistic founders of the Net and Web, and the ideologists behind Open Source.
But as interesting as it is, and important as some of its applications and implications already are, I personally don't believe peer-to-peer will move beyond the interests and worklives of a relative handful of computer technologists, many of whom seem to have lost touch with the needs, aspirations, frustrations and lives of middle-class Americans, who are always -- always -- the people who decide which media technologies will actually revolutionize the world and which will not.
Consumers seem quite happy to buy their books in bookstores or online, in one piece and in traditional form. Nobody is abandoning movies, magazines aren't vanishing, even the record industry racked up more money than ever before last year: $15 billion.
When peer-to-peer advocates cite the telephone as an example of P2P's usefulness, seeking perhaps to piggy-back on its astonishing success and truly revolutionary impact, they ought to stop and think. People who were geographically isolated, whose lives often depended on getting in touch with the outside world, who desperately needed a way of talking quickly with one another, found that the phone provided an essential technological utility at little cost and with considerable reliability.
To use their new technology, they simply had to order it, and someone came to their house and installed it. Almost from the first, it was inexpensive and comprehensible. People didn't have to manipulate it, and the old AT&T, like many pre-corporatist companies, understood the notion of tech support and customer service. If the thing didn't work, somebody came to your house and fixed it or replaced it pronto. You didn't have to discuss it with them on the phone for hours, either. Especially after the first decade or so, the phone company took completely responsibility for creating and maintaining the technologies they brought into homes.
For anyone in the computer industry to compare that level of service and support with complex new information technologies in which the point is that nobody is in charge or responsible for explaining or fixing things is absurd. The public would be crazy to buy that argument. Peer-to-peer is touted as a democratizing force in computing, but it's hard to imagine a time when more than a handful of people will be able to understand, let alone use, it.
The explosion on moderating, filtering and other individualistic systems in recent years has touched off a wave of narcissistic media and culture online -- people talking to themselves, rating one another's comments, limiting their communications to pre-selected or like-minded people, or trading data, nodes and files as much for the sake of it as for any urgently needed utility.
Now comes the much-heralded P2P, another potential plunge into personalized, chaotic and subterranean communications. Is this what the Net is really about, every invididual talking to every other individual at the same time, nobody really able to grasp, comprehend or evaluate what they are seeing, where it came from, or knowing who else might be seeing it?
In nearly 400 pages of intelligent, mostly complex and technical discussions about the evolution of peer-to-peer, from Jeremie Miller on "Conversational Technologies" to Adam Langley on "Mixmaster Remailers," to Brandon Wiley on "Interoperability Through Gateways," only two clearly significant utilities were mentioned -- file-sharing systems like Napster, which has a central server and isn't technically a peer-to-peer technology, which is why the government and entertainment industry could cripple it, and the fact that P2P threatens to make censorship impossible. But governments have little to fear from P2P. Since everyone is an equal content provider, goes the theory, it would be almost impossible for any significant mass of people to ever see the same message.
In his essay, Shirky offers a litmus test for anybody who is confused about P2P: l. Does it treat variable connectivity and temporary network addresses as the norm?, and 2. Does it give the nodes at the edges of the network significant autonomy? So Napster is P2P because the addresses of Napster nodes bypass the DNS system. Intel's "server peer-to-peer" is not P2P, because servers have always been peers. ICQ and Jabber are P2P because not only do they devolve connection management to the individual nodes once they resolve the address, they violate "the machine-centric worldview" encoded in the DNS system. E-mail is not P2P, because your address is not machine independent.
People's technology needs are clear, especially when it comes to the Net. They are looking to trade stocks, do research, talk about sex, buy stuff on EBay, play games and quizzes, or e-mail Uncle Charlie. At this juncture, the tech world seems on the edge of literally sinking into esoteric, exotic new programming and connective technologies that simply make little coherent sense for the overwhelming bulk of technology users, who are already enraged at the cost, poor quality and lack of service involving the outrageously-unsupported technologies they have, from cell phones to computers to DSL. And they are frustrated at a media environment, from telephones to computers, in which noone seems responsible for anything, from dumb and hostile or commercial messaging to minimal tech support. Peer-to-peer is designed to have no central authority.
This seems like the wrong technology at the wrong time. Only five percent of the country even has broadband, and the number isn't likely to go much higher soon, especially with an administration in Washington which has made it crystal clear that it doesn't want to pay for the required infrastructure.
There's a difference between neat stuff and significant stuff. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies does a great job of explaining how P2P works, all the way down to free riding and scalability.
But it fails to tell us why people outside of the technical world should really care. It raises many more questions than it answers. It fails to address the true social implications of technologies like this: do Harry and Martha in Dubuque need peer-to-peer?
Re:My Experience with BearShare (Score:1)
early infringement (Score:1)
Freenet - are you trading kiddie porn?! (Score:2)
That sounds a lot like no-one will be able to control what's being traded in that net. Is that right?
How can the trade of kiddie porn and illegal copies of software prevented then by entities like FBI and BSA?
It must be illegal! I'm going to report this e-mail of yours at my local FBI office at once!
P2P/Distributed Aggregation/Distributed Computing (Score:2)
P2P, Distributed Aggregation and Distributed Computing are three separate but related things.
Peer-to-peer is simply a system where all nodes on the system are on equal standing with each other. There are no dedicated server machines, no dedicated client machines, but rather everyone is both a server and a client and they communicate with each as equals.
