bcater

Too bad someone can't just remove your soon-to-be-regretted letters from the outgoing mail a la Samuel Clemens' wife.

I talked about a variation of this idea with pg, and he brought up some important points. First, who uses enterprise software like distributed computing? Outside of research, it's people unlike us, so what do we know about them? Pretty much nothing. Additionally, what IT manager at a solid company is going to buy the "el cheapo" (pg's phrase) solution when there are guys from Sun telling him/her "Just buy our system, and if anything bad happens, we'll fix it, and you won't lose your job."

BTW, the RSA Factoring Challenge has been over for some time: http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2092.

But back to my first point, what else - besides trying to factor big numbers - would I/you/a-20-something-hacker do with a big distributed network? I can't think of anything.

Someone is going to change the model of how we interact with computers. Keyboards are good, mice are good, big plasma screens are really good, but what's next? Is there a faster or more efficient or more enjoyable way to interact with computers? Do computers have to be boxy? Do monitors have to be rectangular? Unless we have reached the pinnacle of "consumer input/output devices," startups will eventually write the applications that take advantage of the new model - that is, if it's not startups that design the model.

I once worked on a small software project with two other people, and because the requirements and restrictions were so rigid, we didn't have to do much more than work out a UI - the system itself was pretty straightforward to implement. Thus, we figured out what each of us had done before or had a good working knowledge of and started coding.

Currently, I'm working on a much larger project with one other person. Our strategy so far is to try something, figure out why it didn't work, and then try something different. It reminds me of what one of my former math teachers told me: "Whatever you do, don't just stare at the problem. Do something, even if you know it's wrong."