The other day, someone passed around a link to a set of about 15 images: a sequence of a barge being swept under an unopened drawbridge by heavy river current.
If you've seen the pictures, you know: it's kinda interesting! And in no time, as is so often the case, the link was down, as thousands of people shared it and overwhelmed the ISP where it was hosted. An e-friend of mine saved the images and created a mirror on his own server. He told a few people about it. A few days later, he found himself in the same situation: his ISP had to cap him at 128k. His little link had been shared and in no time he was inadvertently killing his upstream connection. A T1 and the bandwidth for it is still very expensive (at least where I live), and it amazes me to see how easily one can clog it. Meanwhile the industry is trying to push broadband, the people want to share larger files, etc. Something's gotta give! The obvious solution is to work p2p into the mix, so that simply sharing an image doesn't mean inviting the entire world to max out your connection. There oughta be - and maybe there is, I don't know about this sort of thing - a hyperlink to search a p2p network. And then, there oughta be a partial p2p client, perhaps one that would only search and leech files and not share them, that could be invoked by such a link. Whaddya think? -- Civil chatter and community since 1990: The Cellar - cellar.org -----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =----- http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! Check out our new Unlimited Server. No Download or Time Limits! -----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 19 Different Servers! ==-----
