What we hope to establish is a refurbishing and recycling business for Internet Information Services. The idea is to collect "pre-owned" bytes of information, recondition them and resell them at a discount. We already have some 256 different values in our catalogue (including 128 _different_ ASCII values!) and hope to launch the service in the New Year. Users will be able to obtain large numbers of "pre-loved" bytes for use in their own information services applications for a fraction of the cost of new bytes. Those willing to take the bytes without support can expect to save even more!
The only problem we have found so far is obtaining a reliable source of used bytes for recycling. We're presently collecting bytes written to /dev/null on our own local UNIX machines and have also managed to recycle a good portion of the huge amounts of output from the archie telnet client (you'd be _amazed_ at how much junk that program produces...)
We're also receiving over 30 Megabytes a day of what appears to be randomly generated text strings over our Usenet feed and have found that we can recycle a good portion of the headers from each posting (sadly, the very low information content in the postings themselves seems to rule out using the message bytes for recycling as we're concerned about quality control on our recycled bytes).
We've even tapped into the "chargen" ports on a number of machines accessible over the Internet to obtain large number of ASCII values, although the net traffic this generates has yet again caused the McGill University administration to notice what we're up to, so I doubt we'll be able to use this source in a commercial service. Still, it's given us enough material to help us get the recycling technology prototyped and working.
Unfortunately, given the huge anticipated demand for such recycled bytes we believe that this will definitely _not_ be enough to meet demand once we go into production mode, so we're currently looking around for alternative sources of supply.
To meet the anticipated demand I'd like to ask each and every one of you on this list to consider setting up a byte recycling service for your network. The idea is to have each individual gather up and send for recycling whatever bytes they no longer need on their machine. Doesn't this sound better than simply throwing them all away with "rm" or "DEL", or by dragging them to that silly little trashcan icon?
Besides, haven't you ever asked yourself where those bytes go when you thrown them away? Believe it or not, most deleted bytes currently find their way straight into the Internet refuse stream, often to turn up in postings to Usenet, or worse, OSI standards documents!
We're trying to do our bit to prevent this from happening and think a viable recycling industry for the Internet is one answer to the problem (and one that will make us all here at Bunyip filthy rich, which is why we're proposing the idea).
Here at Bunyip, we're certainly doing our part to get things started. We're currently working on a new pseudo-device driver for the UNIX environment that will automatically collect the bytes and forward them on to our processing centres without further human intervention. Users need only write the bytes to the new device and they will be automatically sent off for processing!
In time, we hope to see this pseudo-device (tentatively named "/dev/blue-box") installed on every UNIX machine on the network. We firmly believe a strongly supported recycling program would enable us to meet the anticipated demand for pre-owned bytes while having a very positive effect on the ecology of the Internet waste stream (and make us lots of money, but I mentioned that bit already, didn't I? No point in giving the game away entirely, you know. Walls have ears, etc, etc...)
Of course, in the beginning such recycling will not be entirely automated. Users will still be expected to sort their bytes into several groups, including ASCII text, data and "Usenet postings" (which given their low information content obviously aren't worth recycling). Users will also be expected to rinse out their data bytes and remove all labels from files imported from the IBM mainframe environment.
Of course, users will have to use the major number/ minor number pair on the device driver to determine which type of refuse you are recycling [* Note: non-UNIX types should go ask a UNIX weenie to explain this reference. On second thought, don't bother. It's not _that_ funny... *] Anyways, this is a minor inconvenience considering the environmental advantages and savings in hardware costs users can expect from a successful recycling program.
For example, apparently accretion of such waste bytes on disk heads (which build up over time when users continually create and delete files in a networked environment and systems admins continually dump and restore bytes that haven't been accessed for a long time) are one of the major cause of unexplained disk crashes.
Really...
In the future, we might even be able to talk about paying you for your used bytes, although of course in the beginning this would be out of the question as we seek to build our profit margins to the point where we could afford the heating bills we face up here in Montreal each year. We're sure you all understand. Besides, most right-thinking people agree that paying for information on the Internet, although not illegal, probably should be...
Oh, one last comment. One problem we thought we'd have would be in importing and exporting the used bytes into Canada for processing, but apparently this is clearly covered under a clause of the current Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. This clause was apparently put in place to allow the Americans to send transcripts of their political speeches up North for disposal after each election while the Canadians were hoping to profit by sending transcripts of the on-going constitutional and language debates down south each year. Economists point to this clause as one example of the FTA in which the net benefits to each party have been exceedingly hard to define or measure...
In any event, as a global player in the Information Services field, Bunyip is of course studying the possibility of sending the bytes down to Mexico for processing in a maquiladora plant in Baja California in the event the North American Free Trade Agreement manages to come to fruition. Apparently, workers down there will work for as little as 50 cents a day plus all the Usenet postings they can read. Talk about lax environmental laws!
Although we regret the necessity of sending badly needed hi-tech jobs down south, the potential profits will probably be impossible to resist. We figure we can salve our collective corporate consciousness on this by donating a certain number of processed bytes to be used in Canadian Federal government studies on unemployment in the information processing field. There, I feel better already...
Well, that's our plan for the new service. Now, this may not seem as immediately relevant to you as the need to sell used cars to carry commercial IP traffic (that _is_ what we're talking about, right? I've kind of lost track). Anyways, I think such exciting (and lucrative) examples of the potential for a commercial Internet information market should be brought to the attention of this list. Might give everybody something else to talk about!
So, hope you found this at least as valuable as some of the other stuff coming over this list right now. I'd like to think I've done my bit to make com-priv what it is today....
- peterd
--- Insert Legal Bit Here ---
The preceeding posting is copyright (c) 1992, by Peter Deutsch, of Bunyip Information Systems Inc, who should be solely responsible for its contents. Unfortunately for you, like most people I know I had an unhappy childhood (for at least a part of it) and thus can't be held responsible for anything I say or do. On the other hand, if you want to reprint this somewhere, you'd better let me know, and maybe even send me a cheque, or my lawyers will be calling your lawyers and doing lunch! (can you tell I was born in California? :-)
So there....
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Deutsch, Bunyip Information Systems Disclaimer? What disclaimer? I'm president of the company and own half the stock. these _are_ the opinions of the company... ----------------------------------------------------------------------
