[502] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Commercial services I'd like to see
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Wolff)
Mon Apr 1 13:27:49 1991
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: ddern@world.std.com (Daniel P Dern)
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 91 10:13:52 EST
From: Stephen Wolff <steve@cise.nsf.gov>
Dan Dern wants to get answers to questions like:
Where are the good Chinese restaurants in town X,
and which ones serve dim sum.
That's in a subset of the questions I've always used in public talks about
information services and to tweak the tails of the info-services-provider
weenies. Of course, I usually use examples that have a better chance of
being supported in spirit by the Powers That Be; one of my favorites is
Where can I find a Cray 2 with at least 128 Mwords, GAUSS and NCAR
Graphics, and at least 2 hours of third shift time this week for
under $200 per hour?
I further claim that the hardest part of providing useful answers to the
class of questions implied by the two above is NOT the technology of query
languages, NOR that of distributed databases. Rather, we have yet to come
up with a scheme in which, for every entity that installs an item in the
Global Yellow Pages, there are INCENTIVES for that entity to keep the set of
replicated entries up-to-date - on whatever timescale is appropriate (e.g.,
possibly monthly for Dan's question, daily for my example, and possibly every
millisecond or so for some subject-matter-area I haven't thought of yet).
After all, no timetable at all is better than one that's out-of-date.
-s
