It's about time the movement for hardware hackers shifted toward low-power, quiet computing. Having a giant radiator and a blower does niether.
There is no reason that home servers can't be PowerPC machines running with laptop harddrives other than the hardware hackers haven't yet found clever ways to come up with iMac motherboards. I recently changed out the drive in my home server for an IBM Travelstar 40 GNX and for all intents and purposes removed the last noise maker from my office.
A couple of months ago the server was reborn on a retired Apple Powerbook and the difference in the temperature from the traditional machine was profound. Since I live in the desert, I have to dump all the heat I make whether it comes off heat pipes, heat sinks or radiators so reducing waste heat is a good thing. The surplus hardware is out there for the scrounge (just like with Wintel stuff) and the power consumption and heat production is significantly less.
Similar answers are coming for commercial rack mount machines of which Apple's X-Serve is only the first. Remember that power costs money too, and not just fo r the machine but for the A/C to take the heat away.
Of course, because I suffer the same career stresses as every other profession, I must be motivated merely by money. Hardly, but I do know that I and many of my peers labor under an educational debt load that exceeds that of just about any other profession to think that doesn't keep me awake at night when the pager isn't going off is silly. My point is that if you want doctors to not have to worry about the money than we have to fix the process. You can't throw somebody into debt equivalent to a house and not expect them to spent a whole lot of time worrying about how to pay for it.
Perhaps pocket book doctors will vanish left only with doctors that are in it to help people.
Dude, I appreciate your candor, but in terms of what you know about medicine you can get stuffed. I've been working for shit doctor money for months. There is NO work to be readily had regardless of how motivated you are to help people. The rest of us as slaves to insurance companies or HMOs or whoever since we too have massive debt to pay off. Altruism is wonderful, but we've got to feed the family too. I don't know any of my collegues that have a positive net worth and I've scrimped and saved and worked horrendous hours to get there.
I don't know who these doctors are or were that took chickens and labor in trade, but with six figures of education debt looming over most of us, we can't afford to deep fry our salaries. Frankly, you want more of us that don't have to salarymen just like the codemonkeys and truck drivers then lets fix higher ed and the massive costs associated with becoming a professional.
Currently, T-Mobile has misfired on this as anything more than a replacement Blackberry. Their website by all accounts doesn't allow the syncing of the calendar and address data, though this will likely be fixed.
Only on plan exists, $39 for unlimited data and 200 anytime voice minutes. I really want to keep my current voice package that I have with T-Mobile since my phone is my business phone, but I really don't want to be adding another device. I want to eliminate them. The Sidekick could be my phone, my pda and a net device, but it's currently only one of those thanks to the single plan. I'd gleefully pay the full $39 to just add the Sidekick to my current plan, but that's not an option yet.
Those of you who can live with the limitations. Enjoy. I'm waiting until T-Mobile gets it together.
Unless things have changed dramatically, the MPAA is still using software from Ranger Online to perform their searches exclusively. This software isn't all that technically impressive. Anybody with an understanding of protocols and search techniques can make the searches they do in public forums like gnutella and IRC. So then I imagine that they do a simple traceroute to locate the ISP or hosting provider and then a whois for the contact. THis all publicly available and frankly probably requires lots of human intervention. We're not talking banks of computers here, we're talking about a room full of MPAA flunkies doing jack Valenti's bidding.
This might not be a bad thing. Currently, with the pseudocompetition going on there is no quality of service guaranty like there is for leased lines. Making DSL the telco's alternative to T1 and related technologies might really be good inasmuch as it makes it possible both for state enforcement officials to pursue regulation of service quality and also for the telcos to make service level agreements possible. With the Covad vs. Verizon vs. whoever else still owns DSLAM thing going on, it's not in the best interest of the telco to make DSL work well and with bulletproof reliability. The other thing that might be good about this reclassificaiton is that there is a very real possibility that telco owned ISPs might not be able to provide data service to DSL as that might be considered providing long distance services.
I certainly don't think that changing the current mess that is DSL into something else is necessarily bad and likely no worse than the current silliness.
This likely won't have much impact on Apple as a whole. Frankly, after trying to make older hardware useful spending countless hours failing to have successful installs of LinuxPPC and Yellowdog Linux, I was thrilled to see that I can in fact have BSD albiet Darwin flavored without agony (and, of course, my old hardware remains unused).
