ZwiSter
01-08-2007, 04:21 PM
This text is an extension of the release notes of Phex 3.0. Opinions expressed herein are only the opinions of Arne Babenhauserheite, not of the Phex Team in general or of any other member of the Phex Team.
Phex is a free and highly configurable p2p Program for MaxOSX, Linux and Windows, running on the Gnutella Network.
The original release notes can be found on phex.org (http://phex.org).
With Version 3.0 Phex has its first major release since July 2004, and we'll take this chance to have a look back, a look on the wealth of new things which found their way into this cunning fox in the course of two years.
(The impatient among you can simply jump to the changes since 2.8.10).
Much has happened since Phex 2.0.
FileSharing in General
On the filesharing side, we saw the fall of KaZaA, which looked like the rising star in p2p, till it was brought down by spammers, the RIAA, and its own faulty hashing system, and we saw the rise of BitTorrent as a distribution-tool for the internet, as well as a rebirth of Gnutella with LimeWire as its thriving force.
The different p2p networks all evolved, some more and some less. While BitTorrent saw decentral torrents and multi-file torrents and edonkey changed to overnet to become decentral using the kademlia DHT, Gnutella saw improvements on almost every front (broad adoption of dynamic querying, QRP and UDP-Host Caching and much more, for infos, see gnufu.net (http://gnufu.net)), and its userbase is still rising, but Gnutella also witnessed the fall of Bearshare (which surrendered everything it had to the RIAA), while other client-developers stood firm against legal threats.
FileSharing and the Law
But it wasn't the only network, which has been attacked. Hundreds of lawsuits against the users of almost every non-anonymous p2p-network are filed each month, and the media-industrie speaks of a triumph, a triumph which seems to shine in the downbreaking of major bittorrent-sites, the fall of KaZaA and raids on many individual users. But even in the most glorious hour of that media-industry, filesharing continues to thrive, sites like thepiratebay.org (http://thepiratebay.org) openly stand against the threats of RIAA and MPAA and the number of Gnutella users rises steadily, and in that way everything the media corporations accomplished crumbles to dust, as more and more people realize, that the media-industry does not care the least about good music or great artists or even about their customers, but only about making as much money as possible with providing as little content as possible in return - in quantity as well as in quality. And so they make a reality, what was only an irrational fear in the beginning: People stop buying their stuff, because who would buy from the people who just sued a close friend or relative?
New allies
And now, in the looming shadows of the crumbling dynasty of those dinosaurs, new businesses like http://jamendo.com spring to life, which harness the power of p2p-networks, while staying true and fair to customers and artists alike, and who wholeheartedly embrace free licenses like those found at creativecommons.org (http://creativecommons.org), artlibre.org (http://artlibre.org) and gnu.org (http://gnu.org) .
So while the old giants still try to cling to their power using legal threats and suing the ones, who give them their money, the music business is ever faster being taken out of their hands by those who see the chances for innovation and who know, that fairness and real freedom is a value for their customers and fans, and also know that money can be made without stealing freedom from those, who provide their daily food by gladly paying for good products; a philosophy you can very strongly see in those masterminds, who get us the thrilling machinima series Bloodspell (http://www.bloodspell.com/) and merge their creative works with musicians who also thrive in the creative commons.
And as we see all these exciting developements, which transform the internet as we know it into an even stronger tool for freedom, Phex now comes to Version 3.0, and while the revolutions in Phex might not be as obvious as those in the free media scene, there is much to get you excited in the shape of this cunning fox.
Phex 3.0
Among the first things you'll notice when switching from 2.0 to 3.0 (skipping all those versions in between to get a real taste of the changes) are the much improved search, download and library pane, which now feature user-defined filters, user-selectable download-strategies and regexp filtering for your shared files, as well as completed translations into German, Dutch, French and Turkish.
But those are just the paintings on the fur of this quickly evolving fox. In its belly, muscle and bones there have been fundamental changes, which make this fox faster and more cunning than ever.
Switch to Java 1.5
First, really deep down inside, we now switch to Java 1.5, exactly like we switched from Java 1.3 to Java 1.4 in Version 2.0. This means, we'll have a hell of a lot of chances for optimizing and doing things we couldn't do before without hacking too deep to keep it cross-platform.
Rewritten Download Code
Also we rewrote all of the download code, which now saves into single files instead of the collection of parts it used before, and which now allows you to throttle the bandwidth used for each single download. We did this to get a full integration of the changes done by Nick Farrel, who did the first step into the download strategies by making it possible to choose download-parts by their availability, which now is the default way Phex uses: It downloads the rarest parts first (those which are avaible from the least number of hosts). Also the size of download-segments is now adjusted in such a way, that each segment takes a user-configurable amount of time (just take a look into the Download options), so Phex chooses bigger segments from faster sources and smaller segments from slower ones. This makes downloads less prone to waiting forever on the last segment and increases overall download speed..
The strategies allow you to configure for each download, if it should priorize segments from the beginning of the file, from beginning and end, random parts or rare parts. You can get more indepth information on strategies at Download Strategy (http://wiki.phex.org/Download_Strategy).
Also the download pane was redesigned to give you more information in a simpler way and to make it more pleasing to the eye (and you might want to check, if you can see that fox twinkling :) ).
