We the people, the supporters of BLISS, agree to support and uphold the ideals
of BLISS in our lives, however we can.  Know your neighbor, agree on terms and
connect with them, learn the officers associated with each of your connections,
help anyone new who wants to join and when pooling money, plan out equipment for
the largest area you can cover within your boundaries.

We
support the idea that connecting to each other should be on a personal level.

We
want to pool our resources with our neighbors, to make connecting to each other
efficient, error free, and simple.

We
wish to actively join with our neighbors in a easy way that helps each other and
protects both of us equally. 

We
want to create officials within each neighborhood that can help us, and we want
those officials to have additional support.

We
want to expand our neighborhoods, so eventually and at any time, anyone who
wants to actively join has that option.

 

Know
your neighbor – This requirement is important because the only connection you
have to a BLISS network is through any & every other BLISS member.  As BLISS
grows, it will get bigger and faster exponentially, but the number of people you
should know only changes as often as you wish to make more new connections. 
Each connection to a neighbor, is one person the Node Owner.

 

Agree
on the contract – The contracts (i.e. BLISS contracts) are to help guide us to
the best future possible and they only apply when connected to another node. 
The officers, Node Mayors (etc.) can shape their respective nodes through the
contract.  Every contract needs to be verified with each other contract, so
nobody is in contractual violation.  The hope is that everyone agrees to the
BLIS contract at each level, like neighborhood laws or city laws, so the
community drives its creation over the years.  The only thing we have to do if
we want to leave a contract is disconnect from that node.  Remember every new
Node should be built to provide service between every other resident/location
plus spots & wires for future expansion.

 

Make
a light connection – As we look to the evolving human condition, we accept that
we want a simple way to know who to ask or what to do for help.  We support
fiber interconnects as the primary connection between neighbors, but are open to
new solutions.  Wireless technologies are, by definition, something that can be
moved without connection to anything else, so it does not support the
neighborhood long term.  Electromagnetic technologies, like  Wi-Fi or dial-up or
10/100/1000,  at frequencies up to 60 GHz just cannot possibly switch as fast as
light at around 1000THz (1,000,000GHz), so light is our choice for a
future-resistant technology.  Node owners do not have to worry about being cut
off if they don’t agree with one nodes contract, there will be many other nodes
around the world.  We will support small nodes build around wireless, but only
for the earliest nodes in the beginning.

 

Know
your Officers for live 24/7 voting– Each connection you make is to another Node
Owner, each Node Owner is responsible for assignment of at least 4 jobs, Node
Leader, Mayor, Guard &  Supervisor.  The Node Owner may assign none/any/all
jobs to him/herself, or assign it to another person, at any time.  In the
smaller nodes, it is expected that many people will assign control of their node
to the same people.  Control gets assigned only by the Node Owner, and only to
the connected Node.  Any of the officers can be reassigned, at the Node level,
at any time, but there will be provisions for real world handover to the new
officer.  A versioning system for each node levels contract will allow for the
Node Mayor to only need approval from a few dozen people, simple vote on the
proposition.  If too many nodes would drop off because of the proposed changes,
then it’s not for the good of the whole.  As every Node Owner has the right to
change their assignment to anyone, and on the small level this is a minor
problem, then what about as we get bigger?  The larger nodes actually start to
act like a governmental body (and the number of assignments for any 1 post are
like votes), any MyNode assignments are person to person and can only be revoked
by the Node Owner, the other node are created by having a connection so they are
transitory.  BLISS gives guidelines as to suggested transfer speed. 

If
an officer has been officer for <1 week, when average confidence shifts for 1
day, then both people will be in charge until confidence shifts back or stays
(to the end of the week), at which time there will be an official
turnover.

Any
officer in office for 1 week < 1 month, confidence shifting after 1 day,
means new sub-officer must accept and assist primary, confidence stays shifted
for 1 week, then sub-officer promoted to co-officer (and decisions must be
shared), overseen by a superior or 2+ peers, greater than 1 month,
hand-over.

Any
officer 1 month < 1 year, 1st day after shift, send report to other officers,
1st week – sub-officer, 1st month – vice-officer, 2nd month call a town hall, to
discuss the problem, if not resolved before the 3rd month, hand-over

Any
officer 1 year < 10 years, 1st day & 1st week after shift, send report to
other officers, 2nd week – sub-officer, 3rd month – vice officer, 6th month town
hall, 1 year hand-over.

