Some guys at Microsoft (in a paper arguing that file sharing is unstoppable) believe that some guys at MIT have engineered a efficient and highly scalable way of searching a P2P network where node connectivity is intermittent in what they call CHORD (google Chord peer).
The abstract from a CHORD whitepaper:
"A fundamental problem that confronts peer-to-peer applications is the efficient location of the node that stores a desired data item. This paper presents Chord, a distributed lookup protocol that addresses this problem. Chord provides support for just one operation: given a key, it maps the key onto a node. Data location can be easily implemented on top of Chord by associating a key with each data item, and storing the key/data item pair at the node to which the key maps. Chord adapts efficiently as nodes join and leave the system, and can answer queries even if the system is continuously changing. Results from theoretical analysis and simulations show that Chord is scalable: communication cost and the state maintained by each node scale logarithmically with the number of Chord nodes."
Sounds kind of similar to what Freenet is doing.
I've been really intrigued by those White LEDs ever since Curt showed us his LED miner's lamp.
Here's someone who's putting white LEDs to a noble cause:
http://www.rolexawards.com/laureates/laureate2.jsp?id=0067
And, it looks like you can buy LED Christmas lights now. Fraction of the energy, extremely long lasting, and you don't to worry about the tree starting on fire. I think I'm going to check these things out:
http://www.foreverbright.com/
http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/xmas1.htm
Nov 18th, 2002: The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is reporting that experiments into the properties of blue LEDs has led to the discovery that the material used in them may be very suitable for creating high efficiency solar cells- that is, they can make use of more of the full spectrum of sunlight than a normal cell.
Karen Stephenson’s Quantum Theory of Trust is an interesting article about the informal social networks that we participate in, especially as relates to our work environment. Analysis of these networks can give a picture of the health of an organization in these categories:
-work
-socializing
-innovation
-expertise
-career guidance
-learning
as well as who the key individuals for these and what type of people they might be best paired with to remove blockages.
A directory of RSS newsreaders.
The first one that I clicked on, Reptile, really resonates with me. Here's some of it's cool features:
-Reptile clients cache content. If the news feed is down, you can fetch it from your peers.
-a reputation system for any object, be it an entire channel or an individual article. (Wow, I wonder how the content on DayPop would change if everyone who used a newsreader and ranked articles influenced the top 40 instead of just a few thousand influential blogs)
Plus the author seems to be pretty smart and influential. I like the idea of having GUIDs in RSS articles, it would make them uniquely addressable (and P2P searchable) and support my idea for a discussion tool (Usenet2?) that has conversations centered around / started with a piece of publically available content.