>>>> "KA" == Kelly Anderson
<kelly(a)acoin.com> writes:
KA> I'm sorry if my ignorance is showing here, but I went to both
KA> sourceforge and
gnutella.com and I still don't have any idea
KA> what gnutella is, other than it's a peer to peer networking
KA> protocol for file sharing. In other words, I can't figure out
KA> why Gnutella is different from Ares, the old Napster, or
KA> Bittorrent from an architectural point of view.
The main reason it's different -- and one that has nothing to do with
Wikipedia, btw -- is that you don't need to connect to a central
server, like Napster or BT. You just need to know other people running
Gnutella, and get their IP addresses, and then you "discover" new
addresses over time.
The main reason it'd be appropriate is that it's probably still the
biggest P2P network. Because the protocol is open, there are lots of
clients that use the network. Kazaa, Limewire and Bearshare, for
example, all run on the Gnutella network.
One thing it's _not_ good at is for publishing Web sites over
P2P. That's probably what we'd need for Wikipedia.
KA> I am more familiar with Bittorrent, which is very useful for
KA> distributing copies of very large files (which a pdf version
KA> of Wikipedia would certainly qualify as) without using hardly
KA> any bandwidth on the main server.
I, for one, would _never_ download the entire Wikipedia PDF file. Not
only would it be humongous, but several hundred or thousand articles
would be edited between the time I started the download and the time
it finished.
It makes more sense to distribute a page at a time rather than the
whole thing at once.
~ESP
--
Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel -
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