advocacy

Telecom Giants Drag Their Feet on Broadband for the Whole Country

Telecom Giants Drag Their Feet on Broadband for the Whole Country – Newsweek:

For almost 20 years, AT&T, Verizon and the other big players have collected hundreds of billions of dollars through rate increases and surcharges to finance that ambitious plan, but after wiring the high-density big cities, they now say it’s too expensive to connect the rest of the country. But they’d like to keep all that money they banked for the project.

In 2010, the Federal Communications Commission announced the National Broadband Plan, which promised to provide 100 million American households with high-speed cable by 2020. Verizon has been expanding FiOS in major markets, and AT&T has been expanding its U-verse service. And now, instead of spending that war chest digging up streets and laying fiber cable, the cable and telephone companies have invested in a massive and very successful lobbying push. They are persuading state legislatures and regulatory boards to quietly adopt new rules—rules written by the telecoms—to eliminate their legal obligations to provide broadband service nationwide and replace landlines with wireless. This abrupt change in plans will leave vast areas of the country with poor service, slow telecommunications and higher bills.

This is good news if you own stock in Verizon, but very bad news if you have a small business that’s not in a city already wired up.

The federal government’s official broadband map shows vast areas of America still have little or no service, and many areas will never get it under the current plan. “Small business customers, people who work at home and rural communities across the country need to wake up before it is too late,” says Regina Costa, telecommunications research director for the Utility Reform Network in California. “Verizon and AT&T are aggressively moving to dump a large percentage of their landlines and force customers to wireless networks [that] are expensive, restrictive, incompatible with medic-alert services, less reliable for 911 calls and will not hold up during power outages—and in a lot of places wireless just won’t work.”

[It ought to be criminal, but it’s nothing if not corrupt. I’m not a big fan of the Feds taking on projects, but this is one they should. Take the money back form the telcos that aren’t interested, and like the rural telephone work, get the whole country wired with fiber. Probably can be done with a rounding error off the budget… how stupid can we be?]

Nilay Patel: ‘The Internet Is F****d’

Nilay Patel: ‘The Internet Is F****d’:

Great piece by Nilay Patel at The Verge:

American politicians love to stand on the edges of important
problems by insisting that the market will find a solution. And
that’s mostly right; we don’t need the government meddling in
places where smart companies can create their own answers. But you
can’t depend on the market to do anything when the market doesn’t
exist. “We can either have competition, which would solve a lot of
these problems, or we can have regulation,” says Aaron. “What
Comcast is trying is to have neither.” It’s insanity, and we keep
lying to ourselves about it. It’s time to start thinking about
ways to actually do something.

Netflix paying Comcast is the canary in the coal mine.

[Smack on. There’s so much wrong with what’s going lately (carriage wars) because these are the same companies that argue over these things with the television companies. And the other side of the equation is also unbalanced (how much we get charged for really poor access… (I expect us all to have Gigabit Internet)). I guess the only way forward is around these folks, and I’ll bet based on what I’ve seen recently in network technology that it is possible.]

Source: Daring Fireball

37signals is history

Two big announcements.:

However, because we’ve released so many products over the years, we’ve become a bit scattered, a bit diluted. Nobody does their best work when they’re spread too thin. We certainly don’t. We do our best work when we’re all focused on one thing.

Further, we’ve always enjoyed being a small company. Today we’re bigger than we’ve ever been, but we’re still relatively small at 43 people. So while we could hire a bunch more people to do a bunch more things, that kind of rapid expansion is at odds with our culture. We want to maintain the kind of company where everyone knows everyone’s name. That’s one of the reasons why so many of the people who work at 37signals stay at 37signals.

So with that in mind, last August we conducted a thorough review of our products, our customer base, our passions, and our visions of the company for the next 20 years. When we put it all on the table, everything lined up and pointed at one clear conclusion. We all got excited. We knew it was right.

So today, February 5, 2014, exactly ten years to the day since we launched Basecamp, we have a couple of big announcements to make.

