Chapter 3

"Here I come to save the day" -- wasn't that the Underdog theme? Marty again reminded himself that he wasn't an underdog. Well, at least not the bottom dog. He did pass and get his computer science degree after all. Well, except for that class in non-deterministic algorithms. It had taken him all summer to wrap his brain around the idea that you could just lay out all the choices for a computer and there was this cool method that a computer could use to convert a state machine that didn't say how to solve the problem into a state machine that explicitly checked all the possibilities and solved the problem for you.

The trick was to recognize that the Deterministic Finite State Machine had a way of expressing just one choice at a time, but a Non Deterministic Finite State machine could express multiple choices and hence multiple paths through the state machine without making them explicitly different states. Of course, there was an explosion of these different states when you created the non-deterministic version of the FSM. Dry boring stuff if you had to do it yourself. One of the things that made Computers so cool is that they can do it for you, if you load the right programs and know how to knit them together to make a complete system.

There he was wool-gathering again. When Marty figured out how to make a real artificial intelligence, then he would get the computer to do it for him, but unfortunately, he had to be smarter than the computer to set it up originally.

What was it that Robert Heinlein said? Oh yeah, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". Marty pulled out a purple pen from his desk, wrote "TANSTAAFL" on a 3 by 5 card and stuck it to his cork board next to his desk. A bit cryptic, but it would remind him that things have to be earned, they wouldn't just be given to him for free. And it might confuse George. As if it was possible to confuse George more. Come to think of it, George might even be the exception that proved the rule in that case. He didn't seem to have earned anything he had.

A quick phone call to both the City Library and the County Library (with a McDonald's napkin over the phone to muffle his voice) reaffirmed his gut-level assumption that there wasn't any one named Farnswerthy or any variations thereof working there. Marty wondered if the napkin was really effective at blurring his pronunciation so that they couldn't tell if it was Farnswert or Fernswarth, or Furnzweirth. Fortunately, they hadn't asked him how to spell her name, which would have made the use of the napkin surperfluous. The point of the napkin was to blur the word enough that they heard what they wanted to hear rather than what he said work. Thinking about it, it was a rather stupid plan. But if it had worked, he could have skipped a whole lot of work tracking down guesses in the computer.

On an intuition, Marty again scanned the list of clients of WCI's clients and felt his stomach sinking when he saw that Perry's Berry Farm was also a client. Was Perry the same as Mizz Parker? With George you could never really be sure. Of course, it should have been Perry's fault (whoever he was) to confuse the issue by naming his business after a rhyme of his name with Berry...

Time to pull in the big guns. Or at least start trying to gather more information. A few years ago, Mr. Wurczock had come up with the great plan to offer a "virus free" internet experience. And for someone who had little knowledge of computers, and a lot of money to blow, his plan actually made a tiny bit of sense. The idea was that he would take snapshots of his clients' computers, put the snapshot of their computer on a server in the WCI main office, and be able to track down if a virus was on the machine by running the anti-virus check on the virtual computer rather than using the hardware of the actual computer. This would mean that if the real computer was a slow 386, he could just simulate that computer on the special high speed computers in the server room, and find the viruses faster than they could be found on the actual client's machine. And then because WCI had control over their machine whilst they were using the software WCI provided to let them get to the internet, WCI could write back a virus-free copy to their machines hard disk. They would be virus-free, and WCI could charge a higher price for a commodity service like being an Internet Service Provider.

While it seemed to work, Marty suspected that there as also a bit of penny-wise and pound-foolish activity going on. Rather than paying the anti-virus companies lots of money for multiple copies of their anti-virus programs (on each of WCI's client's machines), Mr. Wurczock only had to buy one copy and then run it on his super-duper server machines. So rather than spending fifty dollars a copy for each client, he only spent fifty dollars total, which was really the penny-wise part. Unfortunately, the pound-foolish part was that WCI spent tens of thousands of dollars having this huge computer room full of fast computers and disk arrays, to be able to duplicate the client's computers in multiple configurations, and with copies of their computers downloaded at different times from the real machines. Not that Marty complained about having access to all that computer power.

One advantage of Mr Wurczock's plan was that WCI could also sell a backup-service to their clients. It was easy to restore old files that had been deleted accidentally when you had multiple copies of their machines, hard disks, and even the contents of their USB thumb drives to fall back on when you were looking for that "lost file". WCI considered it a trade secret of how exactly they were able to help recover files, and enforced it with a 30 page legal document they called an employment contract. Marty figured the whole invasion-of-privacy thing was probably why Mr. Wurczock didn't want anyone to explain how it worked.

The backup service did make more money, but it had required even more souped up computers and bigger hard disk drives, as it required a more active copy of the computers to be maintained, rather than just a copy every day or so. It did slow the computers down, and did require some fancy tricks with local hard disk file allocations, but those problems were addressed a long time ago by other programmers before Marty even started working for WCI.

On the plus side (at least for Marty) was that the copies of multiple machines meant he didn't have to do any surfing on the open internet for porn or salacious stories. If any WCI clients downloaded it, it would end up on the server farm within a few minutes. And since WCI was the internet server provider of choice for the county, it didn't even need to be downloaded from the client's machines. It just needed to be copied off the gateway proxy machine to the server farm. Of course, it also was in the virtual copies made of the real machines too.

For efficiency, the virtual machines didn't need to take up virtual space on each of their virtual hard drives storing duplicates of the same files. An efficient control program just kept one copy of each file, with many references stored in the virtual machine copies. This scheme actually worked pretty well. For Marty's purposes, it was also cool because it meant that there was just one place that the Laundry-List-Of-Files was maintained. It was to that LLOF master copy of all files that Marty went to try to track down the elusive Mizz Fernwairth or whatever her name was. His handy-dandy super-smart pattern matching program could search the Laundry-List-Of-Files (LLOF) system just as easily as it could search the help-desk tickets. Of course, searching the LLOF was only part of the solution. A lot more files to search meant a lot more CPU power was needed by his searching program. To even make it possible, the program had to run on the massive high speed server computers rather than just on Marty's desktop machine. Which meant it would be risky. Mr. Wurczock was an eagle in watching expenses, even if the other option was that the computers were wasting money just sitting there not doing anything at all.