Free the Airwaves

Vegas Clinic May Have Sickened Thousands

"LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nearly 40,000 people learned this week that a trip to the doctor may have made them sick. In a type of scandal more often associated with Third World countries, a Las Vegas clinic was found to be reusing syringes and vials of medication for nearly four years. The shoddy practices may have led to an outbreak of the potentially fatal hepatitis C virus and exposed patients to HIV, too.

The discovery led to the biggest public health notification operation in U.S. history, brought demands for investigations and caused scores of lawyers to seek out patients at risk for infections."

Google LatLong: Your content on Google Maps

"Over the past 11 months, people have created more than 9 million My Maps, encompassing a total of 40 million placemarks. That's an impressive 1 new placemark created every second! We never anticipated that people would become so interested in mapmaking, which used to be accessible only to priests, scholars, and academics."

I've made a few maps myself, none worthy of publication. Thinking about how this is probably done, Google gives up a few hundred bytes of disk space (it's not like the actual map data has to be duplicated or anything) and the user gets something that looks really impressive with relatively little effort.

But think of the bandwidth being used by someone who uses the "Random My Map" display (mentioned at the link) as a sort of alternate screen saver. Google has several things like this that can be used endlessly to throw content up on your screen whether you are there or not.

Gadgets such as this seem to say "Go ahead Microsoft, buy Yahoo, go ahead Facebook and dominate social networking (well that seemed to be true until the last month or so), but can you give users sub-second response time and an ever growing storage capacity for things that they can actually use?"

The trick to beating Google (if they don't beat themselves first) is not only capturing click-throughs, but also maintaining an infrastructure capable of keeping up with it all. "Live.Yahoo.com" is anything but lively (not to mention it will be very confusing if the merger with Microsoft goes through) so far and every day I hit popular web sites that either fail to load or load so slowly (usually waiting for a remote ad server to do its part) that I give up the wait. Do the metrics capture these failures or the frustration and resentment they may cause?

In my mainframe days we used to worry about keeping end-users response time below a certain threshold (more than a couple seconds was considered a failure). This wasn't always one company versus another, but also within a single organization, and the issue was that data-entry people and others that got paid to interact with the mainframe would not only be delayed by those pauses during which their keyboards were locked up, but would also lose focus, so that even when they could finally type again their minds would have strayed to something else.

With all our blazingly fast desktop systems does anyone even think of such a thing? Certainly not the vendors I deal with, and not the IT people I keep in touch with. They are resigned, if not happy with the the fact that our screens contain far more graphics than data and no matter how fast our desktop system may be, "painting" that next screen is going to take a while.

Google is the only company that seems to have the infrastructure to come close to the one or two second responses I used to expect, but I wonder if anyone there is keeping an eye on this, or will their be a point at which even they run out of some critical resource and subject us all with interminable "waiting".

The Killing of Wi-Fi : The Threat of Wi-Fi - Columns by PC Magazine

"Here's the value proposition. Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky. These are the speeds we were playing with 10 years ago, but now they're some sort of breakthrough. Yes, it's a kind of breakthrough, considering the phone companies' old 115-Kbps GPRS clunker technologies.

For these speeds—which are capped, mind you, so you cannot actually use what you are sold—you pay $50, $60, maybe $70 a month. And for that money, you get to send files from a park bench a couple of times a week or maybe once a month from the airport. Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?"

Yes Indeedy!

Cox & Forkum: Charmed

(Nice cartoon at title link)

From the Mercury News Article:

"Language fluency was a big reason some of Sun Microsystems' technical support jobs were moved from India to Nova Scotia. Customers in the Americas who needed tech support had griped about having a difficult time understanding the English typically spoken in India. ``This move offered a better fit for our customers,'' said Sun spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek."

I don't think language is the main issue though. Consider an example recently relayed to me (I have less recent personal examples though):

You call about a brand new printer/fax/scanner combo that after a month has started issuing a grinding sound when you do certain operations and refused to feed paper from the sheet feeder (but otherwise scans and prints fine). After asking several sensible questions, the telephone support suggests that you download and install a newer version of the devices firmware. ("Newer version? I just got the thing!") Furthermore, since this will take quite a while, they suggest you call back when the process is complete.

This has nothing to do with language, although it may have something to do with culture. In North America (and other places I''m sure) we have struggled with high-tech devices for long enough to know when the support person has exceeded their competency as is merely stalling for time, or worse, trying to get you off the phone so that they meet some sort of efficiency standards at their call center. These lame tactics might have been common at call centers in Texas or Baltimore in the 80s, but they don't fly any more. In other parts of the world though, callers might have a different, more tolerant response to the "authority" of the call center personnel. It has little to do with language, or accents, which in this melting pot we have here are all too common in daily face to face life.

As to the economics of it all, I suspect the average consumer if given a choice of being on hold for a minute and speaking with someone anywhere in the world, versus being on hold for an hour, and possibly being disconnected in the process to get some bleary eyed tech-seminar graduate from big-city USA, most of us would take the former.

"Unlimited" Data Plans

The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games; (ii) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine–to–machine connections or peer–to–peer (P2P) file sharing; or (iii) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections. This means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using P2P file sharing services and/or redirecting television signals for viewing on laptops is prohibited. A person engaged in prohibited uses, continuously for one hour, could typically use 100 to 200 MBs, or, if engaged in prohibited uses for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, could use more than 5 GBs in a month.

