>>>>> "Tony" == Tony Bowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Tony> As an example, think of a web-based corporate 'address book'
Tony> application. Currently anyone looking up an address would
Tony> load a page of a central web server. But it's relatively
Tony> simple to have that move to each employee's PC (which may well
Tony> be more powerful than the server), at least for querying - but
Tony> still as a web-based application.
But, it's not. That's a potentially huge amount of data; people aren't
going to want to transfer that data to every machine they might want to
use, they're going to want a nice, central, authoritative LDAP server to
talk to.
There's lots of talk of making decentralised search engines, too, which
I also don't see the point of. The reason Google[1] works so well is
that it has _all_ of the data, and can run inference on pages based on
how many other pages mention them, and where they fit in to the grand
scheme of things for a particular search request.
I like the idea of p2p a lot, but there are so many scenarios in which
it cripples the service it's trying to decentralise..
- Chris.
[1]: Or, for example, http://www.alltheweb.com/ *cough*. </plug>
--
$a="printf.net"; Chris Ball | chris@void.$a | www.$a | finger: chris@$a
chris@lexis:~$ perl -le'@a=($^O eq 'darwin')?qw(100453 81289 9159):qw
(23152 19246 2040);while(<>){chomp;push @b,$_ if grep {$.==$_}@a}push
@b,$^X;print ucfirst join(" ",@b[2,0,3,1]).","'</usr/share/dict/words
