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They were both right. The web brought them together. We didn't have to choose after all. I have a fabulously powerful personal workstation on my desk, a slimme
by robotresearcher 13y ago
They were both right. The web brought them together. We didn't have to choose after all.
I have a fabulously powerful personal workstation on my desk, a slimmer, more modest one in my bag, a thin client in my pocket, and a bunch of upstream data centers that provide amazing services.
Some people might hanker for a completely decentralized P2P model of the Internet, and BitTorrent shows this is still hugely relevant. But practical issues of bandwidth mean that there will always be a place for locality-exploiting concentrations of CPU and storage in data centres.
- Uhhrrr 13y agoI meant the part about centralized power being highly suspect. We have certainly seen all too well recently that that part is true.
- robotresearcher 13y agoTrue enough. I guess every generation needs their reminder. Still, the meta-point holds: centralized power lacks robustness (e.g. to corruption and/or the stupidity of a relative few), but has big advantages over widely distributed systems in terms of communication latency and bandwidth that enable efficiency. We're sloshing around dynamically trying combinations, but we should expect to always see some centralized (opportunities for efficiency) and some distributed (opportunities for robustness) stuff going on.