Conference Report: 2000 USENIX: Invited Talks: Providing Future Web Services

by Andy Poggio

Andy basically expanded on Bill Joy's keynote talk. The Internet has effectively begun to mimic Main Street and is beginning to provide those services that main Street cannot, such as any time and anywhere. The six webs are of relevance:

• Near web—Monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached to a nearby system; personalized news such as multimedia and news-on-demand; and educational aspects like multimedia, interactive simulations, and so on. An example of educational uses of the near web can be found at http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/ if you want to learn more.
  
  
• Far web—The television or appliance with remote control, providing entertainment on demand; multiple data sources, providing a lower barrier to entry; possibly targeted advertising with product placement in on-demand movies showing a Coke drinker Coke ads on the sides of a taxi cab but showing Pepsi drinkers a Pepsi ad in the same position.
  
  
• Voice web—For use when the hand and eye are busy, like driving a car.
  
  
• eCommerce web—Computer-to-computer, such as auctions (both "forward" like eBay and "reverse" like eWanted) and dynamic pricing.
  
  
• Device web—Device-to-device for non-PC devices like cell phones and pagers and set-top boxes. These include agents to collect data and remote distributed processing via IP and Java.
  
  
• Here web—Personal digital assets, like "my CDs" or "my MP3s" or "my DVDs;" providing on-demand access and ownership, and allowing the end-user to create her own environments.
  
  

So how do we get there? Three aspects need to be worked on. First, the network has to be enhanced. Ipv6 provides more address space, better configuration management, authentication, and authorization, but has been slow to be adopted. Andy predicts wired devices will win over wireless devices, both quality of service and overprovisioning will continue, optical fiber will replace or supercede electrical (copper) wiring, and the last mile to the home or the consumer will be fiber instead of ADSL or cable modems or satellites. Second, the computer chip architecture will probably remain based on silicon for the next ten or so years. Quantum effects (see the 9am "Quantum Computing" talk for more information) show up around 0.02 microns, so we need new approaches such as optical computing, organic computing, quantum computing, or computational fogs (virtual realities). Third, Andy believes that the system architecture will connect three components — CPU server, storage devices, and the network — with some form of fast pipe, probably InfiniBand (a high-bandwidth, low-error, low-latency fast interconnect).

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