Remember the movie `The Lawnmower Man'? Not a lot of people like the movie, but I do. It's a weird throwing together of two short stories by sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clark and Stephen King.

Mr. Clark had a vision of a world that slowly gets taken over by computers that start learning how to connect up to each other forming a gigantic superbrain network. The takeover of the world is marked when every single telephone starts ringing at once.

Mr. King's short story was of a mystic lawnmower man who goes on a killer rampage. Both stories are horrific.

The movie is also horrific. It's the story of a research scientist who uses computer technology to turn a retarded man into a wrathful superbeing. The man manages to use his altered consciousness to enter a computer and the world's networks.

The movie ends with his takeover, when he rings all the world's telephones simultaneously. Quirky and fun.

I was reminded of the movie when reading the story of Dr. Ben Goertzel, a 31-year-old mathematician who has a vision of a World-Wide Brain -- of the mind taking physical shape as the Internet. In this metaphor, each Web page is a neuron cluster, a hypertext link is a synapse. Human users get to be the sense organs.

It's not as if he is some crazed scientist selling snake oil. Mr. Goertzel is one of the bright stars in the field of artificial intelligence with many reputable academic achievements behind him.

He is known for his mathematical model of the mind as a collection of processes, and processes within processes, interacting parts and wholes.

Consciousness arises spontaneously in a process he calls emergence, in which cells self organise into organs, to organisms and to organisations.

He was reportedly stunned when he saw his vision taking shape as the Internet.

Using Java, a universal programming language on the Web, he began developing software agents to roam across networks, gathering data and bringing it together, to see patterns in numbers, words, and other agents. He is convinced that eventually the network itself could become self-teaching.

A currency analyst found a description of Mr. Goertzel's work -- where else -- but on the Internet and immediately saw its value as a Wall Street tool to gather data.

Together they've formed IntelliGenesis Corp. (intelligenesis.net), and with a team of other researchers are developing a market analysis tool. While another scientist has called it artificial intelligence "word salad'' I find the concept intriguing.

There are already so-called intelligent agents roaming the net. Mr. Goertzel's software could become the next step above that - a meta-agent- if taken further.

Being a paranoid person by nature, only because I welcome new technology while at the same time I am aware of the uses the facists among us could turn it into, I expect all the telephones to begin ringing soon.

While the computer and business community watches Microsoft squirm before the courts in an anti-trust lawsuit, attention has also been focused on an operating system some consider to be superior to Windows.

Linux was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 in reaction to the dominance of Microsoft. Linux is modelled after Unix, a relatively expensive operating system used to run some workstations and Internet sites.

As a rebel programmer paranoid (that word again) about Microsoft's dominance, Torvalds decided to share the secrets of his source code by making it public.

Via the Internet, other programmers from around the world began making contributions and fixing bugs. You can download the program and its source code for free on the Internet.

Some companies also sell low-cost versions of Linux. An estimated three to eight million people now use Linux. Some of the special effects used in the movie Titantic were created on computers using Linux. The system is also used by NASA to piece together pictures of Earth taken from outer space.

The ordinary computer user will have to wait awhile before replacing Windows with Linux. The program is still in development, and there is not a lot of software that has been developed to run on the system.

Companies such as I.B.M., Corel and Netscape Communications have announced they are developing such software. Many computer writers advise ordinary users, like myself, not to bother with the program yet. It involves a lot of tinkering and time to learn the type in commands, and a bit of an adventurous spirit.