Tuesday, November 26, 2013

TechEye

TechEye

Link to TechEye - Latest technology headlines

USA: Road to healthcare paved with good intentions

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 02:02 AM PST

I was in Greece some years ago, sat at the bottom of the Acropolis, minding my own business as I largely do when two grizzled old American geezers started talking about the “home of democracy”.

One said to the other: “They’ve got free healthcare here.” The other said: “That’s because they are socialists here.”  The first replied: “The whole of Europe is socialist. They’re all communists in Europe.”

I was reminded of this exchange because at the Silicon Valley comes to Oxford event, just round the corner, the prime keynoter was one Gary Lauer, the CEO of Ehealth, and an ex-executive at IBM and at Silicon Graphics too. His company is, as far as we understand it, a shopping front where people can choose their own health insurance.

Lauer was at pains to describe what he called the US “health landscape” and to do that he had to talk American politics.

As we European communists know, the majority of US citizens have to have health insurance – often funded as part of a job package by employers or by  governmental agencies. There are about 330 million people living in the USA but around 55 million can’t get healthcare and there is no safety net.

Lauer said: “The cost of healthcare compared to GDP has been rising steadily. Healthcare is a double digit percentage of GDP – thirteen to fourteen percent.”

The silicon and software sectors are dwarved by healthcare, he said and the US population is growing older and life expectancy is growing too. But, he added, the 50 million uninsured people poses a moral and polical dilemma.

The US president Barack Obama wanted healthcare reform, like Bill Clinton before him, and managed to push through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – better known as Obamacare.  And since the act came into effect, the matter has been highly politicised.

Basically, the Act provides for guaranteed healthcare, and mandated that everyone in the USA must have health insurance coverage. The Act also provides subsidies for lower income people – and they are generous subsidies, said Lauer – as much as 400 percent above the federal poverty level.

Each of the 50 states had to implement an online marketing space – a sort of health exchange. But of those 50 states, 36 have not bothered to implement the Act at all. The 14 states who have gone for it have had their problems, for example, he said, Oregon hasn’t managed to enrol one person so far. And the healthcare products compliant with Obamacare are more expensive than the existing offerings. Obama said that if you liked your existing healthcare you could keep it. However an unexpected consequence of Obamacare is that millions of people in the USA have had their insurance cancelled.

The target for the first six months was to enrol seven million people, but the actuality is that so far only 103,000 people are “somewhat enrolled”.

The legislation, said Lauer, stands or falls on enrolment – the system needs people between the age of 18 and 34 to enrol to subsidise the old codgers and the poor and the unfortunate.

Lauer concluded by saying that insurance could become “prohibitively expensive” and that seven senator are up for re-election next year in traditionally Republican states – he talked to them last week and they’re all quaking in their boots about their franchise.

I was in Greece some years ago, sat at the bottom of the Acropolis, minding my own business as I largely do when two grizzled old American geezers started talking about the “home of democracy”.

One said to the other: “They’ve got free healthcare here.” The other said: “That’s because they are socialists here.”  The first replied: “The whole of Europe is socialist. They’re all communists in Europe.”

* According to the CIA World Factbook, life expectancy in Cuba is 78.05 years. The same source gives life expectancy in the USA at 78.62 years. For "communist" Greece it's 80.18 years and for "communist" Great Britain it's 80.29 years.

FDA guns for Google boss's missus

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 02:22 AM PST

The outfit which borught the psychological genius Wilhelm Reich to an early grave, is now gunning for the estranged wife of Google boss Sergey Brin.

According to Bloomberg, the Food and Drug Administration, which shut down Reich just in case he put big pharm out of business by coming up with a cure for cancer, has ordered 23andMe, the Google-backed DNA analysis company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki to stop selling its products.

Wojcicki was given the company which makes a Saliva Collection Kit and Personal Genome Service, which tells users whether they carry a disease, are at risk of a disease and would respond to a drug.

Most of the uses fall into the category of a medical device and require Food and Drug Administration approval, the agency told the company.

The Food and Drug Administration has to decide if the product will cause any harm to patents, or Big Pharm generally. After all if people know what is making them sick, Big Pharm can not make a lot of money a range of expensive quack cures.