This type of system lends itself to a very interesting change in the way someone finds information. Instead of going to a place (e.g. slashdot.org) to get information, you go to the information to get a place.
Distributed aggregation is a method of intelligently locating and well, aggregating resources distributed among nodes across a network. Whether these resources are files, CPU time or disk space, the method of aggregation should remain basically the same. This fits in very well with the peer-to-peer model to provide each node with a simple way of locating resources on other machines.
Distributed computing is a method of using resources distributed among nodes across a network. Distributed aggregation can be thought of a part of distributed computing as you have to be able to find the resources to use them, but not all distributed computing systems provide or even need a method of handling dynamic changes in the peer-to-peer network. Of course, distributed computing systems are not typically peer-to-peer. Individual nodes on the network rarely communicate with each other to share information, but instead handle jobs in batch fashion and push the results up to a central server.
Many have argued that peer-to-peer has existed on the Internet since time began and that all things are basically peer-to-peer. This is quite true in some respects. At the protocol level, machines communicate with other machines in a manner that can be considered peer-to-peer, but historically at the application level there have been a very clear line between servers and clients.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Re:minor nitpick... (Score:1)
As far as I have seen, SETI@home is a screensaver app for people with nothing better to do with their potential CPU cycles than show off their computer's ability to crunch numbers. It's a popular alternative to the many distributed crypto projects, because SETI is a project that will probably never be completed. (Participate in a crypto project with your overnight cycles, and eventually the message will be cracked, leaving you looking for something else to join in on. SETI@home does not have this disadvantage.)
On the other hand, if SETI does turn something up, it will be huge. The eventual mesage crack will just be the inevitable conclusion to the exercize. The entire distributed code cracking net could be replaced with a length of rubber hose and a sadist.
Comment piracy! (Score:2)
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Moderate this down - it is manipulation (Score:2)
This guy is the worst kind of karma whore, he doesn't even write his own comments.
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Re:Comment piracy! (Score:2)
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Re:Comment piracy! (Score:2)
As for "neener neener neener", it is now clear to anyone who had read my comments (and your admission) that you are dishonest. I don't think you can claim this as a victory, in fact, you have been exposed as a plagiarist, and an immature one at that. Congratulations.
I also note with interest that you don't even have a +2 bonus, so the fact that you needed to use someone else's words to get moderated up does not really say good things about your intellectual ability now does it?
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Re:A suggestion for slashdot editors: reattribute (Score:2)
I am not that fussy about who gets karma, but I do think that plagerism is dishonest, and wanted to raise the issue. I suspect that the /. moderators would probably rather not get into the business of detecting and punishing plagerism, however moderators should take action - unfortunately they haven't in this case.
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Re:Peer to Peer only works with a server (Score:1)
Full details are in a draft paper here [homestead.com]. I welcome comments.
P2P wrong paradigm? (Score:2)
How is getting a file from Freenet different from ftp-ing it from someone who has a server running on a dyndns address? The are both based on transient IP's, yet clearly the difference goes further than one using DNS and one not.
The real revolution is the change to a data centric model instead of a server centric one. In DNS based technologies, you first have to know the machine the data is on before you can get the data. And, if that machine is down you won't find the data, even if it is replicated somewhere else. In the new data-centric view, you find the data, and it is fetched from whatever machine has it at the current time. What machine has the data is irrelevant, who cares if it comes from some guy's home machine or from a massive dataserver on the net.
Peer-to-peer is useable, at best, for dialups (Score:1)
That said, P2P is a good thing in my mind. It's flexible and often at least somewhat private (or moreso than C2S counterparts).
My only complaint about all P2P I use is where server lists come from. Napster is dying because it's centralized. Yet, if there is no central server AT ALL, like gnutella, it's hard to find anything.
Will it be useful? With work . . . yes. (Score:1)
P2P is not new (as several people here have pointed out). However, the recent attention brought to the idea has and will continue to spawn new notions of just how the internet can work. As is mentioned in "Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies," the internet was originally designed as a P2P system of large (mainframe) academic and government computers. It was only later that today's trend of client-server applications appeared.
A move back to the original ideas behind the internet is not a bad idea, but due to the size and current structure of the net it will be difficult. Furthermore, as JonKatz mentions, there is the difficulty of finding applications which will be usable by and will appeal to a large group of people (thus making p2p apps potentially profitable). However, I think he goes too far in claiming that this cannot be done. Napster (though it is only a pseudo-p2p system) exemplifies this popular appeal. It seems necessary to make sure p2p applications are simple to use and designed in such a way as to be understandable to a newbie. This isn't always easy, but it is possible.
One method of bringing this about is to have lots of default settings and let users work within the application without ever knowing about what happens behind the scenes. Furthermore, the option to adjust those advanced settings can be appropriately labeled so the novice won't play with it. This is a good principle for UI design in general and it applies here as well.
To conclude, though p2p has both technical and user-related difficulties to be overcome before many new p2p apps will become common, it seems those difficulties can (and in some cases already have) been overcome.
-mhorst
Re:P2P is old news (Score:1)
.NET isn't Peer to Peer! (Score:1)
As far as I know
I dont mean to flame, but I asked my girlfriend to read this article objectively and tell me what she thought. She came back with a feeling that the author wasn't a profesional writer, and couldn't follow because of organizational problems. I wholely agree, and would like to point out that this is a constant in all of Katz's articles for slashdot.
"It's weird that you would want to write when you obviously can't." --my girlfriend
What is this Peer to Peer? (Score:2)
I've got this great idea. Let's adopt the term "workgroup" for the gnutella replacement.
