b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
Shorter Hard Drive Warranties
Market Gap Analysis
Classical Education at Home
I'm insured -- the old fashioned way
Comment-ary
Digital Hollywood Has Game
Int'l Fujitsu Hard Drive Fiasco
Practical Goodness -- Process Improvement and Documentation
P2P Radio -- Rock On
Vista -- Secure IM for Small Business
Transparency in the Music Industry
PaSaMuF - P2P Document Management
Intel Irony
Seb Goes Zen
Macintosh System Tracker
Revealing Digital Hollywood
Heart Surgery and Brain Damage
MIT To Share Open Courseware
Real-Time Political Bullshit
Geoffrey Moore Online Seminar
Intracom 2002
American InAudible
Open Source Intranet Portals
Legitimate P2P
GPS Everywhere
Can You Afford To Do It?
Explaining the Patent Policy of the W3C
Friday, September 27, 2002
Wire the 'Hood
Dangerous Liasions.
Here is everything you need to become a wireless ISP for your neighborhood. [Source: John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Shorter Hard Drive Warranties
What did they do, all get together and see that all my drives fail after 370 days in service? Great, I guess we really are at the point we'll just throw them away.
News.Com: `"Changing the warranty was something all the manufacturers wanted to do, but no one wanted to be first, Rutledge said. "We were all basically playing chicken to see who went first," Rutledge said. "Maxtor took a leadership position...and we're supporting it."' [
Market Gap Analysis
I think RFB is right, I just hope there is money to be made in the opening.
The dirty little secret of content management. Dylan Tweney's latest Business 2.0 column advises businesses to steer carefully between the six-figure CMS overkill solutions that thrived during the dotcom boom and the other end of the spectrum, reinventing the CMS wheel yourself in-house.I've been doing content management-related consulting for the last five years and there's a big hole in the middle of the market for CMS framework software that will handle 80% of the needs of most clients. There's no need, most of the time, to spend half a million dollars implementing a universal document management, record-keeping type system.
I wonder how many businesses could manage their web and intranet content just fine with affordable tools such as powerful blog systems (for example, pMachine or Movable Type) or more full-featured but still affordable-bordering-on-free CMS tools (for example, Manila and PostNuke). [
Classical Education at Home
The Well-Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise and her daughter Susan, provides instruction on how to build a curriculum. But more importantly, it helps you understand how and why a curriculum should be structured in a certain way, and provides a framework around which a solid, classical education can be built. [More...]
Terry Frazier at 4:27 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Learning, Book: reviews
I'm insured -- the old fashioned way
I've got health insurance. Back in August I picked up a thread on the health care dilemma for individuals and the self-employed. Being newly self-employed I was looking for good services and options.I tried eHealthinsurance.com but, like Scott Walker's experience, I found them less than helpful. Their forms are a Mobius loop, their customer service isn't, and when you finally get through all the hoops you find their relationship with the insurers isn't all that great.
Instead, I called my local independent insurance agent -- the people who carry my house and car insurance. They pointed me to a local representative from GE Financial services. This guy specializes in individual health care policies.
He talked me through it over the phone, sent me a couple of different options to review, and told me how to fill out the forms. He made it pretty easy. Where the eHealthinsurance.com approach took Scott 10 weeks, my application to BlueCross BlueShield of Georgia was approved in 10 days! What a deal. And I didn't pay any more than the price posted on eHealthinsurance.com.
The upshot of this is that, as Doc Searls points out, sometimes the online service brokers just aren't what we think they are, and working with real humans in the traditional way is all you need.
Terry Frazier at 3:53 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Health and Fitness
Comment-ary
I miss my comments. I took them off when I discovered that the default Radio Userland comment service doesn't allow deletion. The lack of any sort of notification was also an irritant, but the inability to delete comments was the real kicker. I axed them.But I miss them. I don't want all my blog entries to be conversations, but a little feedback is a good thing and forcing people to send e-mail is a hindrance. So I've been looking at alternatives. I know there have been some improvements in the notification structure (I think you can get an RSS feed off your Radio comments now,) but I still want more control.
I'm investigating Weblogger.com as a possible host for my personal domain. I've started trying out one of their free sites and if I can figure out how to get Radio to talk to that Manila server correctly, and manage comments the way I want, then I'll put them back on.
