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15 Important Tech Concepts In 2006
MBoy wrote to mention a Popular Mechanics story discussing 15 technology concepts that are likely to be important in the coming year. From the article: "Body Area Network (BAN) - Like everything else, implantable medical devices are going wireless. A new in-body antenna chip from Zarlink Semiconductor is in preproduction, and should appear in pacemakers and hearing implants this year. By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor's office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home." I prefer Personal Area Network (PAN), myself.
Someone messed up while writing this article. Samsung said that they were making 16Gb (gigabit) chips, not 16GB chips. TFA: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 13/0243231
"But didn't Bill Gates once say that 640k of memory should be more than enough for anyone? :-)"
Yes, he didnt say that.
In case of a natural disaster, they are on a server
No, mine aren't. They are on multiple site, geographically dispersed, diverse routed synchronous data arrays in secure and hardened data centres.
who has the proper copy and what data gets lost during automatic updates
There are 16 "proper copies" of each instance. Each instance represents a doctors surgery, a hospital trust*, an ambulance trust etc. There are no losses during updates, it's designed to be fully available and resilient in the event of the total loss of a datacentre.
(*trust is UK medical system speak for a local area and may contain one or all of the above)
I seriously doubt they can even call this a method to save storage space
Agreed. Last time I looked it was projected to be +9Pb. I have around 1Pb to look after here.
the weekly/monthly backups would take nearly as much space
The datacentres are synchronised. No old-fashioned "backups" take place. See my first point. However, non-patient related data is taken to tape daily and offsited.
It's a serious undertaking. ;-)
I laughed out loud when I saw that Bush had allocated $125m for EMR in the USA. This will cost BILLIONS.