
Do I Look Like a CEO? - epi0Bauqu
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b4105046863317.htm?campaign_id=rss_topEmailedStories
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maxklein
The real genius in bittorrent does not lie in it's technological superiority,
but in it's bravery and simplicity.

The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have
downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it. Using a http
tracker was going against the trend that all the other protocol designers were
following at the time.

Then someone made it, and it became a big hit. Just like YouTube - it sounds
technologically silly before it is done. NOW it's easy to see how obvious it
is, but before it was done, it was not the same way.

Bram Cohen is the polar opposite of Ian Clarke, and that's why his project is
so much more successful.

~~~
nostrademons
> The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have
> downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it.

This part had been well-validated before BitTorrent came out. People were
already using Napster, Kazaa, and AudioGalaxy, all of which relied on people
leaving files available for upload after they finished downloading them.

Using an HTTP tracker _was_ a pretty courageous act though, and I don't think
the rest of the protocol would work without it. At the time, everyone was
doing desktop clients and trying to make things as anonymous as possible,
since they were all afraid of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

I kinda wonder whether Bram _really_ didn't know it would be used for
copyright infringement, or if he just says that because he's smart enough not
to get sued. _Every_ other P2P filesharing system was used to share music, and
the mainstream media was going on and on about how Napster was the death of
the music industry. You'd have to be living under a rock not to make that
connection.

~~~
DenisM
That's nothing, every operating system was used for copyright infrighment too!
Bill Gates has clearly contemplated mass-scale music downloading when creating
windows, unless he was living under the rock.

Sarcasm aside, universal tools are like that - people use them for many
things.

~~~
nostrademons
My curiosity is because every other P2P filesharing tool written _before_
BitTorrent was used for copyright infringement. Bill Gates is a different
situation, because there were no PCs before he wrote Altair Basic. There were
plenty of P2P filesharing services before BitTorrent, though.

You can't predict the future, but you ought to have a pretty good idea what's
happening in the present.

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charlesju
An amazing story about Cohen. As an engineer, I know it is hard sometimes to
break oneself from the confines of logic and structure to take a more
emotional intuitive approach to understanding the world.

There are two books that I must recommend for any engineer that is in the same
situation as Mr. Cohen.

Blink, By Malcom Gladwell. This book explains the concept of intuition and
thinking with the subconscious. I think this is something that is lost to a
lot of science people that have to rationalize everything in life with
concrete details. In my opinion, I think that our subconscious is a much more
logical real life processing unit than our conscious because it can link
concepts much more quickly. As the old adage says, sometimes you have to trust
your instincts.

How To Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This book goes into
incredible depth with a bunch of narratives explaining the proper way to deal
with people. Very interesting book, in fact, this is the one book PG
recommends EVERY startup entrepreneur to read, and I couldn't agree more.

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bayareaguy
The Python source to bittorrent is worth reading as well, even if it doesn't
quite follow the best coding practices.

[http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/BitT...](http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/BitTorrent/)

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tptacek
It's worth mentioning, while we're talking about the "real genius of
BitTorrent" --- and fine, it's better work than I've done, but ---

BitTorrent is an implementation of an idea (group delivery of content using
FEC) that was quite popular at the time. There was already an open-source C
language startup doing it, and more notably the idea was the foundation for
Digital Fountain, which Michael Luby started during the tail end of the boom.
The Fountain guys even tried to standardize it, as a protocol called FLID-DL.

The relationship between BitTorrent and the kernel of its idea seems to be
approximately the same as the relationship between Napster and IRC XDCC, or
between WinAmp and MP3 players. I think that's a compliment, by the way.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _more notably the idea was the foundation for Digital Fountain_

IIRC Luby came up with a rateless encoding algorithms while working on
overcoming content delivery issues in lossy networks. It had less to do with a
_group delivery_ per se, and more with the lossy transmission medium. They did
initially focus on a single-sender setup, and in that they were quite a bit
different from BT. Only after DF was founded they started looking at
alternative applications of their (patented) ideas and resurrected the swarm-
casting stuff.

In other words I wouldn't mix DF and BT together. They are certainly related,
but they are more different than they are similar.

~~~
tptacek
You'll probably win an argument about Luby's CV, but I'm just going to point
out that the signature technical detail of BitTorrent is FEC, and Luby is an
FEC, coding-theory, and crypto luminary from way before the first bubble.

I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01 that was directly in this
space; we implemented basically the same system as BitTorrent for group file
transfer. We definitely felt like there was significant overlap with Digital
Fountain (though we were using off-the-shelf PD coding schemes, like
BitTorrent did).

"Lossy transmission medium" is another way to think about multicast
congestion, and multicast congestion is another way to think about "how to get
content to a large, diverse audience of people", which I think sums up
BitTorrent.

The big difference between BitTorrent and DF is that BitTorrent is P2P, and DF
isn't. That sounds huge, but realize that "P2P vs. Planned" is an informal way
to describe the major approaches to multicast reliability protocols.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01_

Feel like sharing a name of the startup ? :)

~~~
tptacek
It's not _too_ hard to track down, but, no. We weren't particularly
successful. I've got a blog post or 50 to write about that whole experience,
when it's less raw.

~~~
huhtenberg
I am being lazy. It _is_ trivial to track it down.

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AlexRodriguez
The intriguing side of the article is not so much about BitTorrent, but about
Asperger syndrome.

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mattmaroon
I was really hoping there was nothing on that page but a picture and two radio
buttons for yes and no. That would have been amazing.

~~~
jcl
Sounds like there is a market demand for amiaceoornot.com...

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zandorg
Original request for test porn downloads: <http://www.ntk.net/2002/07/26/>

I believe this is the first mention of Bittorrent when still under
development.

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jonknee
No and BitTorrent doesn't look like a company either.

