Biting the technology bullet

As my regular reader knows I am a real cheapskate when it comes to consumer technology products. However, if you always wait for the inevitable price drops to occur--and they always have--one could miss out on somrhing, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that might be. I really do need some SSDs. I am going to install Chrome on an old notebook comp., and given that the machine has 2 64 bit unmolested cores running @ 1.9 GHz, with a DX11 1 GB GDDR5 video card, the box will fly, and I will not have to give up very much as it already has Ubuntu on board.

Given that I am doing this as an experiment only, it is totally overkill. The little notebook has more processing power than a 2012 i5 Haswell mobile. I have had the little beast since 2007.

The other SSDs are for work boxes that are not mobile.

I need food

I think that I can get a great deal on a three pack of SSDs right now, so I am going fishing.

New iPads vs. Nexus 9 and doubtless copycats.

Apple doesn't seem to want to be in this game. Google w/Lollipop and nVidia's K1 dual core are very, very fast. Please note that the benchmarking was performed with only one of the two cores functional. I am all about performance per dollar spent, and whilst the Nexus 9 may present a good value for some people, it is not for me. I find it odd that Apple's new iPads are little changed. One has to wonder if Apple sees the future, and it is a future sans tablets. Could the Cupertino giant be so focused on the upcoming watch, and a much rumoured TV product to have passed on major updates for the iPad series? Economies of scale are certainly with Apple as almost everything iPad has been fully amortized.

I am still looking at a Hisense Sero Pro 7 refurb. $81.00 at Newegg using Visa Checkout. What is with the make it thinner paradigm? I want a chunky tablet that doesn't dent in the almost inevitability event of a drop.

Ebola 10.16.2014

The 2nd nurse to catch the ebola virus from patient zero demonstrates a comedy(albeit a very black one) of errors by pretty much everyone involved. the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital is reportedly "deeply sorry" for ebola breaches of protocols. Let us call them monumental fuck-ups.

So, it looks like my early hypothesis concerning protocol breaches were manifold worse than I expected.

I used the disclaimer "looks like" as I trust pretty much no one to come out with the whole truth at a point where people are freaked out.

This is very much like a cover-up after a crime has been committed. The crime may be bad in and of itself, but the cover-up is typically gets someone's head on a pike.

The CDC's first objective is not to stop the spread of pathogenic diseases. It is to assuage public fears in an effort to avoid widespread panic.

We have seen this sort of thing very recently. The incidence of Lyme(Borreliosis) was recently increased by a factor of 10. This after a decade or so of denial.

The health workers were not properly trained, and all manner of containment procedures were not followed. I suppose that the latter is due to direct action of the former.

Let us hope that every health care everywhere on the planet is getting schooled in hemorrhagic fever containment procedures.

I am selling my business this week, so it has been lawyers, and negotiations. I should be done with all of that by 25 Oct. or thereabouts.

Top secret Android stuff..Nah, I got nothing I can share

Okay, so it's no secret at all. I think it's all very humorous that Android sites are still speculating about the Nexus (whatever Google decides to name the upcoming tablet) when the FCC has had the testing data available online for days now. nVidia has confirmed that the as yet officially named tablet is going to have a dual core K1 processor with the full complement of 192 CUDA stream cores intact. Oh yeah, the ARM based but nVidia developed SoC solution does support 64 bit addressing. All will be revealed this week. No doubt, there are sites benching the new Nexus tablet, but are under NDAs...I have seen leaked benchmarks of early efforts, but as the hardware and software solutions become more fully mature, things are certain to change. The Nexus (whatever) phone is going to start at xxx sans contract.

New Nexus 5s have been seen as low as $315.00 on ebay. Not nearly cheap enough for me, but a potential deal if one is looking for a phone to use abroad as the current listings are GSM. Google seems to holding steady at $349.00. I have heard some very solid pricing data on the various iterations of the two big device announcements coming this week, but I too will stay mute. All I can say is that tablet is way out of my price range. One can grab a Hisense Sero Pro 7 for under $90 new, and slightly less refurbished. It will seem dark and blurry compared to devices that cost 4x its modest price, but that's a very acceptable trade-off to anyone that really looks at the low value proposition of consumer grade electronics.

Did New Ebola Patient Follow Treatment Safety Protocols?

I think that this is the real question in this tragic turn of events. If so, and one would like to believe that there is video of the caregiver's every moment with the patient. I, for one, do not believe that a patient's right to privacy rises above the interest of protecting the masses against infectious disease by a little in-hospital monitoring. As long as the video records are destroyed after all personnel that had contact are cleared of contagion once reasonable time has passed to do otherwise seems a bit too insane given how error prone humans are.

The multi-trillion dollar question here is that if the caregiver followed all current protocols every moment with the patient and when the caregiver was disposing of potentially infectious hospital gear, then how did the caregiver become infected?

Links to .pdf files concerning harm reduction from the WHO site available here.

If ebola is still transmissable if all safety protocols were followed, then currrent safety protocols are unacceptable. This would imply that at least aerosol transmission is taking place. Not directly indicate, as another route might be involved, but simply the route that most easily defeats the WHO's Personal Protective Equipment(PPE) given the current guidelines.

This does not indicate this strain of ebola is more easily transmitted. It may simply mean that the current safety protocols have has gaps in them since they were introduced. It is worth noting that when working with ebola in a laboratory setting--it is a Class 4 pathogen--requires what are erroneously referred to by some as 'space suits." Yet in a hospital where the risk of accident would seems amplified many times by the relative lack of training with this level of pathogen, not even a self-contained and pressurized breathing apparatus is required.

Please note that this post was supposed to precede that which I just posted. I had this ready at 10 AM Eastern US. So, the patient in that post is the same person as the one mentioned here.

Sorry about that. I closed the browser and my sleep deprived self failed to get back to it until now.

More and Better Ebola Patient Info..via my Business Newsfeed

Reuters delivers the goods. According to the reporter, the health worker is a woman, and was using the CDC ebola protocols for US hospitals which are simply mirrors of the WHO guidelines with more emphasis and much more clarity on Aerosol Generating Procedures(AGP). I would paste the table into my post, but this lame template doesn't respect the "code" tag properly.

While I was searching for the URL of the Reuters article, I found this video featuring a lab coat wearing doctor telling us that our chance of getting this disease in the US right now "is essentially zero," and goes on for another partial sentence before the video ends.

Our videoed doctor also mentions some things about the way the female health worker was likely infected. The improper taking off of contaminated PPE received all the "by name" mentions.

I often find that the business press is ahead of most media types in getting to stories--and even if they are reported. For instance, the Wall Street Journal, with what is likely the most oddly biased editorial section of all major publications, has to serve up sometimes abhorrent human rights violations in countries where the US corporate world conducts business; which is essentially every country on the planet. Where there is money involved the business press has a truly vested interest to accurately report on the darker side of things. Otherwise, the media outlet not getting the financially actionable story out will perish.

That's a wrap!