Wojcicki, who recently separated from her husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, started 23andMe about six years ago to help people assess their risk of cancer, heart disease and other medical conditions. Brin used the saliva kit and discovered that he had a gene that makes him susceptible to Parkinson's.

However, the FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results from the PGS device. It just wants to make sure that the tests work.

"Even after these many interactions with 23andMe, we still do not have any assurance that the firm has analytically or clinically validated the PGS for its intended uses, which have expanded from the uses that the firm identified in its submissions," the FDA wrote.

It was concerned that 23andMe plans to expand the device's use without obtaining FDA approval.

A spokeswoman for 23andMe, Catherine Afarian, said in an e-mail that the company's relationship with the FDA is extremely important and it will attempt to address its concerns.

In this case, the sticking point appears to be UnitedHealth Group, the largest publicly traded U.S. health insurer, which raised concern in a March 2012 report about the accuracy and affordability of the tests.

It thinks that while 23andMe might be on the right path to provide such types of genetic tests within the next 10 years there was a need to identify which work best. 

Blackberry guts senior stuff

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 02:20 AM PST

It seems that the top executives of Blackberry are fleeing the doomed outfit before it sinks.

Three top executives have been seen emptying their desks and putting the photographs of their family into old photocopy boxes as recently appointed Chief Executive John Chen embarks on his promised a shakeup at the struggling smartphone maker.

Chief Operating Officer Kristian Tear, Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben have collected their pink slips and P45s and CFO Brian Bidulka has been promoted to a "special advisor" until he goes in March.

Tear played a key role in BlackBerry's latest restructuring, while Boulben was instrumental in the company changing its branding and name to BlackBerry from Research In Motion.

Chen said he aims to make the company a top provider for companies and governments of mobile devices and device-management tools.

It looks like he is there to stay. Certainly, he is not keeping the company on an even keel until a new boss is appointed, like most interim CEOs. In fact he is making many hands on changes of his own.

Chen is by nature a turnaround artist and sorted out software maker Sybase in the late 1990s so he probably can't resist the challenge.

BlackBerry did not name replacements for the other two executives exiting the company, but signalled more changes could be coming. It said Roger Martin, a board member since 2007, has also resigned. 

Yahoo staff fed up with eating dog food

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 02:19 AM PST

It seems that the people at the search engine outfit Yahoo do not like being told to "eat their own dog food".

Top Yahoo senior vice president of communications products, Jeff Bonforte, and CIO Randy Roumillat were shocked that staff disobeyed last year's dog food order, at the expense of losing PR value, profit potential and a cold wet nose.

Only a quarter of Yahoo staff have obeyed the company's request to "eat their own dog food" and switch to Yahoo Mail, no longer sleep or shag the postman's leg.

The email, leaked to All Things Digital, attempts to bring staff to heel. It begs staff to roll over to the corporate version of Yahoo's webmail system, and smacks staff who refuse to part with Microsoft Outlook with a rolled up newspaper.

"Earlier this year we asked you to move to Yahoo Mail for your corporate email account," the memo howled.... 25 percent of you made the switch (thank you). However, even if we used the most generous of grading curves (say, the one from organic chemistry), we have clearly failed in our goal to move our co-workers to Yahoo Mail.

"Beyond the practical benefits of giving feedback to your colleagues on the Mail team, as a company it's a matter of principle to use the products we make," the memo whinged.

Yahoo mail must be fairly bad. The memo slags off Microsoft Outlook, describing it as "anachronism of the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server terrorised the data centre landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl".

So if Yahoo Mail is that bad and 75 percent of Yahoos still want to use dinosaur technology in preference to the search engine's own software, it really must be pants.

Bonforte, and Roumillat beg Outlook fans that it's time to let go - "at this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed".

Of course, Bonforte, and Roumillat have to admit that there might be times when it's necessary to use Microsoft's software to access corporate features, such as when adding a delegate to a calendar. At this point "you can still fire up Outlook for 30 seconds," the memo reads.

Or you can leave it on and forget that Yahoo has a product. 

Blizzard designer says sorry for Great Tits

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 02:16 AM PST

A top Blizzard designer has said sorry for hyper-sexualiaing female avatars in the upcoming Heroes of the Storm.

