4 ms·

I am starting to think that the killer app for a decentralised web is actually business. Think of the typical large corporation: * Massive reluctance to use c

• lbruder 12y ago
  We used to run a decentralized server on our office PCs to aid in protein folding. The program would lie in the background and monitor CPU usage, then spring into action once the CPU was idle for some time, and utilize all but one CPU core to process one of the work packages available on a central server. To fold proteins, you'd just add your request to the queue, and some time later, you'd get the results, calculated on various PCs from customer support to the labs. Good times.
• evgen 12y ago
  The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decentralized service that is less expensive to develop or maintain than an equivalent centralized service.
  • walterbell 12y ago
    Would you consider Skype (in the original supernode topology) to be a centralized or decentralized service?
    • wcummings 12y ago
      Or Spotify, in the beginning
    • knieveltech 12y ago
      Clearly centralized since MicroSoft bought it and started making changes.
  • 7952 12y ago
    I think OneNote is an example of a good decentralised system. You get a multiuser wiki that only needs a shared folder to save. It is installed alongside MS Office and can be setup without any involvement from IT staff. It is several orders of magnitude easier than installing MediaWiki and needs no big internet connection. It is a big lie to believe that multi-user applications always need infrastructure, they just need to be well designed. I expect that a very large OneNote system may need professional support at some point. But when it does the value is already proven without ever having to ask permission from an engineer. You are right to be sceptical of cloud although perhaps for different reasons. Amazon S3 is probably more secure and resilient than the typical corporate SAN. But the random office in some small town will not have enough bandwidth to use it. To the average user the corporate run services are exactly like the cloud; they are slow and not designed for them. With properly design P2P systems normal users could actually choose their own tech again.
    • pjc50 12y ago
      OneNote is fascinating; it's a great product Microsoft have hardly marketed. Possibly as it's the antithesis of Sharepoint, which is several orders of magnitude harder than installing MediaWiki and therefore people feel committed to using it.
      • 7952 12y ago
        SharePoint is also fascinating. It has an amazing set of features that make total sense from an engineering an features point of view. Yet in my experience it is slow, buggy, and most of the features are never used properly. It has proper versioning and locking that should make team work much simpler. But the philosophy is never really explained and people are just told to interact with features and let the magic solve their problems. Yet people have been doing versioning and locking for donkeys years without ever needing any help, you just make a new file with V2 at the end. We just need software to provide a little consistency and surface conflicts. SharePoint obscures this behind feature bloat and infrastructure.