Mike Rundle: “Because the future of mobile hardware design is for it to fade away completely and have the focus be the OS and apps it runs.”
Yes, software is king. It’s good to be the king.
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Category: Technology
Kevin MD: “There’s a storm brewing around the regulation of medical apps. The FDA has been skirting the issue for too long and it’s having detrimental effects on the potential for such apps. Recent FDA hearings have revealed that the agency is watching the apps stores for potential alarms and that they are drafting guidance. Whatever that means.”
The thought of the FDA regulating software is a bit of a joke. That’s like allowing a Software Developer to prescribe medications. Sure, we could do it, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective as someone trained to deal with it.
How in the world would the FDA propose to evaluate applications? Here’s how it would work. They’d start with great intentions. After a while companies would become buddy-buddy with someone responsible for evaluation and before you know it one company has a competitive advantage over another, even if that company is not worthy.
Let the market decide. If Pharmacists, Doctors, and Nurses use the software daily and notice mistakes they’re not going to put up with it for very long. If medical care professionals don’t know enough about their industry to notice a mistake then shame on them. Software, like the human body, is quite simple, yet it can become quite complex. Regulation is not the answer. It will reduce choice and competition in the marketplace, and that’s not a great model for success.
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No iPhone for you! (Until now)
New York Times: “Well, not all the states. The people of North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming — as if they needed a reminder that they live off the beaten path — had to watch the rest of the nation fawn over their must-have gadgets.”
I had no idea there were entire states not covered by AT&T.
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Pigeon Protocol?
Slashdot: “Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon. One group back in 2001 successfully sent a PING command. But now there’s a practical use for pigeon-based communications: photographers working for the white-water rafting company Rocky Mountain Adventures send memory sticks full of digital photos via homing pigeon so the photos will be ready when the rafters finish up. The company has details on how the pigeons are trained and equipped. It may not be a full implementation of the Pigeon Protocol, but it works in narrow canyons far off the beaten path — and just as David Waitzman presciently predicted, they occasionally suffer packet loss due to hawks and ospreys.”
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Computers still needed
AppsLab: “But why not get a keyboard to attach to your tablet? Yeah, let’s replace that bulky laptop with a skinny tablet and a bag full of accessories. Reminds me of the Sony Vaio I used in 2001; all the cords and accessories I needed to make it useful outweighed the actual laptop.”
This is the same sort of stuff people said about computers when the Internet became popular. We still have computers. I don’t know about you but to do my day job I’d be hard pressed to replace my eight core beast with a tablet, or iPad. I still need computing power to get my job done. Heck, I still need a real computer to do iOS work. I see rows and rows of computers at work. The place the tablet, or iPad, will be handy is in your home. It’s a casual computing device. Much better suited for consumption than creation.
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Testing dlvr.it
I’ve been using ping.fm for quite a while to update my social sites with links to my weblog posts, until recently that is. It looks like ping.fm is suffering from its popularity. The nasty spammers have discovered it and have messed it up for the rest of us. If, like me, you relied on Samuel Aguilera’s great WordPress plugin Shorten2Ping you’ve probably had trouble updating ping.fm, unless his recent e-mail fix worked for you. It didn’t work for me.
I’ve had a dlvr.it account for quite a while now but didn’t have need for it. Now I do. Dlvr.it will publish my weblog posts using a tried and true format, RSS. A while back I used FriendFeed to publish everything, it too used RSS, and I loved it, but once Facebook got its hands on FriendFeed it became kind of crusty and took forever to update my social sites. Too bad, it was a great technology.
Here’s hoping dlvr.it fills that need.
Fingers crossed.