Slashdot Mirror
Google Health's Lifeline Runs Out
turing0 writes "As a former bioinformatics researcher and CTO I have some sad news to start 2012 with. Though I am sure not a surprise to the Slashdot crowd, it appears we — or our demographic — made up more than 75% of the Google Health userbase. Today marks the end of Google Health. (Also see this post for the official Google announcement and lame excuse for the reasoning behind this myopic decision.) The decision of Google to end this excellent service is a fantastic example of what can represent the downside of cloud services for individuals and enterprises. The cloud is great when and while your desired application is present — assuming it's secure and robust — but you are at the mercy of the provider for longevity." (Read more, below.)
turing0 continues:
"I am surprised to see Google abandoning Google Health just when we can see the benefit to personal health when micro sensors such as the Nike Plus and Jawbone's UP bracelet are entering the market. Greater amounts of personal health data can be gathered now via smartphone and then turned into valuable preventative as well as useful diagnostic medical information.
Shuttering Google Health is a surprising and short-sighted decision on Google's behalf, IMHO. Perhaps closing the Google Health service is not 'Evil' per se — but given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs. Services like Google Health are a fantastic public relations tool as well as an amazing potential source of raw scientific data if nothing else.
In closing, it's very funny to note Google suggests Google Health users migrate GH data to the Microsoft Health Vault. Hopefully some Web service other than Health Vault will rise from the ashes of Google Health. The real benefit in terms of Google being a custodian of my health and wellness records via Google Health was that Google as a corporation is considered a trustworthy intermediary by most users and health care professionals. Now I am not so sure; perhaps it's time to re-claim my email ..."
Shuttering Google Health is a surprising and short-sighted decision on Google's behalf, IMHO. Perhaps closing the Google Health service is not 'Evil' per se — but given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs. Services like Google Health are a fantastic public relations tool as well as an amazing potential source of raw scientific data if nothing else.
In closing, it's very funny to note Google suggests Google Health users migrate GH data to the Microsoft Health Vault. Hopefully some Web service other than Health Vault will rise from the ashes of Google Health. The real benefit in terms of Google being a custodian of my health and wellness records via Google Health was that Google as a corporation is considered a trustworthy intermediary by most users and health care professionals. Now I am not so sure; perhaps it's time to re-claim my email ..."
That's why they are abandoning all these non-profitable things and focusing on the stuff that brings in the money: social (Google+), managed by Vic Gundotra and Android, lead by Andy "Hypocrite" Rubin.
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There is a new arrogant asshole in town!
Another day, another Google service bites the dust. At this rate, they're set to outdo Microsoft in the number of obsoleted APIs and services that they use to pull the rug out from under people. And why shouldn't they? We're not the customers. Advertisers are, and if a service isn't helping Google's advertisers, they're not interested in keeping it around.
This is the first time I've heard of Google Health.
How can goolge even have some like that under hippa laws much less sell ad's based on data in it.
But I never really used it, so as bad as I feel to see it go, to be honest, I had no real need for it. Maybe later it will be reborn....
I'm sure Google would be willing to keep the service running if you were willing to pay for it.
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The load of money they have moving contains quite a few secrets which together make everything, very, very unpredictable. They tell us one thing and do other. Call me paranoid, but keep an eye out for any low-profit services that you use because you never really know when they are going to be shut down. Whether a huge company running it or not.
One way of interpreting the decision is that Google is finding it hard to make money off tech-savvy people (who probably use adblockers and can tell the difference between sponsored links and actual search results, etc).
No kidding. I've gotten 3 emails in the last week telling me to export my data or lose it.
The health market is almost entirely database-driven: it's all medical records of one sort or another. Patient charts, billing codes, etc: it's just databases. The database end is complex due to absurdly complicated standards, but also because systems have proprietary data stores that don't talk to other systems well. The worst part, though, is the user interfaces: most industries have UI's that don't suck, but health never seemed to get this right. The database engineers have been designing the UI's forever.
There's a brilliant market here for someone with the vision to combine Apple-quality system integration and UI with a narrow focus on the healthcare industry. Whoever does it is going to sell their product for cheaps to a bunch of doctors and become a defacto standard.