Apple's ultimate desktop success with Darwin/OSX will be because users who need that kind of OS power can now have it without the niggling driver details that plague Intel OS distributions. It amazes me that Linux has been as successful as it has with the agony that users have to endure to successfully install the OS. The bar is much higher now. Users can expect their OS install to just happen and still have the power tools of compilers and real server software without the electronic equivalent of repeatedly stabbing themselves in the leg with a fork.
Of course, the die hard slashdot crowd will always prefer Linux, but it seems to me that things are shifting to a new and friendlier approach.
As someone who has a professional degree (I'm a physician), has helped establish 2 venture funded companies, run a small IT department, worked in the private sector in IT, security and sales just for starters, I can't say enough good things about a well rounded education. I think that any idea of specializing early in life is misguided. Sure it produces narrow thinkers who can't manuever when push comes to shove. When major economic changes come or even life changes, you need to be able bob and weave like a metaphorical boxer.
That ability can't be had by specializing. My liberal art emphasized collegiate education is at least partly to thank for my successes. Hooray small colleges. If nothing else, a broad education preps the mind for accepting new ideas, something that a narrow educational perspective just can't be credited with.
Like creating a starship named Enterprise prior to ToS and eliminating the United Earth Space Probe Authority of Captain Pike wasn't enough rewriting of Trek histroy, they give Klingon's lumpy heads as well... Figures...
The numbers don't work
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
HP has a market cap of about $1.5B, CPQ has $24B. HP will have to issue 25x their current float to make the acquistition which leads one to wonder why CPQ isn't the acquirer. It strongly suggests that CPQ is a mess.
The net result should be a collapse of both stocks in the premarket. But then i've never been able to predict these things.
That's what chapter 11 meant for Northpoint and Rhythms and even wireless provider Metricom. Only the telcos will survive DSL and heck based on my experience north of Seattle, they may not bother to deliver at all.
This piece pretty much ignores the fact that in most states DSL services were already pretty much unregulated which is what allowed the babybells to run roughshod over Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms. There is simply no consumer recourse for being hosed over by the telco on data services once you cross into the realm of the unregulated services. Sticking to T1s and ISDN at least holds things in the realm of tariffed and therefore state regulated services. This has to date been the only reason that these services haven't been totally consumed by the telcos as DSL has been.
The consumer has already spoken in the marketplace only to find their DSL providers driven into bankruptcy at least in part due to predatory practices by the telcos. Predatory monopolies are bad, mkay.
According to court documents available at Metricom's website, all the bidders had to provide Letters of Intent to participate including provisional bids by 5p on Aug.1. Any lead bidder will be announced on Monday Aug. 6.
All of the sale paperwork will be in place for the lead bidder before the auction on Aug. 16 and the deal will close on Sept. 7.
With all the wheels currently turning, it seems even less likely that the network will go dark.
It may be wishful thinking, but since it's a tech writer that wrote the story at go2mac, it's possible that the network engineering staff has been retained until the auction. The network becomes much less valuable at auction if the court ordered total layoffs and the network goes dark so the 50k customers get hosed.
According to metricom, the entire operation is being auctioned off, not just the hardware so I suspect that we'll see Worldcomm step in and get a wireless network on the cheap.
Hardly, I think it was pretty clear that the MacHack ideal was something that he understood. The alienation of the audience is questionable as well. There were many in the audience who appreciated the lively and admittedly sometimes heated interchange. In fact, many were heard to be talking about ESR's keynote after the happy reminicense of this year's Mac engineering reunion.
Few, I think, haven't taken advantage of open source efforts as they have worked to migrate onto the BSD framework of OSX. So while the idea of open sourcing software product may rub some the wrong way, there's no denying the advantages of using open source as a starting point for development efforts, even if just as a learning tool.
In this regard, the Mac developer community has grown up over the last year, and IMHO ESR's keynote got the ball rolling.
Ultimately, the best part of the bizarre business deal that merged Apple and NeXT was the acquisition of Steve Jobs. For all his megalomania and at best offbeat management style, it's the singular vision of the The Steve that has brought Apple to where it is. Their hardware has, for sure, never been better. There is some definite question as to whether OSX can grow from a decent commercial UN*X to something more consumer oriented. My mom can't use it yet, that's for sure...
