Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2000
Even after the departure of veteran reporters Steve Manes and Paul Andrews, The Seattle Times continues to print interesting news stories. In February, Anne Koch reported on a bank robbery by a 6-foot, 2-inch, 190-pound man wearing a pink and lavender flowered dress, cable-knit cardigan sweater, purple hat, either black boots or knee socks, white gloves, and earrings. And he was carrying a purse. The get-up was probably a ploy to distract witnesses from looking at his face, according to an FBI spokesperson.
What I know about cross-dressing bank robbers you could put in a thimble and have room left for your thumb, so I wouldn't presume to second-guess the FBI, which apparently has experience with this narrow criminal specialty. But isn't it just possible that the robber was trying to inject a note of style into a normally drab business? (Two businesses, really. It pains me to be critical, but neither the employees nor the robbers of banks are exactly known for their bold fashion sense.) Maybe Mr. Cable-knit is really the Steve Jobs of bank robbery.
On the shelves in my office library that hold my Internet-related books is a thin volume by Virginia Shea called Netiquette. Its copyright date, I note, is 1994, and its earnest intent is to educate its readers about the community standards of the Internet, "to offer the guidance that all users need to be perfectly polite online."
Yeah, right.
To be fair, most of Shea's book reads surprisingly well today, although a Year 2000 update to the book would have to include chapters on distributed denial of service attacks, viruses, and worms. But what would they say? That it's not cool to destroy other people's property or livelihood? Shea does include a brief section on the Morris worm, which was unleashed in 1988. Morris did time for his prank, and Shea points out this fact, hoping that it will convince reasonable people not play such games. Trouble is, she misses the significant population of unreasonable people on the Internet. (Shea did address the issue of virtual cross-dressing in Internet chat rooms, but didn't mention bank robbing once.)
Now we've got the distributed denial of service fad, a prank about as clever as broken bottles in the parking lot. In one's darker moods one wonders if we shouldn't have taken the online cultural values that Shea's book describes and coded them somehow into the protocols of the Internet, embodied them in silicon. Maybe we should have closed the loophole that allows people to violate the norms of cyberspace by simply deciding to do so, before the barbarians came down from the hills. Maybe some charismatic autocrat will come along who can bend an eyebrow and make everyone toe the line. The Steve Jobs of the Internet? Let's hope not.
Meanwhile, nastiness on the Internet promises to become not just a threat to online businesses but also a competitive tactic of those businesses. Microsoft has been aggressively using the Internet to attack its competitors, and to defend its products against attacks by its competitors, notably Sun and Linux. (I realize that Sun is a company and Linux is an operating system kernel and/or a religion, but to Microsoft they are both the competition.) Microsoft's web site "The Dot-Truth" was set up to challenge Sun's "We're the Dot in Dot Com" ads. This is a business strategy that bears watching.
In the past, if you wanted to attack the competition in print you had to mount an expensive ad campaign, and the competition would have to respond in the same slow, expensive way. Such negative advertising was costly and could easily backfire. Today, it's worth the risk: Dis them online and see what happens. Of course, what can happen is that they respond the same day: The Linux community is mobilized to response immediately to what it sees as disinformation from the Microsoft camp. Nevertheless, this is a potentially powerful tool, lethal and unanswerable if well timed. It works in politics as well as in business, of course, and we can expect to see some outrageous attacks on Presidential candidates online in the last hours before election this year.
Corporate dissing may well settle in as a normal tool of doing business online, along with other, more sinister, tools: A recent news story quotes a security expert who says that "dot-com" companies are now commonly hacking each others' sites. The Internet is inherently insecure, and it's not just kids who are taking advantage of that insecurity. The security expert, Mark Rasch, testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that all the talk of 15-year-old kids vandalizing the Web is "a smoke screen behind which real, professional crackers are pleased to take cover." He described sophisticated attacks against computer systems in which one company steals intellectual property from a competitor, or vandalizes its service, as a competitive business practice. It's easy to do, the rewards are great, and you probably won't get nailed for it.
The reason you'll get away with it is that companies that will report on nuisance attacks like DDoS attacks are at the same time very reluctant to admit to being vulnerable to serious, compromising attacks by competitors. Consumer confidence is a fragile commodity online, and Rasch believes that these companies see themselves as losing much more in consumer confidence from admitting to being hacked than they could gain from a conviction of the hacker.
Maybe Bill Gates can solve the problem. He's got all that free time since he's no longer running Microsoft; he is supposedly looking forward to tackling technological challenges in that free time; he should understand the mindsets of both teenaged crackers thrilled to bring down nation-wide computer systems and corporate executives willing to flout the law in their fervid desire to crush the competition, since he has been both.
But really I see no solution except possibly for the Rodney King remedy. We all need to just get along. Everybody should just behave. And is that crazy? Given the fact that open source is turning some people into millionaires, maybe niceness could become a profitable business strategy. Maybe the meme can catch on.
Enter Eazel.
Eazel is the new Linux company started by a bunch of former Apple employees with the avowed intent to put an interface on Linux that makes it easier to use than Windows or the Mac OS.
Andy Hertzfeld is one of the founders of Eazel. Hertzfeld was also one of the designers of the original Mac OS code, and was responsible for much of its look and feel. His passion for making computers easy to use also showed in the work he did at General Magic after leaving Apple. Cofounder Mike Boich was Apple's first software evangelist and later founder of Radius. Bud Tribble was manager of the original Mac team and later ran software engineering at NeXT and helped develop Java at Sun.