Considering the fact that I - somebody who in many ways spends more time on the Internet than off it - have not heard about this interesting service until today, I seriously doubt that the problem is that there haven't been enough takers. Yes, it sounds a touch megalomaniacal. But my conclusion is that Google has simply just not raised awareness about this product. With the amount of faeces being thrown all over the interwebz for other products such as Google Plus, I dare say that a small fraction of the resources expended could have saved initiatives such as Google Health from flatlining ...
So I've heard google health described in the past as pretty much mint.com but for health records instead of finance records.
1) Is that even remotely close?
2) What is the goog equivalent of mint.com WRT finance?
I could see if goog isn't going to compete with mint in the finance aggregation arena, and obviously GH is flushed, so maybe they are not interesting in being in the general aggregation market?
A side question, since supposedly there are /. readers who used GH, could you specify what actionable items you'd done with G.H.? Not what data they want or you gave, not their business model, not theoretically this and that, but what actual actionable things happened? I'm thinking in terms of impact on my life, I'm not missing much with the end of GH.
A close side question is I can't figure out on line how a PHR makes money, other than vendor lockin tied with corporate contracts. Follow the money! Are they selling records, deep in the fine print, or selling statistical/demographic data, or spamming ads, or ...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Had never heard of it (despite using a lot of Labs stuff).
Nobody I asked had ever heard of it.
Wouldn't use it if I had.
Nobody I asked would have used if it they had.
Nothing that can't be replicated elsewhere, by the look of it.
You can bias the summary as much as you like and call it a myopic decision but I'd much rather they spent the money on something I'm likely to use or see being used at least.
If an ENTIRE Google service can pass myself, and others just as technical, by until its closure then it's quite obvious that it wasn't as good as you thought it was.
Suggesting that I tie in data-recording bracelets and god-knows-what into Google as a business model is just stupid before you even start, too, and its potential as diagnostician is about as good as Wii Fit, I imagine (and if it isn't, probably leads into all sorts of legal implications).
If you want your raw scientific data, then gather it scientifically, not letting Google get spammed with it and then expecting them to pay. Do your research, collect your own fecking data (it's not like you couldn't) and set up a similar and better service if you think it's so useful. Personally, without looking, I think either a) 200 such things already exist and are never used or b) you'd be the first and still it'd never be used.
P.S. Never heard of Microsoft Health Vault either but as far as I'm concerned they can piss all their money away on whatever gimmicks they like - that's what they've always done.
One big thing is that the server-side has all the control. I find this great for me as a service provider. This is one reason companies love providing these services.
However, as a user of various services I realise I have no control. If the services I rely on were to disappear tomorrow there is nothing I can do about it and I'm totally powerless to stop it. The service provided may even be profitable for a provider but if it is not proftable *enough*, or there are cost cutting mesures being done by corporate head-office then the service can be axed. Even if the service is critcal to my business
So the lesson to be learned is the same point made by the Free Software advocates. If software is critical to yourself or your business then you must ensure you have complete *control* of the software, all the way down to having the right to modify the source code if you need to. The convience of web-based services will never compensate for the loss of control. It is a strategic business decision to make: control (the long-term strategic view) or convenience (the short-term tactical view). I fully expect lots of sob stories like this to appear until the vendors start pitching back to CIOs that they could regain control by bringing stuff in-house again (for a fee, of course). Using Cloud services is no different to the 'offshoring' fad that the wise avoided for critical capabilities, followed by the realision that it doesn't always work and the resulting 'onshoring' renormalization. Expect a term like 'in-housing' or something similar to appear in trade rags in a couple of years.
Whatever you do: don't lose control of your critical software and services (and use Free Software!).
I've been an avid user of Google Health for a couple years now. Since the decision to end the service was announced, I've attempted numerous times to find some sense of replacement from HealthVault. HealthVault is a great service, but its hardly equivalent. For instance, HealthVault is merely a storage system for your raw data, and to view it or continue to keep track of it, you have to utilize other services (such as through the Mayo Clinic) with which HV interfaces to manage. It has a lot of possibility, in that you can utilize many specialized services from many different places, however it fails at keeping the experience seemless. You always know that you are leaving to a new site, and often times go through redundant logins and registrations.
