Category Archives: Technology and innovation

ObamaCare Launch: First Hints of Real Back-End Problems on the Federal Exchange Begin to Appear

By Lambert Strether. Originally published at Corrente.

Via O’Reilly — the highly literate and excellent tech publishing company — we read the following. Note that the grey-haired[1] tech guy has pronounced judgment in the headline:

What Developers Can Learn from healthcare.gov
… Remember, even a failure can serve as an example of what not to do
2) Pretty doesn’t trump functional. The site is very well designed from a graphical perspective, and is clearly using lots of Javascript and AJAX to do snazzy transitions and requests in the background. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be interacting with the intermittent failures on the backend very well. If you’re going to make requests behind the scenes, you need to be very tolerant of failures. The healthcare.gov site seems to fail silently and leave a broken user experience in its wake, with no way to continue. Nothing drives a user crazy more than having to go through the same form over and over because of failures that leave them high and dry.

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Wolf Richter: Why IBM Throws Another Billion At Linux (With NSA-Designed Backdoor)

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.

IBM announced today that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers. The big reason? To capitalize on customers’ mistaken perception that Linux is safe from NSA snooping.

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Michael Klare: DoE Forecasts No Meaningful Change in Fossil Fuel Use by 2040

Yves here. While this post focuses on a newly-released Department of Energy forecast, and forecasting is always a fraught exercise, there’s good reason to see it as realistic. It reflects the power of inertia and entrenched interests. If anything, you’d expect the DoE to present a hopeful outlook on the growth of eco-friendly power sources, given how often Obama talks about “green energy” and “green jobs,” but the authors appear to have steered clear of undue optimism.

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Ilargi: London Is Fracking, And I Live By The River

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth, Cross posted from Automatic Earth

It’s a state of mind, a way of thinking and a belief system bordering on outright religion all in one. If it would be recognized as a religion, it would be the world’s biggest. Its followers and proponents hold that growth is a necessary element of survival, that technology is capable of solving all problems (especially those caused by mankind), and that the earth, nature, the living environment, is there for mankind to be exploited at will to achieve that growth

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Michael Klare: The Third Carbon Age – Drop the Fantasy of a Coming Era of Renewable Energy

Yves here. To put none too fine a point on it, the most important steps to reduce carbon emissions would be a Marshall plan level effort to reconfigure living and resourcing arrangements so as to reduce energy demands, and to go particularly aggressively after the worst polluters (for instance, the cars you see spewing fumes, are surprisingly large contributors to total emissions from automobiles). But it’s much easier to go the Easter Island route and keep carrying on more or less as before until you hit insurmountable constraints.

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Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”

Yves here. The Real News Network interview below with Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, is part of a series that examines the power dynamics that undergird our economic system. Unlike most interviews, this one is more ruminative. Rather than trying to deliver some key observations to viewers, this one is more intended to help people recognize that they have blinkered views on some issues.

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Wolf Richter: NSA Pricked The “Cloud” Bubble For US Tech Companies

Yves here. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. As soon as Glenn Greenwald started to reveal the extent of NSA snooping, Ed Harrison remarked via e-mail that one of the casualties would be cloud-based computing models. Wolf Richter catalogues the damage so far. And who would trust any of the proprietors, given how obliging virtually all Silicon Valley players have been when it comes to indulging the pet needs of the surveillance state?

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