Vista encourages downgrades, Linux, used computers

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 09:59.

This note from ComputerWorldUK suggests that the problems for Vista run deep. With so many applications having compatability problems with Vista, companies are sticking with older machines, buying used machines that will run XP, and are evaluating alternatives like Linux and OpenOffice. There are some really good Linux variants available; one I've played with is Ubuntu, which is impressive. The interface has borrowed the best of Windows and Macintosh features, and is easy to use and very fast--even on older computers. And OpenOffice is a respectable replacement for Office. If your word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation needs don't use a lot of special features, you may not need Microsoft Office at all.

Static magically creates 1,500 votes

Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/03/2008 - 09:13.

In the continuing saga of voting machines that simply don't work, here is perhaps the most alarming story to date. In a Washington, D.C. voting precinct during the primaries, a "static discharge" magically created an extra 1,500 votes on the memory cartridge that stores the vote tally. The only slightly good news is that someone did notice that the manual tally of voters at the precinct was only 326, but what if it had not been caught?

Email is a time waster

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 08:13.

New research suggests that email, to hardly anyone's surprise, is a huge time waster. A UK scientist studying how we use email found that stopping to check your email imposes a big time loss on us as we switch back and forth mentally between tasks. For those who have their email set to check automatically on frequent intervals, the overhead of task switching can eat up an entire workday out of a five day work week.

The solution is pretty simple. Turn off automatic checking and check your email only a few times a day. Fewer interruptions means more time spent on work.

Is cloud computing just the latest buzz phrase?

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 08:08.

"Cloud computing" has replaced "Web 2.0" and "social networking" as the latest buzz phrase. IT folks love buzz phrases, and the IT landscape is littered with them. Whatever happened to "client-server," "relational databases," "artificial intelligence," and "fifth generation?" All of those buzz phrases were based on solid and useful technical advances that were grossly oversold as the answer to everyone's problems.

Cloud computing is just the latest, and beware of vendors and IT staff claiming a modest 15% increase in the IT budget to develop a "cloud computing platform" will fix all current and future woes. Or beware of "free" online services that tout cloud computing. Over the past five or six years, as more and more people and businesses have acquired broadband connections to the Internet, it has become more practical to store data of all kinds (documents, email, etc.) remotely and use a desktop application or Web app to access that data. Google Apps is a perfect example, as well as more common services like Gmail and Hotmail.

In many cases, storing data in a "cloud" somewhere on the network improves accessibility, reduces costs, or both. But there are two problems. If you are relying solely on a third party to store your data, you may lose it, as did customers of The Linkup, who just discovered that the company lost large portions of paid customer data. Some customers apparently did not have backups.

Social networking sites also store data in a cloud, and a recent lawsuit over data stored by LinkedIn, a popular business networking service, illustrates similar difficulties. The legal problem arose when an employee left a company in the UK and started a rival firm, using contacts built up during his previous employment and stored online at the LinkedIn service. The employee was sued and the courts forced him to turn over the information; the courts agreed that the contacts represented confidential company data. But it was stored online by a third party and the account was in the name of the employee. And apparently the firm encouraged employees to use LinkedIn to manage contacts.

So beware of cloud computing; technically, it can be used to solve all sorts of datasharing problems, but like any new technology, it can introduce new policy and management issues.

Cloud computing replaces Web 2.0

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 07:21.

Cloud computing has replaced Web 2.0 as a popular IT buzzphrase. Nobody ever really knew what Web 2.0 was, but it sounded important, and a lot of small companies got lots of cash to "really important" Web 2.0 applications and services that were going to change the world, make a lot of money, and cure cancer. None of them made much money, and most of them made no money.

Despite the hype, Web 2.0 signaled a shift to much more sophisticated use of the Web, with much better Web-enabled interfaces. The secret sauce for Web 2.0 services and applications was broadband. Cloud computing takes these sophisticated Web apps and high speed data connections to the next level, where both desktop computers and portable devices like the iPhone are connected continuously to data and services hosted somewhere on the 'net (the "cloud").

Apple probably has the clearest vision for this; the company has provided nearly seamless integration of desktop computers and portable devices like laptops and iPhones/iPods with its MobileMe service. For $99 a year, you get "cloud computing," which means your various devices (e.g. desktop, laptop, phone) all stay synchronized more or less automagically--as long as you have some kind of high speed data connection attached to each device.

Cloud computing, despite the hype, is here, and will quickly become a business necessity, meaning communities that cannot provide their own businesses with the right levels of connectivity will suffer economically. And cloud computing, to work properly, has to work from home as well as from business locations, so residential broadband is business broadband. Finally, communities have to have broadband hotspots for business travelers, because those business visitors have the most urgent need for access to the "cloud" of data they use to manage their work.

Why the airlines are broke, Part 7

Submitted by admin on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 16:33.

Fuel prices may be a proximate cause of airline financial problems, but insanely inefficient reservation systems and insulting fee structures are structural problems that less expensive fuel won't fix. I just spent over an hour and a half trying to make a simple change to an existing flight reservation. A full hour was spent on hold, with periodic updates from the reservation agent, who said the change was being "processed." The call was finally disconnected by a recorded message telling me to hang up and try again. Huh? An hour and a half just change a few bits in a computer, and it could not be done!

The cost of the flight doubled, and there was no change in the locations, just a change in the time. So the airline strategy is to treat customers with contempt and bad service--at the same time. It's baffling, and one can only conclude that airline executives never have to deal with their own reservation systems.