Read on in part two (http://www.unitethecows.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15649).
Phex is a free and highly configurable p2p Program for MaxOSX, Linux and Windows, running on the Gnutella Network.
The original release notes can be found on phex.org (http://phex.org).
With Version 3.0 Phex has its first major release since July 2004, and we'll take this chance to have a look back, a look on the wealth of new things which found their way into this cunning fox in the course of two years.
(The impatient among you can simply jump to the changes since 2.8.10).
Much has happened since Phex 2.0.
FileSharing in General
On the filesharing side, we saw the fall of KaZaA, which looked like the rising star in p2p, till it was brought down by spammers, the RIAA, and its own faulty hashing system, and we saw the rise of BitTorrent as a distribution-tool for the internet, as well as a rebirth of Gnutella with LimeWire as its thriving force.
The different p2p networks all evolved, some more and some less. While BitTorrent saw decentral torrents and multi-file torrents and edonkey changed to overnet to become decentral using the kademlia DHT, Gnutella saw improvements on almost every front (broad adoption of dynamic querying, QRP and UDP-Host Caching and much more, for infos, see gnufu.net (http://gnufu.net)), and its userbase is still rising, but Gnutella also witnessed the fall of Bearshare (which surrendered everything it had to the RIAA), while other client-developers stood firm against legal threats.
FileSharing and the Law
But it wasn't the only network, which has been attacked. Hundreds of lawsuits against the users of almost every non-anonymous p2p-network are filed each month, and the media-industrie speaks of a triumph, a triumph which seems to shine in the downbreaking of major bittorrent-sites, the fall of KaZaA and raids on many individual users. But even in the most glorious hour of that media-industry, filesharing continues to thrive, sites like thepiratebay.org (http://thepiratebay.org) openly stand against the threats of RIAA and MPAA and the number of Gnutella users rises steadily, and in that way everything the media corporations accomplished crumbles to dust, as more and more people realize, that the media-industry does not care the least about good music or great artists or even about their customers, but only about making as much money as possible with providing as little content as possible in return - in quantity as well as in quality. And so they make a reality, what was only an irrational fear in the beginning: People stop buying their stuff, because who would buy from the people who just sued a close friend or relative?
New allies
And now, in the looming shadows of the crumbling dynasty of those dinosaurs, new businesses like http://jamendo.com spring to life, which harness the power of p2p-networks, while staying true and fair to customers and artists alike, and who wholeheartedly embrace free licenses like those found at creativecommons.org (http://creativecommons.org), artlibre.org (http://artlibre.org) and gnu.org (http://gnu.org) .
So while the old giants still try to cling to their power using legal threats and suing the ones, who give them their money, the music business is ever faster being taken out of their hands by those who see the chances for innovation and who know, that fairness and real freedom is a value for their customers and fans, and also know that money can be made without stealing freedom from those, who provide their daily food by gladly paying for good products; a philosophy you can very strongly see in those masterminds, who get us the thrilling machinima series Bloodspell (http://www.bloodspell.com/) and merge their creative works with musicians who also thrive in the creative commons.
And as we see all these exciting developements, which transform the internet as we know it into an even stronger tool for freedom, Phex now comes to Version 3.0, and while the revolutions in Phex might not be as obvious as those in the free media scene, there is much to get you excited in the shape of this cunning fox.
Phex 3.0
Among the first things you'll notice when switching from 2.0 to 3.0 (skipping all those versions in between to get a real taste of the changes) are the much improved search, download and library pane, which now feature user-defined filters, user-selectable download-strategies and regexp filtering for your shared files, as well as completed translations into German, Dutch, French and Turkish.
But those are just the paintings on the fur of this quickly evolving fox. In its belly, muscle and bones there have been fundamental changes, which make this fox faster and more cunning than ever.
Switch to Java 1.5
First, really deep down inside, we now switch to Java 1.5, exactly like we switched from Java 1.3 to Java 1.4 in Version 2.0. This means, we'll have a hell of a lot of chances for optimizing and doing things we couldn't do before without hacking too deep to keep it cross-platform.
Rewritten Download Code
Also we rewrote all of the download code, which now saves into single files instead of the collection of parts it used before, and which now allows you to throttle the bandwidth used for each single download. We did this to get a full integration of the changes done by Nick Farrel, who did the first step into the download strategies by making it possible to choose download-parts by their availability, which now is the default way Phex uses: It downloads the rarest parts first (those which are avaible from the least number of hosts). Also the size of download-segments is now adjusted in such a way, that each segment takes a user-configurable amount of time (just take a look into the Download options), so Phex chooses bigger segments from faster sources and smaller segments from slower ones. This makes downloads less prone to waiting forever on the last segment and increases overall download speed..
The strategies allow you to configure for each download, if it should priorize segments from the beginning of the file, from beginning and end, random parts or rare parts. You can get more indepth information on strategies at Download Strategy (http://wiki.phex.org/Download_Strategy).
Also the download pane was redesigned to give you more information in a simpler way and to make it more pleasing to the eye (and you might want to check, if you can see that fox twinkling :) ).
Read on in part two (http://www.unitethecows.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15649).