Also, customer disservice, gateways and spyware, VoIP, Firebird, more
Mark Gibbs’ BackSpin columns on the Federal Emergency Management Agency requiring hurricane victims to use Internet Explorer 6.0 to file claims on its Web site (see IE required: The government gets it wrong and IE required: Your comments) generated an avalanche of responses from readers on both sides of the issue. Here’s what some had to say:
Smart use of money
Anyone who has issues with FEMA requiring Internet Explorer should go work for a support group for a few months. Yes, it is possible to design a Web site to work on various browsers. However, the amount of time, effort and challenges involved in doing so are counterproductive. Keep in mind that there are audit compliance measurements by which these sites are governed. There are constant new security threats and requirements that have to be addressed.
In this specific case, it’s our tax dollars that are being spent to provide the site, services and support. I am happy to see my tax dollars used wisely and not wasted on the time and resources required to offer the site on non-matured platforms.
Donald Rowland
Cheektowaga, N.Y.
Good decision
If you want to help as many people as possible during a disaster, then you have to make good decisions. The decision to use Internet Explorer technologies on the FEMA and government Web sites was an excellent one. It provided at a minimum 80% to 90% of the people access to the site. Mark Gibbs says he is worried about the poor, but there is no poor person with Apple technology because it costs too much.
I believe Gibbs actually is doing a disservice because if someone actually listens to him, the government will end up spending twice as much to meet his lowest common denominator, it will take twice as long to bring the services online and we will end up with listless, toothless Web sites that are of little value to people in need.
Joel DeRider
President
IceT Corp.
Shoreview, Minn.
Neutrality adds value
Metcalf’s law (that the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network) is just as applicable to Web sites as it is to the Internet. The more useful work or information that is accessible, the greater the value returned. By definition, Web sites that are not browser neutral are worth less.
Given that there are well-defined, supplier-independent standards in this area, the government should comply with these standards. However, the fault lies more with the tools used to develop the Web site than with Internet Explorer. User organizations, including the government, should insist that developers use tools that produce World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant Web sites, vs. tools that deliberately lock the user into a specific vendor’s browser.
It would be interesting to find out whether these IE-specific Web sites comply with American Disabilities Act (ADA) 508. If not, that could be an area where pressure can be applied to bring government Web sites into compliance. While they are pursuing ADA 508 compliance, they might as well pursue browser neutrality at the same time.
Laurie Bride
Fall City, Wash.
No-bid contract
It seems to me that [FEMA requiring Internet Explorer] is not only bad policy, but may be illegal, though I’m not a lawyer and can’t provide legal advice. Can you imagine the IRS having a requirement that filing taxes electronically could only be done through MS Money or Turbo Tax? The government can certainly specify an end format for the data, but not the programs that achieve that format.
In effect, FEMA has given Microsoft a no-bid contract that forces anyone who might want to interact with FEMA to buy not only Internet Explorer, but an entire Wintel environment.
Steve Goldman
Long Valley, N.J.
Denying services
I think those who talk about majority rule are missing something. We are not talking about a commercial site in a competitive environment here. If a bank decides to exclude 10% to 15% of its potential customers from its online services, those people can vote with their feet and their money. But government services are a de facto monopoly. It’s not like someone that has been excluded from a service can apply to Canada or Mexico for help. Phrase the question this way and see if it feels the same: Is it right for a government organization, paid for with our tax money, to deny service to a taxpayer just because that taxpayer purchased an Apple computer?
Dennis Mosman
Minneapolis
Greater concern
Of Mark Gibbs’ comments about FEMA, I am most troubled by his accurate assessment that the Web site did not exist before the disaster. FEMA’s browser choice can generate debate, but its slow response at IT provisioning — apparently at every level — is my greatest concern.
Tommy Jacobsen
Technical services supervisor
Office of Telecommunications Management
Baton Rouge, La.
Fake-out
The real issue is: How does the Web site determine you are using or not using Internet Explorer? The browser being used should be able to do everything anyway — display the Web page and reply to form entries. Some smart coder should be able to fake the reply to the host site when it tries to determine your browser type.
Bob Vrbka
Network administrator
Centennial Public Schools
Utica, Neb.
Favoring monopoly
The fact that 85% of the user community has Internet Explorer shouldn’t preclude accommodating those users who do not. The government should support any viable access method and encourage more to join the fray rather than selecting software that is incapable of supporting alternatives to Internet Explorer.
