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P2P Developers Stand Up To Intel
Simone submits this article about two different visions of peer-to-peer computing - one from Tim O'Reilly, and one from the Intel corporation. (O'Reilly expounds further in his column). Watch and cheer from the sidelines as the mega-corps jockey to control the buzzword standards process, turn it into a useless mush, and are surpassed by protocols that work.
So, we have here a definition that makes servers talking to PC's a P2P relationship. . . hmm. . . don't ftp, and http, and nfs fall into this category? Of course they do. The truth of the matter is that the suits-and-ties-and-power-lunches-and-buzzword crowd are just now discovering the nature of the internet. . . That any computer can talk to any other computer (provided it has an assigned IP). So what all this P2P "buzz" is really about is just what high-level software protocol standards we'll use to facilitate peering different machines in a given situation. E.g. how will "my" e-commerce server talk to your credit-card validation service server to know that the customer can or can't purchase from me.
I do agree with you though that this is a lot of people spouting hot-air right now.
I know you understand what P2P is; perhaps you don't fully realize how it is different from the old-school internet model is.
The fundamental difference is obsoletes the "mainframe style" of computing which Sun thrives (i.e. of selling a few high powered servers) and instead has a lower-powered server at everyone's home.
See why Intel loves this?
Intel's fundamental business plan is two-fold: to get more people to use computers, and to get more people to use more powerful computers.
Intel is active in bridging the digital divide, making computers easier to use, and more accessible, attempting to achieve the first goal. But they are also active in trying to get people to use more powerful computers, and they are constantly developing new software technologies in order to demonstrate the need for more powerful computers. P2P is a glorious example of this.
I think Intel is imagining a world where every internet technology is peer-to-peer, such as e-mail, file sharing, and web technologies. It is fundamentally different from the current model because it gets rid of the powerful centralized server, and requires everyone to have a server.
Many people don't realize this, but internally, Intel considers Sun to be much more of a competitor than AMD. P2P is the one technology which has potential to make Sun irrelevant, because it makes big, centralized servers irrelevant, and replaces them with Intel desktop machines.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Or so old and bloody obvious that no-one before Intel thought that they could get away with making up a fancy name and marketing it.
Both Tim O'Reily and Intel are just blowing bullshit here. There is no such thing as "P2P", at least not in this new definition of it (that is the definition that they aren't sure what it is yet), and everybody except the press, the bullshitters, and the venture capitalists know it.
I mean, what exactly are Napster and Gnutella that makes them something new and revolutionary?
They are simply search engines (and rather bad ones compared to say Google) that can handle a high volatility of the hosts where the data is located. And the only reasons why this high volatility is present at all is that:
a) ISPs are doing their best to keep people from having static address where they could put normal servers. This partially because of the lack of IPv4 addresses, but mostly in order to maximise profits by having users that need servers require more expensive accounts.
b) The data they are being used to distribute is illegal and so non-volatile sites carying it are hunted down.
So, a) is caused by corporate stupitidy at the ISPs (many of whoom, I'm sure, will say they are P2P supporters now that it will help the stock price), and b) is because of the legal stupidity also known as copyright law (which has it's biggests supporters in companies like Sun, IBM, and Intel, all "P2P working group founders" according to the ZDnet story). There is no revolution here, just a clumsy workaround for a completely unnecessary problem. What these programs offer is simply the chance to download stuff that has been hunted off the web by lawyers working for the same corporate structure that now thinks "P2P" will be the next big money extorting machine for them...
I am one of the three or four lead designers/coders of one of the networks mentioned in the article, and I honestly couldn't give a rats ass how this working group is formed, or who controls it - at least until they can actually define what the fuck they are in control of, and what it is that makes this something new different.
(The project that I am a part of, Freenet, is trying to do something new, but what we are trying to achieve is only of the very surface connected to "P2P" as the money crowd sees it. And it will take years before we are ready (the Internet was given 25 years before the money crowd realized it was a prime rape target - why can't we have a tenth of that?))
Is anybody else tired of all these Three Letter Acronym buzzward fads that for the past year or two come long every few months and are proclaimed to be the greatest invention since blah and will become a market worth billions of dollars only for a few companies to IPO successfully just to tank a few months later.
Frankly I can't see how P2P is any less a meaningless buzzward filled, destined to fool a lot of investors, make a bunch of young CEOs rich, unproven, hype filled technology. Every time I open an issue of Fortune or Forbes I see some fool going on about how P2P is the next big thing and how Napster being so successful confirms this. Now unless I have been living in an alternate universe for the past year, Napster is not successful. They've spent millions of dollars obtaining lots of eyeballs, but the one thing the dot-comm massacre has shown us is that eyeballs do not necessarily transform into revenue. This reminds me of all the dotcomm evangelists who used to claim that B2C was the way to go because Amazon was so successful (even though they are yet to turn a profit and spend $150 million a year just to service their debts).
Second Law of Blissful Ignorance