Shaping public opinion (Score:2)
Who knows, maybe Katz was bought off by the industry to start dissing it, putting on negative spin, etc.
A suggestion for slashdot editors: reattribute (Score:2)
Given the availability of this evidence, rather then deleting the post, couldn't the slashdot editors reattribute the post (and karma) to the proven original author when such disputes arise. No content is changed, only attribution.
This kind of policy would have the dual effect of rewarding the original author for posting a very sound argument, while removing the incentive (whoring for karma) of plagerizing the posts of others. Most importantly, it would avoid removing a positive contribution to the discussion (in terms of the content, which deserves the +5 score even if the plagerist does not).
Harry and Marth (Score:1)
Well, I don't know Harry or Martha, but I live in Dubuque [dubuque.org] and I want and need peer-to-peer.
About that last Dubuque reference... (Score:1)
In any case, I found it to be pretty darned funny since Jeremie is one of those people at the top of the new P2P world and from a traditional small-town farm family himself.
Next big thing? No. Sucks? No. Next step? Yes. (Score:5)
No big deal. Use p2p when necessary and beneficial. Use other methods when appropriate.
When will everybody, publishers included, quit looking for the "next big thing" when most of them don't understand the abilities of "the big thing already here". After all, look how long it too for p2p to catch on, when the technology has had very little to do with advances in technology.
DHCP is the killer P2P app (Score:2)
As for P2P as some kind of permiter around a non-surveilled zone of the net: notice that Ethernet is dependent on MACs. All the transient IP addressing in the world doesn't get around that. And to my knowledge other transports have a similar invariant logical-to-physical mapping. Consider the security issues with that. Consider the security issues if you don't have that . . . : Is it trust then verify, or verify then trust?
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Re: Stolen music (Score:1)
Hey it's brand new- what about cell phones? (Score:2)
Re:Peer to Peer (Score:1)
> Does p2p enable theft? Yes.
Only if you really believe that someone can "own" something that does not exist. I own an idea. It's in your brain, too, so I own part of your brain. I own these bits: 1001010100 01010101010. If you use them, you owe me money.
If that doesn't sound ridiculous to you, you're not really thinking about it.
Re:Napster may die someday, but (Score:2)
AudioGalaxy is *MUCH* better. Too bad the web interface is a little slow. In all other ways, it's MUCH better than Napster.
To non-AudioGalaxy users: It supports resume! You select a song and it downloads from one person until they disconnect, then switches to someone else with the same file (uses CRCs for verification) and downloads the rest. If nobody is on with that song, it waits until they are.
AudioGalaxy is also immune to Cuckoo Eggs, when some shithead with something to prove takes a valid song, replaces the middle with something non-music, and re-offers it on Napster, to screw over other people. AudioGalaxy shows you a list of the versions of the song available, with the lengths and quality, as well as the number of users with each version. As long as more people have the real song than the screwed one, you just pick the most common file and you're fine.
Re:Wrong tech, wrong time? No. (Score:2)
Napster (and things like it - media sharing) ARE/b> the killer P2P apps. That part of your argument is complete crap.
Re:P2P is old news (Score:1)
Re:ZDNet Article (Score:2)
What's new here? (Score:2)
Ummm...no. 'P2P' is just a different way of describing what the Internet always has been. OOooh, now I can distribute my own stuff!! I can be my own publisher!! I can even let other people contribute and talk back!!
Basically the same thing with the same motivations that drove amatuer radio, CBs, and BBS phenomenons.
P2P Summary: The Audience is the Show (Score:2)
I'll take the broad definition of "peer-to-peer" here and say that in the realm of things that are legal, P2P has the most impact in the following areas:
In the idea space, when the consumer voice is just as important, or more important than a singular voice. For example, product review sites like Epinions [epinions.com]. A mass of users can provide far more information on a wider variety of topics than Consumer Reports can.
In hobbies, where there isn't profitability in commercialization. For example, KLOV [klov.com], the Killer List of Arcade Games. You've got a large number of enthusiastic collectors who are documenting information about games that have long since lost any commercial value.
In dark legal areas, where a commercial entity cannoy provide what the audience wants. MP3s are the best example. There isn't a place (commercial or not) to go to get your MP3s. Peer to peer is the place to go.
In short, peer-to-peer fills in the gaps where commercial organizations do not exist, can not exist, or do their job poorly. And because that is always going to exist, so will peer-to-peer.
Not really (Score:1)
MBONE [hpc.mil] and a decent application design.
IP Multicasting is quite neat.
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A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
I am sure they said this about phones at one time (Score:1)
Re:Comment piracy! (Score:1)
Don't be a hypocrite, Ian. If you believed in those words when you wrote them, then they are equally true now. You should be happy they got moderated up again...
Re:Comment piracy! (Score:1)
Others think that it is wrong to read something written by you without paying you the amount of money that you request. Because enforcement of that necessarily leads to the inhibition of the freedom of information, it is not acceptable regardless or whether it is right or not. How is this any different?
Jon Katz is a bot (Score:1)
Re:So Jon (Score:2)
Re:minor nitpick... (Score:2)
Legit Peer to Peer (Score:2)
Napster is alive and swell. (Score:2)
Fortunately the "ruling" and the heat are coming from the people that control the crap on the radio- "music" I've never had a taste for. Napster is still a great place to find material from extinct and independant labels- music I would gladly support if I could actually *find* it.
