a crank's progress

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.

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.”

CNN.com – Record labels seek OK for P2P sabotage – Sep. 27, 2002

But some lawmakers worried that overzealous copyright enforcement measures could end up targeting innocent computer users, and said they did not want to encourage a high-tech game of cat and mouse that could easily get out of hand.

“What are the implications for the Internet’s functionality when the inevitable arms race develops?” asked Virginia Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher.

Boucher noted that overzealous copyright enforcers have already mistaken a photo entitled “Portrait of mrs harrison williams 1943” for a song by former Beatle George Harrison, and demanded that Internet provider UUNet terminate the account of a customer who posted a book report on Harry Potter.

Just what we need: more script-kiddies launching clumsy attacks on random systems/networks.

The Seattle Times: Monorail idea wins wide applause, but many say cost outweighs benefit

Even though a majority of Seattle voters would not be frequent riders, they want to build a city monorail.
[ . . . . ]
As with school and housing levies, Seattleites appear willing to pay for amenities they consider a general public benefit.

Imagine where things would stand if the past 40 years had seen a progressive expansion of the monorail: it might have been extended as far as the old Interurban route, permitting car-free transportation from Everett to Tukwila. It’s interesting to speculate what might might have happened had this come to pass. Perhaps Microsoft would have chosen someplace on the monorail corridor for its headquarters and eliminated the dreaded crosslake commute. I can see monorail stations at the two downtown sports stadiums, taking fans to the top of the seats. A station at Colman Dock would unite the Mosquito Fleet of the 19th and early 20the centuries with the 21st.

A friend writes: because i never finished my degree, the state will pay for tuition as i
continue to collect unemployment [ . . . ] it seems that about half of the people in
my classes this quarter are former tech workers who were laid off from
local startups.

I have always believed the key reason to look for a college degree on a resume is to see if the applicant can set a long-range goal and deliver on it. I don’t care what it’s in: the material you learned may be irrelevant 5 years into your career, but the skills you develop in learning new things and achieving the necessary milestones are what really count.

My correspondent was not one of those who thought he’d strike gold in the boom years — it was a job with the possibility of some financial freedom and the certainty of interesting challenges, no more than that — but I know there were plenty of self-taught “rock stars” who were too cool for school.