People using BitTorrent can experience response time delays of from 2 to 4 seconds while uploading files because of buffers filling up in their communications equipment. This makes impractical the use of other applications such as games and real time communications (applications requiring sub-second response times) while files are being uploaded.
The paper suggests that vendors (ISPs) support P2P applications by improving caching, cache discovery (peer selection), and congestion control. It concludes,
Our μTorrent client, with 35M active installs, is one of the most popular and probably the most popular is the U.S. We’re looking forward to implementing standard ways of making it work better for the users and the ISPs and we believe that the vendors of other popular BitTorrent clients would follow because this would improve the experience of the users of their clients.
(Shalunov twitters fun things like, “Bob became evil because he sat next to my raincoat in a restaurant: he subverted TCP fairness by opening two Firefox tabs at once,” and “When I have a spare decade, I’ll write the Sucklopedia, which will document the ways in which everything, alphabetically, sucks.” You can follow him here.)
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, ten years old this week, has been elevated from a Harvard Law School research center to a University-wide center. This is a big deal. Congratulations!
David Isenberg had Howard Levy and Chris Seibold playing during breaks between speakers and panels at Freedom to Connect this week. I have a lot to share about my experience of this years gathering of “net heads” inside the beltway. Heath Row blogged most of it with almost verbatim transcriptive objectivity. Suw Charman did her bit for the live blogging cause as well. Over the next few weeks, as time permits, I’ll try to pull some of my thoughts into English and share them here.
Go the site, take the census, and do the speed test. Drew Clark introduced us to this new “crowdsourcing” application this morning at F2C. Grab a button for your blog.
I have a lot of work in front of me over the next couple of weeks, so naturally I started my Monday morning with a walk around the blogs. These two posts by Tom Matrullo provided food for thought and opportunities for procrastination:
The first, “gathering small crowds,” offers a link to a Jerry Michalski screencast that should interest anyone who uses a combination of Facebook, twitter, and FlickR. Michalski demos how two applications provide bridges among these social network tools and offer a level of integration you might find useful.
The second post (at FASTforward), “An adjacency of opposites,” contrasts Clare Hart’s corporate perspective on net services emerging provision to knowledge workers of highly managed and contextualized information via “dashboards,” versus David Weinberger’s more populist, idiosyncratic, spontaneous and non-commodifiable vision of the messy, miscellaneous, “here comes everybody” internets.
Dan Farber, a key member of the CNET organization since they acquired ZDNet in October, 2000, has been appointed the new Editor-in-chief of CNET News.com. He says goodbye today to his ZDNet blog “Between the Lines:”
This will be my last post on Between the Lines and ZDNet for a while. I am moving over to head up our sister CNET Networks site News.com starting today. My talented, experienced, incisive and prolific BTL partner Larry Dignan will become Editor in Chief and Chief Blogger of ZDNet….
Dan has been part of the CNET organization since they acquired ZDNet in October, 2000. Congratulations on the move, Dan. The new media journey continues.
