From a bench in Bushnell Park, or a spot overlooking the Connecticut River, or from the living room of a house in Blue Hills, Hartford residents can now access the Internet through a wireless - and free - municipal network.
But the very next sentence says otherwise.
Mayor Eddie A. Perez plans to announce today the launch of a $1 million pilot program to test the service, along with a push by the city to sell inexpensive computers to residents.
How is that free? One million dollars is not free. A more truthful statement would be “no cost to lower-income users”. This program is only free if you ignore the fact that the taxpayer is funding this program. (The article isn’t clear about the origin of the funding, but it’s most certainly not a private gift to the municipality.)
Furthermore, does Hartford really need a wi-fi network when only 25% of its townspeople even own a computer (and how many of those are wireless-capable)?
The article goes on to say:
(S)tarting in March, only the first 20 hours of access per household will be free; after that, residents will have to buy unlimited access for $12 to $17 a month.
Ah. The fine print.
So, in truth, Hartford is making available low-cost, subsidized wireless internet access to its citizens at a discount. That’s a far cry from “free”.
I’ve often told interested parties that my wife and I have a fertility secret: relocate. Each time we’ve moved from place to place (first Georgia to Connecticut, then Connecticut to Texas), we’ve also discovered that we’ve managed to create a new child in the process. We’re two for two in this process so far.
Since we have two in diapers, we’ve decided to stay in Texas in hopes that it will keep her fertility in check. However, I think I’ve managed to do one better:
Heavy use of mobile phones may damage men's fertility, a study has suggested. Researchers found those men who used a phone for four hours or more a day had fewer sperm and those they had moved less well and were of poorer quality.
So, let’s recap. Relocate and get pregnant. Use your mobile phone (in my case, my Treo 650) for four or more hours per day and reduce your sperm count.
That's what comes to mind after watching again the melee between FIU and Miami. Both schools should be utterly embarrassed. Both schools should go further than one game suspensions for the players involved. And ALL players involved should publicly come forward and individually apologize for their actions. And the players who were slamming each other with helmets and stomping on other players should be dismissed from the team. Period. Rest assured the NFL wouldn't condone this. Just ask Albert Haynesworth.
From Wired Magazine comes this handy guide for converting YouTube video to iPod video: 1. Add the Greasemonkey extension to your Firefox browser. 2. Go to www.userscripts.org and install the Download YouTube Video script. 3. The next time you watch YouTube, you’ll see a Download Video option beneath the screen. Click it to save the file to your desktop as QaQw9V4Upj4.flv or whatever. 4. Install and launch the free Super video converter (www.erightsoft.com). 5. Select Apple – iPod from the Output Container option, and then the output video codec H.264/AVC. Set size to 320 x 240. If you get an error message when converting, unclick the Use DirectShow button. Otherwise, drag the converted file into iTunes and it’s ready for viewing.
Portable video. It’s the wave of the future… er, present.
Mobile ESPN was a bad idea, a niche market within a niche market. Techies and sports don’t always mix – I’m proud to claim myself as a fan of both. Techies who are willing to fork out bucks to carry around on-demand sports content are few and far between. Even I didn’t succumb to the Mobile ESPN craze.
So what would have drawn me to a Mobile ESPN subscription? How about allowing me to view the content on my choice of mobile device? I certainly was not willing to buy a broadband phone when I already have a Treo 650. Perhaps podcasting Sportscenter for a subscription fee? I already listen to some ESPN podcasts, such as PTI. I might pay a small fee for a portable version of Sportscenter for me to watch in the morning. But exorbitant pricing coupled with forced conversion to new hardware? That’s just a bad business model. And that’s why I didn’t buy into ESPN Mobile, and thousands of other sports fans didn’t either.
Georgetown University Hospital suspended a trial program with an electronic prescription-writing firm last week after a computer consultant stumbled upon an online cache of data belonging to thousands of patients, Wired News has learned.
The leaked information included patients' names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, but not medical data or the drugs the patients were prescribed, says Marianne Worley, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based hospital known for providing emergency care to the nation's most powerful political figures.
The hospital had securely transmitted the patient data to e-prescription provider InstantDx. But an Indiana-based consultant accidentally discovered the data on InstantDx's computers while working to install medical software for a client.
{…}
The consultant responsible for the discovery, Goshen, Indiana-based Randall Perry, says bad security practices contributed heavily to the incident. Perry says he accessed the data using a password he discovered hard-coded into a popular medical practice application, where any moderately skilled user could retrieve it.
"This is just security through obscurity," says Perry. "My home network is probably 10 times more secure than what they have set up over there."
Our IT shop has strict rules about hard-coding any connection strings, DSNs, etc. DON”T DO IT. Period. Everything must be contained in a config file, whether it’s the web.config file in ASP.NET or an ini file for a Windows-based application.
Of course, this applies only to future development, as we recently discovered a client/server app that pushed the admin passwords out as ASCII text to the client PCs. Obfuscation? Nah. Encryption? Pshaw. Who needs it? This is the attitude of many developers. Fortunately, our in-house dev group is paranoid about such things. Apparently, the medical records industry could use a dose of such paranoia.