Google Health however kept everything restricted to a couple pages. Your blood pressure measurements, weights and other vitals were displayed in concise graphs The greatest strength of Google Health was its stripped down visuals and your ability to create your own trackers for virtually any metric. I used it to keep track of my migraine headaches in hopes of finding a trend which would reveal possible triggers. Some of the services, such as the Mayo Clinic's personal health manager, which use HealthVault offer similar customization, but they are very stripped down, the interfaces are clunky and, once again, it takes an annoying amount of log-in's and desperate clicking to get into the service.
I wish Google would just release the source, so that someone else could construct their own version. I for one would. I loved it.
The concept of Google having any access to health information is frightening, to say the least. They already have way too much information about way too many things for way too many of us, already.
I have a feeling I am not alone in this feeling about the Google overlords and this might have contributed to the non-popularity of Google Health. And no, I wouldn't want to give health information to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Microsoft either!
I am amazed regarding the postings here of people who have never heard of it. But for those people, Wikipedia is your friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_health
So I found myself wondering... why do some people love it so much? Is there some specific aspect of the show that they consider well made or what?
Nah, we just really want to have a new show to rally around and identify with (like "Star Trek" once was). Its merits or lack thereof are irrelevant; It's just that is was there, not totally crap, and on prime-time TV...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVN6-yd-xU
2012, year of the fart service.
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Turing0, how much were you paying for your Google Health? what service guarantee did you get for your paid contract with them? Oh, $0 and nothing. Quit your whining, so a free trial balloon was cancelled, pony up some bucks for an equivalent service with a vendor and then you'll have a right to complain about service or lack thereof.
This isn't specific to the cloud. This is one of the risks when you put anything crucial to the existence of your business completely in the hands of a single other entity. It could be as basic as having a sole source for a part that you have to have available to manufacture your product. If that supplier goes out of business or discontinues that part, you're SOL. And since you don't have any control over them, you can't do anything about the situation. Your only recourse is what every businessman has known for centuries: make sure you always have more than one source for any critical supplies and items. That's also why businesses had warehouses, so if there was any interruption in their supply stream it wouldn't shut them down while they sorted out how to get their supplies and raw materials delivered. The cloud's just another case of this. If you base your entire business on a service provided by a single company, you're at the mercy of their business plan (or lack thereof). A smart businessman would insure he could get the same service from at least 2 sources, so if one of them shut down he'd still be in business and have time to figure out what to do next.
Seriously. I never recommend to my customers that they rely on "cloud services". In the last year or so, even Amazon and other services have gone down, taking innumerable websites offline for unpredictable amounts of time.
Just recently, an Amazon server went down, and a customer was notified that their site was down and that they had 48 hours to save the site or it would be gone... and they received the notice about 24 hours after that 48 hours had already expired.
Other people I know have had other, similar experiences.
My advice to customers is: DO NOT make your business dependent on the performance of "services" over which your have no control. You are putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, and that's just plain a Bad Idea. And that includes everything from depending on Google Apps to sites on EC2.
I'll pass, thanks very much.
The health market is almost entirely database-driven: it's all medical records of one sort or another. Patient charts, billing codes, etc: it's just databases. The database end is complex due to absurdly complicated standards, but also because systems have proprietary data stores that don't talk to other systems well. The worst part, though, is the user interfaces: most industries have UI's that don't suck, but health never seemed to get this right. The database engineers have been designing the UI's forever.
There's a brilliant market here for someone with the vision to combine Apple-quality system integration and UI with a narrow focus on the healthcare industry. Whoever does it is going to sell their product for cheaps to a bunch of doctors and become a defacto standard.
You're largely correct but the biggest problem is that even at an Enterprise level, it is a cottage industry. Everyone has different processes. What works well for one system is an absolute disaster in another. Hell, what works on one floor of a hospital doesn't work on another.
It's very frustrating.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I found the writing quite amusing at times, and the rest of it was good enough that I am willing to sit through it to get to the good bits.
