Thanks for the comprehensive writeup of the good &...

2011-05-19T10:49:14.173+01:00

Thanks for the comprehensive writeup of the good 'ole days. I always felt somehow like an apprentice (best way to learn! can't get books on this stuff 'til its too late) to you two ROADsies and also my officemate at the time, Joel Crisp. The ideas you describe here definitely fed into FOAF and nearby -- the scenarios in http://www.foaf-project.org/original-intro are pure eLib/DESIRE thinking really. Where I think we went wrong was in under-estimating just what could be achieved by centralising and buying thousands of PCs. So we tended to make "it'll never work" points about Altavista and friends, rather than "do we really want it to work this way?". Interesting you make the link to P2P, ... i always felt it made all the public-funded distributed search efforts look rather embarrassing by contrast. Do you think P2P search can erm 'come in from the cold'? Or it'll always be a fringe thing?

Yeah, dust off the PhD! Whilst IPv4 multicast has...

2011-05-18T23:46:43.860+01:00

Yeah, dust off the PhD! Whilst IPv4 multicast has pretty wide acceptance in some spheres (large Universities and research centres), lots of commercial ISPs have ignored it. Now they're busy ignoring IPv6, but when that finally arrives via your cable, ADSL or VDSL connection at home, then I think we're going to start seeing a rapid rise in IPv6 multicast based tools.

Now the real trick for your dusted off PhD is explaining how a distributed multicast search will tie in with centralised search provides such as Google or Bing. Extra points if you can show how money can be made... ;-)

Comments on Martin Hamilton's blog: Back to the Future - Resource Discovery, Revisited...

Thanks for the comprehensive writeup of the good &...

Yeah, dust off the PhD! Whilst IPv4 multicast has...