If that doesn't work out, I'll be looking into one of the 3rd-party services like YACCS. In any case, I'm working on getting my comment-ary back.
Digital Hollywood Has Game
I wonder if the biggest issue isn't really that consumers don't care.
DVD Makers Starting to Play Games. You've dropped your VCR player and soon you can forget your PC. At least, that's what the DVD industry is planning on. Michael Stroud reports from Digital Hollywood in Beverly Hills.[...] Consumer electronics companies have yet to announce they're making DVD players incorporating the technology. If the players end up being too expensive, consumers won't buy them.
And most importantly, studios and consumer electronics companies will need to create a buzz about the features they're adding, or consumers won't care. Even with millions of PCs capable of playing enhanced DVDs now on the market, Wuthrich noted, "the biggest issue is that people don't know it's there."
[
Int'l Fujitsu Hard Drive Fiasco
I wonder if IBM buys hard drives from Fujistu? They seem to have similar reliabiity rates.
PCA attacks 'shabby' handling of Great Fujitsu HDD fiasco. We publish Open Letter from trade association[...] from the reports we have received from three continents we can conclude, with a reasonable degree of confidence that the MPG3xxx series drives may well have a failure rate in excess of 20% pa (40% within two years of install). Indeed some of our correspondents would say this is a conservative estimate. [...]
[...] I am a Tech for a School District in BC Canada. We purchased a brand new lab of Hewitt Rand machines about a year ago. They all came with the MPG3204AT 20 GIG Fujitsu Harddrives.As Hewitt Rand has gone out of business, we have been having to deal with Fujitsu Canada directly.
So Far, out of 30 machines, we have had 26 fail with the "no harddrive" lack of detection by the system. That is 86% and climbing every day. These machines stay running all the time. They were fine for about eight months and then they started to fail at a rate of 2 - 3 per week. [...] [
Practical Goodness -- Process Improvement and Documentation
Practically speaking, a basic approach for the entrepreneur without a budget for a big buck consultant to come in and do this for fee.
GREAT APPROACHES FOR SMALL BUSINESSES AND CONSTRAINED BUDGETSProcess on a Shoestrong. The Process Group October Newsletter covers shoestring process improvement and practical project and process documentation. Process improvement is one of the first to go when making cuts. If it's cut,... [meryl's notes] via [
Thursday, September 26, 2002
P2P Radio -- Rock On
Another fine and useful app for P2P, the Pirate-to-Pirate software with no redeeming social value. Here's a quote from the article:
For the PeerCast team, they see their goal as advancing the technology of online music distribution, in lieu of the music industry's reluctance to do so. "We're based in Japan. The Japanese tend to embrace new technology rather than hiding from it like the music and movie conglomerates have done in the West," says Goddard. "We have to find a better way to publish music. At the moment the people who control that appear to have no incentive to move forward. So if they can't, then the rest of us are going to have to do it for them."
Now, if someone could just get Doc to fix his weblog so his RSS feed didn't repost every article, every time, in one long, continuous post.
Meanwhile the Great Workaround continues. DigInternet Radio the P2P way, by Howard Wen. And thanks to Hanan for the link. [
Vista -- Secure IM for Small Business
Something to track as Allie tries out another critical component of the small business intranet -- secure IM. If I'm right the product Allie refers to is Vista, a product of i3Connect. Here's what the company says:Secure IM Solution for Small BusinessThis is a very cost effective secure instant messaging solution. It is designed such that it can be installed and maintained very easily. It is targeted at the rapidly growing corporate messaging solutions based on Linux (available Q4 2002) and NT servers. [...]
The company lists Jabber compatibility as well as all the public IM protocols. Looks like pricing starts at $500 for 50 users. I'm eager to see what Allie finds performance-wise.
Secure IM Solution for Small Business."Secure IM Solution for Small Business "
This looks very interesting. It seems like it is one, small, light-weight client for both IM and RSS news grazing. I am going to give it a try.
The product name is "Vista". [
Transparency in the Music Industry
When the Nazis or the Soviets launched brainwashing campaigns labeled as education we called them propaganda or human rights violations -- here we just call them advertising.