A computer is not a typewriter (Score:2)
C'mon, Katz, get with the "l970s". Just because a "1" and an "l" on old-sk00l typewriters looked the same in Courier monospace, doesn't mean they're equivalent. Please, please, please adjust your spell checker. You really date yourself when you make this error.
Re:Dissident Opinion (Score:1)
Also, other comments I've seen about P2P being an "internet over the internet" are also fallacious: networks like Napster and Gnutella are structurally identical to the WWW. Just a different port, and they don't serve HTML! The *only* advance from the WWW to Gnutella is participatory searches.
Re:minor nitpick... (Score:1)
Re:P2P is old news (Score:1)
TiVo sales down? (Score:1)
A couple of months ago, we were being told that TiVo was going to alter everything about marketing, but now digital replay recording sales are in the tank.
This is not what I want to hear. The last thing I want is for my TiVo to become nothing more than a cheap LinuxPPC box. It's downright painful trying to watch TV without the TiVo software, once you've had it. (Incidentally, the 2.0 software update RULES.)
Anyone have some sales figures to back up this supposed financial crisis?
Imagine it was 1991 (Score:1)
Would you have said the above about the web?
Does peer-to-peer give better throughput? (Score:1)
I wrote a two-part article about this on osopinion.com last December (here are part 1 [osopinion.com] and part 2 [osopinion.com]). - adam
Quick, I see hype! Lets cash in on the anti-hype! (Score:2)
symmetrical broadband = p2p. (Score:1)
As mentioned in numerous posts, p2p is simply another way to have fun with standard and ubiquitous tcp/ip.
The p2p internet will occur when 56k connections are remembered with nostalgia. When, not if, but when, fiber to the home, or ethernet to the home, goes pro, we will see p2p as the dominant traffic pattern through all those routers.
When we all have symmetrical (upload_bps == download_pbs) connections with 100mbs pipes, we are all simultaneous consummers and producers. The central networks and distribution networks a` la Akamai, Inktomi, Digital Island will become irrelevent. Anybody can stream video, anyone can cache content. We'll all be able to present content as easily as we can retrieve it.
missing the point? (Score:2)
Re:Comment piracy! (Score:1)
One Application (Score:1)
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OliverWillis.Com [oliverwillis.com]
Re:One Application (Score:1)
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OliverWillis.Com [oliverwillis.com]
Re:Napster may die someday, but (Score:2)
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years to figure out? (Score:1)
The current crop auto-connects to a server for you and all you have to do is type in your search criteria.
people are not as dumb as you think. That's why there are millions and millions of napster users.
http://www.hyperpoem.net
Re:Comment piracy! (Score:1)
Neener neener neener.
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That's just the way it is
Dissident Opinion (Score:5)
The claim that P2P would be great if only the systems would interoperate really doesn't bear much scrutiny, TCP/IP is often the full extent of what these systems have in common. This isn't a flaw, it is a simple fact.
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That's just the way it is
I apoligize in advance... (Score:2)
"Does Peer-to-Peer Suck?"
Not as much as these lame stories from you, Katz!
Peer to Peer works with a list of servers (Score:1)
Maybe they'll shut down one web page, but they can't get them all at once.
Couple of links to check out:
Gnutella host caches [hostscache.com]
Clip2 Super Peers [clip2.com]
Re:Peer to Peer works with a list of servers (Score:1)
Re:A computer is not a typewriter (Score:1)
Jon Katz, sitting in Lancaster, PA, by candlelight. He is typing furiously at an Underwood typewriter, writing articles about technology, of which he's actually never seen before. He has a stack of old "Wired" magazines as a reference.
At the end of the day, CmdrTaco stops by, picks up the manuscript, scans and OCRs it, and uploads it to Slashdot.
Re:Dissident Opinion (Score:1)
Re:Napster may die someday, but (Score:1)
To get your music downloaded on Napster, you essentially have to be famous already. On MP3.com, people can actually find you, even if you're unknown simply by browsing.
That's not entirely true. I use Napster to find other tracks by artists who are far away from being famous, but who I've heard one thing by and want to check out more. And if I like a lot of their stuff, I usually buy the CD.
Many artists don't have material on MP3.com or don't have commercially released material on mp3.com. I like the try before you buy aspect of Napster more than anything...
Danny
EDI isn't P2P (Score:1)
Your EDI reference is interesting, because practical EDI isn't P2P. It's supposed to be; the protocols themselves are basically so. The trouble is that EDI sucks, like Bill G's vacuum cleaner, and that to work around the minefield of incompatibilities in it, an EDI structure has developed where nearly everyone talks to a VAN as a translating intermediary, rather than directly to the end-points.
EDI ought to be P2P, but can't be, and one of the drivers for the many XML-based EDI replacements is regaining P2P.
Sadly, if you talk to the wrong bunch of over-priced consult-o-suits, they'll sell you VAN-based XML solutions, because VANs are what they know best.
What's the problem ? (Score:1)
Consider the security issues with that. Consider the security issues if you don't have that [invariant logical-to-physical mapping] . . . : Is it trust then verify, or verify then trust?
So what's the problem here ? Everyone and their dog appears to be working in this problem space (maybe that's just because I work in a P2P research lab) and there are many, many crypto-based solutions to this. There are already ePerson demonstrators out there that offer verifiable, trustworthy, but still anonymous, identification of community members.
In simple terms, you own some sort of valuable token, and you can communicate it to your PC, your phone, and your TV. With it, they can buy services from service vendors (large or small) such that the vendors get paid, but you don't get trailed through your consumption history.
