* Tony Bowden ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 10:39:53PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote: > > It sounds like the model you're proposing is centralised-with-caching, > > rather than p2p. > > In the short/medium term, absolutely. AS I said in the original: > 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. > > For most things, I see this happening as an intermediate stage. Most > desktop machines spend most of their time (even when being used) doing > next to nothing. Organisations have a huge amount of potential > processing power on the desktop, but aren't using it.
What do they need this power for? I agree its a shame that its not being used, but what is the average company going to do with it? Sorry If I'm being thick, but I just can't think of anything that an average company (i'm ignoring scientific companies and major financial organisations) can parallelise efficiently across lots of PCs. > More and more work will be pushed back to the desktop. This was > the trend in computing for a long time. Until the web explosion pushed > everything back to a client/server model again. Hmm, I'm not sure the web is what I'd traditionally think of as a C/S model, ymmv. > Even your average commercial web site doesn't take full advantage yet of > the power in most of the recent browsers, that would allow so much more > to be achieved on the client before needing to send another request back > to the server. As people start discovering what can be done with this, I > think we'll start to see quite a major reduction in the number of > round-trip requests needed to achieve many web-based tasks. Which is > good for everyone (except maybe the bandwidth companies!). Less load on > the server is good. Less waiting on the part of the user. Are you thinking about something like a supermarket site sending lots of product information in one go and then letting the customer browse using Javascript on their local machine? > > Isn't this all just adding latency to the client->server model without > > really taking away any centralisation or adding any benefits? Never underestimate the power of taking some old technology and adding a liberal dose of pseudo technical marketting bullshit and this isn't a bad thing in my book. Greg -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/ jabber:[EMAIL PROTECTED] msn:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
