breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.
breve simulations are written in an easy to use language called steve. The language is object-oriented and borrows many features from languages such as C, Perl and Objective C, but even users without previous programming experience will find it easy to jump in. More information on the steve language can be found in the documentation section.
breve features an extensible plugin architecture which allows you to write your own plugins and interact with your own code. Writing plugins is simple and allows you to expand breve to work with existing projects. Plugins have been written in breve to generate MIDI music, download web pages, interact with a Lisp environment and interact with the “push” language. To develop your own plugins, you’ll need to download the plugin SDK from the download section.
Why Newswire? Newswire is a peer-to-peer, fully decentralized system that brings news to your desktop, within seconds after it is published. This technology gives the community the power to weave a collaborative infrastructure for the delivery of essential information to individuals in a robust, scalable and secure way. Newswire is a survivable system which will deliver news to subscribers even if large parts of the infrastructure are under attack or stress.
The development of Newswire followed discussions after the 9/11 attacks when flash-crowd effects made it impossible for many to reach essential news sites. Email and weblogs proved more effective technologies in that situation, although both still suffer from the centralized risks of overload and single-point-of-failure. A more robust approach is to use a peer-to-peer structuring of the system and provide strong incentives for people to collaborate on the delivery of information to everyone by giving up a bit of bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Newswire has the additional effect that it can significantly reduce the load on the websites carrying real-time news information by providing hints about when information has changed. This would change the frequent redundant poll behavior seen by many news sites into more effective visits.
The Newswire Technology What is the technology that makes Newswire so special? At the core is epidemic communication and state management to maintain distributed knowledge about subscriptions, participant network capabilities and forwarding load. The epidemic technology was first developed by Alan Demers and friends at PARC, but has been completely revised at Cornell in the past years
The structuring into zones and virtual hierarchies is based on the small worlds phenomenon. When you organize participants into small groups of local participants with some knowledge of other remote nodes you can construct very effective routes in a decentralized, autonomous manner.
These technologies are used to build a loosely coupled, dynamic overlay network, that continuously monitors network load and capacities to achieve a fair load.
Subscription information stored in Bloom Filters is aggregated such that simple forwarding decisions can be made anywhere in the network based on the location of the publication and the direction where possible subscriber are localed.
… that having to scale up your system is no longer a burden, but it becomes an advantage and you can deliver on the true promise of scale-out: more nodes means a more robust system.
We have had some legal issues with the deployment of the newswire beta, and a new core communication component is being developed. But I would be happy to break open the ideas in the system and work with others to see whether this can be a good experimentation platform.
The Ninth Circuit had found Napster liable because the company itself maintained and controlled the servers that searched for the digital files its users wanted to download. Grokster and StreamCast, by contrast, operate decentralized systems that allow users to find each other over the Internet and then exchange files directly. Consequently, the appeals court said, the two services did not exercise the kind of control that could lead to legal liability for infringing uses.
Courtesy of zLab Associate Kevin Hughes’ KevsNews:
Slashdot | Decentralizing Bittorrent
… “Exeem is a new file-sharing application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. Exeem is a decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network. At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. Currently, the network is in beta testing and already has 5,000 users (the beta testing is closed.) Once this program goes public, its potential is enormous. “
…the fraction of all [US] retail sales that are conducted via E-Commerce … [is] still only 2 percent, at about $17.6 billion out of $916.5 billion last quarter. The growth rate for [US] E-Commerce is about 2-3 times the pace for total retail sales, but even though that sounds like a lot, it will take a while for the E-Commerce share to become very important in the aggregate. (Simple extrapolation of the last five quarters of growth in each series would get to an 8 percent share in another 10 years.)
(I’ve taken the liberty of inserting qualifiers in the text — the original author seems to have thought unimportant the distinction between ecommerce and American ecommerce. But he’s talking about American ecommerce and quoting figures from this Census Bureau report.)