 

 

Open
expansion – We are only strongest with all of us connecting to each other.  We
will be the guiding light for the human future.  We will help those in our node
and listen to the officers we assign to ourselves.  We encourage all people,
businesses, governments, etc to join with us, so everyone has a vote on the
future of their neighborhood.  As new nodes become available to connect to, you
always appoint the node officers to your new connection.  Now the Node Owner
needs to know his MyNode officers and his Node officers, (who are probably the
same people, now).  As more nodes get added and every expansion is planned to
cover every smaller area, then upgrading is as simple as getting another add-in
card and jumping the fiber from the smaller to the larger node.  Always build
out as though everyone will join with their own nodes.

 

We
are putting out a call to the creators of the world to give us choices for nodes
(Cisco, Cienna, D-Link, etc).  What do we expect?

1. Automatic
   fail-over / Mesh
   Support – As long as there are multiple connections with neighbors, then the
   packets will get through
2. Active
   QOS (Quality Of Service) – Constantly monitor and adjust traffic to minimize
   congestion
3. Battery
   Backup – We want the Node itself to work if there is a power failure, for at
   least 1 hour
4. Simple
   – WAN inputs, LAN Inputs, Officer Assignment Tool (per connection & for
   Node0), integrated notification, voting , and security verification (owner has
   total control), and buy-out offer control for Node0.X members
5. Expandable
   – Ability to add new cards to take advantage of new tech and new
   nodes
6. Transparent
   Dynamic Routing – Any traffic not to or from the Node will be passed as
   optimally as possible to the best connected node, all completely outside the
   LAN.

Two
types of officers, connection and location based.  Location based officers are
responsible for the relationship between the Node, the Node’s Connections and
the Node Owner.  Connection based officers are responsible to ALL location based
officers involved.  Note, the Node Owner is only responsible to assign the
officers, if the owner wants to let someone else do all the work, they just have
to assign it to someone else (hopefully someone well suited for the job).  Part
of the contract between two neighbors is the creation of new officer positions. 
Each officer position is filled with a real person, who accepts the position,
responsibilities and benefits before any new connection is made.

 

Example:
I live in an apartment with 10 tenants, 6 agree on a BLISS contract Node0 and
appoint me to all Officer positions to implement it, I accept.  BLISS allows for
this by stating that any member of a shared node (a Node0), that was bought by a
community, can sell any other member of that shared node (Node0.1-Node0.X) their
ownership in the initial node (i.e. passive members).  The Node Supervisor is
who gets notified of any sale and once ownership becomes one person, then they
become Node Owner. Default BLISS contracts give access to all passive members
for ever, but any maintenance must go through the Node Leader.  There is an
option to charge the passives (like an ISP, if it is legal in your area), but
all charges are to the be a function of real world costs, like power
consumption, labor, or necessary parts/equipment from the Node Leader’s point of
view).  Because of this I plan on buying out everyone else, a month or two at a
time…, so I get to choose Node Leader.

When I think about networking it brings up ideas that correlate messaging technologies with person to person interaction.  Messenger, Message, Trust, Time.

A long, long time ago (90’s to 1H 00’), far far away (the 80’s) growing up as a geek was filled with the ridicule and mocking as the films over the years have shown(mostly).     –SawyerIII @ Asstd.

I have worked with computer, electronics, and technology for the last twenty-five years(directly and/or indirectly).  Additionally, I have experience with a large sampling rate (20-200 avg. people/day) of the general population of the large metropolis of San Antonio, TX for the last 10 years.  The people who I have had increased contact with for the last 5 years have been those who consider themselves (whether they knew the definition or not) to be technology enthusiasts, gamers, users, novices, and haters.

Don’t shoot/kill the messenger!

“I resent the idea that people would blame the messenger for the message, rather than looking at the content of the message itself.”     -Anita Hill

“Don’t blame the messenger because the message is unpleasant.”     -Kenneth Starr

As time passed I have delved deeper into technology and peoples interaction with it, and have realized that people have a lot of distinct, time sensitive points of knowledge that when taken in total make up their entire body of knowledge about any subject.  The problem arises when they have no personal context upon which to filter good vs. bad information at that time.  I find (through observation) that people tend to rank information from good to bad based on the level of trust that they have with the originator of the message.  This has historical basis and I think most people would agree with this, but I think we can agree that people have done well at transitioning from separating the messenger from the originator of the message.

I heard it through the grapevine.

There are things that we need to know about the message, other that its contents, these I classified as referential, instantaneous, & long form messages.

• A referential message is usually person B repeating a quote from person C received by B in the past at some time T<0,  and repeated to you now (person A @ T=0)  without context (e.g. retweet).  People with eidetic memory have the best chance of passing along a referential message.
• An instantaneous message is created by person B @ T=0 using only their knowledge cloud (e.g. true inspiration, most live spoken conversations) witch is filled with events from T<=0 and perceptions/expectations of future events (0<T).
• A long form message is when someone, person B, gives you, person A, a message created by person C filtered by B & C’s individual knowledge clouds @ T<0 WITH or WITHOUT context (e.g. text message, tweet, mail, any written communications, etc).