More on topic, when a series (or product or service) is removed people will generally feel a sense of loss. If there is no similar replacement, people will tend to remember the good parts, forget the bad parts, and want to relive those halcyon days when it existed.
When something outlives its shelf life, people get used to it not being so good, and its loss isn't as much of an impact. "They should have killed it earlier" is something I read a lot.
A highly rated restaurant will often give you enough food to be sated, but no so much that you are stuffed, so that you want to come back. The widely bashed "gourmet" portion sizes, where you appear to pay a lot for relatively little, is intended to whet your appetite for future visits in the same way a cancelled series makes people look forward to a "next installment" which never arrives.
It's quite simply the negative side of "Always leave them wanting more."
Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault's personal health records (PHRs) are well known in health IT circles, but even among the health IT and healthcare informatics professionals I work with, uptake has been very shallow. There have been connected PHR-enabled sensors available for weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, and many other biometrics for some time, but again, very little interest in flowing this data into stand alone PHRs.
Stand alone PHRs aren't the only way to facilitate doctor-patient interaction. Many leading electronic medical records systems (EMRs) offer integrated personal health records - the disadvantage being that these records only show the data from one provider or health care system. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are rapidly springing up across the country to facilitate provider to provider data integration and provide a compelling model for direct patient participation in their care.
Personally, I've tracked these services for years but I've never bothered to create an account. Entering my information manually is tedious, and the standards and integration between EMRs and stand-along PHRs is emerging at best. If I had a fully populated PHR, it's not clear what value I'd really get out of it. My main provider already has most of my information and can source information directly from other practices when needed. Doctors are culturally suspicious of patient submitted data, as they have concerns about amateur self-diagnosis and drug-seeking patients.
The way Google is winding this down increases my trust in their other services. Google announced their plan to shutter Google Health a year and a half before the final shutdown date. They're offering multiple data export and migration options, including instructions and support to migrate to their largest competitor, HealthVault. I've had significantly worse experiences with migration / upgrade of many paid services / software - I'm looking at you Intuit.
Most likely that means it wasn't for you. I've been watching a lot of shows lately that were canceled or otherwise ended early. The State, The Tick, Brisco County, Dilbert etc., and they were good shows that for one reason or another only lasted for a season or two worth of shows. The problem ultimately is that it's hard to say at what point a show should be canceled. It's easy to assume that they'll continue indefinitely when much of the time they don't, you end up with a show like The Simpsons or Family Guy that continues past the point of being funny and becomes kind of a drudge to watch, if you even bother.
Services are largely the same way, sometimes Google cancels them before anybody knows what they're for, like wave, and other times they let them go too long. I get the feeling that health was probably a matter of the latter.
Alas, 99.9999999999999999999999999% of health advice on the internet is quackery. I quickly learned to skip the rest and go to the Mayo Clinic for real rather than imaginary information. Not to mention that it's free.
However, they really need to focus on their core products and bring them up to par to their competitors, if they did that. They would be leading in thos specific things instead of launching these stupid things every other month or 2 months, like google Talk PC client, has not been updated since 2006 or 2007. And doesn't have the same voice codecs of any of the web versions or video. Not to mention their mess up on google talk and Messenger on google plus. But that is just one of them, i will support google for some more to come. But there is only so much we can have faith on.
Some sort of "Social" follow-my-bowel-movement thing or some such.
I'm surprised that nobody noticed it: Google is stopping all its future innovations, and concentrate on short-term revenues, which is a decision from their CEO, not by the cost of maintaining the current tools (it's a very small cost).
Something similar happened in 2000 with the 3M company, when James McNerney from GE became the new CEO.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm
In 5 years, 3M, which was ranked as the most innovative company in the world, fell at the 7th place.
This year, 3M disappeared from the 50 most innovative companies, check here:
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html
McNerney focused on using Six Sigma, and improving productivity.
3M, based on a culture of innovation since 100 years, had its internal culture almost destroyed in only 5 years.
The inventor of post-it said that it would have been impossible that the "post-it" concept would have been successful using the new method.
