VMware - A new kind of simple machine

What they taught us in grade school about "simple machines" needs updating, as shown by the wildly successful launch of a new company, VMware. (Priced at $29 it closed the first day at $51 and is now $117 a share, two months later, and growing.)

Why is that so successful? What energy source is that tapping into? Let's look at that.

You remember "simple machines", of course, right? (No, not the rock group.) Our class "went over" this standard list, I think:

• the lever
• the wheel and axle
• the inclined plane
• the wedge
• the screw
• the pulley

Actually, our textbook had this great picture of a steam shovel with transparent overlays that you could flip one by one and peel down the layers and see all the parts inside. I liked that the best and spent more time playing with that than listening, I confess.

So, if you're hyper-active, interrupt yourself and flip to "how stuff works" and see how those huge T-shaped construction cranes get the cab and T-part up on top. Hint - it's not with a bigger crane -- they build themselves up by adding pieces just below the top.

But, back to "simple machines".

First - why did they bother mentioning that? Why are these in the school curriculum at all? A hundred years ago, most people had to solve problems that involved moving heavy objects around the farm, and this was a list of helpful answers to how to do that.

These days, I think most grade-school students in the urban USA have never seen a pulley, "wheels" means a car or bike, "screw" doesn't refer to a machine, and, never having split wood, they don't recognize a "wedge" or why that might be useful to them.

It's a shame, because the whole point was supposed to be a set of really helpful ideas you could go home and use right away to make your life easier, and that got lost somewhere between prep for the SAT and classes that don't seem related to real life.

The whole concept of rigging up something outside you to amplify your own efforts so you could move things you thought were beyond you seems to have been lost.

So, these are now almost unknown, along with other basic skills everyone once knew, like how to make a campfire from scratch in the woods, even with a box of matches, or why washing hands is important so you and your friends don't get sick or die from some disease.

Besides, there are other "simple machines" that I find useful to know too. Siphons have come in handy.

Pushing "sideways" on a taut rope can move heavy objects a few inches at a time, which is often all you need, etc. (Yes, Martha, you CAN push on a rope.)
So, if you don't have a mental toolbox of possibly useful tools, you should consider starting one.
If you have one, here's another one - a "virtual machine."

In the immediate sense, what VM sells is software that lets you make something that looks from the outside just like a file to one computer (Mac, PC, or Linux), but that seems from the inside as if it is an entire computer of one of those types. The result is that you can effectively run a PC on your Mac, or Linux on your PC, etc. That's helpful and cool by itself. In fact, you could have many different virtual computers running at the same time inside one real piece of hardware.

This is an improvement over IBM's mainframe "VM/370" operating system introduced back in 1972, that let each user have a "virtual machine" of their own inside the IBM mainframe, but they were all just clones of the mainframe. (Today, you could have a VM inside your VM, etc.) That was very helpful because it totally insulated users from each other, so that if one person totally messed up their program, it wouldn't take down the whole mainframe, just their own virtual machine, and everyone else would be unaffected.

Some of my friends found out that

if you put a virtual PC inside your PC, it actually runs a lot faster than the real PC.

The reason is that the real PC keeps doing really stupid things like checking many times a second to see if you just put in a CD, and these really slow it down. The virtual PC only has to check a virtual CD drive, which is much faster because it's all in memory, not hardware. So VMware is helpful in making an old machine run faster doing the same thing.

But there's a different side to it, which is the other way around. VMware also sells "virtual servers", which let you take multiple real computers and connect them and create a single, seamless, virtual mega-computer out of the pieces. In this case, you are making "unity" out of "multiplicity" or even "diversity". Or, you can make MANY different virtual servers, of any type, out of many different pieces of hardware you have kicking around.

So, hardware and software become completely decoupled.

The great thing is that if one of the actual physical computers goes down, it doesn't break anything, it just slows everything down a little. Conversely, if your virtual server isn't fast enough, or doesn't have enough RAM, just scrounge up some more discarded PC's and hook them in and make your single virtual server run faster.

This is a machine solution to the class of problem I spend a lot of time on, namely, how to get committees to work. How can we co-operate so that adding another person always improves our thinking power, so we can tackle hard problems by just adding enough people until the problem budges.

This is the new kind of "simple machine" that we need to build, socially.

Since everyone seems to have forgotten the whole point of the "machine" concept, which was to make our chores easier, people aren't even looking for some new "machine" that will make our current jobs easier. (Although some thought that "computers" would help.)

The "magic" is the same as with a simple machine, like a big pry bar. Instead of pushing on the boulder with our hands, we go get some tool instead, and make a two-stage solution, where we push on the tool, the tool amplifies our push, and the tool pushes on the boulder, moving it.

We need to get back to that concept, socially. We need to stop trying to "push on" social problems one person at a time, looking for a "stronger" person if one person can't move the boulder - and think about ways to get a middle step -- building a virtual strong person out of many actual people, where the virtual strong person can lift the boulder easily.
That would say we need to put energy and resources and effort into doing for people what VMware did for computers -- solving the problems of how to make them work together as if they were one, seamlessly.

Like VMware, when we finally get it cracked, it will be wildly, amazingly helpful, successful, and popular and we'll be able to do things easily that we had given up on doing before.

It's a cool problem, and we really need more people working on it.

(Crowbar photo from flickr by jwhairybob)
(Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge in Brazil by by chris.diewald )