Here’s the first: Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp. With our whole team – from design to development to customer service to ops – focused on one thing, Basecamp will continue to get better in every direction and on every dimension.

[I keep seeing this move. I still love it. Focus is so important at this point in time.]

iPad, Chromebook common theme? Simplicity.

Want to know why Chromebooks that “don’t do as much as my “laptop” picked up a bit this year? Want to know why iPads and the like are a growing segment? Because they cross the 80% line of what so many people do. No doubt some of us do all kinds of complicated things that require “more” in some sense. And maybe as networking continues to improve and “cloud” resources become less general and more tailored this to will change. But for now, Sure. You can’t run Pro Tools in the cloud etc.

That said, lots and lots of folks don’t do that stuff and can work perfectly comfortably with a web browser alone. Would I want to code in Github’s web interface only? Not at the moment. But I’ve already checked in changes when I was out and about and someone mentioned a bug or problem that I knew I could easily fix. The build system takes it most of the rest of the way, and another phone app completes the process. It’s a long way from impossible, and that’s just one example of something that we “assume” in many cases require heftier hardware. And sometimes it does. For now. Maybe.

But many of us do things that are simpler from an experience standpoint. If you use Amazon, Facebook, Google for mail or documents or spreadsheets, etc. there’ almost no need for something more complicated than the pads or the Chromebooks. And they’re far simpler to run each in their own way.

More often than not a simpler experience is a better experience and is the disruptive force that topples company after company in the tech field (and others as well).

More badass period

GOTY 2013: Badass Girls Need Not Apply:

I have gone to buy a computer, and had the salesperson speak to my husband and not to me, even though I am a professional game developer and my husband has trouble using a printer. I have had men in my department throw a Halo launch party and not invite me, assuming that as a woman I have no interest in games. I have had my professional opinion on server purchases overruled by men that were talking over me in meetings, and then watched those men be fired when the systems they purchased didn’t work.

Those life events inform my experiences and opinion. And, they inform my perspective on 2013 Tomb Raider. And, with respect, if you only have people voting on game of the year from a very singular opinion — generally white, straight and male — it’s missing so much information that it loses its validity.

This doesn’t mean guys can’t have awareness of issues affecting women. And it doesn’t mean women have a singular, monolithic opinion on games or even sexism. Even among my female friends, we have vastly differing opinions about 2013 Tomb Raider. Some of us love Bioshock Infinite; some of us hate it. But more viewpoints need to be represented in discussing games. We need more female games journalists who have a more central part of the dialog.

Sometimes, though, you run into a guy with empathy, who takes multiple points of view into account, not just his own. He might not even think of himself as a feminist. When 2011’s Vanquish came out, former IGN editor Ryan Clements was extremely enthusiastic. Then, in the middle of glowing praise of “watching an enemy explode into a cacophony of pieces” and “feeling entire highways crumble away under your feet,” Clements makes the following offhand remark in his video review.

“I say this game needed more badass girls, but that’s just me.”

[I agree. the world needs better representation for girls/women/ other folks etc. Expand the point of view of your company, team, whatever as widely as you can. It raises everyone’s level. We also need more folks who are badass at whatever they do and whatever field they do it regardless of gender or other ways people falsely divide themselves. ]

The Surveillance Age

The Cassandra Version:

My hope — my expectation, even — for 2014 is that the fog starts to lift.

As much as I like using the fog metaphor, the thing about surveillance is that there is no actual fog. You can’t see it. It’s everywhere and gets in everything, and it still looks like a sunny day on the internet.

But still.

[Now that are our eyes are open, and we continue to add to the piles of data companies like Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc. know about us and of course, the vast amounts of data the Government knows about us what do we do? As a technologist I have a few ideas of where I can make things better for some people. And that’s what I’m going to do.]

screwed

2014:

There are industries of people throwing money at other people saying they’ve found a breakthrough way of doing X for Y, where X is Instagram and Y is something that couldn’t possibly be a dishwasher because that wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. There are companies like Everpix who try to fulfill what some other companies are promising and what we all want, but they run out of money. To the extent that they can’t survive because no one wants to pay and all the funding’s gone to Twitter-optimized coupon sites that don’t know five years in how to turn a profit, yeah, we’re screwed.

