Interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman 76
ReadWriteWeb writes "To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Richard MacManus interviewed two senior engineers from Sun Microsystems - Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview discusses the past and future of the Web, including the impact that Sun's servers have had over the years. Also discussed is the reason why Tim and Radia believe that P2P won't be a driving force on the Web going forward. Radia thinks that having central sites where people can register is key to making the Web scalable and more secure."
P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:P2P (Score:2, Interesting)
1. P2P requires holes in firewalls. You cannot use P2P applications safely through a firewall, you must also allow incoming connections.
2. P2P and a distributed attack look identical. There's no way to tell the difference between a P2P application and a worm attacking a network. As such, allowing P2P applications to exist necessarily lessens the security of the network by allowing worms to hide in the P2P traf
Re:P2P (Score:3, Insightful)
People like it.
All the technical reasons in the world don't matter if people prefer it to everything else. Until you have actually created and properly hyped a better 'technology', then P2P is here to stay.
Re:P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything about the Internet being a secure network?
Look, the Internet, by its very nature, is inherently insecure. It cannot be secure. Only networks where resources can be controlled and managed can be considered secure. You can only secure your own private network, and if that network is connected to the Internet, even via a firewall, its security must be considered at least compromiseable, if not already compromised (this depends on how important security is to your network -- U.S. military and civillian intellegence consider air gap security to be the only security that is acceptable in relation to the Internet and their classified systems). P2P or no P2P.
As for holes in the firewall -- any service your network provides to the public internet requires holes in your firewall. If you don't like that, then don't run services on your public facing connections. *shrug*
And I thought... (Score:2)
Well, that's what I think of it... Isn't Sun almost dead?
Re:And I thought... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And I thought... (Score:2)
Re:And I thought... (Score:1)
Well, in many places in USA, schools and libraries are required to use filters
to remove "bad" WWW sites. Btw, the list of "bad" sites are secret, or you may use
reverse engineering. Oh wait, I forgot about DMCA.
> Sadly, other countries like China are.
US companies are providing the technology and know-how, but hey, "let the market decide".
Re:And I thought... (Score:2, Informative)
Most oppression software is not American, but I still disagree with selling to certain actors. At a special event la
Re:And I thought... (Score:1)
Re:And I thought... (Score:2)
Presumably that was meant more or less sarcastically. The question I'd ask is whether you can figure out a way of providing only technology that can't be abused in such ways (and yes, IMO, the great firewall of China is an outright abuse of the technology). While it's applied to a much larger number of
Re:And I thought... (Score:1)
Yes, it meant that way
it abused so much.
> The question I'd ask is whether you can figure out a way of providing only technology that
> can't be abused in such ways (and yes, IMO, the great firewall of China is an outright abuse
> of the technology).
Most technologies, as you know, can be used for evil, but that does not mean that the technology
in itself is evil. However, some techn
Oh I get it (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Oh I get it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh I get it (Score:1)
Re:Oh I get it (Score:1)
Re:Oh I get it (Score:1)
Instead, we'll need to use a dump truck to move the data around.
Re:Oh I get it (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe check out her book, Interconnections, on Amazon to get a feel for the type of work she does.
Re:Sig (Score:1)
What's Danny Devito have to do with Sun? (Score:1, Funny)
secure== (Score:2)
Need a new interviewer (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the two with the IQ's & overly impressive resumes do the talking. MacManus, I'm really hoping you're leaving all the good stuff for part 2. I didn't see much in the way of a single worthwhile question or topic. The writing was dry and elementary.
Mr. MacManus.. When you get people of this caliber to speak to you, don't treat it like a freshman project for the campus paper. Please do something before you release part 2... Or just toss that page into the fire before you embarrass yourself any more.
(P.S. It never hurts to plug your interviewees work either... "Interconnections" kicks ass...)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to disagree. No disrespect to Ms. Perlman intended, but I think the term "groundbreaking" more accurately describes the work of Admiral Grace Hopper [wikipedia.org]. I will give you however, that Ms. Perlman is arguably the most influential and groundbreaking female engineer currently working in this industry.
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:1)
And FORTRAN and LISP and ALGOL58 mainstream languages.
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:1)
I believe that an ALGOL58 implementation was begun at IBM, but I don't know if it was ever successfully finished (as you note, FORTRAN was the standard there). A derivitive (MAD) was implemented on the IBM 704.
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:1)
And the record structure as well as sophisticated file handling.
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
I may have failed to correct the idea that she invented COBOL - but since you were the one who suggested she did, you'll have to share the blame for that. :-)
Adm. Hopper's actual invention was A, the first compiler and the first of the so-called "third-generation" of "English-like" programming languages. A was released commercially as FLOW-MATIC, which later led to COBOL.
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Flow-Matic wasn't the first compiled language either. That honor belongs to Fortran, which was first developed in 1953. Every reference I've ever seen credits John Backus with inventing the compiler.
And distinguishing between Flow-Matic and COBOL is not useful, since both languages have the design flaw I'm criticizing.
