Edward was a frequent and wickedly-brilliant sparring partner back in
the alt.next and comp.sys.next.advocacy days. Dave Long, in a
roundabout sort of way, I think you'll like him in particular.
Myself, I'm scared of what he knows about metadata, these days...
Your humble servant,
Rohit
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Adam L. Beberg, 25
Cosm
Some computational problems, such as defeating today's commercial
encryption, strain even the most powerful machines. Adam Beberg has
figured out how to tackle such challenges: Throw the unused time of
10,000 computers at them. Such "distributed computing" promises
greater access to number-crunching power, possibly leading to
scientific and technological breakthroughs. For example, SETI@home, a
search for intelligent life in the universe, is following Beberg's
lead with a distributed computing scheme to analyze radio telescope
data. In a realm with more commercial
significance-encryption-Beberg's ideas have already paid off. In
1997, he founded a nonprofit group called Distributed.net. During the
group's first year, it hosted an alliance of computers called the
Bovine Cooperative, which won a prize by breaking a form of
encryption known as RC5. Beberg left Distributed.net in April to work
on Cosm, an open-source distributed computing project. Says former
colleague Michael Labriola, now CEO of Invisible Web Publishing: "The
ideas that came intuitively to him could literally change the world."
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Edward is relatively anonymous. I was amused to find that we almost
crossed paths much earlier; in 1995 I had to decide between joining
Blackbird or W3C -- I think I did OK :-)
http://candl.let.uu.nl/archive/cts/html/scontentmarkupblackbird.htm
Otherwise, see you this weekend, I hope...