The Eazel team has been hacking on the GNOME GUI for Linux for some time, and only went public recently. Its Nautilus project is not an extension to GNOME as indicated initially in some reports, but is the file manager of GNOME itself, the central feature of the GNOME 2.0 desktop.
Not only is the Eazel team embracing open source (GPL open source, to be precise), but it's embracing niceness across the board. Eazel's third cofounder is one Bart Decrem. Decrem is the founder of Plugged In, a nonprofit community access center in East Palo Alto, California. EPA is a low-income community at the other end of University Avenue from Stanford University. Decrem is one of the nation's leading advocates on Digital Divide issues, and Plugged In "has become a national model for ensuring that low-income communities not get left behind in the information revolution," according to the blurb at the Eazel web site. I don't want to say that Eazel has set itself up as a model of corporate morality. That's a totally gratuitous spin on my part, and purely speculative. (Actually they have, but I don't want them suing me for slander because I hurt their business reputation by portraying them as too moral for the tastes of vulture capitalists.)
Is it possible? Could the do-the-right-thing-and-they-will-come spirit of the open-source community spur new business models that are more human, more moral than the total amorality of the transnational corporation?
One thing is clear: I'm not going to be able to carry on the refrain of this column by labeling gentle, modest Andy Hertzfeld as the Steve Jobs of anything.
So let's move on. I wrote a couple of months ago about some of the recent advances in nanotechnology. Reader Murray Lesser wrote to tell me about an important nanotech story that I missed: Cheap flat display devices may well be the first consumer device built using nanotechnology, judging by the report of a breakthrough at the Samsung Institute of Technology in Suwon, South Korea.
Researchers there, using carbon nanotubes as cathodes, have managed to build an experimental 4.5-inch full-color display. They claim to have the mass-production problems solved and predict that the technique will soon make it possible to mass-produce flat displays that cost less to manufacture and use less power than conventional LCD displays. Commercial applications of nanotechnology, Lesser says, are almost ready to pop out of the labs, and the venture capitalists are probably hovering in the background.
Possibly so. New developments are happening every week. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) reported in the February 24 issue of Nature on a simple technique they developed for producing nanoscale patterns -- for nanochips, possibly -- that shows great promise.
They placed a thin film of polystyrene (the stuff to-go coffee cups are made of) between two electrodes, heated the polystyrene until it liquefied, applied a small voltage to the electrodes, and bubbles appeared in the liquid.
The form of the bubbles, it turns out, was precisely controlled by four factors -- the electrical force, surface energy of the liquid, viscosity of the liquid, and atmospheric pressure. When these forces are all just right, what you get is very, very tiny bubbles, all the same size and the same distance apart, to nanoscale precision. Precise grids of bubbles at nanoscale precision are pretty and tantalizing, but what's really useful is that the researchers now know how to lay down an arbitrary pattern of bubbles with the technique. They can, in other words, imprint a film with a very specific design in a process called "pattern transfer." In pattern transfer, one of the electrodes is etched with a master pattern, and the film accepts it.
Then there's the "wet" nano work being done in lots of places, including the University of Pavia (Italy), where chemists this year demonstrated a single-molecule switch that they think could be used as part of a "wet" computer, meaning a computer built out of chemicals in solution. But there are still a few hurdles to overcome: The switch takes 12 seconds to turn off and over a minute to turn on. This limits the usefulness of the technology somewhat.
Another recent revelation about nanotechnology raises a different warning flag. It appears that carbon nanotubes, or buckytubes, have a serious drawback. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led by Alex Zettl, took a good hard look at the properties of buckytubes, the first such study to be done, and reported their results in February. This is important because buckytubes have seemed like the key nanomaterial, with a nearly ideal combination of strength, heat conduction, and electrical properties. That's why the Samsung researchers that Lesser alerted me to are using buckytubes, as are so many nanoresearchers.
Unfortunately, it turns out that buckytubes are very noisy, electrically speaking. Millions of times noisier than conventional conductors and semiconductors. Why this should be so is not clear, and the result was quite unexpected. One theory is that it's a surface effect that can be ignored in copper wires, but that becomes all-important in buckytubes, which are so thin as to be effectively all surface.
Whatever the source of the effect, it calls into question the whole idea of using buckytubes for any kind of computer applications. They could still be useful in sensors, where the signal they are to detect swamps out any level of noise, but this level noise would make it impossible to use them as, say, transistors.
I'm not aware that the Samsung researchers have any solution to this noise problem. I'm not suggesting that it's not solvable -- perhaps the buckytube electronics can be developed in clean rooms or can incorporate nanoshielding to keep out whatever external influence is triggering the noise.
But maybe the venture capitalists will want to wait and see. Nanotechnology has great promise, but there's a lot of overpromising going on in the field, too. I'm trying to avoid becoming one of those overpromisers. I don't want to be the Steve Jobs of nanotech.
If the company you work for refuses to give you your own jet as a bonus and all you can get out of them is a lousy $20 million or so, here's an idea for a vacation getaway to blow it all on: A group of developers has leased the MIR space station to rent out as an orbital resort. The $20 million they are paying is incidental; they expect to get that back from the first visitor. The real cost will be the renovation that they hope will turn it into the tourist destination to end all tourist destinations.
I suppose they read all the news stories that portrayed the space station as well past its expected life span, polluted with cosmonaut sweat and chemical contaminants, creaking under metal fatigue, and with a history of almost burning up. It's also in an inconvenient location, but I'm sure they know that.
DDJ