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"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
>
>...
>
> Maybe it's time to start looking harder for that luxury, instead of
> putting up with the received wisdom of "if we build a huge centralized
> system, everything will work better."
Nobody is talking about building a huge centralized system. I used a
centralized system as an *example* because sometimes centralization can
be efficient. The whole point of a caching proxy is to achieve
efficiencies of scale through centralization.
I could just as easily have used a decentralized system as an example.
An intermediary that does not use caching is an encrypting,
privacy-protecting proxy. Such a proxy still needs to understand the
protocol in order to understand what you are asking it to do once it has
done its encrypting. If I have to set up a different privacy-protecting
proxy for every XML vocabulary in the world I'll pretty quickly go out
of business and my customers will lose the *decentralizing* benefits of
the proxy.
> The longer we spend on that set of knotty issues, and the more we
> privilege work that address those issues, the less time we have to
> consider alternatives that might just make our lives a lot easier and
> keep a lot of us sane.
Solving knotty issues *does* keep us sane. The Internet wouldn't exist
if someone didn't solve the knotty issues around routing and congestion
control, for example.
Paul Prescod
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