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Information technology for medical care
Really interesting article in The Atlantic about efforts to reform the medical information system. One general observation is that the potential of information systems to permit flexible corporate/government operation are often defeated by corporate culture So representatives of Athenahealth approached the major health insurance companies and proposed a new payment model: Instead of paying for…
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The internet as we know it
Comcast demanded a “recurring fee” from Level 3 “to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’scustomers who request such content,” Thomas Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday afternoon, seemingly alluding to the Netflix service. The action “threatens the open Internet,” Mr. Stortz added. Comcast did not…
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Free and Open Source Licenses
Interesting discussion here. But many FOSS-based transactions are not commercial in the foregoing sense. Instead, software subject to a FOSS license may come into a product without the producer knowing that this has happened or, in any realistic way, assenting to the terms. Also, the software often comes from a non-commercial party. An engineer downloads software from an…
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Corporate Law and Programming State of the Art
Big companies that want to use our software but don’t want to use our standard EULA keep sending proposed sales contracts that include a really peculiar provision. The provision asks us to guarantee, to represent, to warrant and all that stuff something which everyone knows is false: that our software has zero bugs or errors.…
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Social Network and Lessig
Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “one friend” and partner, and Facebook’s initial CFO, who was eventually pushed out…
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out of the loop in silicon valley
NYTimes. But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.” Another potential backer, reports Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times, invited her…
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Shape of the internet
“When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple of years ago we had to start measuring them in zettabytes, and now we’re measuring…
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An interesting article in ACM communications: is the world ending?
Coverity has a program that reads other programs looking for errors. The company started as a research project from Stanford (how unusual!) and the Communications article is really about what they found in commercial world. One thing they found was a lot of crappy programmers. Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body…