It's not clear what you mean by a "distributed centralized approach," George, because that's what P2P enables, if done correctly.
The biggest advantage of P2P, other than cost-shifting, is scalability, as the data center server has only so much CPU and bandwidth available.
Content distribution will clearly continue to happen as disk drives, CPUs, and bandwidth get cheaper, so there's not much to be gained by hiding your head in the sand and pretending that permanent laws of computer science are against distribution.
And as far as your argument on power goes, that's quite bizarre this late in the day. We did Wake On LAN in the 90s to adapt power consumption to activity, and it still works.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
P2P's biggest advantage is scalability. Think about that.
We're still at the beginning of the P2P era, and we make a serious mistake to assume that the things we can do with P2P today represent the limit of the technology. The IETF and DCIA are working to housebreak P2P's bandwidth appetite, which is currently its most objectionable feature.
Many of is access the Internet from multiple locations and multiple devices, for example, and we need to access the same set of personal data wherever we are. A home-based server is one way to do this, and one of the features of such a server is the ability to download content from diverse sources as a background activity. it makes sense for house-broken, legal P2P to be one of the options for this, and I see no reason it can't use RAID or any other disk technology natively.
I don't think users are wholly comfortable with entrusting personal data to a third party locker service, for example; I'd much rather have my personal data under my control.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
Disk drives are cheap enough now that RAID 1 mirroring is a practical and inexpensive backup system, George, and it doesn't have privacy issues.
Brett Glass
· 1 year ago
By the way, one of the most disingenuous labels I've seen yet is the DCIA's characterization of P2P as "distributed computing." P2P nodes do no computing except a small amount to figure out how to redistribute data VERBATIM, with no processing whatsoever! And perhaps they invest a bit to see just how thoroughly they can saturate the pipes and how effectively they can rob bandwidth from more important uses.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
It is a "distributed server network" though. I don't consider P2P a very well-behaved application at the moment, but with appropriate management it has some potentially interesting uses.
Brett Glass
· 1 year ago
Unfortunately, P2P can never be as efficient as a simple, direct download -- which in turn can never be one millionth as efficient as a broadcast medium such as the airwaves. There is only one thing it's good at: hiding the source of pirated content. Which is why it was invented....
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
Efficiency is nice, but there are other attributes that make engineered systems valuable. The scalability of P2P is its best feature, and it has that hands down over centralized client/server.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
Once again, I'm not making an efficiency argument, I'm making an argument for scalability. As the demand for a piece of content grows, P2P ensures that the bandwidth grows with it. and that applies to CPU and disk as well as communications bandwidth.
P2P does have some advantages over centralized client/server, and there's no sweeping that fact under the rug. Like DPI, P2P is a tool that can used for good or ill.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
The CDN model also has a hard limit on the number of streams it can serve, but P2P is more dynamic. Most dynamic systems are less efficient than static systems, but they have a place.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
CDN's don't deal with with transient effects, such as high peak demand for popular content. We've seen several examples of a popular piece of content creating meltdown on CDN servers, going back to the Victoria's Secret incident.
P2P has some definite uses, and does some things quite well.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
Nobody ever said otherwise. At the FCC hearing today, Mark Cuban touted Multicast, just like I did at Harvard. That's the ticket.
Richard Bennett
· 1 year ago
Dynamic transcoding is actually a common technique in IPTV systems today.
Getting into Switched Digitial Video is a fairly radical infrastructure change, but many cable systems are going that way. It plays hell with Cable Cards, but Cable Labs just green-lighted a couple of SDV boxes, so it's just a matter of money.
All Comments
The biggest advantage of P2P, other than cost-shifting, is scalability, as the data center server has only so much CPU and bandwidth available.
Content distribution will clearly continue to happen as disk drives, CPUs, and bandwidth get cheaper, so there's not much to be gained by hiding your head in the sand and pretending that permanent laws of computer science are against distribution.
And as far as your argument on power goes, that's quite bizarre this late in the day. We did Wake On LAN in the 90s to adapt power consumption to activity, and it still works.
We're still at the beginning of the P2P era, and we make a serious mistake to assume that the things we can do with P2P today represent the limit of the technology. The IETF and DCIA are working to housebreak P2P's bandwidth appetite, which is currently its most objectionable feature.
Many of is access the Internet from multiple locations and multiple devices, for example, and we need to access the same set of personal data wherever we are. A home-based server is one way to do this, and one of the features of such a server is the ability to download content from diverse sources as a background activity. it makes sense for house-broken, legal P2P to be one of the options for this, and I see no reason it can't use RAID or any other disk technology natively.
I don't think users are wholly comfortable with entrusting personal data to a third party locker service, for example; I'd much rather have my personal data under my control.
P2P does have some advantages over centralized client/server, and there's no sweeping that fact under the rug. Like DPI, P2P is a tool that can used for good or ill.
P2P has some definite uses, and does some things quite well.
Getting into Switched Digitial Video is a fairly radical infrastructure change, but many cable systems are going that way. It plays hell with Cable Cards, but Cable Labs just green-lighted a couple of SDV boxes, so it's just a matter of money.