ARTS & FARCES internet

Dave Winer is thinking about what I wrote last night about RCS, and it looks like we’re going to play a round of intellectual ping pong. That’s good, I’m game and looking forward to exploring yet another application for this unique communication medium. What we would ordinarily do in email, we get to do in public and you get to watch. Here’s Dave’s initial response supporting the desktop model. I’m sure there will be more to come.

Todd Hoff has some thoughts about the desktop model that are pretty much inline with my own. He says that laptops don’t make good servers. intrepid.farces.com is a PowerBook “Wall Street” with a 266MHz G3 processor, a 30Mb hard drive, and 192Mb of RAM. I find it more responsive than the 850MHz Pentium III with 768Mb of RAM that runs this server. I wouldn’t want to try to run something like Slashdot on either machine, but for several thousand users per day, either works just fine.

Reading Hoff’s criticism of the desktop model made me smack myself in the head and realize where my resistance to the desktop model is coming from: I don’t have one. My wife and I have been using laptops as our main computers for the past 4 years. While I use my laptop a lot from my desk, it bounces all over the house, to client sites, etc. It even went to Hawaii once.

When I’m at my desk, connectivity is a hardwired fast Ethernet connection to the switch upstairs. When I’m away from my desk, but still around here, connectivity is much slower wireless 802.11b that is flaky even on a good day. When I’m anywhere else, connectivity is either dialup or a client’s network. In the case of the latter two, my IP address is dynamically assigned and changes regularly.

One of the things UserLand has said it hopes to do with RCS is enter the enterprise through the back door. Because almost all enterprise IP addresses are dynamically assigned by a DHCP server, the desktop model isn’t the best and may not even be workable. What happens when users receive new DHCP leases? At best, it’s difficult to relocate the desktop servers.

I’ll never go back to being tethered to a desktop, so until network connectivity is ubiquitous and permanent with a static IP address anywhere in the world, the desktop model just won’t work for people like me. And chances are pretty good that there will be more people who work like me in the near term.

Dave makes a point of how little processor time Radio 8 requires on a relatively cheap modern desktop machine.

Here’s the Windows Performance Monitor for the machine this server runs on (the above mentioned 850MHz Pentium III I bought for less than US$2,000).

Now this machine runs all the overhead associated with Windows 2000 Server, plus Frontier, Zope, IIS, and a Retrospect server that backs up our entire network. Frontier alone serves between 2,000 - 5,000 page views each day. Because those 100% spikes are regular over time, I suspect Windows is doing some weird housekeeping or I have something misconfigured.

Dave and I are both of the same generation and I know for a fact that we share at least one hero. I’m betting that Mr. Natural is another. Mr. Natural had a thing for tools and was known to say “use the right tool for the job” on more than a few occasions.

Unless RCS comes in under US$50, Frontier is the right tool for the job. Here’s hoping I’m wrong. Should UserLand set the RCS price under US$50, there will be a groundswell of exciting new activity at the edges of organizational intranets as well as the edges of all the networks that comprise the Internet.