2002-08-01»
Replying to Dave Winer»
The best trick in blogging: wait a while, and someone else will write your
entry for you. Dave Winer said
yesterday:
Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to
work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter
entirely.) Further, it's weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by
coercing programmers to work for $0 that that's freedom. To me it seems
obvious that that's slavery.
... which seemed to me so wrong, on so many levels. But it took a better man
than me to write the
gentlemanly
reply (and from more experience than I can provide too):
I'm surprised by each of these sentiments: that we're not writing usable
software, that we're not making money, and that it's coercion (and thus
slavery).
2002-07-30»
All Hail Verity»
Jorn's just linked to the very funny Verity Stob
journals, so I guess I can now. Verity was my first boss, actually - we both
worked on or near a magazine called .EXE in the early Nineties. One of my
proudest claims is that I'm the annoying new office boy who sets fire to a
UNIX box in one of the earlier columns. The girl Adrian Mole should have
married, if life were kinder to him, and even crueller to Verity.
2002-07-25»
Zero-day pr0n!»
Bram Cohen
, the man behind CodeCon and other fine goods and services, has a problem. He's been
working on an excellent P2P utility for the last six months or so, called BitTorrent.
The idea behind BT is brilliant - it's a helper application for browsers that
lets you download large files (like movies) from multiple locations at the
same time. One site is the original location - the others are all the other
BitTorrent users who are downloading the file at the same time. In return, you
share the bits of the file you've already grabbed to other downloaders. It's
like instant, distributed mirroring. It takes the load off the original server
and increases the speed of everyone's file grab . The throttled
bandwidth taken by others uploading is not noticeable (after all, you're
already filling much of your pipe with your download anyway), and unlike most
P2P apps, it all goes away as soon as you've finished downloading anyway.
Anyway, Bram's in the final stages of stress testing his code - but he's
got a problem. BitTorrent currently shrugs off every load test he's thrown at
it, but even in the middle of a slashdotting, he's only ever seen twenty or so
people doing a simultaneous download of his test files. In the words of
Bram:
I'm now in the very bizarre position of having to beg for people to
download porn. The page of the current load test (a 700+ meg file) is
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/porn.html.
Windows, Unix tars and a Debian package of BitTorrent are available from Bram's site.I've
suggested that he get hold of the ISOs to the full Debian 3.0 install CDs -
the equivalent of pr0n among the Free Software sexless beings of pure
energy.
