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."

Comments

Central Server vs. P2P

[nascarguy27]

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.

You have no privacy, get over it.

[Zigurd]

"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.