Hopefully when you receive this message you mentally duplicate the event into two categories, contextual and non-contextual.  As these messages are recalled by you, person A, you can then try to separate message from the message and log them by time.  Remember it is very difficult to separate the messenger from the message on the messengers side, but you can try to do better once you have the message.

I don’t trust it.

People have an very hard time acting as a messenger if they understand the message because there is a natural inclination to interpret the message to add it to their own knowledge cloud(unless you have an eidetic memory) this means it is almost impossible to pass that message to someone else UNFILTERED.  This is because when you, person A, receive a message created by person B @ T=0, most people (both A & B) will filter the message through their own individual knowledge cloud, which may change the truth of the message.  This is similar to mistranslation between languages, so the process of passing the message changes the meaning.

How old is the message?

Now that the mound of dead messengers is no longer filling up the entrance to our homes, then what about the message itself, what information can we get from it that is independent from the message itself.  If there is 2-way communication between people then there is a lot of information that can be properly filtered and refined for clarity, but with single messages then the only metric you can use is time.  Time is another area in which people fail to keeping their knowledge cloud updated.  A current example of this is the Vista OS, if you ask people whether Vista is good or bad, then the answer they return is directly from their knowledge cloud, if you then ask them how they came to that conclusion then you get back either a personal or a referential response, both of witch are time dependent.  If the time concentration of their Vista knowledge is only focused around Vista’s launch (2006-2008), then the answer you usually get back is that it’s bad, however if you ask someone with a time focus on VistaSP2+ (2009+) then the response you get back is usually good, and those whose time focus encompasses both times then you will probably get "”It was bad, but now it’s good”.  This tells us that talking to someone that keeps their knowledge up to date is far more important than someone with a large knowledge cloud. Additionally those people who have a large, up to date knowledge cloud AND can intelligently filter their knowledge cloud, then the are the best people to talk to about a subject.

What does this mean?

So with the following summary…

1. Messenger – We can only judge the truthfulness of any message using our own personal knowledge cloud.
2. Message – Almost every message is filtered twice, from the sender and by the receiver, based on their personal knowledge cloud (whether they know it or not).
3. Trust – People usually use trust as the identifying factor of truthfulness, when talking outside their personal knowledge cloud (whether they know it or not).
4. Time – Time moves on, (so should your personal knowledge cloud).

we see that time is important to all of these categories.  So getting the “truth” is not easy, but the most important thing we can do is remember that all knowledge in our knowledge clouds is time sensitive.

What does this have to do with computer enthusiasts?

First lets define some classifications (as of 1H10)…

• Gamer – Innovators – Always pushing the high end of the technology across the board, usually concentrated on the hardware.
• Enthusiast – Early adopters – Similar to the innovators they push the technology, but usually not as quickly in the technology’s lifecycle.  They tend to spend time optimizing the software and get the best use out of the hardware they have.
• Users – Early Majority – By far the largest group of people who use technology every day of many different types and many different ways.
• Novices – Late Majority – People who are starting out for the first time and have a very small knowledge cloud.  They are still figuring out who to trust.  This is where the hardware with the best NUI (natural user interface) should do well.
• Haters – Laggards – These people currently haven’t found a technology that works for them yet, they just hate a particular brand, or they are afraid.

I classified myself as a “gamer” until the mid 00’, because only the highest machines performed at the level I wanted them to.  Nowadays I think that the gamer group has “jumped the shark” or “gone off the rails”.  While I agree that ultimate gaming realism needs a certain quality output, lets consider what we have as possible output and input mechanisms…

1. Ears – Speakers – We have been reproducing sounds in 3d for decades now, and those sounds can be far outside the ranges human limits (sub and supersonic), so now the real sound innovation is in software.
2. Eyes – Display – Resolution, resolution, resolution, I hear this every day and have to respond that resolution WITHOUT size, is useless.  Now lets get some perspective, if you have at least 20/20 vision then the minimum distance you should sit from a 24” 1920×1080 is 3’ away (or 3’ *~10’ to reach the human retina’s theoretical limit.)  Society needs to right size their displays, so, find out where you want to place your monitor and distance from the display where you want to possibly operate it device, min and max and choose the size at the maximum distance. Resolution will be defined at the closest location (and remember 20/20 is the standard minimum while 20/12 is max for the retina), and if that resolution at that screen size is larger than any available screen technology, then you need more smaller screens.  This means that the gamers are currently at the mercy of the display manufacturers NOT the graphics card industries, multi-monitor cards have been around for years.
3. Nose / Tongue – “The Stink/Taste Machine” – Not much yet (here come the Innovators)
4. Touch – Mouse / Joystick / Keyboard / Display / Camera – When people touch something we expect to have a reaction, I added display and cameras to the touch category because of the obvious touch screens and the newer camera capture & identification technologies (think Microsoft Project Natal).  There are amazing technological jumps in this category, as it is an upcoming technology full of promise and ideas.

