Baylink

Member since: Aug 17th, 2006

Baylink's Latest Comments

Blog Activity

Blog	# of Comments
Engadget	3 Comments
Download Squad	2 Comments
The Digital Photography Weblog	1 Comment
Engadget Mobile	1 Comment

Recent Comments:

Why Diaspora will win (Download Squad)

May 21st 2010 3:02PM I see I neglected to expand my first point:

Napster had a pretty good chance of telling you immediately if someone had what you wanted, *because* it had that centralized index.

Gnutella, bittorrent, and the like, on the other hand, operate roughly by "send[ing] a query out into the net, and waiting for results", the necessary time for which can vary from "drink cup of coffee" to "brew coffee" all the way up to "cook and eat dinner".

Clearly, that's not practical for something intended to replace FB, and I see no way to fix *this* problem either, within the bounds of the system design as it's currently envisioned.

Why Diaspora will win (Download Squad)

May 21st 2010 2:58PM The problem is twofold:

The Metcalfe Effect is rough, yes, but MySpace beat Friendster, before it got beaten by Facebook, so it's not impregnable.

The *real* problem's what I call the Napster Conundrum.

Napster was so much more useful than all the other apps that followed it, like Gnutella and ed2k, because *it had a centralized index*.

The other problem is that there are several usefull services Facebook provides which it *can* provide because the central servers constituted a trusted (heh) third party.

The first rule of distributed client-server apps is *you can't trust the client*. Ask John Carmack if you need any more on that. Because that's true, quite a lot of the stuff that makes Facebook useful *can't be implemented* in an environment like Diaspora's, because *everyone's an untrusted client*. To everyone else, that is.

I'm not sure even PKI can solve this problem, completely.

MID device sales far lower than estimates, only Intel surprised (Engadget)

Jun 5th 2009 10:41AM Oh, c'mon...

Devices like this are *critical* for... sending the entire database of secrets of the American intelligence apparatus to your ex-bestfriend from college, so he can be babysat by a hot blond and an NSA assassin.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

How would you change HP's Mini 1000 Mi? (Engadget)

Apr 24th 2009 10:30PM I would love to buy one of the HPs.

Any one of them.

But until they get over this compulsion to put glossy screens on them (as if anyone's going to use it to watch movies...), I won't touch one.

Matte screen is an absolute requirement for me.

QChat-enabled LG for Sprint in the wild (Engadget Mobile)

Feb 22nd 2008 2:41PM Well, that would be interesting, since Sprint's job board had "Senior Architecture Design Engineer" or some such posted for the Qchat project with a Fall 07 posting date, the last time I look.

I have no doubt they can screw up the architecture of Qchat as badly as they did with DirectConnect, er, PTT, um, WalkieTalkie. (And I say this as someone who sat in a conference room in Tampa in 1996 with a district and regional manager from Nextel, told them they needed to implement what they would later call Cross-fleet and Nationwide, and was told "nah; they'll never do that. Our customers aren't telling us they need that.".

I did; my client did. Look; there it was.

For Qchat, they need easy iDen interop, a PC/Internet desktop client -- even if they bill it as a separate line of service -- and the ability to cluster said desktops into a dispatch group, with manual release of the operator-radio association from the operator side.

Extra bonus points for using open protocols on the Internet interface.

That won't be what we get, though.

California school district getting 1,000 Asus Eee PCs (Engadget)

Nov 28th 2007 11:07PM Of *course* teachers are Luddites.

If they try to use computers in their classrooms, they'll run the risk of being senteced to 40 years of felony charges if a pop-up trojan pulls up a porn site during class.

*I* wouldn't ever let a computer be turned on in my classroom. And I'd tell everyone who'd listen why...

In pictures the Nikon D80 (The Digital Photography Weblog)

Aug 17th 2006 1:05AM [ drive by comment ]

Frank: you're mistaken on two pretty important points.

Copyright inheres in an image from the moment you click the shutter; be prepared to provide case law citations if you wish to be believeable claiming otherwise.

And *I*, at least, don't feel like plugging my expensive camera directly into my (consumer-grade) computer...

Plus, pros should always be splitting shoots up among several cards; cards do fail and get stolen...