Irresistible Forces

Trevor Merriden

• 04 september 2001
• 9781841121703

Samenvatting:

"I believe that the peer to peer technology on which Napster is based has the potential to be adopted for many different uses. People generally speak about the ability to share other kinds of files in addition to music, and indeed, Napster has been contacted by entities such as the Human Genome project that are interested in sharing information among specific communities of interest. But peer to peer technology, or distributed computing, also has tremendous opportunity for sharing resources or computing power, lowering information and transaction costs. Peer to peer could be used to create a pool of resources in aggregate to solve a range of complex storage, processing and bandwidth problems. Peer to peer also has the potential to change today s understanding of the relationship between source and site. Think how much faster and more efficient the internet could be is instead of always connecting you to a central server every time you click on to a web site, your computer would find the source that housed that information nearest to you if it s already on the compter of the kid down the hall, why travel halfway around the world to retrieve it? A number of companies, from Intel on down to small start ups, are looking at ways to develop peer to peer technology, and I believe that many of them will succeed." Shawn Fanning, Napster creator, on the wider potential of peer to peer networking.