Hassan Ibraheem

United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru (c) - Alex

@bleys whada'ya'mean ? - silpol

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YlTh0yJS0M - Alex

oh, I see... :D - silpol

Anyone want to explain that to me? I thought bittorrent-style P2P worked efficiently because chunks are designed to arrive out of sequence so as not to create a bottleneck on the necessarily smaller number of hosts with chunks to serve. Live streaming requires chunks to arrive in order and with little delay. How does P2P help here? - DeWitt Clinton

Heh, DeWitt, you're not missing anything. - Jason Wehmhoener

I just commented on the TechCrunch article. First time I've felt compelled to. - DeWitt Clinton

According to my calculations, Google was using something like 540gbit/s and used probably about 250TB of bandwidth for this event. That is if the figure of 700 thousand viewers is correct, and I'm timing that by 1 hour even though the whole event was 2 hours, for average. If bandwidth costs $0.10 per GB, then cost of bandwidth might have been just something like $25,000. That wouldn't be very expensive at all.. - Charbax

@Charbax - wow! - DeWitt Clinton

DeWitt: there's been a lot of recent research in developing BitTorrent-style (distributed economic) algorithms for real-time streaming. Having all the hosts online at the same time means there are more hosts serving chunks as well. I don't know that it's been productionized yet. - Jim Norris

@Jim - that definitely makes intuitive sense, and I know of companies that have been exploring this space for at least 5 years (thinking way back to one in particular). But afaik none of the existing protocols in deployment are doing this. Not saying it is impossible, just saying I bet Mike Arrington was talking out of the wrong end of his torso when he wrote that, because he doesn't know either. - DeWitt Clinton

@Jim, I think that is what P2P-Next is doing http://www.p2p-next.org/ . http://www.tribler.org/SwarmPl... - Hassan Ibraheem

@Charbax - your calculation, written as a Google query: http://www.google.com/search?q... - DeWitt Clinton

A bunch of CMU folks have done research on P2P streaming. Conviva is one of the companies (from CMU and Berkeley folks) which is commercializing it... - Ashwin Bharambe

For what it's worth, real-time P2P streaming has a much better shot at succeeding if Microsoft licenses and commercializes it. It's totally in line with their Silverlight and Xbox XBL strategy, and they can deploy it to a billion desktops overnight. - DeWitt Clinton

P2P-Next did some tests broadcasting the Eurovision song contest in Europe to hundreds of thousands of people http://tech.ebu.ch/lang/en/p2p... - Charbax

I watched the Eurovision song contest last year over the net, and it only froze once right at the start of the show. I thought oh well that's it, but after about 30 seconds it came back, and didn't drop or freeze again all the way through (three hours) - Ian May

Actually, P2P streaming of video is pretty common these days. I would even say "mainstream". I watched Olympics live from China using PPLive, and watch shows at least once a week, for example. It's not a techie phenomenon -- I learned about PPLive from AARP-aged Chinese people, all of whom use it. - Joshua Allen

Not totally sure how P2P saves real costs though -- doesn't it just shift the bandwidth need and cost? - Brian Sullivan

@Brian: Yes, it shifts expense to the local ISPs - Joshua Allen via fftogo

Joshua: So the local ISPs eventually have to find a way to transfer the cost to the customer/user? How is that good for users? - Brian Sullivan

@Brian: This hit to ISP is on upload bandwidth, which historically was underprovisioned; which is why Comcast and others have throttled P2P traffic, and why companies like MSFT have avoided heavy use of P2P (since it would hurt the ISPs). But ultimately it will be more efficient for edge ISPs to handle this type of traffic, as long as they get compensated fairly, and the ISPs seem to be adapting. - Joshua Allen

"But ultimately it will be more efficient for edge ISPs to handle this type of traffic" -- why ? Doesn't this actually create more traffic if there is more edge to edge traffic ? But even if this does happen -- who does the "compensating" in this model?-- ultimately the subscribers to the ISP? Again I ask how is this good for users? - Brian Sullivan

@Brian: It's more efficient, because the amount of traffic on the backbone is decreased by more than the amount at the edge is increased. Imagine that 100,000 people in each of the 10 largest cities in America simultaneously ordered the same book. Amazon could send out 1 million trucks to deliver the books, or could send 10 trucks and have the local post office print copies in each city. It's dramatically better for the backbone as well as for the publisher. It's better for the user as well, since it's quicker to distribute copies from locally. Try watching TV on PPLive (actually, CCTV is doing P2P on their own now, as well), then try streaming that same video stream from any streaming server in China. The former is rather nice, the latter is impossible. The only party who takes a hit is the local ISP, and their hit is not proportionally as bad as the benefit to the other parties. Thus the inexorable renegotiation of expectations, and the inevitable move toward ISPs allowing P2P. - Joshua Allen

Joshua -- doesn't your model assume though that P2P algorithms are tuned to favour transfer between "closer"' parties (which happens naturally in your example). I am not sure that this happens in other P2P situations. - Brian Sullivan