AT&T billing runs amok

Submitted by admin on Mon, 08/13/2007 - 08:49.

iPhone users are starting to get bills from AT&T (which is really SBC), and the bills are apparently stupefyingly detailed. This article describes 52 page, double-sided bills that include detail on billing items that cost $0.00. Apparently one of the problems is that even if you have an "unlimited" data plan (for using the Web and email features of the iPhone, AT&T provides billing line items for every time you access the 'net, even if there is no charge for such access.

This is yet another example of IT departments run amok, along with accountants and bookkeepers who apparently lack common sense. Margins on cellphone accounts are already slim; it makes you wonder who is responsible at AT&T for looking at the cost of postage. How can the company afford to mail out a 52 page bill?

Why health care costs so much

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 06/07/2007 - 08:18.

At least part of the reason that health care costs so much is due to arcane software and poor information systems design. I had to have a routine blood test this morning, and went to the hospital to do it so I could take care of it early in the day.

The whole process kicked off at a desk in the lobby where I had to fill out a slip of paper that was carried by hand to the patient registration folks. After a twenty-five minute wait, I finally got to talk to a registration person. This is where everything went seriously off the rails. I've been to the hospital before for this sort of thing, and they had a record of me in the computer. But the poor woman registering me clicked away with her mouse and typed for six full minutes. I thought I was on line at at airline registration desk--the only other place where I see long periods of typing going on for simple tasks.

The registration process generated at least 18 sheets of paper that I could see, and I suspect several more were generated at printers whirring in the background. Part of the time was spent checking data like date of birth, addresss, and phone number, which they already had but had to ask again, in a tedious process repeated daily in tens of thousands of doctor's office and medical facilities around the country. And of course, there was the requisite photocopying of my insurance card. I suspect that every day, we probably use a forest's worth of trees making copies of insurance cards.

The actual process of taking a blood sample, including being greeted by the nurse, rolling up the sleeve, printing labels for the samples, and putting on a band-aid, was under three minutes.

Total elapsed time: 40 minutes.

What should and could happen? This business of photocopying the insurance card is insane. The hospital has computers. The insurance company has computers. We have this thing called the Internet. Insurance companies and health care providers could establish an open standard to verify insurance coverage electronically, with much higher reliablity than a worn piece of pasteboard carried around in a wallet.

Today, you can buy a thumb drive with 2 gig of memory on it for under fifty bucks. This would hold my entire medical history, from birth, including a good sample of important X-rays. It could also hold some personal information like address, phone number, and next of kin. Instead of endlessly and repeatedly manually filling out forms and entering data, we could carry one of these, with something like thumbprint biometric secure access. Instead of many minutes of typing, I would plug it into a little keypad at the registration desk, enter a PIN number and a thumbprint, and everything needed to would transferred (and only what was needed, under the patient's control). Quick, easy, and more accurate than hand data entry.

This is not a difficult technical problem. I suspect it has more to do with the health care establishment's fear of giving more control to patients. But ultimately, we pay, one way or another. We should be in control, not underpaid and overworked clerks (who are really controlled by IT staff who have failed miserably to be of any real service to their clients and customers).

Airline IT failures

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 03/05/2007 - 13:51.

If the airlines are losing money, they have no one to blame but themselves. The systems they use to process their customers are so arcane and inefficient it is a wonder that they work at all. On Friday, I was in New England, which was having a typical bad weather day. I had a noon flight out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and discovered via email at 9 AM that Delta had rebooked me on a flight out of Boston instead, also leaving at noon.

There were so many problems that it is hard to list them all. The email looked suspiciously like a phishing email gimmick--please logon to the Delta site to check your flight status. I tried to call Delta but after a half hour on hold, gave up. I logged into Delta (I am a Delta frequent flier), but could not print a boarding pass--no explanation. At nine-thirty, I decided that I better head to Boston, even though I had not been able to verify the change.

When I got to Boston, I could not print out a boarding pass from the Delta kiosks, because the system "could not find my ticket." Oh joy. I had to get at the back of a very long line to go wait for a ticket agent, and realized I would miss my flight--it was going to take an hour or more to go through the line. I was finally able to flag down a passing Delta agent who let me jump the line and get help. After the agent "found" my ticket, she spent a full minute punching away at her terminal just to print a boarding pass. Huh?

Repeat the problems I had by thousands or tens of thousands of passengers every single day, adding in all the extra Delta staff time needed to work around bad systems, and you have passengers fleeing to other airlines and greatly increased staff costs. My ticket was obviously in the system, since it was able to send me an email, but how can one terminal or access point not be able to "find" it? This is a catastrophic failure by the Delta IT department, and the whole group should be sacked for nearly bankrupting the company with garbage software.

Too many IT departments love expensive, hard to use and hard to maintain systems because it justifies their existence, justifies larger staffs, and justifies bigger budgets. Don't let IT staff hijack your school system, business, or organization. Demand excellence, simple systems, and low costs.

Microsoft taxes Mac users

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 02/08/2007 - 08:21.

Most businesses, if they had the opportunity to attract several million new customers with almost no effort, would do so willingly. Not Microsoft. In an almost incomprehensible move, Microsoft wants Mac users who want to buy a copy of Windows to pay $100 more than other Windows users. All new Macs can now easily run Windows alongside the Mac operating system, and many Mac owners are looking forward to being able to run a Windows application occasionally. You would think Microsoft would welcome these folks with open arms, but apparently not.