David Barrett wrote:

> Thus so far as I can tell, as much a fan I am of centralized designs,
> anything that keeps realtime bandwidth off of the server seems like a win,
> HAVE vectors included.

This is an instance of the general question of whether P2P is more 
efficient than centralization. For example, it has been argued that 
BitTorrent is less efficient than HTTP, because for a given transfer 
(e.g. 100 downloads of a 1GB file), BT transfers more total bytes over 
the Internet. I think this is the wrong measure of efficiency, since 
some bytes cost more than others. P2P is about "wasting" bandwidth and 
CPU that has zero marginal cost (peers) to save nonzero-marginal-cost 
bandwidth and CPU (servers).

Of course, a working system trumps theoretical considerations, so if you 
can make a centralized system work well, more power to you.

Wes Felter - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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