PS - Liked your DHCP analogy.
P2P - Natural evolution of network stacks (Score:1)
I was thinking about this last night. Considering the old OSI layered model of networking, we've seen each layer transform from asymmetric to P2P operation, crawling gradually up the protocol stack. Is P2P the obvious evolutionary goal of all networking ?
Back in Olden Days, the physical layer knew where the DTE and the DCE where. Ten years ago, we used transport and session protocols that knew where the Netware server was. Now an asymmetry in a new presentation layer would certainly raise eyebrows.
Is peer-to-peer symmetry just an inevitable consequence of evolution ? Will everything in the future turn into a mesh of edge-serving boxes; indistinguishable from each other, but all speaking common semantics ?
If your corporate mail server is slack in the evening, why not rent its capacity to an Akamai-alike, on the chargeable distributed.net model ? It's not just processor cycles that could be traded on this distributed marketplace, but how about storage, bandwidth or even favourable topology ?
Re:Wrong tech, wrong time? No. (Score:1)
The fact that only 5% of users have broadband has more to do with its currently poor reliability and higher cost than dial-up service
Hmmmm, Europe (well !North America), timed local calls, dial up, cheaper than DSL/cable. Maybe not.
Re:P2P is old news (Score:1)
the next great thing (Score:1)
You say that like that's a bad thing...
Katz Parrots Media Line (Score:2)
I am very disapointed that Jon Katz has bought the media's line on P2P. To many, including people that should know better like Michael Robertson of MP3.com, peer-to-peer technology means file sharing of one sort or another. Full stop. While Mr. Katz refers to different uses beyond this, he fails utterly to understand what those uses are. For example
"Like those falling trees in the forest, information needs critical mass. It has to be seen and heard by substantial numbers of people to have significance"
What what possible relevance does such an observation to a product like Groove? None. Because Groove is not about file sharing, it is a collaboration tool (the best ever IMHO).
I admit to being biased, because I work at Hotline Communications, possibly the oldest extant peer-to-peer company. We have dozens of interesting uses for P2P technology that have nothing to do with file sharing. At least, not of the kind that Mr. Katz seems to understand. (tempting, but I won't insert a commercial here) We believe that people will use different kinds of applications. Some will be to exchange information, but many will be used to manage information. Unlike Mr. Katz, we believe that people want more control over their lives and are not content to give control of their attention and time to Microsoft, or AT&T.
It is also kind of silly to assert that
Peer-to-peer is touted as a democratizing force in computing, but it's hard to imagine a time when more than a handful of people will be able to: understand, let alone use, it.
This is patently false. Some 20 million plus people apparently understand, let alone use, Napster.
And, as an aside, is it generally accepted that "middle-class Americans, ... are always -- always -- the people who decide which media technologies will actually revolutionize the world and which will not?" I was under the naive impression that people in places like Japan and Germany and Egypt and India would make their own decisions about what kinds of media technologies suited them. I guess that explains why America is so far ahead in wireless communicatons.
Mr. Katz says that people's uses for the net are "clear". Is Mr. Katz seeking to become the first Luddite of the Internet age? In any case, how many of these "clear" needs existed five years ago? So possibly new technologies can create new and interesting ways for people to communicate. When those ways become general, they become a "clear need" in Mr. Katz's book.
And lastly, what's wrong with democratization? Is not more choice inherently a good thing? Mr. Katz appears to think that this technology is so worthless, that more discussion is pointless. Possibly to spare Harry and Martha in Debuque the burden of thinking about it. Qualified Intellectuals like Mr. Katz can do that for them. And anyway, they are just going to want what AT&T gives them, right? Because they don't care about doing things beyond their "clear" needs, they just want good service. I just hope that AT&T looks to Qualified Intellectuals like Mr. Katz for guidance.
The power of peer to peer processing (Score:1)
Rich
Why make the distinction? (Score:1)
Client/Server breaks down when the server gets too many requests, so load balancing was invented. Peer to Peer is like taking load balancing to the next level. If all machines are servers, we theoretically do not have the problem of too many clients for not enough servers.
The ideal systems will probably combine Client/Server and Peer to Peer. Real distributed computing (such as CORBA) don't restrict you to Client/Server or Peer to Peer. Server CORBA code can go on the same machine as client CORBA code. You can build the system any way you want.
Re:Clay Shirky is an ID10T (Score:2)
http killed ftp for browseable information, and the www search engines killed archie for indexing. The point is, that popular olden-day files were duplicated across numerous ftp servers, you used the closest/fastest ftp server, and archie searched by (IIRC) file name/short description. Very limiting, but very useful for certain kinds of information.
Clay Shirky is an ID10T (Score:3)
And here's what Clay Shirky says on the O'Really web site:
Let me get this straight, Clay: 1) Napster *is* peer-to-peer, because their host resolution protocol is not based on an IETF standard, 2) dynamic DNS *is not* peer-to-peer solely because it uses a datagram format specified in the ARPA/IETF RFCs? I'm sorry, Clay, but you're a fucking idiot.Nearly all of the Internet protocols are peer-to-peer, and they always have been (the only dedicated-server to dedicated-client protocols that come to mind are DHCP and BOOTP, but they are kind of special in that regard). What you are talking about is distributed servers vs. centralized servers. So quit this mindless repetition of "P2P". You sound just like those faddists who started saying "B2B" a while back.
