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pod · 24-07-02, 11:06 AM

I think this whole Altnet thing is a pipedream. It won't work for any but the most specialized applications.

Lets take a look at the two examples given.

Movie render farm. I know it sounds very nice and reasonable, but there are several showstopping problems with it. First, this is not a tiny program we're talking about. Animated movies are rendered with heavy duty, complex industrial 3d rendering applications, designed to run on multi-processor xeon systems with 1gb of RAM at the very minumum, and gigs of available disk space. How many of Altnet's nodes will have such capacity? Second, how exactly will this huge rendering software get to the nodes? How will the gigabytes of models and textures get to the nodes? Third, who's gonna license their software so it can legally be used in such a manner and how much will it cost?

The second example is even worse. Distributed streaming? Even more unlikely, LIVE distributed streaming? If you have a source feeding 200+ nodes a combined 200kb/s, and those nodes have a combined bandwidth of 200kb/s (lets keep things simple and ignore the tremendous overhead of each node), then you must have a target capable of receiving the said 200kb/s. Duh, why not skip the middle-man and feed the signal straight through? I realize this is a trivial example, but come on. If you want to excite people about this, there surely must be better ways. Shoutcast already does something like this, where you have a single source, and a bunch of high-speed repeaters everyone connects to. That's why the likes of Digitally Imported can have live DJ shows because the DJ can feed 1000s of people from a single DSL line in his house. A P2P network is useless for streaming. How do you deal with the hugely variable latency? There are already problems with this as it is, with regular single streams, where packets routinely get dropped or arrive out of sequence, and you just hear a bunch of digital glitches. What will you do when a bunch of your nodes suddenly start checking their email or automatically downloading SP2 for XP?

There are some ok applications for P2P, and SETI and distributed.net and that DNA thingy are one example. Another, also already done, is content distribution. You download a small download manager, that's just a special P2P client, and let er rip.

Oh well, we'll see what happens with this one.

24-07-02, 11:06 AM	#8
pod Bumbling idiot Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Vancouver, CA Posts: 787	I think this whole Altnet thing is a pipedream. It won't work for any but the most specialized applications. Lets take a look at the two examples given. Movie render farm. I know it sounds very nice and reasonable, but there are several showstopping problems with it. First, this is not a tiny program we're talking about. Animated movies are rendered with heavy duty, complex industrial 3d rendering applications, designed to run on multi-processor xeon systems with 1gb of RAM at the very minumum, and gigs of available disk space. How many of Altnet's nodes will have such capacity? Second, how exactly will this huge rendering software get to the nodes? How will the gigabytes of models and textures get to the nodes? Third, who's gonna license their software so it can legally be used in such a manner and how much will it cost? The second example is even worse. Distributed streaming? Even more unlikely, LIVE distributed streaming? If you have a source feeding 200+ nodes a combined 200kb/s, and those nodes have a combined bandwidth of 200kb/s (lets keep things simple and ignore the tremendous overhead of each node), then you must have a target capable of receiving the said 200kb/s. Duh, why not skip the middle-man and feed the signal straight through? I realize this is a trivial example, but come on. If you want to excite people about this, there surely must be better ways. Shoutcast already does something like this, where you have a single source, and a bunch of high-speed repeaters everyone connects to. That's why the likes of Digitally Imported can have live DJ shows because the DJ can feed 1000s of people from a single DSL line in his house. A P2P network is useless for streaming. How do you deal with the hugely variable latency? There are already problems with this as it is, with regular single streams, where packets routinely get dropped or arrive out of sequence, and you just hear a bunch of digital glitches. What will you do when a bunch of your nodes suddenly start checking their email or automatically downloading SP2 for XP? There are some ok applications for P2P, and SETI and distributed.net and that DNA thingy are one example. Another, also already done, is content distribution. You download a small download manager, that's just a special P2P client, and let er rip. Oh well, we'll see what happens with this one.