One does not need to look too far down the technology path to see that an unintended consequence of government supporting only one access method is that we end up with only one access method. I can’t imagine anyone making a credible argument for pushing the competition out of business in favor of awarding a monopoly.
Richard Smart
Silver Spring, Md.
No majority rule
I concur with Mark Gibbs’ assessment that government’s purpose is for the greater good, and not to enforce a majority rule. The government is for everyone, not a select few, not even a select majority, but everyone within the borders of this country, even if our browser preference puts us in a minority.
Bryant Belknap
Manager, systems and networks
Excel Storage Products
East Stroudsburg, Pa.
Java jive
This has to be one of the biggest issues on the Internet that irks me — especially when the company is using Java as the engine to run the site and then has the nerve to tell me that it only works with IE6. Whenever I encounter a site that does not work properly with Opera or Firefox, I e-mail its Web master and encourage them to comply with the highest level of WC3 standard that they can to ensure that their Web site is reachable by everyone. Most times they are surprised that their site does not work with these browsers and have never heard of WC3. However, larger companies are different; I have had many heated arguments with customer service drones and their IS help desks who chant the Internet Explorer mantra and seem unwilling to work with the customer. I then have to point out to them that Java is platform independent, so it is their fault that their site does not work. Frequently the problem is HTTPS service and authentication and encryption; the rest of the time it is their programming skills that need refinement. I do note though that repeated complaining works as the bank I deal with has now fixed their Java code to allow me to log in with Opera and Firefox.
Glen Merrick
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
Too much downtime
While I do find it annoying that FEMA has required Internet Explorer to access its system to register for aid, I find the fact that government cannot even keep a Web site up and running even more disturbing. I recently acquired an ATV and wanted to look for places to ride. Many Web links point you to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for this information. Unfortunately the Web site has been down for security reasons. I figured this was a temporary issue so I looked a week later; same message. It has now been over three months since I started checking, and every link about California BLM land and off-road use is still down. They still claim it is a security issue. Can you think of a private company that would accept its Web site being down for more than three months?
Glenn Plank
Systems engineer
FaxWorld
Huntington Beach, Calif.
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Confluxion today
Regarding Howard Anderson’s column, “Confluxion: The state of our lives”: I couldn’t agree more: device/technology overload. The exponential growth of new products is now far exceeding mankind’s ability to keep up. It used to be that the medium was the message; now the mediums destroy the message.
It was probably far more efficient in the past as a society when fewer people had a way to broadcast to the masses. When one person talked/presented/wrote, hundreds listened. Now with everyone talking/broadcasting/writing, nobody is listening to any of it because there’s a million channels of information coming at them. We just jump from one to the next in a span of seconds, taking basically nothing worthwhile from it.
This is the chaos model at its best so far in mankind’s history: chaotic at the beginning, then a relative stability in terms of information presentation, and now back to chaos. The only way to solve it is to develop a system/model on how things progress. Which of course, will never happen, since with 6 billion people being able to broadcast their opinions, all of which will differ, conclusions on anything in the future will be hard to come by.
I give television itself another decade of life. First everyone had their own e-mail account, then everyone has their own cell phone, now everyone has their own music station if they want to stream off a server, their own TV stations are soon to come. Finding footage to broadcast? Nothing’s scripted anymore. It’ll be all-reality TV. Think the overwhelming number of useless blogs out there is bothersome? Wait until everyone is broadcasting real-time video. Strap on a headband and watch someone walk around the city doing their daily things all day. “Today I’ll watch channel Mike Smith.” “No, I changed my mind…Channel Mike Smith on the Angle #2 cam”. And I think I’ll watch it on my wireless laptop on my lunch break, while I myself am broadcasting 10 Internet TV channels.
Blogs won’t last. They started off fast because not everyone had one. Now that everyone has one (or 20), nobody will care about reading them, they’ll just care about writing them (for people that don’t read them because they’re writing their own, and so on, and so on).
With bandwidth going up all the time, why be limited to a mere 500 digital/cable satellite channels on my TV when I can get HDTV real-time quality, and 10,000 channels being broadcasted from a single neighborhood and watch it on my laptop as I walk around town.
It used to be bad enough when camcorders came out and you had to sit through hours of a relative’s boring home video when visiting. Now there are Web sites.
Ten years. TV stations run by corporations – gone, radio – already gone. I can tune in to any home-run station around the globe on any subject I want. Movies? Maybe 20 years, until desktops can pump them out by one person alone, made over the span of a lunch break. DVDs? 5 years, if that. It’ll all be on compact flash soon. Heck you can already get 8gig memory cards. But then again they have 60gig DVDs coming out. Hmph.