I think they meant to say that it has unlimited limitations. Yeah, that must be it.

Everything is Miscellaneous

"I had a brainstorm-y idea I floated to NPR I will try out on you, too. Keep in mind that it's an ill-formed, un-thought-through idea, which you should feel free to kick the bejeezus out of.

NPR values civil discourse. And, despite its reputation in some circles, it's committed to being non-partisan. So, suppose on pages devoted to particular segments or topics, NPR listeners were explicitly charged with pulling together links that represent the spectrum of opinion and thought on that topic. If it were a page about, say, the Libby trial, users would be asked to find Web references from the left and right, from US and elsewhere, from the scholarly to the flippant. If this were to work, it would presumably be because some small cadre of users stepped up to the task. Getting the 'social physics ' right would be crucial, of course.(This idea is spurred by Debatepedia, except it aims at a plurality of views, not a duopoly.)

Bad idea? Impractical? Undesirable? Too much coffee, not enough reality?"

Maybe I'm missing the point of your idea, but I'll kick the bejeezus out of anyway:

Slashdot, Digg, Netscape, the list is endless of places you can go and have a good argument (insults are down the hall). We started down this road before the Internet even got popular with the original "Usenet" newsgroups, where the word "flame war" was first coined (I think).

Never in these "debates" doesn't anyone appear to change their mind about anything and almost never does anyone even admit to having discovered an aspect of the issue that they were previously unaware of. Such discovery does take place I suspect, it's just that everyone too proud to admit it.

I've never understood why media outlets maintain the pretense of neutrality (they don't do a very good job of it generally), but my hunch is that it is simply to get the largest audience. You can lean to the left or right, so long as you don't lean so far as to drive half the audience away in disgust.

Let's face it, we can't all be well informed about everything. Read one of the web sites mentioned above to see how woefully uninformed we can be. Even journalists display their ignorance on a regular basis, and some of this ignorance comes through as bias (eg: yes there ARE scientists that don't buy global warming theories, no matter how often you say the issue is settled, their stories are on the net, why not on NPR?).

My favorite programs often have well spoken (key ingredient) representative from across the political spectrum, and a moderator that lets them have more or less equal time. I've never seen anyone do this better than the McLaughlin Group, but others do a passable job. Often the commercial interruptions or the need to cover too many topics spoil the chance for any depth. If there is such a show where they only cover one topic per week I don't know of it (but I'm a radio and Internet person who rarely watches TV).

I don't know of anything like this on the Internet, but it could be a perfect, in ways, a much better format:

1: Pick topic
2: Assemble two or three topic matter experts with views that span the spectrum.
3: Post starter article (this could be in written, podcast, or video format, or some combination) that lays out the basic issue in the most broad terms (no potentially biased details). Topic expert could express themselves at this point, but I sort of think this would be distracting to "viewers" who might start forulating responses rather than just spelling out what they think from their existing knowledge.
4: Allow readers, viewers, etc. to either post their ideas to a public forum, or (this might be better) e-mail their points of view, to prevent the flame wars. E-mail would encourage each viewer to give it their best shot in one message rather than drop into "debate" mode.
5: Have the topic matter experts read all the responses (offline) and prepare a statement that puts forth their (the expert's) point of view, augmented by any supporting statements from the received comments (and/or pointing out particularly flawed arguments from those same comments).

Give each expert the same amount of time to speak or the same word limit to stay within. Optionally have a rebuttal round or two.

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The problem with this format is of course it doesn't give the professional journalists much to do. That is unless they also serve as the topic matter experts, something that might be OK for some political discussions, but not so OK for hard science, technology issues, and other areas where journalists don't have enough depth. Maybe thats why it's never been done.

We used too expect our politicians to do our homework for us. Daily public opinion polls have made our democracy more participatory, but do we really want these decisions made based on who shouts the loudest? Our form of government could well vote itself out of existence if we don't find a new way to carry on the debate soon. I'm not optimistic.

Users told to dump servers, return to mainframes

The cost of ownership of a mainframe are between 30 and 60 per cent better than 30 Sun servers or 300 Linux servers, Illuminata says.

I think I saw this in a Woody Allen movie once.

Air Force May Hire Outsiders to Oversee Projects

The Air Force is considering hiring outside engineers or consultants to oversee systems integration of its next-generation navigational satellites, according to industry and government officials. Typically, the military service that orders a particular system retains primary responsibility and control over systems engineering and integration.

But hiring a separate project integrator could set a precedent for future projects and would be a tacit acknowledgment that both Air Force Space Command and the Pentagon's massive weapons-buying bureaucracy lack the necessary expertise to perform the required oversight role.

This makes a lot of sense. But I guarantee that the average mid-rank military type managing a high-tech project is at least as conversant with the technology being applied as is the typical government IT worker in the same position.

So a good start toward downsizing government (if any elected official ever gets the idea to do such a thing into his tiny brain) would be to turn more of the work of setting up IT infrastructure (there's that word again) over to tech companies that manage the effort overseeing other tech companies that do the work.

Taiwan quake shakes confidence in undersea links

Dzubeck added that the Internet bust in 2001 had hit expensive plans by various companies to lay undersea cables along new paths that were less likely to be affected by earthquakes.

I'm not really sure why this is news. But maybe it should server as a reminder that some of our infrastructure over here (like the telephone and cable wires buried underground or running along poles have even less redundancy (read: none) in most cases. In this case there were ten cables and seven of them were damaged.