Dana Blankenhorn

A Few Words About Google Health

Google Health was doomed from the start.

It was based on a legal fallacy and a technical one.

• The legal fallacy was that you own your health data, and can control it. That may be the law, but that's not the fact. The people who collect your data control it, and that control is important to them.
• The technical fallacy was that most people are versed on technical subjects, and either have the patience to input their own data or go through a complex download-transform process to get it.

Both these fallacies have been pushed for years by so-called privacy advocates, mostly shills of insurers, who use Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about technology to keep it out of doctors' offices. Through laws like HIPAA, and their continuing campaigns against reason, these "advocates" make it necessary for you to keep filling out the same damned forms -- over and over again -- whenever you see a new doctor.

AHLTA Connections Given Control of VistA Open Source Project

Fred Trotter writes about a very scary story out of Washington.

The custodian for the new VistA system, the open source software that's supposed to replace what the Veterans Administration is now using, will be a long-time Defense contractor with no ties to open source whatever.

This is important for two reasons:

1. DoD is not as enthusiastic about open source as the VA. 
2. The DoD's health care software system, called AHLTA, sucks. It sucks because it's built on a contractor model, with proprietary software companies holding their own intellectual property close to the chest, refusing to cooperate until they're paid by everyone else around the table.
3. Eventually, AHLTA and VistA are supposed to be merged, under the new open source process.

Biting the Long Tail

When Wired editor Chris Anderson was doing his work on The Long Tail in the last decade, he was wildly excited about the possibilities.

Instead of just going after the big customers, he said, prosperity would come by serving smaller markets more effectively, using computer technology. Here it is illustrated, from his blog.

Maybe. (Anderson is now focused on the making phenomenon.)

But the big story of 2011 is how the long tail can bite.

In many industries you don't just have a long tail of buyers, you have one of sellers, and by going after the long tail of sellers lawyers can cause enormous damage.

Will Law Force a Meego-Android Merger?

At first blush the idea sounds stupid.

Why should Android, the leading phone OS on the planet, merge its code base into Meego, which has shipped a single Nokia phone that will likely disappear faster than Mr. Popper's Penguins?

One word. Law.

As Florian Mueller has pointed out, many times now, Google faces an immense potential liability from Oracle's copyright-and-patent suit. The suit isn't against Android per-se. It's against Dalvik, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) written to run Java-based applications. The Google legal team did not do their homework before letting this semi-proprietary thing into the wild, and Oracle may justify its purchase of Sun with one law suit as a result.

While Google and Oracle are both part of the Open Invention Network, the patent consortium designed to protect Linux, the suit is about Java, not Linux. The OIN has not, and will not, interfere, even though OIN head Keith Bergelt has made noise about wanting to protect Android in the press.

How Open Source Works, or Why HPCC Will Fail

Having followed open source for nearly a decade now, I've learned a little about how the business works.

It's based on what appear to be contradictory impulses.

1. It's driven from the bottom-up. It's based on community, even if the community involved isn't giving you money or code. Without the passion and mission of users, you're dead.

2. It's entrepreneurial. No new business can grow fast without someone driven at the helm. Even if you're not about the money. The Free Software Foundation is nothing without Richard Stallman, the Linux Foundation foundered until Jim Zemlin came along.

So when I see a press release or a web site run by an open source start-up, I can now tell without looking at the code whether the project has a Clue and thus, a chance.

Tomorrow's News Today: Google Chromebook #Fail

When I traveled to China in 2009 I had an HP Netbook with me.

It was a failure. It only had 2 Gigabytes of internal storage, which within a few months wasn't even enough to run Windows (which updates constantly). I bought a 32 Gbyte stick for it, but as that wasn't the primary drive Windows never recognized its full capacity.

Now Google has, through Samsung and Acer, introduced Chromebooks that solve all those problems.  And they, too, have Fail written all over them. 

The problem is not the operating system, or the dependence on online updating. (Ostatic seems to have a problem with that). The hardware itself is first-rate, with 32 Gigabytes of chip memory inside the box and a Linux that won't swallow it all, leaving plenty of room for applications.

