OK, here's how I understand it. When the web first came out it was like a nice way for nuclear physicists etc. to share data. You knew what you wanted, you went to www.foggybottomuniversity.edu and got it. Great. Then the common man found out about the web and it became a huge mess. Then search engines came and tried to sort out the mess. These were neat for a while and then people got bored of them: outdated links, too much "control of information", etc. Then the file sharers came along and proposed to automate what web users were originally doing by hand: sharing information.
That sounds like a good idea. So I tried looking into a gnutella client and what do you know, there's not one but about five hundred billion different gnutella-ish programs. Most of them not necessarily compatible with each other. Of course I haven't tried all of them but I bet most of these pieces of software not only don't work, but never will work, because they're written by amateurs for no purpose whatsoever save the self-gratifying gloat of putting their greasy code on the net. I bet half these things are written by the same type of person who did that really sophisticated, visually stunning checkers game in my second-year programming class, which segfaulted after every attempt at a move. And what is the stated intent of these tools? To help people search for stuff on the net? That is, to help people wade through the extravagant amounts of redundant information on the net? Hah. -chris