In my opinion, it's a very short-sighted decision, as you can see with Microsoft and IBM, which invest a lot of money in innovation.
It's impossible to predict what will work in a few years, and I doubt that the current monopoly of Google on Internet ads will long very last.
Now, let me give a prediction:
currently, Apple and Google are ranked 1st and 2nd as the most innovative companies.
I bet that in 2 years, they won't be in the top 10 anymore.
Damn right he is.
Go to Hell, Google lackey. He has made a valid point (unlike you).
You say that the writing was mediocre, I'd argue that it was actually very good. The episodes did vary, however and followed an arc, so I suppose if you only saw a couple, you might not have seen it at its best.
The same basic functions of Google Health can be achieved with a spreadsheet and some organization (except the perhaps convenient share feature). There's nothing groundbreaking here it seems. If you're really hurting for the same interface, I can't imagine it would take very long to write one. And Google provides a raw data file for download, so no need to start over with your records. Software like GNUmed will be major overkill compared to GH, but there might be other simpler alternatives that exist for maintaining a personal health record.
The point about dependence on the cloud is a valid and obvious one. Whether or not a service is free will determine your right to lament its passing on /. apparently (I don't think there is any "whining" here), but the service can be discontinued just the same. If you had been paying for it, you'd receive a refund and an apology, but you'd still lose a service which could have otherwise been sustained with local software.
GH is likely the veritable drop in a big financial bucket, but there's probably more to it than cost. Maintaining secure health records and complying with stuff like HIPAA rules can be treacherous, and I suspect that liability played some role in the decision. Maybe not...
Agreed, but on the other hand, I find that's true for almost all SF TV shows.
Dilbert RSS feed
records are hoarded by doctors, pharmacies, hospitals
It's offensive how this works. Take my X-rays for example. My surgeon sent me some place to get them done. He's the one with a clue; they just take pictures. Despite this, they insist on having me wait for some on-staff radiologist to "interpret" the X-rays. They claim state law requires this. (if so, surely because they lobbied for it) Then I'm not allowed to truly own the images, physically or by copyright, and neither is my surgeon. (again by state law, which they surely lobbied for) I'm allowed to borrow the X-rays, taking them to my surgeon so he can see them. I'm sternly warned that I'm violating some law if I don't bring them back. WTF, is somebody covering the storage costs? Fortunately I didn't see a due date, so I'm still "borrowing" my own damn X-rays a decade later and I don't remember who the "owner" is. If I had foolishly been a good boy and returned them, I'd currently have no possible way to access them. The X-rays would be gone, preventing future surgeons from being able to compare them with newer X-rays or being able to make an initial guess before ordering new X-rays.
The same goes for the dentist. IMHO, it's a racket to encourage repeat business. Come back to us, or you suffer extra X-ray exposure and it won't even be covered by your insurance.
I liked Summer Glau's portrayal of a sensitive damaged girl with subconsciously trained fighting or psychic abilities that would kick in at random times. I also liked Sarah Conner Chronicles because I liked watching her as a terminator.
TL;DR: Summer Glau == fap fap fap fap
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
As the developer of a Patient Management System, I agree completely there. Our code is littered with location dependent workarounds for individual business units doing things differently one way or another for no apparent reason.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Let's put all medical info on the internet, publicly accessible. Let's include DNA sequences and video of all medical procedures. This would be wonderful for accountability (billing fraud, malpractice, etc.) and research. It would increase continuity of care, particularly when you show up unconscious far away from your normal care provider. It would cut down on the spread of disease, especially if we added mandatory testing for disease: you can look on the internet to see if your date has an STD. It would cut down on crazy people and drug addicts going from doctor to doctor in search of one (or a hundred) who will cave in to some demand. In short, the benefits would be astronomical.
Maybe the reason why no one ever heard of it is because Google is a Tech company. They didn't get the attention they wanted because they dont spend the time to market their products. How many times did you even hear an announcement about any of the new services google started offering? Maybe one at the launch but that's probably it. Honestly it just seems like it's more of a failure to inform the public on what they're doing more so than that they aren't making a quality product, or need to focus on one thing more than the other.
