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Date: Sat, 06 Jul 1996 09:31:19 +0100
From: Tim Murphy <info@cinox.demon.co.uk>
Hello John and Frank
Saw the article in the New Scientist and just have to share these thoughts with you.
"Java is not under threat this week"; Mm well perhaps not but in a few weeks it could
be...
This webnuron thing is brilliant. If it was seriously adopted it could reduce the
complexity and cost of computing by a least one order of magnitude.
It reminds me of another brilliant idea - PADS. A concept involving small mini
programs that can be easily written to a common standard and distributed over the net
enabling people to have access to very cheap (almost free) operating system and
applications software. This would be grown on their own machines as they need other
bits/extensions from libraries of functions made available across the net by the
original author of each particular PAD, then copied to numerous sites automatically.
The user would pay a micro cent for each PAD copied and the originator would receive
a small but steady royalty which they could donate to the pad system, offset against
their own PAD purchases or collect a payment for their work.
The point is tho that good ideas and schemes are never adopted for rational reasons
but are adapted to different purposes, as in sgml/html or when some corrupt oligarchy
(the us military industrial complex) thinks a particular thing will serve it's
interests (the internet), not realising that the academics had a different agenda
(that of sharing knowledge, cooperation etc.).
Unless there is an unstoppable cheap mass market killer application no bright idea
will survive. A good example is wave power - Because of the dependency on research
grants for development it was nobled by an assessment committee stuffed by Thatcher's
people with allies from the nuclear power industry who just cooked the guys figures,
= wave power is 5x more expensive than nuclear. When the truth was that even on a
conservative assessment it is the same or marginally cheaper.
The killer application that unlocked the PC was the spreadsheet. From what I have
read (and maybe understood) you seem to be pointing at Web Mail. OK, I see it, It
sends a shiver down my spine! but it needs to happen fast. To get that going I would
suggest an Internet Nerdathon with just that objective. I call it "brain cell
networking". That is to get a large (even massive) number of people to
cooperate/brainstorm a complex project and come up with the result. There are several
considerations; time scale, structure and coordination/integration not to mention
management of the project and refinement of the work. It also generates huge
quantities of e-mail which has to be sifted and cross referenced. So you need a core
team of people who know what they are trying to get from all the mental activity. It
needs guidance and strong nerves.
Such a project turns people on, even if they are only doing a trivial piece of the
jigsaw according to their ability or availability they see it as their baby and will
put in days of work and effort just to get their bit right. Of course some people let
you down or screw up or have a technical hitch but you know that will happen so you
build in at least triple redundancy. The more critical the bit of work the more
redundancy. You also get them to form their own groups as they need to by making all
the communications available to all of them except things that will confuse them or
the core administrative comms between the instigators. 90% of the trick is in the
planning and specification of the issues. It is like a chemical reaction, get the
proportions just right and it goes off and cooks itself nicely.
An example is the story of how the windows sockets (winsock.dll) api was specified.
Francisco or some such in about 1990/1. I can't even remember the details. Basically
a large informal meeting occurred and by the end of it, (via truly a horrendous
brainstorm), they had it. Some little time later a certain Peter Tattam from Tasmania
of all places, put out a half finished unstable alpha shareware version and was
getting so much feedback he was able to issue 4 beta versions in three days, one just
4 hours after another. That was the one that worked! Trumpet winsock.dll!
X-UIDL: 836655950.001
Some years ago I participated in a project called "seize the media" where over one
weekend we had 50 sites around the world linked by e-mail, voice lines and fax. There
were physical media conferences in church halls, community centres etc, with anything
from 20 to 100 participants, Alongside that were thousands of other people just
logged in over the net. It worked. We seized the medium.
Last year we wanted to do a netcast cyber cafe in the middle of a cow pasture at the
Glastonbury Festival. We wanted to run tcp/ip to a suite of PCs on an Ethernet LAN
for the public attending the festival to surf with, a live web site mirrored onto a
big server in London on a fast pipe and an ISDN line (from BT!)for the local
connection etc. We also wanted to do it with renewable energy (solar and wind)
generated on site and blow the minds of the revellers with a low power 220 watt
projector piping the music into their visual cortex via a 50 foot screen with a
program called cthugha.
We used the net (usenet and the web) to advertise what we wanted to do and ask for
technical help and resources. The people we needed came like bees for honey. We ended
up doing it at the festival with about 50 people, starting from a core group of 10,
the others we had never met before. Some of them only attended by wire but their Unix
skills were vital. They brought all the necessary skills and equipment between them.
We needed one guy for 5 minutes only, to configure the router on site, but he was
there! Other people spent months doing boring things like trying to find recycled
paper cups to satisfy the technophobic zealots in the green hierarchy that we were
cool enough to be allowed onto the sacred turf. Actually building the network in the
Cyber Cafe in the field was easy, it was building the wooden floor (to stop the
moisture coming up from the ground) in the marquee made from mud encrusted pallets
and the bloody politics that was the difficult bit.
Since there is no Glastonbury Festival this year, (the farmer has been ill and is
having a year off), some of us decided that it would be nice to do a Virtual
Glastonbury. We consulted the leading Web Design Houses and were told 15,00 to
25,000 sponsorship would do a decent job. Then they looked at the ceiling, rolled
their eyes and shook their heads, since we had only got a pledge of 5,000.
We used brain cell networking, result - Virtual Glastonbury - which can be seen at
http://www.glastonbury.org, produced in three weeks flat, in another week it will be
finished. How? 30 htmlers and graphics people from all over the UK and the planet
working for peanuts and kudos but with motivation. Plus, as a launching stunt we
managed to bypass Wiltshire Constabulary and English Heritage by netcasting an image
of the Solstice Sunrise from Stonehenge despite nhundred police and roadblocks etc.
How? easy.. a Nikon digital camera with a telephoto lens, a notebook PC with
paintshop pro, a pcmcia data card, a nockia digital cell phone and vodaphone gsm,
(all borrowed - we are not rich) thence by ftp to our website.
I love your concept. Go for it! and give Microsoft a nightmare they will never wake
up from.
Regards and Good Luck.
Tim
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Tim's Emails
Re: Web Neurons, Brain cell Networking