Why to Not Not Start a Startup, by Paul Graham

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

That will change if you get a real job after you graduate. Then you’ll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companies do is boring, you’re going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy, compared to college, but boring. At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it’s easy and you get paid a lot.
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Peer-to-Peer: An Overview

Introduction

“P2P” or “peer-to-peer networking” is maybe one of the most controversial and interesting trends in the dawn of the new century; its complete decentralization challenges all definitions of private intellectual property and creates new technological, commercial and juridic challenges.

In this article I will enumerate some companies that provide P2P file-sharing services, after providing a short overview of the concept and implementation of P2P.

Technology

In a few words, the term peer-to-peer

“refers to the concept that in a network of equals (peers) using appropriate information and communication systems, two or more individuals are able to spontaneously collaborate without necessarily needing central coordination”

(Schoder & Fischbach, 2006).

In this broad category not only enter the well-known (and hated, see “The Register” reference below) file sharing networks, some of which will be enumerated later; but also applications old as the Internet itself, such as the Usenet or FidoNet, which can also be called P2P networks (Wikipedia, 2006).

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AOP & The DataServices Project

Introduction

Five years ago I worked as a Software Engineer for a startup, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which had the goal of creating a web-based systems management console, to control and monitor the status of large computer installations, much like Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) does. This tool would eventually benefit from being a web-based application, and as such it could be used from anywhere, without having to install a “fat client”; just launch a browser, point to a particular URL, and you are done.

During the project, I was able to work towards the creation of the first AJAX application I’ve ever seen (this was 2002!), and also, to use Aspect-Oriented Programming techniques for the first time.

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Free Beer aux Brasseurs?

Je viens d’envoyer cette lettre à Les Brasseurs, une brasserie très connue à Genève, Lausanne et Nyon:

Bonjour, Je suis depuis longtemps un amateur de vos bières, que je trouve depuis des années simplement formidables, et un client régulier de vos locaux de Lausanne et Genève. Je travaille comme informaticien, et je suis récemment tombé par hasard sur ce lien: http://www.freebeer.org/blog/ La “Free Beer” est une recette de bière “libre”, dans le sens suivant: vous pouvez copier la recette, la produire librement et la vendre sans payer des “royalties” à personne. Vous pouvez même “downloader” les étiquettes et le branding, et la vendre librement. La recette est publique. Seule condition? Que si jamais vous modifiez la recette, vous êtes tenu de publier la recette modifiée, sur votre website par exemple, ou par écrit, mais vous devez la rendre publique. L’idée vient de la Scandinavie, et elle a des fortes racines dans le monde de l’informatique et du logiciel, puisque la “Free Beer” est une bière “open source”, tout comme divers logiciels, comme le navigateur Mozilla Firefox ou l’ensemble bureautique OpenOffice; maintenant elle est aussi produite et distribuée en Italie et ailleurs. Sachant que Lausanne et Genève sont des hauts centres techniques à niveau mondial (EPFL, CERN, et j’en passe) je me dis que vous avez la l’opportunité de faire un gros, gros point (et de séduire une clientèle très, très “geek”); au nom de plusieurs de mes collègues, je peux vous dire que nous serions ravis de goûter une “Free Beer” faite par vos soins :) Merci pour votre attention et à tres bientot! Adrian Kosmaczewski http://kosmaczewski.net/ PS: vous trouverez plus d’informations ici: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/02/18/free_beer/
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Google Everywhere

It all started with the search engine. I think it was sometime back in 2000, while I was working in Argentina.

av_logo.gifI was an avid everyday AltaVista user; I found it quite useful since 1996 (when I started browsing using Netscape at the University of Geneva) and I was frankly happy with it; I was not looking for another search engine. All the others I had used were not as good, so I kept using AltaVista for years. I knew how to cope with the poor result sorting, and I would usually find what I was looking for, typically as a link buried in page 4 or 5 of the search results screen. It was like that, it took time, and more often than not, I did not find what I wanted.

However, one day I saw a colleague at work looking for something at a new search engine, called “Google“. I asked her the URL, typed it on my browser, and started to use it. I haven’t stopped since. Google was (and is) amazing. It is rather unusual for me to have to go to page 2 or 3 of the search results: I usually find what I’m looking for, right in the first page. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is the sign that shows how smart the backend engine is (as well as the team that created it). Joel Spolsky was among the first to notice this at the time, I think.

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TCP Friendliness

TCP congestion control tries to bring solutions to the problem of packet loss, which happens in networks for several reasons:

  1. Increasing number of hosts connected to the network;
  2. Increased traffic to and from the hosts;
  3. Limited capacity of routers in between hosts and networks (Kurose & Ross, page 254).

Congestion is an important problem raised by multimedia streaming applications, where a high quantity of UDP packets (typically with audio and video information) is sent through the network with important rates. The problem with this approach is that UDP has no congestion traffic, and as such packets might be dropped by routers if a buffer overflow occurs. TCP, on the other hand, provides network congestion management, but

“TCP is not well-suited for many applications such as streaming multimedia, because TCP congestion control algorithms introduce large variations in the congestion window size (and corresponding large variations in the sending rate)”

(Kyasanur)

Network congestion, in turn, has complex consequences in terms of lower perceived quality of service, which is easily seen by the low quality of IP telephony communications in peak hours, bad quality video connections, and the commercial implications of these problems (difficulty to newcomers to provide innovative services, low acceptance by end users, etc). Continue reading