Can anyone talk to me about P2P (for homework)

[AntirhinumMajus]

I could do with some current examples of P2P

For:
Data (have Napster but it's a bit old)
Disk Storage (no idea?)
Processing (seti@home)
Bandwidth (don't even understand the reference)

Are there any others?
TIA

Is skype P2P?

I am so out of my depth

P2P (call me old-fashioned but I much prefer 'peer to peer') is any situation where individual machines work autonymously (rather than a server and a number of client machines, reporting back to the server).

I don't know quite what those topic headings are intended to mean - in the bulk of cases large quantities of data will be transferred.

You may find a few articles on wikipedia (sorry, only had 4 hours sleep yesterday/today and eyes near to closing while I type)...

Start from [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_(disambiguation) here] on Wiki and come back when all has been digested ?

Sorry if that's a bit of a cop-out, but I'd only have {poorly} tried to precis several articles and would end up indicating I found the info on Wiki, and that's likely to be better researched (since I claim no major expertise in that area).

Or even autonomously - told you I was tired !

Thanks

Struggling with homework & I appreciate your help

Yes Skype is a p2p app.

I'm a bit confused about some of the headings too. Could bandwidth be about the implications of a p2p network?

For example the original iPlayer used p2p technology to distribute files. One of the reasons that the BBC did this was to limit the effect of all that downloading on their network connections.

However the counter point was that the amount of traffic that ISPs were handling exploded.

"Normally" most users just download from the net and with broadband your download speed is faster than your upload. However with p2p people begin to use that upload capability and with the BBC iPlayer in particular particular strains were caused.

Peoples machines would also continue to upload even after iPlayer was quit, there being a separate component in the background that handled that side of things.

If people were on capped network connections their limit could be topped.

Oh and Bit-Torrent is a more up to date example of a "Napster" type of thing.

TBH I don't really understand it but there was an implication of bandwidth sharing

But I submitted it this morning & I hope it is all OK (at least as good as I could manage)