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Interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman
ReadWriteWeb writes "To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Richard MacManus interviewed two senior engineers from Sun Microsystems - Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview discusses the past and future of the Web, including the impact that Sun's servers have had over the years. Also discussed is the reason why Tim and Radia believe that P2P won't be a driving force on the Web going forward. Radia thinks that having central sites where people can register is key to making the Web scalable and more secure."
Q. Why an interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web?
.com of course!
A. Because Sun put the . in
OK! ok, sorry, I'll get my coat.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
that decentralization was the driving force to even create DARPANET or TCP/IP. If we centralize everything again we might have some overhead on administration and traffic but when one or multiple nodes fail, the internet will still be there. If you centralize everything at say the USA and that country decides to implement the Great Firewall, you're pretty much boned.
Well, that's what I think of it... Isn't Sun almost dead?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I guess having a centralized server that is prone to attacks does make the internet more secure? How could I have been so stupid.
I wonder if Radia is an expert in Perl.
Radia Perlman is an expert in running a singular Radius server!
I SWEAR the subject line said "Rhea Perlman" when I first read it.
"they own your arse and every search query you ever use" Hang on...
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
This was a disappointment. I was really hoping for a lot more out of this interview. Two brilliant interviewees, (one of which is arguably the most influential and groundbreaking female engineer to ever work in this industry, the other is the creator of one of the most prevalent markup languages used); an interesting topic, (I'd like to know what these two think of the past 15 years, and more importantly, what they see to come); finally a simpering imp of an interviewer.
Let the two with the IQ's & overly impressive resumes do the talking. MacManus, I'm really hoping you're leaving all the good stuff for part 2. I didn't see much in the way of a single worthwhile question or topic. The writing was dry and elementary.
Mr. MacManus.. When you get people of this caliber to speak to you, don't treat it like a freshman project for the campus paper. Please do something before you release part 2... Or just toss that page into the fire before you embarrass yourself any more.
(P.S. It never hurts to plug your interviewees work either... "Interconnections" kicks ass...)
IMHO, The central server stucture is the way to go. The entity that owns the central server(s) can concentrate security on those server(s) and thus provide verification that you download what you wanted. You can also track payments and such easier with a central server structure. With P2P, you never know what you are going to get until you run the file, and it's harder to track for liscensing purposes and the like. P2P has been shown to be faster in some applications, but with people getting faster and faster connections to the internet, the speed advantage is going to be less in the future.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
"You have no privacy, get over it." - Scott McNealy
Although McNealy spent a lot of time and ink explaining his point of view, and claiming he was taken out of context, he never backed off that statement. In fact, he clarifies this way "If there were no audit trails and no fingerprints, there would be a lot more crime in this world. Audit trails deter lots of criminal activity. So all I'm suggesting, given that we all have ID cards anyhow, is to use the biometric and other forms of authentication that are way more powerful and way more accurate than the garbage we use today."
The part that is wrong about this is that audit trails are for government and corporate operations, to make sure they are honest and within the law, and within the bounds of their investors' and constituents contracts. Applying the same controls to individuals is oppressive, and McNealy should not have been surprised to find out many people objected to his view.
I wrote parts of this stuff
These two experts are talking from the corperate world angle.
Tracking every minute detail about your customer and being able to control them is #1 priority.
P2P as we know it is not even an option for business and corperate use. Audit trails, logging and control with recall capability is what they are talking about and is what is wanted by control freaks in the corperate world.
And they are right, that is what the corps want. Ignore the fact that most people HATE logging in at a site to access thigs and do not want to be tracked.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The other guy is an ass in a hat who likes to suck up to his management.
No contest.
Great, I thought - an interview with one of the brightest people I've ever worked with: must be full of insight and wisdom.
Don't even waste your time reading it. Just a couple of dull, out-of-context remarks about P2P that the interviewer picked out of what I hope was a rather more interesting conversation. Who is Richard MacManus - and why?
Central sites?
Hmm... I thought Sun's slogan was, "The network is the computer".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Google is based on a network of x-number (say 500,000) of low-grade server pcs.
They layer on a highly redundant, fault tolerant, hot-computer-swappable,
massively distributed file system.
This is a much smarter solution for reliability than centralization. Further
decentralization (even across corporate boundaries) would lead to even less risk of
information loss.
Consider that one single corporation, even with massive decentralization, is still
vulnerable to a single legal attack by a single misguided corporation or government.
A distributed, encrypted, cache-migrating filesystem layer on top of millions of
anonymous peer computers would be even more secure and reliable.
The fact that 1 expensive Sun computer can be replaced by 2 or 3 (or 10 or 20)
commodity pcs networked together is what is causing the death of Sun.
And make no mistake; unless Sun reinvents its business model to FULLY recognize the
power of commodity-computing and decentralization, it WILL complete its long death
spiral, or live out a weak, pathetic old age selling replacement Sun "mainframes" to
technically locked-in fortune 500 customers.
Note: You can re-introduce a layer that creates virtual "centralization" and "registration"
on top of a fully decentralized, encrypted, and migrating filesystem layer, if you need
to. Google already does this. So the argument made in the article is specious.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Radia wrote a poem called "Algorhyme", modified from another poem by Joyce Kilmer, "Trees":
I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span.
So packets can reach every LAN.
First the Root must be selected
By ID it is elected.
Least cost paths from Root are traced
In the tree these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
I think you need to make a distinction between logical and physical centralization.
It's possible (as your Google example points out) to have a physically decentralized system which is logically "centralized," at least insofar as it can be made to look like a monolithic system.
It's this sort of thing which seems to have a lot of possibilities in the future. Having all your eggs in one basket is just asking for trouble (just ask Napster, or the people who had their websites run out of New Orleans datacenters last year). But having to deal with a distributed/decentralized environment is hard, and it's limiting. Networks which can self-organize, and then present a unified front to the outside world, are really the future. It's sort of a reversal of the old client server model: instead of taking a single server and creating lots of little virtual server volumes, and showing them to many clients, you instead take lots of processing/storage nodes and abstract them into a single VM, and then present that to the user or the user's applications as a whole.
I'm not saying it's a magic bullet -- having a distributed system that's logically centralized makes it almost as vulnerable to malware as a true centralized system (because by centralizing it, you provide an avenue for a virus to spread or affect large amounts of data) -- but it does solve a lot of the problems inherent in old-style centralized systems while retaining some of their advantages.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
http://www.jxta.org/
Does Radia even know about this? One of few projects Sun funds and hasn't been canned because it actually makes money.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Those who want to sell us a centralized internet conveniently forget why the internet was created in the first place and why even before that the old centralized configurations were traded in for decentralized computing in the '70s and '80s. But it's always lucrative to sell you all new stuff, and if you're a server manufacturer there's not much profit margin in P2P...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Given some of the comments about wanting more context, I've now done a podcast of the entire interview.