Yep, just look at the OP's comment: "it was on par with Farscape". However, IIRC, Farscape was already gone when Firefly came along.
Imagine if they made a new sci-fi TV show, and sci-fi fans complained that "it's only on par with ST:TNG but with better fx". Would that not be reason alone to watch it (assuming you liked TNG)? It's not like they're still making TNG episodes after all. Do people really expect every new TV show or movie to be so much better than everything that came in the past? That's a pretty ridiculous expectation.
The problem with sci-fi is that there just isn't much available that's good. There's been some great stuff in the past, but you can only re-watch old shows so many times; you want something new, you don't want to always live in the past. Suppose you like movies about people in spaceships in outer space, like Alien/Aliens, the Star Trek movies, 2001, or countless other sci-fi movies in the 70s and 80s. Well, unless you put a continuous loop of the first 10 minutes of Avatar on your TV, you're not going to see a whole lot of this kind of sci-fi made in the last 5-10 years, because there have been almost no such movies made. If someone made a new show as good as Firefly, and it didn't get canceled as soon as people started watching it, sci-fi fans would be ecstatic simply because they now have such a show to watch, when currently they don't unless they want to watch endless reruns of a 20-year-old show.
Hang on a tic. Google have been sending emails for months to advise users that it will be shutting down and are allowing users to export their data until 2013. I don't see the problem here. They didn't just pull the plug without notice.
So I found myself wondering... why do some people love it so much?
I personally hate Firefly. I had a misfortune to see a few initial episodes, and that was that.
I personally know people who like ST, DS9, Babylon 5, but I don't know anyone (within my circle of acquaintances) who would be ecstatic or otherwise fond of Firefly.
I can't reliably tell today all the details that I disliked so much. But from what I recall, to be able to watch Firefly you have to like SciFi and westerns. Both. If you like only one of them then the show is not for you. I believe I even turned the T off when some kind of a folksy dance started. I have no use for SciFi with dances and dresses.
I'm sure the few episodes that I managed to see aren't enough to fully understand the show. However it's unwatchable to me, so I guess it will remain a mystery forever.
I asked for my sister's records once and got physical film. Three months later they gave me a CD. When I said thanks, they said it was just what they were legally required to do.
Storing the film was a pain and reading the CD was a pain, but passing them to the next doc and getting them back was a lot quicker than having one hospital send them to the other.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Funny. I would have sworn I felt abused by all the advertised features in VC/VS that didn't work in my case.
I hear that there's this syndrome where the abusee ends up always trying to defend the abuser.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Google as a corporation is considered a trustworthy intermediary by most users and health care professionals
lol, you poor naive little baby, you.
Whedon does a great job of character interaction. Buffy interplay with a large cast by the end was amusing, Angel was a darker mood but enjoyable, and Firefly strikes me as the best example of his style. The characters had backgrounds that mattered and stories that didn't have the characters change their behavior to fit the storyline. (For example, the last few episodes of Sanctuary just was too forced with Will all of a sudden anti-Magnus, was way out of line with his character) If you've only seen a few episodes of FireFly watch the rest, in order. The tone was also different, ST had a consistent clean glossy future. BSG was nitty gritty drama. Stargates all had the clean future also (Let's ignore SG:U, that didn't figure out what it was). Firefly had just the right mix of a lived in universe, the western motif and had a good mix of drama and comedy. Besides, the companions were hot. I'll be in my bunk.
I agree that Google should have made a long term commitment. Wasn't this one of the founder's wives' pet projects? That alone should be enough reason to focus and do it right. With one of the Google founders worried about their personal genetics and wanting to program their own genes healthcare should be getting a huge IT bonus instead it looks like they're dropping the ball. I wouldn't be surprised about political pressure. The latest health care law limits hospital competition so the per-hospital electronic records have no need to be competitive. I've seen what top hospitals like cleveland clinic offer for electronic records. That sort of record keeping should be standard.
And do you guys trust online bill statements? Same problem.
I'd rather they PGP email, or mail-drop an encrypted statement every month than park it on their site (and wait for me to remember to download it) for the amount of money they're making off me every month.
