Friday, March 08, 2002

Netflix sets plans for Wall St. premiere. The company, which rents DVDs online, registers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public in an offering that would bring in $115 million. [CNET News.com] I love the Netflix business model and I'm a loyal subscriber.  For me, Netflix is an entirely better experience than Blockbuster.  I hope that they do well in their IPO. 7:59:45 AM

The more time I spend thinking about P2P architectures, the more I think that IM is the solution.  Here is how they stack up: 1) Proven scalability.  Compare the ~3 m simultaneous users online at AIM and ICQ with the ~1.5 m Napster and Morpheus (at their peaks). 2) The ability to connect to specific individuals on an IM system vs. the fractional network approach on the current P2P systems. 3) Authorization and buddy lists.  IM has it.  P2P systems offer the ability to ban only. 4) QoS (Quality of Service) is much higher on IM than the current P2P systems. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:53:59 AM

On having found the true religion. Patrick Logan: "I've been a disciple of this religion for over 20 years. ... One significant feature of Emacs that beats everything else... all the dialogs, directory listings, shell output, info documents, etc. are all editable text." [diveintomark] I completely agree.  One interface to multiple applications.  It's beautiful. 7:44:08 AM

Cemetery.Org. What do you want to have happen to your data when you die? [kuro5hin.org] Interesting idea and associated set of problems. 7:41:31 AM

Mining the Genome. The Human Genome Project piles up Everests of data. But getting new drugs out of it will require sophisticated software for sniffing out patterns—one of the most crucial tasks of the hot field known as bioinformatics. [Technology Review - Software] 7:22:22 AM

Patrick Breitenbach notes that the new ActiveBuddy SDK is out.  He wants to build bots in Radio using UserTalk that provide services to AIM users. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Interesting.  I really like the idea of ActiveBuddy.  I just wish that they'd release on other IM networks too. 7:11:11 AM

© Copyright 2002 Douglas W. Burke.