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People were horrified when a kidney went up on eBay's auction block last summer. But a new auction service, set to launch in February, brings the scalpel to the highest bidder. Huntington Beach, Calif.-based Medicine Online lures patients wanting prettier noses or trimmer thighs to search online for the surgeon of their dreams. Surgeons then bid to perform cosmetic, foot, or vision-correction procedures, but not life-threatening operations such as a heart bypass or liver transplant.

Hate your big honker of a nose? Post a request for rhinoplasty on MOL's Website along with your age, gender, occupation, location, health information, and insurance coverage. Doctors then have 72 hours to start bidding for the procedure based on their credentials, fees, and location. They also can direct potential patients to their homepage on MOL where they can compete with audio and video presentations.

The establishment, however, does not approve. Dr. James H. Wells, treasurer of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and vice president of the California Society of Plastic Surgeons, is appalled at the idea. "Medicine is built on trust, not on Internet linkages," he says, adding that patients already can get information about surgeons online. "These people [at MOL] are only interested in lining their own pockets."

Medicine Online is still sculpting its revenue model for the cash-driven cosmetic and reconstructive surgery market where more than 2 million procedures are performed each year. Will the vain pay a fee? Perhaps, says Mike Sussman, chief operating officer of MOL. "It might cost $7 to put my nose online," he figures. Bidding surgeons will likely pay an annual subscription fee.

So far the surgeons are trickling in — feet first. To date, only 20 podiatrists have signed up to bid for surgery.

Enough Already!

PIPE DOWN

"The combination of tech and sex is already pipelining porn into every home, ready or not."
-Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 28, 1999

"You don't need to understand techie terms such as 'pipelining' or 'branch prediction.'
-St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 15, 1999

"The mayor has his hands on the pulse of the whole thing. That's because there are people in the Bears organization pipelining everything to City Hall."
-Walter Payton, the late Chicago Bears running back, Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 1999

"In our evaluation of caching appliances, we were impressed with CacheFlow's attempt to bring the pipelining benefits of HTTP 1.1 to older HTTP environments."
-Network World, Nov. 1, 1999

"'We're just pipelining'."
-Jack C. Lee, President and CEO, Danoil Energy, PR Newswire, Oct. 27, 1999

"Automatic pipelining of large blocks of combinatorial logic is also easily achievable in FPGA Compiler II version 3.3, with the simple inclusion of a bank of registers placed before the logic block in the RTL code."
-Business Wire, Sept. 20, 1999

"We needed a state-of-the-art, automated solution for deal origination, pipelining, primary syndication, agency servicing and accounting."
-Gail Glassbrook, director of lending and international services, Michigan National, Business Wire, Sept. 13, 1999

Joy Schtick

His card reads: "William N. Joy Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Corporate Executive Officer Sun Microsystems Inc."

Photo: David Strick/Corbis Outline

It's quite a handle, but not as descriptive as it could be. Perhaps the short, sweet title that appears on Wile E. Coyote's business card would be more apt. It reads simply, "Super Genius."

Computerphiles first took note of Bill Joy, 45, as the principal designer of University of California at Berkeley's version of the Unix operating system. In 1982, he left Berkeley and, with Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, founded Sun Microsystems. He has been one of the driving intellectuals behind the company's tech strategy, and its Java and Jini technologies.

When most people think of the network, they envision the Web — browsers, sites, hyperlinks, email. Not Joy. His vision for the Internet is one that links not only computers, but millions of smart, discrete devices — everything from plugged-in electric lights in the home to conveyer belts on factory floors — all communicating, often without the need for human intervention, through the Net.

He calls this vision "pervasive computing." Historically, Joy recently told an audience of technophiles and businesspeople at a meeting in Woodside, Calif., digital information technology was focused inward, where disks were the primary medium of information exchange. With the advent of the Web, the focus went outward. The third wave is pervasive computing where every device gets software, a link to the Net, and an invisible intelligence all its own. The "focus" will be everywhere. "Ninety-nine percent of these devices will be invisible," he says.

Although Sun is based in Palo Alto, Calif., Joy does most of his brainstorming at the company's famed Aspen, Colo., R&D lab, a place that is to computer geeks what Area 51 is to UFO buffs — Dreamland.

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