A different proposal for XO upgrade.

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 16:19 -0400, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
> 
> You've just described BitTorrent, if I'm not missing something.  It's 
> already designed to optimise the bandwidth used by talking to the
> people 
> who have the fastest connection to you, it automatically allows each 
> person who pulls down a unit to share it, it's fault tolerant, allows 
> the "lead" to drop out (doesn't actually have one), and generally is 
> robust as all get out.  It also has a file-format that allows for a 
> downloading just that fragment you need (i.e. just one file, or just
> one 
> block, or whatever).
> 

Kind of.  Last time I checked bittorrent just used a random guess to
figure out who to try and get bits from.  i.e. you were just as likely
to get your bits from india as you would from the guy on the next lan.
We're talking about something here that's different than that and
specifically uses the high bandwith of the local wlan vs. the low
bandwith of upstream connections.  i.e. there's a sense of locality.  bt
doesn't really have that unless they have changed the way that they do
it.

--Chris