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"The hard problems in distributed computing are not the problems of how to get things on and off the wire. The hard problems in distributed computing concern de
by w10-1 4y ago
"The hard problems in distributed computing are not the problems of how to get things on and off the wire. The hard problems in distributed computing concern dealing with partial failure and the lack of a central resource manager. The hard problems in distributed computing concern insuring adequate performance and dealing with problems of concurrency. The hard problems have to do with differences in memory access paradigms between local and distributed entities. People attempting to write distributed applications quickly discover that they are spending all of their efforts in these areas and not on the communications protocol programming interface."
They got that right. Most of the value of Java, and the market value of Google and Amazon, come from solving these problems.
The viability of javascript in the browser has depended entirely on the communications protocol not being that important.
One thing the paper misses is the value of encryption. Distributed computing is severely limiting if it can't be encrypted. Indeed, the rate-limiting factor to uptake might be not protocols or distributed algorithms, but confidence in encryption and distributed security -- and that's as much a social problem as a technological one.
- mcguire 4y agoAt the time this was written (IIRC), public-key encryption was still under the DSA/RSA patents and therefore not commonly available. And (possibly) the machines didn't have the horsepower to do a lot of cryptography.
- pjdesno 4y agoEncryption was export-restricted until 1996. Actually that isn't really relevant - most of the systems the authors are talking about (and that they worked on) would have been running on enterprise or campus LANs, and it wasn't totally clear (at least to the sysadmins at the place where I worked) whether it was even legal to connect corporate networks to the internet at that point in time if you weren't a govt contractor. Based on what I recall, most of the security threats we were worried about had to do with corporate espionage and information theft, and would have required physical access to the network. In that environment, encryption isn't important in the same way as it is on today's Internet.