Scott Switzer

Vermont first state with single payer healthcare system

I spent six months with Jay looking at the existing healthcare insurance landscape, and we agreed that a watered down national healthcare bill will not be effective reform.  A single payer system is a proven model, and a state run single payer system is a great start.  Hopefully more states will take the lead here and remove healthcare insurance state by state.

History revisited: Google/Android 2011 vs. Microsoft/Windows 1995

This article about how Google is using ‘Android Compatibility’ as a tool to dissuade manufacturers from using Google competitors is just like what Microsoft did in the nineties to encourage their OEMs to use Microsoft preferred browsers, ISP’s etc.

Hopefully I am wrong, but it seems like that this behavior is the beginning of the end of innovation for them - kinda like what happened to Microsoft 15 years ago.

Ecommerce and Document Databases

In this blog post, MongoDB gives a  high level overview on how document databases are particularly suited to ecommerce (as well as analytics).  There are a few people who are using MongoDB for ecommerce, and I think that this is one area where document databases will perform well.

There is yet to be an open source ecommerce application which uses a document database (to my knowledge).  Perhaps the start could be for Mongo, Apache, or some other open source project to release a the document equivalent to a ‘reference schema’ for an ecommerce application.

There is some work being done on the Vespolina project (which uses MongoDB and Symfony2) here:

https://github.com/vespolina/vespolina

It would be great to hear from people about other efforts!

Re: Why I'll remember May 2, 2011

Redditor describes how Americans were ‘celebrating in the streets’ upon news of Osama Bin Laden’s death.  I had a similar feeling as the poster - however, my disgust was toward news stations who manufactured this silly reaction.  I don’t (refuse to) believe that celebration was on many of US people’s minds.

I spent time reflecting on our actions before the event, how a group like Al Qaeda could exist in the first place, whether our reaction was appropriate, and whether silly images of people celebrating provides any closure to families of those directly affected by the bombings.

Faces of the OpenX Community

Here are the photos of 2,130 people who have used OpenX for their job!