Artists join industry campaign against music piracy. SiliconValley.com Sep 26 2002 0:41AM ET[...]The music industry is launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to combat Internet music piracy by appealing directly to fans to stop stealing.[...]
[...]Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the education campaign is part of a multifaceted strategy that includes combating file-swapping services in court; supporting paid alternatives such as pressplay, MusicNet and Rhapsody; and lobbying for new laws.[...]
[...]The print and television ads starting today enlist nearly 90 recording artists and songwriters -- including such superstars as Eminem, Madonna, the Dixie Chicks, Luciano Pavarotti and Brian Wilson -- who say illicit Internet downloads threaten the livelihood of everyone in the industry, from artists to record-store clerks.[...]
[...]"What we're doing is we are robbing our cultural past and we're destroying our cultural future," said David Benjamin, Universal Music Group's senior vice president of anti-piracy.[...]
[
The new laws we need to be lobbying for are those that will force full disclosure by any industry that wishes to mandate personal behavior. Before we let the RIAA and MPAA into our living rooms to run our lives, let's get a peek into their bedrooms and see just how much money really goes to the artists, just how much do the execs rake off, and just what sorts of practices do BMI and ASCAP use.
If you want to stand up in public and claim to be the Good Guys, stopping those who would rob our culture and destroy our future, you should have the fortitude to prove your motivations, your actions, and your vision are superior to the alternatives.
PaSaMuF - P2P Document Management
Recently I wondered out loud if there wasn't someone working on legitimate avenues for P2P. Specifically, I asked about small, decentralized collaborative editing and document management systems.
PaSaMuF is a filesharing system which indexes and shares common document types (Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, plain text, etc). Still under construction, PaSaMuF extracts information from the documents along with basic file metadata to ease searching. More in the project description:The project goal is to implement a tool for sharing documents over the internet.
Unlike Gnutella or Morpheus, the tool is meant to be used by small communities to have a simple and reliable document sharing/ management solution that works cross-plattform.
The application will support common file formats like PDF, DOC, XML, etc. The system analyses those document types and extracts meta informations that are useful for other peers searching for documents.
As we do not want to reinvent the wheel, the system will use many commonly used software products available for free. [...]
(via InfoAnarchy) via [
This is nice. It's probably geek central, and will be a long way from a commercial-ready product, but it's a start. And the stated goal to start with commonly-used components means this may not take too long to get rolling. Good stuff worth more investigation.
Intel Irony
Am I the only who's noticed that the Intel ads during NFL games show a young (patently criminal, moral-free, music-stealing, property-thieving, convicted-by-default, social anarchist) computer user burning his own CDs? And all while Intel's management crawls in bed with Hollywood to make sure such activity is impossible. Isn't that just a bit disingenuous?
WSJ. Wired. The music industry is set to launch an ad campaign against P2P file sharing. "People going into computers"??Ms. Spears, for example, is quoted in the ad saying: "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It's the same thing: People going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music."[
Seb Goes Zen
Maybe this is what people mean when they keep telling me I think too much.
Oblique Strategies for Would-be Ph.D.s.Jill: Anders suggests two cards for the pack we obviously have to make for PhD students and other stuck academics, you know, like Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies" pack of cards for artists.
For me, the point in Oblique Strategies is that understanding happens when you stop thinking. I don't know why I keep forgetting it. Getting the big picture is not something you do, it is something that happens to you. It is instantaneous and can only occur when you finally let go of all those little individual puzzle pieces you were fiercely tring to fit together.
Why is it that they always tell us to work hard, if those crucial a-ha moments only come about when we stop? Because we need the raw materials. Chance favors the prepared mind. [
Macintosh System Tracker
Many (ok, many, many, many) years ago when I ran large Mac-based prepress facilities for a living we had to keep track of all the software on each station. Maybe my fogged, aging memory is playing tricks on me, but I'm sure we did not do this by hand. I seem to remember there being some sort of SystemInfo thing that would read the system configuration and software installations and provide a printable listing.I can't find anything like this now. It can't be that hard to do and I'm sure someone has a tool for it -- I've just overlooked it.