So there’s still a lot of B2C commerce that’s still not using the web. Even in the $23-billion-a-year American book industry, Amazon has a minority — Amazon’s selling US$2 billion a year in the US but $5.8 billion a year overall. (Notice, again we have the long tail: Amazon has the most online transactions, but most online transactions aren’t on Amazon. America has the most sales, but most sales aren’t in America.) I think online book sales in general are only a small multiple of Amazon’s sales, and Amazon apparently only has around 9% of the book market (assuming all of Amazon’s sales are books, which isn’t quite true).
So American retail ecommerce is 2% of American retail sales; presumably in the world, ecommerce is an even smaller percentage, particularly by PPP. Even in industries like book publishing, which is almost perfectly suited to online selling (large numbers of different products, each highly standardized, costing many dollars per kilogram, not perishable, requiring significant research to find products suited to the buyer) online selling seems to be a minority of all selling.
How can we make ecommerce more useful? It clearly has a long way to go.
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2004-12-07 15:22:392012-03-26 17:03:31E-commerce is still tiny
A “Decentralized” A-life Visualizer
Decentralizationthe breve simulation environment : home
breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.
breve simulations are written in an easy to use language called steve. The language is object-oriented and borrows many features from languages such as C, Perl and Objective C, but even users without previous programming experience will find it easy to jump in. More information on the steve language can be found in the documentation section.
breve features an extensible plugin architecture which allows you to write your own plugins and interact with your own code. Writing plugins is simple and allows you to expand breve to work with existing projects. Plugins have been written in breve to generate MIDI music, download web pages, interact with a Lisp environment and interact with the “push” language. To develop your own plugins, you’ll need to download the plugin SDK from the download section.
Klein, J. 2002. breve: a 3D simulation environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life. Proceedings of Artificial Life VIII, the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems. The MIT Press.
[from a recommendation by Kai Mildenberger]
Newswire: Cornell’s decentralized news network (“zNN”)
DecentralizationNewswire – Collaborative real-time content delivery
Vogels pointed to half a dozen really great papers in All Things Distributed: Epidemic Computing at Cornell
Also, he noted: All Things Distributed: Wired on the Scalability of Feed Aggregators
The Supremes Learn About Sharing
Decentralization[NYT] Justices to Hear Case on Sharing of Music Files
The Ninth Circuit had found Napster liable because the company itself maintained and controlled the servers that searched for the digital files its users wanted to download. Grokster and StreamCast, by contrast, operate decentralized systems that allow users to find each other over the Internet and then exchange files directly. Consequently, the appeals court said, the two services did not exercise the kind of control that could lead to legal liability for infringing uses.
Decentralizing BitTorrent
DecentralizationCourtesy of zLab Associate Kevin Hughes’ KevsNews:
Slashdot | Decentralizing Bittorrent
… “Exeem is a new file-sharing application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. Exeem is a decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network. At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. Currently, the network is in beta testing and already has 5,000 users (the beta testing is closed.) Once this program goes public, its potential is enormous. “
E-commerce is still tiny
CommerceBrad DeLong quotes Andrew Samwick:
(I’ve taken the liberty of inserting qualifiers in the text — the original author seems to have thought unimportant the distinction between ecommerce and American ecommerce. But he’s talking about American ecommerce and quoting figures from this Census Bureau report.)
So there’s still a lot of B2C commerce that’s still not using the web. Even in the $23-billion-a-year American book industry, Amazon has a minority — Amazon’s selling US$2 billion a year in the US but $5.8 billion a year overall. (Notice, again we have the long tail: Amazon has the most online transactions, but most online transactions aren’t on Amazon. America has the most sales, but most sales aren’t in America.) I think online book sales in general are only a small multiple of Amazon’s sales, and Amazon apparently only has around 9% of the book market (assuming all of Amazon’s sales are books, which isn’t quite true).
(As another footnote, eBay’s gross merchandise volume is around $30 billion, of which more than half was in the US’s $70 billion a year [from the above Census report].)
So American retail ecommerce is 2% of American retail sales; presumably in the world, ecommerce is an even smaller percentage, particularly by PPP. Even in industries like book publishing, which is almost perfectly suited to online selling (large numbers of different products, each highly standardized, costing many dollars per kilogram, not perishable, requiring significant research to find products suited to the buyer) online selling seems to be a minority of all selling.
How can we make ecommerce more useful? It clearly has a long way to go.