The problem is the basic design.

Can Open Source Save Ridesharing?

Before coming into the office this morning I took a walk. I crossed some major roads, stood waiting for the lights and looked into the cars that passed by.

Nearly every view was the same. One car, one person. Sometimes it was a big car, an SUV or pick-up. It seemed amazing to me. With gas at $4/gallon, almost no one in Atlanta shares the ride to work.

For most of my working life there have been attempts made to encourage ride sharing. Advertising has been tried. High-occupancy lanes have been tried. Now high prices are being tried. Nothing seems to work.

Does open source have a chance?

Open-Ride, a German program that arranges spontaneous ride-sharing via smartphones, hopes going open source will make things happen. The code, now available on Sourceforge, under the Affero GPL license 3.0 (the most open open source license there is) has a simple mobile interface that collects and matches desired trips.

OpenOffice and the Great Game

Larry Ellison has something in common with most reporters.

They're both fans of the Great Game.

The Great Game is a way of analyzing everything through the Great Men leading Great Movements and Great Peoples on to Greatness. It's a top-down analysis that sees peoples and movements as mere pieces on a chessboard, to be manipulated by the Great Man (it's almost never women) at the Top.

If you've ever watched nerds debate Austrian history, for instance, or play video games, you've seen this type of analysis in action. Princes and kings and heroes and villains. Everything is seen from 30,000 feet, and everything can be manipulated because the Great Man has control of the board.

Open source explicitly rejects this type of analysis. Because the code is open for inspection, available to all, it's the code that matters, not the Great Man (or woman) behind it.

The Big Opportunity in Home Servers

A lot of people are writing today that Apple has killed the home PC  with its iCloud and iOS announcements.

They haven't. The PC has been dieing for years. As a client.

But as a server? Not so much.

I know that the long-term talk about “media servers”  has proven to be a dead end. I'm talking about an opportunity that has existed for nearly a decade, which I first began labeling “the world of always-on.”

I'm talking of single-chip, specialty devices that can provide automation, security, inventory and medical services to our aging population.

• Devices placed in-line with lights, kitchen appliances, and any other system which uses energy, which can monitor the conditions of those devices, turning them on-and-off in response to a program.

• Single-chip cameras that can be turned on remotely, or via a program, to provide constant security.

• RFID chips placed on goods and even foodstuffs that can monitor the inventory and location of what you got.

• Medical devices that can monitor and report on health without outside intervention.

Elvis is Leaving the Building

In the last decade Steve Jobs has transformed technology the way Elvis transformed music.

Everyone now dances to Jobs' tune. Where products were once announced at trade shows like Comdex, and sometimes delivered months later, now they're announced and delivered at Worldwide Developer Conferences, set pieces where CEOs strut the stage and, thanks to webcasting, reporters in the room and everywhere else are on equal footing.

The nature of technology has changed too. The PC era is over. We are now well into the gadget era. Client devices survive for the length of a phone contract, maybe less. They come to you complete, with no hardware upgrades, Floppies are gone, CD drives are gone, keyboards are gone. It's all done online, wirelessly. Even the browser is dead, replaced by “apps” that define a single site's interaction.

It's been a heck of a ride. But just as those who saw Elvis' last concerts could see the paunch, taste the sweat and feel the angel of death hanging just off stage, so it is with recent Apple Worldwide Developer Conferences. Especially the one early this week, where Jobs appeared to the sound of James Brown's “I Feel Good.”

Well, here are some cold, hard facts. James Brown is dead. Elvis is dead. Steve Jobs is dieing.

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back in 2004. It's a miracle he's alive today, a miracle made possible by a liver replacement two years ago that he hid from the public and hid from shareholders. 

Wise observers say he seems to be in even more of a hurry these days, and there's reason for that. The bell tolls. It tolls for all of us, but pancreatic cancer is still incurable, and only 4% live five years. 

Jobs has lived seven.