Ernest Retzel's original message described an interesting use of the
Internet--that is digital video conferencing. I first saw this in use
at the San Diego Sun Microsystems office. Cameras on the workstations
and scattered around their facility allowed any workstation user to
visually search for someone or communicate via video with someone else
on there network. To be able to use this technology to hold small
conferences would be terrific. I'm sure there are many others besides
myself that loath taking all day to flight to a meeting. I hope
someone is working on standardizing this for the better of us all so
we don't have to exclude folks without a Sun.
This tread also prompted a discussion between David Mathog and Ernest
about whether the Internet should be commericial or public. Of course
we all pay for the public form of the current Internet. We all pay for
our local and campus connections through our institutional overhead
rates or in some other manner but the national backbone and much of
the regional networks are publically funded. Information is wealth and
it is in the public good to maintain public networks that promote the
interconnection of the country. The government should make sure all
the country has equal access to this information. At some point in the
future I'm sure we will all be paying out of our pockets for services
used on the network and not just for the hardware as we do today. I'll
close this message without going further into this discussion except
to add that the commercialization of the Internet has already started
in many ways.
Mike Cherry
cherry at frodo.mgh.harvard.edu
