[x3d-public] RE: [www-vrml] P2P - was. Clay Shirky Weighs In On SL and VRML History

["Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

Agreed.  Then it comes down to what a machine is applied to.

The only way to make it fair is to enable the local machine owner to
determine what use they will make of their slice of the ecology given rules
for the preservation of the ecology itself.  Centralized management at scale
always fails for reasons we all understand from both thermodynamics and
information theory (it comes down to entropy and the energy budget).  One
problem is socially, when a government has historically been that and it
begins to crumble, it tends to become a gangster state.   This is when the
value of our values is realized by the smarter people.  Sorry, I don't want
to go philosophical here, but these decisions are technological; some of the
solutions are, but we have to ask ourselves what we value before we can
choose the technology.

Yes, there are good reasons for very hot iron and we've both worked on
systems where that can't be avoided, but I suspect that in the medium term,
our respective governments will begin to tax those as a means to curb their
growth.  We are already seeing the organic tax in the form of soaring
electrical rates that will increase the costs of the server farms and that
will be passed on to the customers, thus limiting their ability to hand out
free memberships.  How long it will take that to affect our markets is
undetermined but it may be sooner than we think.

len


From: Eric [mailto:eric@geovrml.com] 

Imho, P2P is definitely the way to go.
For those who did struggle thru pro and cons of mainframes versus PCs in the
80es do have a nice feeling of renewal :)

The arguments were absolutely the same in both camps.
I had to install a CRAY, coupled with vectorised 3090 IBMs, and I can tell
calories were a nightmare. But it had some interesting uses though ... in
the other camp of the WAN were kids with their SUN workstations and a few
fools with PCs. Battle was raging at network level ... 

Both ecologically, thermodynamically and humanly PCs won the battle against
centralisation forces.

One should infer to what this may imply to Web3D ... I remember a very well
known thin client (was called a terminal emulator at the time), it was
called VT 100. I'm sure you could find it buried deep in XP gusts. It won !
it's still here :)

P2P has a lot of other impacts too, both economically and structurally. 

Eric.



-----Message d'origine-----
De : owner-www-vrml@web3d.org [mailto:owner-www-vrml@web3d.org] De la part
de Len Bullard
Envoyé : samedi 16 décembre 2006 00:23
À : 'J. A. Stewart'
Cc : www-vrml@web3d.org; x3d-public@web3d.org
Objet : RE: [www-vrml] P2P - was. Clay Shirky Weighs In On SL and VRML
History

I'd be surprised if they do that.  Their business model is based on having a
server farm where the content lives in their system, not one where the
content is on the user's system.  They like Google endorse the mainframe/big
iron model that we all once used.  It has its charms particularly that one
can control the up and down time and performance centrally.

But ecologically, it's a disaster and that is beginning to be noticed.

len


From: owner-www-vrml@web3d.org [mailto:owner-www-vrml@web3d.org] On Behalf
Of J. A. Stewart

Len and others interested in the history of 3D -

Should someone decide that shared 3D is dead because
peer-2-peer (p2p) is the future:

if you read:
http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/17904/page1/

p2p is the future.

You can always say that we were doing this half a decade
ago - our MVIP-II protocol is peer-2-peer.

And, it had dynamic, shared spatial audio, where audio groups
would come and go depending on locality in 3D land. There was
no audio GUI - it is/was automatic.

With Application Level Multicasting installed, MVIP-II should
run "as is".

So when SL (or whatever replaces it) comes out with p2p, we
can say, with authority, "that it worked back at the turn of the
century with VRML, what took you guys so long?"

John Stewart,
CRC Canada.




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