What's next, Clay? When I make a TCP/IP connection to a friend's computer, will I be using a TCP frame with a *true* SYN flag set. Will my use of a SYN flag to connect to a corporate mail server be an attempt to retrofit a P2P approach on the traditional protocol in a misguided attempt to impose my mindset on a protocol that is much more flexible and liberating?
Abusing nomenclature just because it sounds nice is asinine. Abusing it as the basis for faux technical articles on the O'Really web site is idiotic. Why don't you actually learn to write some networking code and at least *try* to learn some vague inkling of the technical basis of your statements.
Because the shift from centralized to distributed servers *is* important. It *is* a paradigm shift, and it does have tremendous implications for how people communicate and work. When I say "distributed", and I explain to somebody what it means, they can suddenly understand that it means your life will be pervaded and supported by a ubiquitous fabric of computers and information. Distributed means that you don't connect to Joe's computer, you connect to Joe's service, and it does whatever Joe wants wherever he and his machines happen to be. It means forwarding high-priority emails from trusted people to Joe's pocket communicator (cellphone/digital tablet/PDA/tricorder). "Peer-to-peer", on the other hand, implies that I talk directly to Joe. It brings to mind the telephone model of peer-to-peer communication, which is *not* the distributed model. That's why it's important to use the right words. With the right word, the right slogan, you can convey a concept in a way that attracts people. It's the difference between "Walkman" and "portable tape player".
Re:EDI isn't P2P (Score:2)
P2P is old news (Score:5)
Before Napster and all the hoopla over this buzzword, people were doing the same thing via IRC, FTP, NFS, etc. The protocols have changed, but the idea certainly hasn't. Now businesses are scrambling to implement "P2P", when they've been doing it all along, using things like EDI.
Heck, we were doing it in the BBS days. The old FidoNet feeds used to trickle from peer to peer, with each node making local phone calls to transfer to a nearby node. The whole system was set up to avoid long distance charges, by forming a web of nodes.
P2P is like the invention of plastic (Score:5)
Katz, as usual, is missing the point. He's right when he says that the average consumer doesn't care about P2P and isn't really affected by it. P2P is an underlying technology that will provide the building blocks that will allow some truly kick-ass applications to be built. Joe Average may not have cared about the invention of plastic and probably doesn't know the first thing about polymer science, but Joe's life sure is made easier due to all that cool plastic shit he owns! People can, and hopefully will, develop applications that use P2P technology, but hide it behind an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface and that perform a useful function. Napster became popular not because it was a type of P2P technology, but because it was easy to install and use and because it did something people wanted to do - it located and obtained music. All the Napster clones, wannabes, lookalikes, etc. have all failed to become immensely popular because they either didn't do anything particularly useful or were too difficult for the casual user to figure out.
Katz also makes another mistake - he doesn't look far enough into the future. P2P may not appeal to today's consumers, but it appeals to their kids. I'll bet P2P will have a much greater impact on the way people share information by the time today's teenagers, who grew up on the web and Napster, reach the age of their parents.
Peer to Peer only works with a server (Score:2)
If the governments and other big brother types close THOSE down, peer to peer becomes hit and miss and only as good as the new release mechanism.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
ML (Score:4)
It is here [infoanarchy.org], if you are interested. And yes, Jon is wrong, again :-)
--
Another Fad (Score:3)
Hand Calculators
Video Games
Personal Computers
Local Area Networks
Client Server
Internet
Ecommerce
And Now P2P
When will they ever learn that none of this crap works.
Where the hell's my slide rule.
So Jon (Score:2)
Re:Next big thing? No. Sucks? No. Next step? Yes. (Score:2)
Hopefully the Free distribution of information will someday make hype (and stories like this one, which seems merely to jump on the hype bandwagon) a thing of the past. No longer will marketeers (CueCat comes to mind) be able to snow us with their claims and blue-sky talk. The proof will finally be in the pudding. Napster proved that.
minor nitpick... (Score:2)
Seti@home is designed to combine people's spare cycles to find aliens
As far as I have seen, SETI@home is a screensaver app for people with nothing better to do with their potential CPU cycles than show off their computer's ability to crunch numbers. It's a popular alternative to the many distributed crypto projects, because SETI is a project that will probably never be completed. (Participate in a crypto project with your overnight cycles, and eventually the message will be cracked, leaving you looking for something else to join in on. SETI@home does not have this disadvantage.)
I've meet many people who participate in SETI@home... none of them said that they expect aliens to be found.
Nothing new (Score:2)
You're working at a company with 100 workstations. You aren't going to setup a peer-peer network, you're going to setup a central server because that's the best solution.
It's the best solution for performance and maintenance. The only factor where the central server model isn't better, is in cost. In the business arena, cost isn't that big of an issue. Companies understand it will be cheaper in the long run for them to have a central server than try to maintain several workstations that all require each other to be operational %100 of the time.
Also please note that my examples are for mid to large sized companies. I know most small offices will use a peer-peer setup. Those offices also only have a small number of workstations, say about 5. Noticing any similarities to Gnutella problems yet?
Peer to peer has it's place. The Napster model is pretty good. It has a central server for queries, but the actual data is served from a peer connection. This doesn't address any reliability issues but it is a good midpoint for the performance/maintenance/cost factors.
Lets all face it, peer to peer could possibly be perfect down the road. The only problem is increasing the speed/capacity/bandwidth of the current peers.
That brings about another point, peer means something equal. A workstation connecting to a server uses the same TCP protocol as one connecting to another workstation, however we don't define them as peers. Peer to peer MUST hold true to it's definition for it to be useful. Servers talking to servers are peer to peer. 56k user - 56k users are peers. 14k users to DSL users are not peers.
