To announce that there must be NO criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President
Right or Wrong,
is not only UNPATRIOTIC and SERVILE,
but is Morally TREASONABLE to the American Public.
Theodore Roosevelt
A Short Note on an iTunes Fix
Several days back in a discussion on a more citizen-focused design for government services, I made reference to how the podcast list functionality had changed; I could see old (already played) podcasts available for download; I have occasionally had to resubscribe to a podcast; I would want to do cleanup to show only unheard/watched entries in my list view; legacy functionality let us delete undesired entries. When the last major release of iTunes came out, I found deleted episodes in my existing subscriptions listed--but the functionality to remove these wasn't available. I soon found an iTunes thread of other users whom had voiced similar concerns.
For the non-IT reader, those of us who do upgrades do dry runs with rigorous testing to ensure that expected functionality is upwardly compatible/consistent. No longer being able to modify my podcast list was a violation of that principle; I found it incredulous that Apple, which prides itself on easy-to-use products, would not have caught this issue.
The bottom line is that I noticed yesterday that iTunes had released an update, and some preliminary testing confirmed that the delete function was now restored to the podcast list view.
There was actually a second reason for raising the fix. HHS Secretary Sebelius decided to compare ObamaCare's release glitches to Apple's release of a new operating system
I clearly have an iPad, and I also have an iPhone, and about ten days ago got the prompt that the operating system had changed and did I want to upgrade to the new operating system, and so I did, on both my iPad and my iPhone...And then about five days after that, I got the second prompt saying, ‘Well, there’s a little problem with the iOS 7 system and now we have a ‘new’ new upgrade and why don’t you re-upgrade your upgrade.'First things first. Sebelius' pathetic attempt to dismiss the ObamaCare gaping opening-day functionality problems with a minor OS patch merits a JOTY nomination.
Second, the Obama Administration has had 4 years to plan and test/stress-test its rollout (see discussion below); third, Apple is in a highly-competitive industry; it competes with heavyweights like Google and Microsoft in the device/platform market. The federal government, by definition, is a monopoly.
It Was a Day Like Any Other Day (Government Shutdown)
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| Courtesy of the author via the Bastiat Institute Group on FB |
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.On This Day A Century Ago--A National Tragedy
C. S. Lewis
"The modern income tax was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson exactly 100 years ago today, October 3, 1913." When America was hit with a Weapon of Mass Economic Destruction... Via Cato Institute
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| Courtesy of Bastiat Institute via LFC on FB |
Chart of the Day: How Effective Are Your Fed Dollars in Education?
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| Courtesy of the Cato Institute |
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| Courtesy of the Laissez Faire Capitalism group on FB |
A short series of notes:
- One of my brothers-in-law, a fellow IT professional, wrote a Facebook comment, pointing out that heavy user workloads often overwhelm servers and are to be expected; if you think it's bad now, just wait until the closing date of the enrollment period... I didn't initially post this in response, but a lot of the initial problems were reported after midnight, when it's not like Black Friday at WalMart or the opening of a blockbuster movie. But lots of websites handle huge user loads (take the major search engines like Google); if your store website crashes, you can lose a lot of sales volumes to your competitors. There are hardware and software solutions, e.g., to distribute user workload across a number of servers and to stress-test systems. You have to consider hardware at the design stage, e.g., ensure database servers have enough memory, your network links have enough bandwidth, you have enough servers, load balance hardware (like F5 Big-IP) or software, etc. I've been involved in a number of go-live's; we all do a number of dry runs before cutover. The types of problems experienced on opening day smells like an amateurish/incompetently managed rushed release of a not-ready-for-prime-time application system; if this happened in the private sector, the IT managers would have been fired for cause. Not to flame a relative in a blog post, but I felt that he was giving a Sebelius-like excuse.
- One of the Stansberry investment newsletter writers is a retired MD. This is a short clip of his first take on ObamaCare:
The results could be disastrous… Already, I've heard stories of elderly folks whose annual out-of-pocket expenses are jumping $3,000-$4,000. Physicians I know in California are looking at reimbursement rates dropping to 70% of what Medicare pays them. One doctor told me a new Obamacare plan requires hospitalization for procedures – like the common retinal surgery diabetic vitrectomy – that haven't required hospitalization in decades. Apparently the state and federal groups crafting these plans aren't up to date on the current standards of care in medicine and surgery.
- I found this piece of leftist garbage posted on Salon: "The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting", which was cited by a free-market group on Facebook. Here's a slice of the swill:
Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything they’ve been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: He’s not just black, he’s the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for birtherism: They can’t get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.)
Trying to argue that principled resistance to a Ponzi scheme, centralized, Procrustean healthcare scheme we can't afford with a $17T debt, which Obama had not run on (he had opposed an individual mandate during his initial campaign, and the law was the result of Senate Dem deal making that Obama was not involved with hands-on) and which lacked popular support at the time of passage, is racially-motivated is, in itself, a morally reprehensible racist smear. The President's skin color is not relevant to the fact of bad public policy, and trying to divert attention by charges based on unsupported racial paranoia is extraordinary bad form, even for a "progressive" like the author.
A funny response from a poster noted that conservatives also opposed HillaryCare back in 1993-1994 and asked "Was that racist, too?" I ad-libbed, "No, the 'progressives' would argue that the rebuke was misogynist." Listen, the progressives are stuck trying to defend an unjustifiable, divisive, still as unpopular piece of Statist excrement; their only intellectual response is to smear the opposition.Grow, Baby, Grow
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gorrell and Townhall |
The Supremes, "Love is Here and Now You're Gone"