But we’re not screwed because no one wants to pay for anything and would rather file status updates during Christmas dinner. We’re screwed because no one dares to actually break the mold. No one wants to unhinge everything and fucking fix it. No one wants to stop making photo library apps for 2001 where it’s just cool that you can have those family photos on the computer or the photo sender app for 2006 where you can send pictures to people outside of the room(!) and make the photo library app that will be needed as everything will be going digital, everything will be kept forever and accessible from everywhere and no one will even remember there being a discussion about no one remembering paper copies or rolls of film.

I promised some ideas and there’ll be ideas, but I can’t do this alone. Stop wondering about what version numbers the next versions of Windows and OS X will have. Start wondering about how the hell we’re even getting along with what we have.

[+1]

Source: Brent Simmons

So why did she get fired?

A Twitter Message About AIDS, Followed by a Firing and an Apology – NYTimes.com:

By Saturday afternoon, Ms. Sacco was no longer an employee at IAC. The company’s statement also said:

There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally. We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core.

[Yes, I know why she got fired. But I’m askin’ “why did she get fired”. If they know her to be a “decent person at core” then shouldn’t they have forgiven this misstep? Nah, it’s clearly expedient for the company to remove a social liability… Jobs are complicated things but it always concerned me that most companies have no moral compass of their own. Might there not have been an alternative to “off with her head?”

And BTW, don’t join a mob, you cannot control the outcome and it’ll rarely be what you expect.]

FDA Tells Google-Backed 23andMe to Halt DNA Test Service

FDA Tells Google-Backed 23andMe to Halt DNA Test Service – Bloomberg:

“FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results from the PGS device,” the agency said today. “The main purpose of compliance with FDA’s regulatory requirements is to ensure that the tests work.”

The FDA used candid language in the letter to outline the work the agency has done with 23andMe since 2009 to no avail, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings and had hundreds of e-mail exchanges. The FDA said it has given the company feedback on study protocols, discussed regulatory pathways and provided statistical advice.

[Here’s the thing… genetic testing can’t tell you whether or not you will develop a disease, only whether you carry a gene mutation that *statistically* puts you at a higher risk. Meaning they’ve found a correlation, but as far as I can tell, no one knows whether an individual gene by itself affects anything. It seems quite the opposite from what I’ve read… changing one gene seems to cause other genes to change as well and explain why in part all this is such slippery stuff… why there are no “cures” being batted about. (Yes, I know people are working on all kinds of stuff, but it all runs counter my experience that this form of “reductionism” applies well in complex systems.) Negative tests for a given gene mutation also don’t mean that you’re in the clear: For example it seems that only ~5% of breast cancers and maybe as much as 15% of ovarian cancers are caused by hereditary mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 the genes made somewhat famous by Ms. Jolie. As always, I’m not telling anyone what to do, and certainly if you’re not relying it diagnostically have at it. But between the margin of errors in the tests themselves, the limited number of markers that a service like the above checks, etc… seems like a really low grade indicator of anything. I know it appears high tech and shiny, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate or reliable, or that we have any idea what it means when we see it.]

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule:

When you’re operating on the manager’s schedule you can do something you’d never want to do on the maker’s: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They’re effectively free if you’re on the manager’s schedule. They’re so common that there’s distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to “grab coffee,” for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you’re on the maker’s schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager’s schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day’s work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren’t clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I’ve realized what’s going on, perhaps there’s a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker’s schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager’s schedule is that they understand the cost.

[Well explained. I try and line up meetings in a given day. When they can’t be aligned that way I use the middle of the day, reserving the morning and end of the day for “maker” time. Allez! ]