Widespread usefullness of peer to peer is a ways off. It's still evolving. It wasn't that long ago that we all used ANSI BBSes on 2400 baud modems. We evolved from that, and are still continuing to. Just because it exists, doesn't mean it's the solution for everything right now.
Wrong tech, wrong time? No. (Score:3)
Ummm, you don't need President Bush to budget cash for cable/DSL to be available. You just need companies with business models that aren't stupid [fuckedcompany.com]. The fact that only 5% of users have broadband has more to do with its currently poor reliability and higher cost than dial-up service - and the fact that many users haven't seen the killer app (Napster notwithstanding).
There's a difference between neat stuff and significant stuff. ... [D]o Harry and Martha in Dubuque
need peer-to-peer?
I think so. Napster adoption has been extremely fast, and not specific to techies. Legal Napster or other apps (not Gnutella, probably, if only because the name sounds obscure and the obvious web address is useless [gnutella.com]) will drive people to use P2P and adopt broadband soon enough, I think.
And don't forget porn. I've read that there are pic trading P2P tools out there (haven't used any myself of course!) but if there's anything that will sell to Harry and Martha in Dubuque, it's quicker access to hardcore. Don't believe me? Remember VHS, which took off in no small part because it was adopted by the adult industry - and all of those pay sites that were profitable long before Red Hat.
Re:Anyone else really love ripping CDs? (Score:2)
Steal away; most of us do. Just don't try to moralize it.
Re:P2P is old news (Score:2)
Of the protocols you mentioned, FidoNet is the closest thing to what we have today. IRC is not P2P except for the DCC aspect of it, which is an explicitly created one-to-one connection. The new P2P systems allow a series of one-to-one connections to appear as a mesh to the end user.
So, yes, the actual file transfer methods have been around for a long time, but the methods to find those files are relatively new.
Yep (Score:3)
Well, I just got off the phone with my Aunt Martha and she said that after a long discussion with Harry, they decided they do, in fact, need peer-to-peer.
Peering into the future...The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]
USENET is the pre-eminent success story (Score:2)
And I've been happy with edonkey for downloading DIVX.
I think p2p will always be there, but may be a little tougher to use, which will just keep out Joe Sixpack, so it's not necessarily a bug.
Re:Napster may die someday, but (Score:5)
Napster is in fact pretty lame for new musicians. How do you find them unless you know the title of their songs or the name of their bands? You can't. Napster doesn't allow browsing by genre.
Much better for the new artist is mp3.com [mp3.com] - the artist gets paid for downloads, can sell CDs via it, they retain the copyright on their music. The user can download new music for free, and find out what the new artist's music is like. You can browse mp3.com by genre, so I can just poke around until I find something I like.
To get your music downloaded on Napster, you essentially have to be famous already. On MP3.com, people can actually find you, even if you're unknown simply by browsing.
Intensely Decentralized? Give me a break... (Score:2)
This is the sort of writing I find in government reports. It is part of the reason that I cannot read an entire Jon Katz article.
ZDNet Article (Score:2)
I wonder if Katz was inpired by this ZD Net Article [zdnet.com] this morning
Napster may die someday, but (Score:3)
I believe that society has put too much stock in musical and cinematic superstars. People used to do these things for the artistic merits behind them. It wasn't until the marketing industry of the MPAA and RIAA began gouging with prices that musicians became the greedy, self-serving bastards that many are today.
I can see where the RIAA has been detrimental to music. How many times have you heard this statement: "So-and-so is okay, but I liked their earlier stuff better." I know I've said it many times. What happens, I believe, is that because of the contracts for X number of albums, the "artists" do not put their heart into the music. They know they have their contract to fall back on. They can write a couple of good songs and fill their album with crap, and because of those good songs, they will make money still.
Anyway, all I really want to say is: Listen to Prince, he is releasing his next single on Napster!!!
p2p is cool, but that 2nd "p" is a problem (Score:2)
I on the other hand, will simply suck the marrow out of the system.
Why? Because I am a no good bastard? =)
No, because I am, for all intents and purposes of p2p, boring and useless. But I do make a killer martini.
I can't code very well, I have no CD collection (I think I own about 10 or so), and I am no graphic artist. I am also, as you may have noticed, not the best writer. What does that leave me to contribute? Perhaps some bandwidth or processing power.
Big deal.
And so it goes with hundreds of others like me who are talented in the non-digital world, but have little to offer to others in the p2p world. We will burden the system with our taking, and we are unable to give in return.
P.S. The offer of a martini stands for the bloke who put those killer Black Sabbath recordings out on the net. You know, the ones that you can't buy anywhere.
Weap-to-Reap (Score:3)
So nice for peer to peer to be marketed this way, as such a rogue technology, then we always run back and cry foul when regulatory rules, or laws come into the picture. In an instance like this, where someone was pointing out just how good of a technology this is to circumvent laws, just shy of saying "Hey kid come here... wanna break the law and sell warez? Use peer to peer".
So peer-to-peer is being championed as a technology, a business opportunity and an investment, as well as a revolutionary new means of empowering people and protecting their civil liberties and sense of individualism. Sounds pretty good.
Actually at this point it doesn't sound good. How could anyone with enough common sense to say "your totally anonymous, and free" think that investing in this technology won't cause them the heartaches of having many people who could wander anonymously free from "government", etc., (as he states) run around commiting white collar crimes such as credit card fraud using this system. Sure now there is "cracker (not to be confused with hacker) insurance" so why not make them a fortune with the possible problems I can forsee based upon the authors comments?