Anyone who has a lead on something like this please drop me a line. (I know. I have to get the comment thing re-enabled here.)
Revealing Digital Hollywood
One more way to ruin a good morning. I've got to stop reading my news aggregator.
[...] Most revealing quote of the day went to Brad Hunt, CTO of the MPAA, who at one point summed up the challenge facing the entertainment and computing industries this way: "How do you make the PC a trusted entertainment appliance?" That's the mindset, the shared assumption, underlying the forces on this side of the copyright battle. Wading through two days of that negative energy was a trying experience. [...more] [
Heart Surgery and Brain Damage
My father had heart-bypass surgery several years ago. He has complained ever since about poor memory and slower mental function. I just wrote it off to age and cantakerousness. Maybe I was wrong. We need to fix this.
New Scientist. New ultrasound treatment for filtering fat from blood after a heart operation. Yikes. I haven't heard about this before:Two thirds of patients undergoing major heart operations suffer some form of mental impairment afterwards, such as a reduced ability to perform mental arithmetic or remember phone numbers. In half of these patients the problems are permanent. The cause is still controversial, but most researchers think that minute fat droplets lodging in the blood vessels of the brain are responsible. It is thought these block the supply of oxygen to tiny clusters of nerve cells.[Source: John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Terry Frazier at 8:37 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Health and Fitness
MIT To Share Open Courseware
I wish someone from MIT could get in front of the Congressional Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, and get through to that public menace, Congressman Howard Berman. He and Coble will singlehandedly destroy the Internet and drive the economy into the toilet all to save the jobs of a few worthless record execs. (But we should save those fine folks who brought us American Idol -- there's a real contribution to culture.)
MIT OpenCourseWare opens on September 30th.BBC News: "Why don't we, instead of trying to sell our knowledge over the internet, just give it away." ... "There is no revenue objective for OCW, ever. It will always be free."
What a great idea. Of course, MIT has a great reputation for quality. The long-term implications must scare many, many people shitless. Also see Anders' post. [
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Real-Time Political Bullshit
Hear Berman run. I'd listen to this, but it's awfully soon after breakfast. I don't know if I could keep anything down.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2002, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time in 2141 Rayburn House Office Building, Oversight hearing on Piracy Of Intellectual Property On Peer-to-Peer Networks. Live Audio Feed - only available during meeting [
Geoffrey Moore Online Seminar
Rick Klau points to a free online presentation by Geoffrey Moore.
Find the Leaky Pipes.If you're in the tech business (whether you sell into it, work in it, or represent it) and you haven't read Crossing the Chasm, stop reading right now and buy a copy. It's one of the books that really defines the space - so much so that Geoffrey Moore (the author) created a consulting group based on the book's themes (The Chasm Group).[...]
[...]The focus of Moore's presentation was the current economic climate and provided a detailed look at how to successfully sell technology solutions in that climate.
I won't try to summarize his presentation. It's remarkably lucid, very substantive, and well worth the hour or so it'll take to watch it. Placeware has the archive available online - definitely check it out. [
Intracom 2002
Another conference for the futures list. I need a client in Montreal. The price for these intranet things is steep -- I'm not used to having to pay for conferences. In my industry I either went only to the expo (because I'd heard all the speakers many times) or I was invited to be on some panel that got me in free. At least this one is in $CDN which means about a 40% discount in $US.
Intracom 2002 etc.. There will be a short break from blogging as I am just off to the Intracom 2002 conference in Montreal. At the end of last week the organisers told me that they had almost 200 delegates for the event, which does not surprise me given the quality of the speakers....
American InAudible
I hate to hear (I guess I should say read) this. I'm looking forward to getting caught up on AI while I get my exercise every morning.
Help!
Well, the audio project is not going smoothly. Not at all. I sat down this evening and made a list of unresolved issues. Anyone see what I'm doing wrong? [...] [
Open Source Intranet Portals
I really like what Brent is doing here, and admire his fortitude for taking an Open Source solution into a BigCo, even if it didn't work out like he hoped.