For those who have attended MacHack, ESR included, there is an understanding of the spirit of what's going on. The hack show is about rediscovering what it is that makes engineering and software design fun to begin with. Sure, some hacks are derivative and some are pure presentation with little or no coding involved. Heck, some the most legendary hacks have been pure showmanship. The reason that things like the Password sniffer went over well is because of the presentation. Blackmailing the entire audience serves as excellent marketing.
Judging a hack on merits of utility or even total originality isn't fair. That's just not what this event is about. There's more here than merely recompiling dsniff to run on OSX. I would have thought that the whole thing would be fairly obvious to the slashdot crowd at large. Clearly, some get it and some don't.
Now I need to figure out why I'm awake at 6a PDT on the Monday following 72 hours with very little sleep.
Not because it's open source, but because of the way it's open source. It's forced places that Linux might be used commercially to pursue other avenues because all proprietary development efforts are at risk of having to be completely open sourced because of the letter of the GPL. Other licenses such as that for BSD allow a more limited sharing of a company's proprietary "magic" so contributions can still be made to the community without torpedoing commercial software development.
This isn't about a religious BSD vs. Linux OS war, it's about a sensible open source license versus one that is far too limiting to be practical. Yes, Linux is where the noise is, but just because lots of people use it doesn't make it the right choice. It just means that Linux is the Windows of open source.
Maybe this means that the BBC will cut loose of the official copies of some Dr. Who stories that were never finished or in a couple of cases filmed at all. I hate to have less than reverence for the dead, but the idea of getting much of the Dirk Gently material as it originally appeared in the script of the episode "Shada" that was never finished thanks to a BBC stike is just exciting.
Running Explorer 5.1 preview for OSX seems to let you in quite nicely. No sense of not working at all. I could test more, but fact checking isn't the readers job...
Life grinds on in the technology based startup world. There's less capital to make it happen and we keep stuggling to meet deadlines and ship product. Some companies had real value 18 months ago, some still do. Sure it'd be nice to be shopping for the yacht now, but as the rest of the startup world burns, it's nice to have work and keep pluggin'.
I watched from the sidelines during the boom. I watched options traders start companies with no management experience save their connections with wealth. I watched naive programmers' fortunes rise and fall with the market. I know a number of millionaires from the boom, I know a number of guys left nearly penniless. Technology marches on.
An 18 year -old registered Republican? Just what of the party planks do you believe in?
Rape of the environment
Corporate profits over human rights
Legal regulation of bedroom behavior
Crushing of labor unions
The supremacy of the almighty dollar
Bludgeoning non-believers with the Bible
A gun in every pot
Sure this list is extreme, but 18 is too young to be that conservative. Of course, if Mommy and Daddy's trust fund is what you're out to defend then it makes sense, your wealth over everyone else's.
Ok, it's time to delurk for a while. It's not often that the Slashdot crowd proves that their usually at least minimally knowledgable selves have no clue about something.
Firstly, I am a physian. I still hold a valid license, full rights to prescribe and perform surgery and all that. I have taken a step into the private sector and now work as a technologist.
Most GPs, which are the docs that most geeks see regularly, don't make jack when you consider that they have 4 years of undergraduate education, 4 years (minimum) of medical school, and 3 years (minimum) of internship and residency. Add to this that private practice docks have all the debts and liabilities associated with running a business and are paying off six figure student loans that thanks to the first bush administration have been running up interest those last years of training.
General practice/family practice physicians make on average $130k/year which sounds like a lot except that is not a salary. Docs are nearly always self-employed legally due to requirements that they maintain their independent status. Combine this with the fact that normal benefits still have to come out like health insurance and retirement planning and the income is markedly less. I know a number of family practice docs who start their taxable income well under-six figures.
Whither the Lexus? There is a physican mystique that docs, right or wrong maintain. Since there is a definite 'boys club' for hospital priveleges the air of success and professionalism is a maintained facade. They buy expensive cars even if they can't really afford it so they look successful enough not to raise eyebrows in the doctors' parking lot. That combined with the fact that many patients would be entirely non-plussed to see their physician driving around in a '77 pinto with a brown hood and a blue door tends to push toward trendier rides.