Unless a model is globally accepted on how to funnel the creation and usage of new technology, it’ll be a digital version of the Ice Age.
Heck, who says I have to be a Canadian because I was physically born in Canada? People will soon spend more (some already do) of their lifetimes in the digital world than the physical. Maybe I’ll start up the first official online country.
My next goal is to write a script that produces its own everything. Search online video clips to make its own movies, searches Web blogs to make its own. Kind of like when you come home and hear that your answering machine got one of those automated computer calls tell you about something. Sometimes I wonder if behind my back my answering machine and those computers on the other end have naughty little relationships of their own.
Marc Nagy
St. Catharines, Ontario
Customer disservice
Regarding “Cell operators work to restore networks in New Orleans”: Ironic that T-Mobile is so active in Katrina efforts and now will work with people on their bills. I never had an annual contract with T-Mobile, but they billed me for one anyway after Hurricane Ivan. When I told them that I had relocated to a friend’s basement in an area where they did not have reliable coverage and asked that they cancel my service, they insisted that I provide “proof of residence” in the form of a lease or a property deed. They fouled up my credit rating, but not only did they not get my money, they also did not get my recommendation to others when they did begin to market in this fringe area.
Patricia Collins
Fitchburg, Mass.
Stopping spyware
Regarding “Gateways are the best way to stop spyware”: This isn’t rocket science. Make sure that as you browse the Web, you are on an account that has no install authority and updates or installs require an administrator logon. At work this should be the default, even though I have worked at companies where the IT staff has given everyone admin status and paid for it. It works at home too, and I haven’t been burned. I also look at the source HTML or other code to look for redirects, and have found some obvious ones.
Bill Baka
Marysville, Calif.
Feeling the heat
Regarding the story, “VoIP rollouts generate heat, power concerns”: I’m not convinced. I buy the need for bigger circuits in the intermediate distribution frame (IDF) — we’re upgrading our circuits from 20 amps to 30 amps in our IDFs. I buy the idea of bigger UPSs in the IDF. I buy the idea of bigger power supplies in the switch in order to produce the juice to drive all those Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices. And I buy the idea that these bigger power supplies and UPSs, assuming they are less than 100% efficient, are contributing more waste heat to the IDF.
But I don’t buy the idea that temperature in the IDF is going to rise all that much, because most of this extra wattage pouring into the switch is being dissipated not in the IDF, but on the desktop, where the VoIP phone resides.
A network delivering PoE is really a giant distributed heating system. I might buy the idea that the temperature in the human-inhabited areas will go up, because all these VoIP phones are pumping out heat. But I don’t buy the idea that the IDF will receive any significant fraction of this newly acquired heat.
Stuart Kendrick
Network analyst
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Seattle
Don’t forget Firebird
I find it surprising that the article “Open source databases grow” does not mention the Firebird open source database. This is particularly odd given that market researcher Evans Data Corp. noted earlier this year that “Firebird is the most used open source database for enterprise applications, more database developers use Firebird for single purpose applications and Firebird is tied for the most used database for workgroup applications. Further, MySQL and Firebird are locked in a virtual tie in the open source database space with each being used by just over half of database developers who use open source databases.”
This popularity is due in part to the fact that Firebird (like PostgreSQL) has a more business-friendly license than MySQL. Firebird is also more full featured than MySQL, including ACID compliance, and also has a long commercial history and following under its original commercial name, Interbase. Unlike PostgreSQL, Firebird has also been long available on Windows as well as Linux. For more information on Firebird, click here.
Eric Anderson
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Broken record
I enjoyed Scott Bradner’s column, “Never met a tech they didn’t hate”. Another thing that I always find funny about the recording industry is that they always want to attribute their falling sales to piracy alone.
I’m sick of being told the CD/DVD I purchased doesn’t belong to me and can only be used under their ever-tightening rules. If I buy a CD, why can’t I copy the songs to my MP3 player and listen to them? Then there are companies like Sony that place new copy protection devices in their products without disclosing them to the public. It wouldn’t make me happy to find the music CD I purchased won’t run on my computer where I listen to most of my CDs.
I wish people would get fed up with the one-sided agreements and boycott all CD/DVD sales until the industry quits trying to bully all of us into their terms. I think it’s going to take that kind of a revolt to make the recording industry see reason.
Ron Blessing
South Bend, Ind.
