I think he misses the point

LILEKS (James) The Bleat

Ask yourself this. You’re poor. You have a heart attack. Do you want to be in Havana or New York? Which phone system summons the EMTs faster? Which emergency response team is better equipped? Which hospital is better staffed with highly-paid doctors who have come from all over the world to work here?

Somehow I suspect that a heart attack in Havana at 3 AM means bundling Uncle Raul into your block captain’s ‘57 Belair and hoping it doesn’t break down before you get to the hospital.

Well, of course, you can always beat the stuffing out of a straw man. But the “universal health care” most people are interested in is the kind where your kids get taken care of without a lot of hoop jumping and red-tape untangling, where you’re not as likely to have a heart attack because you’ve had good preventive care. People want to be able to change jobs and keep their health insurance, maintain continuity of care with their doctors, perhaps continue treatments that would be disallowed as a “pre-existing condition” under a new insurer’s rules.

That’s what universal health care means to me, and I wish we had it. I’m not going to bash doctor’s salaries or any of that tired old cant (the only way I could get into medical school would be if I was carrying a mop), but the insurance quagmire is another matter. Our overpaid and underworked congressfolk are exempt from it: why can’t we be?

Maybe the Lileks household needs a good long nap: today’s Bleat was little more cranky than insightful.

more proof that the PC industry has been following Detroit’s playbook

PC Makers Hit Speed Bumps; Being Faster May Not Matter

So far the response of the personal computer industry to its worst decline in history has largely been one of denial.

“People are walking around like members of the cargo cult after World War II,” said Mark Resch, a partner at Onomy Labs, a Palo Alto, Calif., technology consulting firm. “They’re just hoping the planes come back.”

This article reinforces what many have been saying for years: you don’t need a lot of MHz to read email and surf the web. Once you reach the point where increased speed doesn’t deliver anything (and I would suggest this is south of the 1 GHz level), bandwidth adds more value. And once you have some reliable broadband connection, you really don’t more PC hardware. Maybe better quality audio and video, but no more expensive upgrades to your computer itself, no more licenses for word processors and spreadsheets that, for all their new features, don’t make things any easier this year than last year or the year before that.

I’ve thought for years the PC industry was getting a pretty good deal: they could crank out dull-looking beige boxes, year after year, with the same crummy issues with cabling and peripherals, the same unfriendly form factors, and all for a healthy margin and reliable growth rates.

If you have ever opened a desktop PC and seen how small the actual board is, you can’t help but wonder why the case has to be so big, why it can’t be made to fit into more places instead of dominating one’s desk or taking half the legroom under it. PC makers relied on the chipmakers to stimulate demand with faster chips, software makers relied on faster chips and new hardware sales to drive upgrades, and now they have to figure out what to do next.

Good thing some folks can imagine a future without the beige boat anchor:
In the midst of a general computing and chip-making downturn, ARM Holdings, a British company that is the world’s largest designer of microprocessors for consumer devices like cellphones and personal digital assistants, is experiencing record growth.

ARM chips are designed for the new world of computing away from the desktop PC. This year, there are 1.3 billion ARM microprocessors in cellphones, personal digital assistants and other consumer devices — for the first time exceeding the one billion personal computers that have been produced.

“There is tremendous growth in all the little things that help life,” said John Rayfield, an ARM vice president based in Los Gatos, Calif. “Centralizing them all in one large computer makes no sense.”

where once we worshipped speed, we now seek efficiency

Intel’s Huge Bet Turns Iffy

It turns out, Dr. Schmidt told the audience, that what matters most to the computer designers at Google is not speed but power

Interesting article for both the lessons being learned by Intel/HP nd the direction indicated by Google. Having spent some time in large colocation centers, I can see why power consumption and its associated costs would be an issue.

So while Intel publicly carries the Itanium standard, it also has a hedge bet in Yamhill to counter AMD’s transitional 32 -> 64 bit chips.

Be careful when you use VNC

Notice that you might void your Windows XP license by running a VNC server on XP:
“Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop features described below, you may not use the Product to permit any Device to use, access, display or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer, nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display, or run the Product or Product’s user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product.”
(from: Microsoft Windows XP Pro EULA)