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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.
I didn't know that Intel had released a P2P library until I read this article. There's no link to the library from the article, so I looked it up. Turns out the library is released under the BSD library and is hosted on Sourceforge.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
In the old days, our computers talked to each other. I send you a mail, and my VAX sends it to your Sun. Then, everybody put a PC on their desk, and everything was centralized. I send you an email, it goes to my mail server, then to your mail server, then to your computer.
Well, now we're back again! Imagine that! Bring out the VCs! Bring out the patents!
I predict by 2005, we'll see a new form of P2P that uses a Central Peer for maximum performance. Get this folks, we all know how great P2P is, but sometimes it can be inefficient. What if your peer is down? Why not forward your data to a Central Peer, which is a beefy computer that can handle lots of data, and let it worry about the details? So your computers are on the Edge, and the big computer is at the Center of a big conversation. In fact, the Edge computers don't even have to talk to one another, they can just communicate with the Central Peer.
I dub this exciting new invention: Center/Edge computing. I have a patent, and lawyers.
Yawn.
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.
P2P is an abstract model for communication between 2 or more points. It exists in our phone switching networks (~100 years), Internet (~25 years), most common network-based software (~20 years), etc. Does your company use sendmail, or maybe even Exchange? SMTP is a P2P transport. Perhaps you read news? NNTP is a P2P transport.
The notion that Napster (or any other file sharing system) can lay claim to any part of the P2P phenomenon, aside from raising awareness, is absolutely ridiculous. The notion that P2P is just now starting to gain a foothold in businesses is fiendeshly drug-induced.
The hype still continues. Ignorance pervades. What they really mean is "distributed", and even then most reporters are still talking out of their asses.
--jordan