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P2P in 2001
nihilist_1137 writes: "Zdnet is reporting that P2P is becoming more used in business. "It's now over two years since a few underground song-swapping services put peer-to-peer technology firmly at the forefront of the IT agenda... A look back at some of the more significant P2P stories of 2001 shows that -- although not a new concept -- P2P is starting to assume a very important role in the corporate space, as tech giants scramble to succeed in this new market."" Hard to believe that the Napster battles have been going on for two years now.
p2p is good technology, but from a management standpoint, p2p is missing one major portion that the client-server model isn't: Control
Even if authentication is there, if logging is there, management ( at least the ones I have run into) like the idea of a central, impenetrable bastion of information, with big pretty accounting graphs. It is a large firewall to bringing about change in anything other than a pure technology-oriented business.
AWG
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How can this parent not be flamebait? This issue here is not distributed computing. Distributed computing implies that there will be more than more CPU in more than one PC, working together to accomplish a single result. P2P doesn't really match this pattern at all. P2P does two things on your box. it sends and it receives. Now, I'm not trying to over simplify the deal, but short of their own very special search/connect algorithm, these are a glorified FTP server/client combo apps. But they are not truly "distributed".
God bless'em for what they are, and what they have allowed me to see and hear. The reason this type of application is news worthy is because it is the absolute fastest, easiest, and most reliable way for me to access content on the net that I can't find via other channels. These apps make big news because it fell into the laps of every day citizens, and opened u[ a whole new world for them.
pointym5, do you see what I mean? No, wait. I don't care. your do elite for these things, I don't know why I bother.
"One area of P2P that saw plenty of development in 2001 was instant messaging."
Yahoo! IM, ICQ, AIM, etc. are not P2P. They are pretty server-centric systems.
I think I'm going to go try Jabber.
The folks at OpenCola have thought up a really cool use of P2P - to Save a website's Bandwidth Problems. The technology allows websites to send parts of a large file to individual users, and then each user uses P2P to get the rest of the file. I think it's a really cool way to stop net congestion. No wonder they're one of Fortune's 25 cool companies of 2001.
Actually... Napster's backend can sort by network distance (we have the ability to determine the network distance between two arbitrary IPs in log(N) time), but we only enabled it for Internet2.
So for example, we know Sprint peers with UUnet and so Sprint users would see Sprint users first, UUnet users next. Doing it at the AS level is far easier than actually attempting to map the actual hop distance between every arbitrary point on the Internet.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.