Writing in his bog, Dustin Browder said he had regrets about playing down the issue over-sexualiaed character designs in games in recent interviews.

But his apology, which has the faint whiff of a PR manager applying a Chinese burn, follows an incident with a Rock Paper Shotgun hack Nathan Grayson.

Browder was chatting to Grayson when he said that Blizzard just made characters who looked cool and said the design sensibility behind Heroes "is more comic book than anything else."

When Grayson pressed him on the whole "why do women have to look like a teen boy's sex fantasies" question Browder seemed to lose his rag a bit. Before the interview was horridly bought to an end by a PR minder who remembered that Browder had a sudden hair appointment, he had come up with quotes like.

"We're not running for President. We are not sending a message. No one should look to our game for that," he said.

Now Browder seems to have reconsidered and is saying that this was a serious topic, and he did not want people to think he was insensitive about how he portrayed characters.

He adds that the company had an amazing roster of heroes and we will always strive to make sure that everyone can have a hero that they identify with and feel powerful using.

However, Browder did not mention any actual changes in company policy, nor did he indicate that there was going to be any move to change female costumes in any games. 

Intel wants half a billion for broken TV

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 02:12 AM PST

Chipzilla has confirmed that it is trying to sell its broken streaming TV project to its partner Verizon for half a billion dollars.

OnCue has been having problems getting off the ground since it was officially launched in February. Intel's new CEO, Brian Krzanich has decided that the problems are terminal and he can't be doing with the expense anymore.

OnCue is a provide pay-TV programming over any high-speed internet connection. It was supposed to be a major threat to cable-TV services that deliver shows over dedicated lines. Intel developed a system that includes servers, set-top boxes and applications that stream content to phones and tablets.

According to Bloomberg, Krzanich 's move happened as Chipzilla came close to sorting out deals with some of the major programmers for content which had been the main sticking point. However, the terms were such that Intel would have faced upfront outlays in the hundreds of millions regardless of how quickly the service caught on.

A $500 million sale would let the company recoup its costs as it retreats on its plans while still supplying chips to the new owner.

It had been widely rumoured that Intel was giving up the ghost on the project, but it seems to think that there is value in selling it off, even if it does not have a ghost of a chance of making any money for years. 

Intel has totally lost the plot

Posted: 25 Nov 2013 08:05 AM PST

When newly hatched Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told analysts that Intel was moving into the foundry business, a thousand jaws in the semiconductor business must have dropped.

The fact is that while companies like Taiwanese megafoundry TSMC can maintain so-called “Chinese walls” to prevent information from customers leaking to other customers, there’s such a hearty mistrust of Intel that we can’t really see how it can be serious in entering the already crowded foundry business.

Not that it will be the first time that Intel has fabbed chips for other companies – it made HP chips for several years as part of its close collaboration in the Itanium debacle. And it is still making DEC Alpha chips as part of a federal dictat laid down several years ago.

On the one hand, Intel is still making feeble attempts to compete with the ARM band such as Qualcomm, Samsung and the rest, but handset vendors have been deeply reluctant to throw themselves into the Chipzilla camp. A similar reticence means that Microsoft Windows is also an also ran on the tablet and smartphone fronts.

Intel’s business model was predicated on the application of Moore’s Law and the virtual monopoly it enjoyed on the X86 server, desktop and notebook fronts.  It totally missed the “inflexion point” which meant it missed the boat by assuming that the X86 bandwagon would go on forever.

Nothing is forever, not in the computing business.  With its enormous fab capacity, Intel could probably make the majority of semiconductors that go into every device and gizmo on the planet.  And we’re sure that Intel would love that to happen – but it’s bred such an atmosphere of distrust over the decades that it would have to totally re-engineer its inner corporate culture as well as persuade foundry customers that it is alright, really.

And it’s also highly unlikely that the vast cost of process technology would make being a foundry player a viable business. So-called pure play foundries don’t have the taint attached to the Intel name.

So it appears to us that Intel’s gravy train is rapidly approaching the buffers and it may well be too late for someone to switch the inflexion points to put it on another track.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)