[Blocks-development] Penny-arcade; blocks2?

[Michael S. Jr. <bl...@ms...>]

Is anyone still alive?  The last few messages to this list were all spam, so
I wouldn't blame you guys if you have all unsubscribed.

We got "wang-dotted" over a year ago, if anyone cares -- apparently Blocks
was one of a list of random filesharing clients linked at the end of an
article at the web comic Penny Arcade about the RIAA's great customer
service.  http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2003-09-12  I was kinda
happy to see some traffic, but near as I can tell nobody actually tried to
use the client.

I don't know if anyone cares, but way back in 2001 I said I had just gotten
a programming job.  I ended up losing that job three months later, sadly -- 
they let several of us go.  The company was DPI Merchant Services, that
credit card processing company that was in the news for getting hacked a
while back.  And no, none of my remaining code had anything to do with that.
:-)

I've been going back to school -- I'm currently on my last semester of a C/S
degree, and am terribly terribly busy.  No time for Blocks at all.  But
right now I'm taking a Programming Languages class, and it's really opening
my eyes.  I think I'm well-trained enough now to be able to handle a complex
system a bit better, so I might take another stab at understanding Blocks.

How about everyone else?  Right now I'm of the opinion that a good next-step
filesharing innovation would include giving the user a way to teach their
filesharing client to implement their wishes, beyond those anticipated by
the developer and written into an options dialog.  I'm mentally tossing
around weird ideas I want to share with SOMEONE, and I'm curious if anyone
is still out there who wants to listen.

Weird idea 1:  more of a concept, really.  Filesharing network users are
social creatures.  They participate in different groups, and they have
different individual standards and values, and different group standards and
values.

Weird idea 2:  Filesharing programs are intelligent agents, and we need a
way for users to express their standards and values to these agents so they
can respect and implement them.  This is vastly more complex than any set of
options in an options dialog, and users are probably going to have more
complicated needs than we will EVER be able to foresee.  None of us is wise
enough to create the perfect feature set and the perfect options dialogue.
I am embarrassed that in 2001 I seemed to think I could.

Weird idea 3:  Armed with this new knowledge from this Programming Languages
class, that breaks down the very act of executing statements into these
fascinating "semantic reasoning" pieces:  I think we should build a kind of
scripting language and execution environment within a filesharing network.
I'm imagining an entire filesharing community of multiple clients (but
nowhere near ALL clients on a network) expressed as a shared execution
environment, where all the nodes cooperatively execute these scripts, with
security and authentication and node-to-node communication as each statement
is executed.  I'm imagining creative filesharing network users building and
implementing completely new things that we never foresaw, using this
environment.

This stuff starts to get harder to talk about, because as I start getting
deeper into this Computer Science program of study my list of conversation
partners gets shorter.  This stuff is really enlightening.  If I see
interest expressed on this list, I'll go into more detail.

--Michael Spencer