You're largely correct but the biggest problem is that even at an Enterprise level, it is a cottage industry. Everyone has different processes. What works well for one system is an absolute disaster in another. Hell, what works on one floor of a hospital doesn't work on another.
It's very frustrating.
Is this a US issue? How does this play out in countries with socialized medical systems? To what extent are the records centrally stored and/or standardized in other countries?
Oh you don't know. You only have to be compatible with one system. A Sun system that is older than I am, to be exact.
In fact I know one country that pays $100k for every single healthcare computer, because it's the only approved model their software runs on (which is still in development, using mainframe development tools). Today they have to be custom made one-by-one. Thank God they've at least used an emulator for the storage of things like pictures and scans, so actual hard drives can be used (well 16G, but hey. That's modern for these guys)
It's a case of pick your poison, I guess.
I recently watched a few episodes, just to see what it was about. I love both scifi and steampunk, so I should be the target audience for a space western like that.
But it's not Steampunk. It's pure sci-fi with some cultural western and Chinese flair on the outer-rim colony planets (not unlike star wars and star trek). Get further into the series and you'll see some core planets.
It was... OK, I guess. The acting and writing were mediocre (A bit too many cliches, etc. but tolerable)
That's where you part ways with a lot of us. Compare whedon's writing to Lucas or any trek, and you'll find character growth and clever interplay of personal goals.
and the special effects were OK (when taking into account the budget constraints they probably had).
CG will look dated because CG always looks dated. If you can ignore it while watching B5 or ST:TNG, then you can ignore it anywhere.
The setting itself was nice, though there wasn't that much originality if you're already well familiar with the genre.
genre? Cowboy bebop and... What else exactly?
Really, it was on par with Farscape: I wouldn't change the channel when it's on but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to a friend.
Firefly keeps within its universe's setting. No aliens (all human colonies), no magic (so no episodes like Catspaw or That Old Black Magic), no sound in space, very little lasers (mass drivers still being better bang for your buck). Watch far enough, and you'll find they don't even have regular interstellar travel (it's only been done once, long ago). The only super-science they have is gravity manipulation, and it powers engines, lifts, keeps feet on the deck, and allows for insane accelerations. But very little "quasi harmonic nucleon polarity reversal" talk.
So I found myself wondering... why do some people love it so much? Is there some specific aspect of the show that they consider well made or what?
Did you like dr horrible's singalong blog? This show was written just as well. Humans like a little bit of cliche. Without it, there's little structure, like in an art film. But they also like surprises, and this series has a lot.
folksy dance is just a pretext for some girl to "marry" the protagonist
Thank you for confirming my suspicions.
It's free, therefore they cancel it is a fallacy. Paid services also get cancelled.
It's free, so they get to encourage you to rely on it then pull the rug from under you and you have to say "thank you" is also a fallacy. My lack of payment does not mean that the provider can't do me harm.
The message is clear. Cloud services are for suckers. If you can't independently access your data and run your code, it's integrity, security and accessibility are at the whim of the hosting company.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I am impressed...something from Ayn Rand that I can actually agree with. i suppose that this is an example of how a lotus blossom can grow from a river of feces.
Not that I am unimpressed by her writings...or ANY THING like that
pleasant dreams
xvart
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
And it has ponies...
In a sense, longevity is an issue for any non-free software. With open source software, as long as someone is interested in using it, that software will be useful. With non-free software, once it is past its end-of-life date, it is only as good as long as it can run on your operating system. Web applications are only a more extreme form of non-free software, because they don't run on your computer, they run on the operator's computer.
Who else around here is claiming to make Myopic decisions?
I suppose I might even qualify as "middle-age". (ouch)
My life tends to be better when crummy people get what they deserve. If you lose your job because your employer finds out about you, then maybe I can take that job. Maybe my son will take your job. Alternately, maybe you would rather shape up to avoid losing your job. I like it if you shape up; it's not cool if you run around spreading diseases or driving drunk.
And yes, I really do want you to lose a relationship with my kid if you have some disease or drug issue.
So no, I don't mind this issue at all. I love the idea even more because of it. Fix your life, and you will have nothing to be embarrassed about.