Happy Birthday GPS
Twelve years ago geocaching suddenly became useful to citizens. Prior to May 2, 2000, the GPS satellite network had a “feature” called Selective Availability that provided an intentional degradation of the GPS signal so that only the military could use it with accuracy. When President Clinton signed an order to permanently turn off the feature, civilian GPS […]
Patient-centered Medical Home
The health care system of today is based on an entitlement-oriented fee for services model. Providers feel entitled to be reimbursed for the services they provide. The more services they provide, the more reimbursement they receive. The payers–both government and insurance companies–have not yet provided sufficient incentive to providers to shift the focus to health […]
E-Books From Your Local Library
Libraries are trying their best to make borrowing e-books convenient, but publishers are not making it easy. See E-Books Are Easier to Borrow, Just Be Prepared to Wait. The New York Times story said that e-book borrowing is preceded by e-book waiting. I decided to take a look a virtual visit to the library in Ridgefield, […]
How to Empty Your Inbox
I got a call from Claire Suddath at Bloomberg Businessweek a few weeks ago. She told me about their upcoming second annual “How To” special issue. We talked quite a bit about the history of email and various approaches to manage it. By necessity, the story had to be edited down quite a bit to […]
OS/2 Celebrates 25 Years
Harry McCracken’s story (see 25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System) about OS/2 brought back a lot of memories. Seeing my picture in PC World magazine made me feel old — who is that young man? Bill Gates and I were both wearing purple shirts, but that […]