Thursday, December 20 2001

One of the things that hasn't been said about Boingo yet

is how good, or bad, the network congestion is going to be in the real world. (Plenty of people have already commented on the name.) I'm sure it works great in focus groups but the 2.4 GHz spectrum is shared by a whole host of devices that are going to be competing for a fixed amount of bandwidth. Even if it were limited to 802.11b widgets and you're sitting in the lobby of an airport when 15 gamer-weirdos invade the coffee-shop and start playing Quake across the wireless, you'd be fucked. I wonder how much overhead the VPN-hack adds... And just in case any once thinks I'm also some kind of networking genius on top of everthing else, I'm not. I'm only relaying a conversation I had with a friend who knows more about this than I.

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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is conflate

| source : web1913 | Conflate \Con*flate"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Conflated}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Conflating}.] [L. conflatus, p. p. of conflare to blow together; con- + flare to blow.] To blow together; to bring together; to collect; to fuse together; to join or weld; to consolidate. The State-General, created and conflated by the passionate effort of the whole nation. --Carlyle. | source : wn | conflate v : mix together different elements; "The colors blend well"; "fuse the clutter of detail into a rich narrative"--A. Schlesinger [syn: {blend}, {mix}, {commingle}, {immix}, {fuse}, {coalesce}, {meld}, {combine}, {merge}]

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