On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 04:53:06PM +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: > Tony Bowden sent the following bits through the ether: > > He did a keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference last > > week, based roughly on the book. > > Did you go?
Yes. > Was it an interesting conference? Yes. > Is p2p the future? No. It's the present :) My personal take is that we'll start seeing more and more web-based applications move, at least partially, to the desktop, co-ordinating initially with centralised servers, but then gradually moving to a purer 'P2P' type set-up. As an example, think of a web-based corporate 'address book' application. Currently anyone looking up an address would load a page of a central web server. But it's relatively simple to have that move to each employee's PC (which may well be more powerful than the server), at least for querying - but still as a web-based application. For updates, for now it would probably still submit to a central database, which would then get sent out to the individual PCs. But it wouldn't be too difficult to have this percolate in a P2P manner, removing the need for the centralised server altogether. There's obviously a lot of problems in making something like this really work in a large organisation, but they're mostly not 'pure' technology issues at this point. I think that most of this stuff will follow the maxim that people are massively over-estimating the short-term effects, but massively under-estimating the long-term effects. > I looked at some of the presentations and they seemed quite > interesting: > http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/18/presentations.html There were a lot of interesting presentations. I've only just got back, as I was in Boston afterwards, so I haven't gotten around to writing them up yet, but as I do they'll appear on my weblog: http://www.tmtm.com/insanity Tony
