The “Investors Business Daily” recently wrote an op-ed piece opposing public healthcare. I’m not going to get into the overall argument about public vs. private healthcare, but the line below (since edited out of the official version) is just too hilarious:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

Stephen Hawking? You mean the Stephen Hawking who was born in Oxford because his parents moved there during the Blitz? The Stephen Hawking who enrolled in University College at Oxford to study physics? The Stephen Hawking that works at Cambridge University as an astronomer and physicist? The Stephen Hawking who was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982?. That Stephen Hawking?

For a more famous Briton, you’d have to choose one of the members of Monty Python. For god’s sake, the guy looks like a grown-up Harry Potter.

Now, none of this is meant to indicate my, or NetQoS’s, support or opposition for public healthcare; but the mistake illustrates a basic point – without doing some basic research, you end up looking foolish.

For example, early datacenter consolidators who moved applications from branches to the home office servers didn’t do the basic research regarding latency in their applications and ended up with extremely slow applications when they were moved from the low latency LANs to the high-latency WANs.

The only real way to fix the slowdowns was to recode the applications so that they made fewer round trips between the server and the application – because no matter how good your network is, you’ll still experience latency associated with the speed of light.

If we ever pass that barrier, it’ll be because of people like, say, Stephen Hawking, doing the research and getting the information.

More generally, it never hurts to have more information before drawing your conclusions. You can’t claim that performance has improved – or degraded – unless you have a baseline to compare performance to. You can’t assure someone that the problem does not exist in the network unless you have full end-to-end visibility of the network.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go meet with the Prime Minister of Britain, Mr. Bean.