Peer-to-peer is useful where "the goods you're trying to get at lie at many endpoints; in other words, where the value of information lies in the contributions of many users rather than the authority of one." It's obvious that this could be valuable in research and some kinds of business development.
Again referring back to the top comments, why would I, or should I trust someone down the line if I probably won't be able to determine exactly who the person is, if that person is trustworthy. At least via a website you have limited means of determining this, based on the quality of the website, most business will probably throw on a "customers" or "partners" link, etc., as opposed to me just looking for anonymous joe in west bubblefuck to do business with.
P2P threatens to make censorship impossible. But governments have little to fear from P2P. Since everyone is an equal content provider, goes the theory, it would be almost impossible for any significant mass of people to ever see the same message.
Hell yea it will likely introduce all kinds of horrible censorship, and again the author is dead wrong by stating all is an equal content provider. What about those offering illegal things, why would I want to be equal to their actions?
Privacy links [antioffline.com] (well suited for this article)
Companies never "get" it. It's sad. (Score:2)
However, I think peer-to-peer is important for an entirely different reason. Consider the direction the computer industry is heading in. Think about MS Passport -- read the slashdot article if you want to get your daily scare. Think about their
Here's where we get into what I'd use peer-to-peer for, and what I'd really like to see people start to do.
Remember the Bulletin Board? Back in the '80s, when the net wasn't really all that available to most people, private individuals would start bulletin boards (BBS's) and do everything we now do on the net. There was no government control, or external influence, you just had to install a high-capacity modem and enough lines and you were in business. If you were slick, you could get a primitive internet connection and share it among your users (no web, just like, telnet and stuff).
BBS'es were great. You could share files, communicate with your friends, work on a shared server... So, picture this:
Microsoft gets its way. The internet is dumbed down, collaboration is affected because no one wants to let Passport's EULA dual-copyright their stuff, most people end up using stupid little net appliances... Techies everywhere are bummed. So, we get fed up, order DSL service, hack together a Linux box or three, and start non-passport servers. Then, we start a peer-to-peer network that encrypts communications between nodes so that they can't be captured except within the p2p network (where Passport,
It gets better.
As society gets more corporate and techies get more and more disillusioned and annoyed by what they're seeing around them, they decide to pull a mini-secession from the rest of the world and form a virtual nation. It's organized in the same way revolutionary cells were in old communist countries. One server is connected to a group of other servers, for one-way publishing downward, while they're connected to each other. No server "knows" anything about the server above it, or the servers below its peer servers, so you can think about the system as a big tree, with each node able to reference four or five children, and so on, and able to receive info from its parent node. Information can be quickly disseminated from a semi-central authority (which would have a number of peers itself, so the system would be quite redundant) throughout the network. If one node were to be shut down, at most you could shut down its peers and their child nodes. The controller of that node could then rebuild that part of the tree by assigning new systems in.
How about that, slashdotters? A whole underground society, working via an encrypted, heirarchial tree-like network of mini peer to peer networks, happily trading files and code and whatever else they want, without having to worry about corporate america at all. You could even arrange a currency and a work-reward system, and drop out of society entirely. Members would have to "show income" as organized crime used to in the twenties, so they could get joe jobs to cover their rent and food, and handle everything else on the black market. Think about THAT -- black market tech consulting. No taxes! heh heh heh...
JUST KIDDING -- don't sic the IRS on me.
But, seriously. Wouldn't that be something?
crazyphilman@programmer.net
My Experience with BearShare (Score:2)
Big device for trading pr0n
It has the reputation for being the successor of Napster. And it's a great Gnutella client, but what i'm actually seeing (since it displays all the queries that people are sending) is that people are requesting almost nothing but porn.
Don't get me wrong, you can still get whatever music you might desire, but i see it all as being completely overshadowed by the VAST amount of porn that is going through.
Publishers will stop looking for next big thing (Score:2)
Re:Napster may die someday, but (Score:2)
the RIAA has been detrimental to music. How many times have you heard this statement: "So-and-so is okay, but I liked their earlier stuff better." I know I've said it many times. What happens, I believe, is that because of the contracts for X number of albums, the "artists" do not put their heart into the music. They know they have their contract to fall back on. They can write a couple of good songs and fill their album with crap, and because of those good songs, they will make money still.
I actually have someone in my family that has been signed by a record label, received gold/platinum albums and then had the band broke up. What I don't agree with in your analagy is that - Most bands play for years and years (and years) before getting 'discovered' and in that time span they will have a rock solid album with their 12 best songs. Now the record company will want a follow up album in less than a year! So they have to conjur up all the talent they have to create something that is rushed to market where they're given no 'ifs ands or buts' - just get an album out (and believe me the record companies can be complete asses - money is their bottom line). So what you get is a great first album and the second, third album is just crap because they have no time to work on the songs. Talk to any musician that has been signed and I bet you will hear something similar. Oh and by the way most musicians dont get into music to make money they do it because they love making music - not because they hope to get signed and make big money (oh and just because you get signed doesnt gaurantee that you will make money - you friggen dipshit) I believe this to be a more realistic analagy of what happens when you say "I liked their earlier stuff better." So please, next time you try to think - please pull your head out of your ass first (it will at least unclog your ears for you to listen to common reasoning)Remember were ever you go, there you are!