You're getting your info from Wikipedia aren't you? Well, the entry on Flow-Matic is accurate enough, but is easy to misread. It says that Flow-Matic was the first "English-like compiled l
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Yep. (Yeah, I know...)
Yes, but I'm not talking about FLOW-MATIC when I refer to the first compiler, I'm talking about A-0. From Adm. Hopper's Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]:
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Are you suggesting that an anonymous slashdot poster is somehow more credible? Why is that? (I'll ignore the "bozos" part - although I can't help but find it amusing that someone with a sig like yours is resorting to name-calling instead of citing better sources of information...)
You want more references, just Google for "invented the compiler" (include the quotes) - ever
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
You mean XML? Bray didn't "create" it. He was a key member of the committee that designed it. Calling him the "creator" devalues the other members of the committee, especially Jon Bosak [wikipedia.org], who defined the need for a simplified SGML and drove the project to create it [sun.com].
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:2)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:1)
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:1)
First off, I must apologize for the "simpering imp" comment. I have a great deal of respect for most writers, as I do quite a bit of it and know exactly how difficult a profession it is. All that aside, while I maintain my original stance, I'm not one to poke holes in others work without providing anything constructive in return. First, I must admit th
Re:Need a new interviewer (Score:1)
Thanks buffoverflow, your comments are helpful. I will indeed adopt the Q&A style next time. I should also mention that I got very short notice about having the chance to interview Tim and Radia (literally I was told of the opportunity the same day I conducted the interview). So I didn't have much time to prepare questions. It's fair to say my interests are in the Web (Tim's focus) than in the security/networking side of things (Radia's focus), so the questions probably were slanted to the Web.
Live and
Central Server vs. P2P (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Central Server vs. P2P (Score:2)
There's no need for a single central server for this purpose. If anything, a really big site becomes enough of a headache to manage at all that in a lot of cases, there seems to be nobody who understands its overall structure well enough to be at all sure they've provided even minimally adequate securi
You have no privacy, get over it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Although McNealy spent a lot of time and ink explaining his point of view, and claiming he was taken out of context, he never backed off that statement. In fact, he clarifies this way "If there were no audit trails and no fingerprints, there would be a lot more crime in this world. Audit trails deter lots of criminal activity. So all I'm suggesting, given that we all have ID cards anyhow, is to use the biometric and other forms of authentication that are way more powerful and way more accurate than the garbage we use today."
The part that is wrong about this is that audit trails are for government and corporate operations, to make sure they are honest and within the law, and within the bounds of their investors' and constituents contracts. Applying the same controls to individuals is oppressive, and McNealy should not have been surprised to find out many people objected to his view.
Everyone needs to remember.... (Score:2)
Tracking every minute detail about your customer and being able to control them is #1 priority.
P2P as we know it is not even an option for business and corperate use. Audit trails, logging and control with recall capability is what they are talking about and is what is wanted by control freaks in the corperate world.
And they are right, that is what the corps want. Ignore the fact that most people HATE logging in at a site to access thigs and do n
What a pity... (Score:2)
Don't even waste your time reading it. Just a couple of dull, out-of-context remarks about P2P that the interviewer picked out of what I hope was a rather more interesting conversation. Who is Richard MacManus - and why?
Central sites? (Score:2)
Central sites?
Hmm... I thought Sun's slogan was, "The network is the computer".
Re:Central sites? (Score:1)
Layers is the key (Score:2, Insightful)
They layer on a highly redundant, fault tolerant, hot-computer-swappable,
massively distributed file system.
This is a much smarter solution for reliability than centralization. Further
decentralization (even across corporate boundaries) would lead to even less risk of
information loss.
Consider that one single corporation, even with massive decentralization, is still
vulnerable to a single legal attack by a single misguided corporatio
Physically decentralized, logically centralized. (Score:2)
It's possible (as your Google example points out) to have a physically decentralized system which is logically "centralized," at least insofar as it can be made to look like a monolithic system.
It's this sort of thing which seems to have a lot of possibilities in the future. Having all your eggs in one basket is just asking for trouble (just ask Napster, or the people who had their websites run out of New Orleans datacenters
Re:Layers is the key (Score:1)
That's what Sun has been doing for the last 3 years or so, changing their business model away from large irons to scalable commodity based based systems. Today you can get a Sun Galaxy to a lower cost that an Dell....
But there are still a lot of customers where a large scale system is a way better fit than a cluster of 2 to 4way systems, ask any Bank about their core banking system
Cheers
JXTA? (Score:2)
Does Radia even know about this? One of few projects Sun funds and hasn't been canned because it actually makes money.
Consider the source... (Score:2)
Full Interview available now as a podcast (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Full Interview available now as a podcast (Score:2)
Re:Full Interview available now as a podcast (Score:1)
Oddly enough, I can't use an iPod at work, because it might be obvious that I wasn't fucking working.
We don't all work in laid-back web design studios, you know.