BTW, the NBC Olympics were broadcast to Silverlight using a P2P layer developed by Move Networks. And this layer is used in production on ABC and FOX players as well, IIRC. They don't come out and say that it's using P2P, but it is -- same as people using PPLive or CCTV don't actually know what "P2P" is. Which is as good a definition of "mainstream" as any. - Joshua Allen

@Joshua - can you point us to anywhere that gives details about the Silverlight P2P implementation? That would indeed disprove my assertion that this wasn't in the mainstream. - DeWitt Clinton

@Brian: Yes, it assumes that most P2P traffic happens between peers who are fewer hops away on the network. This is a rather safe assumption in the case of an event with mass appeal -- that is, the more popular the event, the closer the peers on average will be. The data bears this out in any study I've ever seen. - Joshua Allen

"This is a rather safe assumption in the case of an event with mass appeal -- that is, the more popular the event, the closer the peers on average will be." -- maybe but it doesn't seem totally intuitive to me. - Brian Sullivan

I got a 1TB drive - I want to dual boot between OSX and Windows.. I had the drive formatted as NTFS, I installed ntfs-3g in OSX, and suddenly, it appears I am "missing" a lot of data. I am concerned with the ability of non-Windows OSes to write to NTFS... - Tim Hoeck

NTFS, mostly, but I don't dual boot - they're (effectively) network storage drives accessed by both my mac and PC. - Eric P

tim, use a NAS. - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

NTFS gives me the trots, always has done. - RefD

so.. have a dedicated machine, be it a NAS, or another PC... that kinda sucks :) Can't all OSes just get along? - Tim Hoeck

NTFS gives me the herpes - directeur

what about ext3? How might that work with Mac/Win/Linux? - Tim Hoeck

Don't forget XFS - Jesse Stay

so fortunately, I was able to recover the files using regular windows chkdisk... now I am debating. - Tim Hoeck

Yeah...it's really nice to be back on Linux. - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Hmm...you just have plain Ubuntu in? I prefer KDE to Gnome for a basic desktop. Banshee for music. - Neal "thePuck" Jansons

Yeah, just Gnome. Don't really have a preference between the two anymore. It's been so long. I know I used to run both simply because of the different software I needed to record/produce music. We'll see how it goes. - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

What do you need? Love my Ubuntu - everyone's needs are different. Forget what comes loaded since we have a customized staff desktop. - Mlibrarianus

Hrm...I have Gnome-do, so that seems to be a big piece of how I work. Pidgin for IM. I guess I'm just interested to know what software everyone else uses. All the stuff I used to use back in the day I think is not even active anymore - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Start with the ubuntu-restricted package. That gives you codecs for mp3, dvd, avi, etc playback. Also install k3b, which is an excellent CD/DVD burning tool. The rest will kinda depend on what you like to do. - Jason Huebel

Amarok for music. OpenOffice for office stuff. Firefox or Flock for web stuff. - Secret Ninja Steven

Oh, and VLC. - Secret Ninja Steven

Wow, what a name. "restricted" LOL - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Rahsheen: does going open source really require as much time as everybody says (i.e,. a hobby)? - V for Veselka

Ah, yeah...VLC. Gotta research the rest of those. - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

What do you guys use for Torrents? I was using Utorrent in XP. - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Firefox. Links (prefer it to Lynx, but have both installed). GVim. Eclipse. AIR Runtime for various AIR apps. Flash. restricted packages for media. Kino for DV video. Wine/Crossover. VirtualBox. VLC. Songbird. and on and on, depending on your interests... lots of options. ;) Oh, and DOSBox, heh. - abacab

You can still use uTorrent via Wine/Crossover, actually. - abacab

I have a love for Azureus/Vuze. And it's cross platform. - April Russo

I try to avoid Wine/Crossover or any of that stuff. There's gotta be a viable alternative. Oh yeah, Azureus. - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Same things Steven Perez mentioned plus Gimp, Blender, Scribus, Camorama, K3b - Mlibrarianus

Azureus got too bloaty for me a long, long time ago. And there's nothing wrong with a little Wine; everything in moderation. ;) - abacab

If you're running Linux, you don't install software, you write it. ;) - ·[▪_▪]·

For torrents, if you want to stay away from Wine and Azureus I'd say go with KTorrent. If you're going to be doing any video/audio/graphics editing, I'd recommend the packages that are in Ubuntu Studio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... - donato

I use Vuze/Azureus for torrents and love it :), I also used qbittorrent which is nice and simple :). http://qbittorrent.sourceforge... . - Hassan Ibraheem

Good lookin on Ubuntu Studio, all my favorite junk: hydrogen, ardour, muse, etc... - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

audacity, inkscape, openoffice.org-draw, vlc; then the whole http://www.medibuntu.org stack of DVD codecs etc. - Chuck LeDuc Díaz

As a web dev / software making monkey - it's great, but not feasible for public adoption. the process is too cumbersome to adapt to - Sociosophy Reviews via twhirl

Not for me, but I know it's confusing for many people. - Hassan Ibraheem

At least we're increasingly aware of the problems and now highly motivated to address them! I'm sure email and instant messaging went through similar hurdles. - Chris Messina