Via Business Insider. I probably watch fewer than 10…
Category: Technology
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Poncho
I subscribe to an amusing weather service called Poncho. It’s currently in NYC and Boston only. It’s weather with a personality. You get a brief morning and evening email (or text) with the basic info.
It’s the descriptions of the day that make it good. We had one of those spectacular spring NYC days today. Poncho said:
This is the Monday that all other Mondays should aspire to be
Other examples include:
I APPROVE THIS FORECAST. HIGH OF 57
A bit cooler today, with partly cloudy skies & temps hitting the high 50s. This is the Sunday we need, & a Sunday we can believe in.
Expect rain, gustiness, & temps in the high 40s all day long. Not so fetch. Keep dry & warm!
Today deserves a slow clap for improving so much! Still some chances of scattered rain this evening, with temps dropping to the low 60s.
Temps sink back below into the high 30s this evening. Expect more of the same tomorrow. Was spring just a dream?
I’m not sure how well this can scale, but getting some personality from your new tech service is refreshing.
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Pay for Performance
In healthcare, great in theory. In practice, not so much…
Measuring quality is hard. It really, really is. P4P requires that it be reasonably easy. They need metrics they can get from everyone without the gathering of data taking too much time or money. But those factors sometimes lead us to measure the things we can easily measure, not the things that matter.
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Private Cloud?
I recently read some nonsense about the benefits of a “private cloud”. It’s a good PR line because most people don’t understand the cloud and you can make it sound scary.
Werner Vogels is the CTO at Amazon and has been for a very long time. He knows the cloud and he knows security. I mean he really knows. I’ve blogged about him before.
One of my favorite blog posts from him was written in 2006 about storing credit cards. It’s titled, “You Guard it with Your Life”. In light of everything that has happened lately, remember this was in 2006. Two great quotes:
Credit card information should be kept in a physical secure location separate from your other servers with armed guards in front of it (I am not kidding).
I won’t tell you exactly how we implement our schemes but to get to Amazon customer credit cards you will need a small army of Marines
In 2009 he wrote what is still the best post on “what is the cloud” I’ve seen. He was announcing Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud, while pointing out that a Private Cloud is not the cloud.
A key quote:
These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed “private cloud” does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination
This may require some explanation. Elasticity is one of the key benefits of the cloud. Origami could double the number of servers we are using in a matter of hours and then scale back down a day later, paying only for what we used. A private cloud cannot do that. “Capex elimination” is CIO speak for capital expenditures, meaning paying for physical servers. Again, if you have a “private cloud” where all resources are dedicated to you, then you are paying for those resources. If it is possible to double your resources quickly and those resources are available to only you, then they are just sitting there and you are paying for them. That’s not the cloud.
Vogels states that the cloud has three key benefits:
- Eliminates Cost
- Is Elastic
- Removes Undifferentiated “Heavy Lifting”
The last point means that operating a data center is a pain in the butt. You have to be an expert on air conditioning, power supplies, flooring, a bunch of stuff that your clients don’t care about. Not having to think about that is a big benefit. That’s the only one of the three that the “private cloud” gives you.
So if your vendor is in a “private cloud” they are not as elastic as they should be and you are paying them more for storage than you should be.
Even Salesforce.com’s Desk product uses Amazon EC2 and touts their security (Salesforce is a leading cloud provider as well). If you have a private cloud, ask if
critical locations have extensive setback and military grade perimeter control berms
They probably don’t know what “berm” means.
People do not understand the cloud. That means other people will try to fool them. Anyone who is touting their “private cloud” is trying to fool you.
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Full Stop
This headline is three words too long…
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More Net Neutrality
A good, but long, explanation of the Net Neutrality mess…
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Vaccines Rock
From the Incidental Economist (which you should read) reporting on CDC findings:
Among 78.6 million children born during 1994–2013, routine childhood immunization was estimated to prevent 322 million illnesses (averaging 4.1 illnesses per child) and 21 million hospitalizations (0.27 per child) over the course of their lifetimes and avert 732,000 premature deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses
Averted 732,000 premature deaths. Not trivial.
Vaccination will potentially avert $402 billion in direct costs and $1.5 trillion in societal costs because of illnesses prevented in these birth cohorts.
$402 billion dollars. Again, not so trivial.
Or feel free to listen to Jenny McCarthy. She is, after all, attractive…
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Baseball Borders
Brilliant visuals by zip code from the NY Times…
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Net Neutrality RIP
This is one of those obscure tech topics but it really isn’t that complicated. Imagine you have a startup company making cool ties. You create a nice web site. Your ties are cool and business picks up.
Then Comcast says that they will reduce the speed they serve up your website unless you pay them 10K a month.
If that sounds crazy to you, realize that Netflix just did this (not that they wanted to). They paid Comcast extra to get good speeds. Only it wasn’t 10K. Sure, they can afford it. But can your custom tie site?
The Verge has a bunch of articles on this:
Some NSFW language, but a good one.
The original, (with the original NSFW headline).
Today’s article about the FCC proposal.
And Mother Jones’s RIP article.
This is a big deal. Imagine if Walmart’s trucks could drive 75 mph but everyone else had to drive 55. Would we stand for that?
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Be Curious
I couldn’t agree with this more:
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 