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bluesky - Re: Hi, and some comments

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Wei Dai <weidai AT eskimo.com>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Hi, and some comments
  • Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 17:59:49 -0800


On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 10:54:58AM -0800, Ian Clarke wrote:
> I suspect that the two may be mutually exclusive, although don't ask me
> to prove it ;) In Freenet, information's availability is in proportion
> to its demand. This is probably the perfect situation from the
> perspective of consumers of information, but not for producers of
> information (I had this argument with Richard Stallman over a year ago).

But nobody consumes *just* popular data, so you still need a system that
can handle the less popular data. What are your thoughts on OceanStore? It
has problems, but I think it clearly proves that it is possible to handle
both popular and unpopular data in the same system.

Do you have a good idea of how availability scales with popularity in
Freenet? For example, from what percentage of the network would you be
able to find a piece of data that has been requested by 50% of the nodes
in the last month? 10%, 1%, .1%, etc.? What kind of goals are you aiming
for in this regard?

> If you take television as an analogy, some of the information is there
> because it is popular (the content), and some is there because people
> have paid to put it there (the advertisments). From the point of view
> of someone watching TV - would you prefer a system with or without
> advertisments?

As a TV watcher, I obviously prefer a system with ads, because otherwise
there wouldn't be any professional free television programs. But that's a

bad analogy; here the problem is how to ensure less popular data can get
to people who specificly request them, not how to fund original content.

> The huge file *is* a resource, but its popularity (in proportion to its
> size) will determine the degree to which it is replicated on Freenet, if
> at all. You seem to be thinking in terms of providing a service to
> producers of information, where as Freenet provides a service to
> consumers of information. From this point of view, all information is a
> resource (the value of which is determined by popularity).

By resources I meant storage space and bandwidth, rather than content. Who
will be paying for them in Freenet? Who will be paying for content is a
whole other issue which probably deserves a seperate mailing list to talk
about.

> Most people in the world today have 28.8k or 33.6k modems - and pay for
> internet connectivity by the minute, that is hardly what I would
> describe as a surplus of bandwidth.

Those people obviously will not be participating as storage servers. But
there are a lot of people with broadband Internet connections, and they
will provide sufficient supply to ensure very low publication costs.




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