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Australian State Govt. To Fund iPads For Doctors
angry tapir writes "The current premier of the Australian state of Victoria, John Brumby, has promised every doctor in Victoria's public hospital system would be issued with an Apple iPad if his incumbent Labor Government was returned to power in the state's upcoming election."
Sounds fair they should go to tender and be fair to all the other tablet pcs and not mention "ipad" directly. Chances are the idea won't fly anyway so there will never be ipads to complain about, people know what an ipad is not a tablet PC this is an election stunt :\
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
The main problem is any tablet with a capacitive screen is basically useless for real work.
You need pen/stylus input to sign, take "handwriting to text" notes and annotate documents.
An ipad is even more useless, it is a glorified media player and web device.
It frustrates me that Apples popularity and marketing has made the capacitive screen a must have feature , it is less versatile and accurate than the alternative, it is however perfectly suited to small touch input devices like media players and phones - not devices requiring a real variety of input.
If not for the cool-factor, is there a reason for giving iPads to the doctors instead of some other pad?
It is what it is.
I agree it does seem an odd choice of vendor, however many other options (MS Google) could be just as constraining if they choose to write software for them.
Whatever hardware they use, it'd be silly to tie their systems to binaries for one platform anyway. If they serve their data using HTML it won't matter what hardware they use as they can easily change it later. Tablets could actually be a very useful tool in hospitals if used well.
...and people criticize Linux for putting too many burdens on it's end users.
If you need an "enterprise deployment guide" to just lay out the basics, then you've failed. You've also demonstrated the OPs point.
Not every doctor has an "Enterprise Support Team" to fall back on.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Indeed, unless there's only one supplier who offers to meet some specific need, I would have thought it would be a legal requirement to put such requests out to tender, otherwise you're just asking for even more corruption and nepertism.