In the 90’s it was all about ram and storage, but this stopped critical in terms of capacity (not speed or efficiency) back in 1H00’s.  Since 2H00’s the capacity question has become a bit of a boondoggle, most people have more than they need.  “But my computer is so slow…”, yes, but adding more ram or a BIGGER (not faster) drive is probably not the best hardware investment which means that capacity is not the issue for most people.

People perceive performance based on what they see(or hear, touch, …) on the screen(speakers, ‘power glove 2?’), so as long as the technology responds at least as fast as the sense can operate at (~5-120Hz frames per second, 20/20-12 @ 6.25Hz(.16s) visual acuity, 10Hz(.1s) force feedback, auditory frequency 20-20kHz @ 5hz, etc) then it is working, and if slower then there is a point that it becomes unpleasant for each type of output which means…

1. <0.1seconds – Speakers, Monitors, Touch(change the display or make a sound on touch event) – direct interactions with the UI needs to respond in some way to the user
2. <1   seconds – Touch(Vibrate function) – the program need to do the task assigned or risk breaking the persons concentration
3. <10 seconds – Touch(electronic brail machine) – need to respond at least this fast or risk loosing all attention
4. >10 seconds – Nose & Tongue – you need a progress bar.

Since the 2H00’s the easiest way to improve performance, if you could afford it, was to use iterations of the same things we have been doing for years…

• replace the primary drive with multiple hdd’s in a raid configuration
• use a ssd (maybe in a raid)
• use a ramdisk software to place important software in memory ‘permanently’

The biggest difference now is that SSD’s have become as price competitive per gig as the hdd’s from 04’ vs ssd prices now.  The interesting thing is that hdd’s took ~3 years to double their $/gb while ssd’s have only took ~1 year.  This is the big lesson, as we remove more and more of the mechanical solutions, we start approaching a faster generational turn over from 3 years to 1.5 years.  With this information, I suspect that the early majority will start accepting ssd’s as the common primary drive on Intel’s G3 release, woe to the OEM’s (notebook, motherboard, and case) who don’t design for at least 2 types of drives (either x2 2.5” bays, or x1 2.5” and 1x pic-e 1x).

So what should the gamers be interested in now (after they get a good ssd), why different monitors and interfaces, this is the path with growth potential.  I can’t wait to see commercial examples of the tech I saw at CEDIA 09, here in San Antonio, TX.

What is going to happen next?

Just like every major change in a technology, the few people that keep up-to-date will change their focus to the next major advancement.  For those who have not kept up, I have a prophetic tidbit for you…

One of Intel’s next chipset rev.’s (I think it will be the 6X series) will incorporate their newest tech, lightpeak.  This tech, for those that don’t know, is a low cost (<$10) high speed (10+Gbps) long length (~100m) optical cable that should replace all other copper cables.  One of the most important parts of this design is that they are building bridging technology right into the hardware, so finding add-on devices to convert to/from lightpeak from/to USB, Firewire, SATA, iSCSI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, etc. shall be easy to design and manufacture while we transition to integrating it as the standard optical connection of the future.  Did I mention that Intel (part of the USB Implementers Forum), designed an optional optical connection as part of draft usb 3.0 “optical future-proofing” specifications, which was later dropped from the specification (maybe) for these reasons…

1. the research was not yet ready so Intel wanted to wait for USB 4.0 (or maybe integrate it into mini-displayport?)
2. they experimented with tech and found that a physical limitations was too great for tech at that time
3. Intel decided that for the good of the industry they needed to let their hardware partners build up a reserve, before diving in with both feet and laying down the tech they’ve been holding back (imagine lego building block like cubes, where you could stack up your motherboard, on a chip by chip basis, with no tools)
4. Intel realized that their competitors were not yet building speed out to the edges of the motherboard, so the time was not right.
5. they forgot
6. the manufacturing breakthrough needs to be on a small process and there is not enough free room at existing fabs
7. they wanted to wait until the economy was just enough
8. they are waiting until they can add optical microphone technology into the lightpeak specification
9. someone like Apple made a huge buy in the first run of technology and are building up stock
10. they haven’t yet cracked some design flaw and want to minimize the leakage until closer to production

“Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”     –Kurt Vonnegut