Open Source, Closed Minds. I've been pitching web collaboration via Open Source tools lately. I'm trying to generate interest in having people contract me in to supply them with a working Open Source based collaboration portal and to provide advice and development in those areas.Specifically, I'm demoing to companies a full-featured Open Source based intranet site with news items, comments, forums, downloads, weblinks, etc and comparing its features to more extensive (and expensive) solutions such as Microsoft's SharePoint. A really good example of such a comparison is the case study of the Government of Hawaii's portal.
Last week I was in a gigantic multinational company. The presentation went well - they were impressed by the scope, manageability, extendibility and feel of the demo site. They liked the idea of saving bucketloads of dough. Everything was going smoothly.
Then they remembered that the previous week they had received an internal memo declaring that Open Source software was not to be used in the company unless a commercial solution did not exist... [
Still, this is the type of entrepreneurial activity I admire. I liked it so much I went to Brent's business site to check out other stuff he's done. I learned he's in Toronto. I just signed up a client in Toronto and will likely be traveling there 1-2 times a month for the rest of the year. I would love to check out what Brent has put together and see if there are opportunities for it in the US market.
Legitimate P2P
I'm tired of the dogma and rhetoric and shrill, outlandish claims. Why can't someone find a good, legitimate use for P2P to shut these lawyers up? I can't be the only person that sees the value of making local storage available as a company resource.There must be a market for small, decentralized collaborative editing and document management systems. Using a shared network, rather than a monolithic client/server, would seem to be a better, lower-cost approach for small- to mid-size companies.
If Berman and his ilk ever get into the "War on Drugs" they'll be trying to shut down the Interstate highway system because roads are rampant channels for the transport of contraband.
Berman has become a serious public nuisance.
Political News from Wired News - P2P Pugilists Put Up Their Dukes.In a panel discussion steeped in dogma, adherents on both sides of the Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) debate accused each other of everything from aiding thieves to destroying the Internet.
[ ... ]Panelists at a Cato Institute lunch last week focused mostly on H.R. 5211, a bill introduced in July by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), whose Los Angeles district covers northeast San Fernando Valley, including the Hollywood Freeway corridor.
Berman's bill would give copyright owners the legal right to disrupt the unauthorized use of their copyrighted works on P2P networks using as-yet-undefined tactics and technology.
The House subcommittee on courts, the Internet and intellectual property, of which Berman is the ranking member, will hold a hearing Thursday to explore the alleged piracy of intellectual property over P2P networks. [
GPS Everywhere
Great, now I'll never be able to hide.
CNET NEWS.COM - Motorola: New chip will bring GPS to all.Motorola is unveiling a global positioning system chip it says is the first GPS satellite sensor small enough and hence cheap enough for practical use in consumer-electronics devices such as cell phones and notebook computers.
The Instant GPS chip will give users of such devices the ability to tap into a satellite system and pinpoint their geographic location. Measuring only 49 square millimeters, or less than half the area of a Pentium 4 processor, the chip will sell for roughly $10 in volume quantities, said Tim McCarthy, business director for GPS at Motorola's Automotive Group's Telematics Division. That should let device makers add GPS for about a quarter of the cost of current multiple chipsets, which run about $40.
"All of a sudden, starting 10 or 15 years ago, every electronics device had a clock," McCarthy said. "I see position awareness going down that same path. It's just a question of how long it takes." [
Can You Afford To Do It?
It's not whether you can do it, but whether you can afford to do it. As soon as Apple reaches economic parity with Windoze, I'm in.
Flirting with Mac OS X. "UNIX is for servers, Windows is for desktops. Right? No, wrong. Turns out nowadays you don't need to use that ugly W word to have a decent desktop and office environment. Enter Mac OS X." [ranchero.com] [
Explaining the Patent Policy of the W3C
Danny Weitzner chairs the working group charged with deciding the W3C's policy on patented technologies. In this interview he tries to shed light on how W3c is trying to address the current patent fiasco and find a solution that makes all 490 consortium members happy. Sounds like herding cats.
Standards chief caught in patent storm. ZDNet Sep 24 2002 3:10PM ET[...]What happens to your work once you decide about the exception? When a working group has developed a proposed recommendation, that proposal goes to the advisory committee, which consists of one representative of every single of the consortium's 490-odd member organizations. The director (Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee) looks at the comments and decides whether the thing should become a recommendation or not.[...more]
[
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