Doctors don't know jack about technology. It's true. I labored unsuccessfully throughout medical school to get a small software venture off the ground. You can't really sell this stuff into a market that doesn't understand. That combined with the lack of money available to fund development of really good back end office apps means that only a couple of vendors exist and frankly, they suck.
Really good medical software would automate charting in a way that's intuitive to physicians. The stuff that's out there requires that the physician learn new techniques. This is no good at all. I wouldn't even build a clinic with much more than a billing back end right now because the charting software sucks so bad. On the other hand, there are paper based charting forms that are built around the way docs were taught to think that work great. Not a retrievable as electronic, but pretty darned good for a start.
I'm not a lawyer, but email and IM of patient data is a minefield under the new privacy guidelines that frankly I haven't been able to figure out yet. That combined with the liability issues of giving out advice without examining the patient makes these technologies a total disaster.
In short, I'd get a solid billing system and wire the office but not install machines everywhere. I would likely do wireless networking to a PDA for writing presciptions just for legibilities sake. I would not do email or IM for patient care, period, let somebody else set the legal precidents.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about time the movement for hardware hackers shifted toward low-power, quiet computing. Having a giant radiator and a blower does niether.
There is no reason that home servers can't be PowerPC machines running with laptop harddrives other than the hardware hackers haven't yet found clever ways to come up with iMac motherboards. I recently changed out the drive in my home server for an IBM Travelstar 40 GNX and for all intents and purposes removed the last noise maker from my office.
A couple of months ago the server was reborn on a retired Apple Powerbook and the difference in the temperature from the traditional machine was profound. Since I live in the desert, I have to dump all the heat I make whether it comes off heat pipes, heat sinks or radiators so reducing waste heat is a good thing. The surplus hardware is out there for the scrounge (just like with Wintel stuff) and the power consumption and heat production is significantly less.
Similar answers are coming for commercial rack mount machines of which Apple's X-Serve is only the first. Remember that power costs money too, and not just fo r the machine but for the A/C to take the heat away.
Of course, because I suffer the same career stresses as every other profession, I must be motivated merely by money. Hardly, but I do know that I and many of my peers labor under an educational debt load that exceeds that of just about any other profession to think that doesn't keep me awake at night when the pager isn't going off is silly. My point is that if you want doctors to not have to worry about the money than we have to fix the process. You can't throw somebody into debt equivalent to a house and not expect them to spent a whole lot of time worrying about how to pay for it.
Perhaps pocket book doctors will vanish left only with doctors that are in it to help people.
Dude, I appreciate your candor, but in terms of what you know about medicine you can get stuffed. I've been working for shit doctor money for months. There is NO work to be readily had regardless of how motivated you are to help people. The rest of us as slaves to insurance companies or HMOs or whoever since we too have massive debt to pay off. Altruism is wonderful, but we've got to feed the family too. I don't know any of my collegues that have a positive net worth and I've scrimped and saved and worked horrendous hours to get there.
I don't know who these doctors are or were that took chickens and labor in trade, but with six figures of education debt looming over most of us, we can't afford to deep fry our salaries. Frankly, you want more of us that don't have to salarymen just like the codemonkeys and truck drivers then lets fix higher ed and the massive costs associated with becoming a professional.
Currently, T-Mobile has misfired on this as anything more than a replacement Blackberry. Their website by all accounts doesn't allow the syncing of the calendar and address data, though this will likely be fixed.
Only on plan exists, $39 for unlimited data and 200 anytime voice minutes. I really want to keep my current voice package that I have with T-Mobile since my phone is my business phone, but I really don't want to be adding another device. I want to eliminate them. The Sidekick could be my phone, my pda and a net device, but it's currently only one of those thanks to the single plan. I'd gleefully pay the full $39 to just add the Sidekick to my current plan, but that's not an option yet.
Those of you who can live with the limitations. Enjoy. I'm waiting until T-Mobile gets it together.
Unless things have changed dramatically, the MPAA is still using software from Ranger Online to perform their searches exclusively. This software isn't all that technically impressive. Anybody with an understanding of protocols and search techniques can make the searches they do in public forums like gnutella and IRC. So then I imagine that they do a simple traceroute to locate the ISP or hosting provider and then a whois for the contact. THis all publicly available and frankly probably requires lots of human intervention. We're not talking banks of computers here, we're talking about a room full of MPAA flunkies doing jack Valenti's bidding.
This might not be a bad thing. Currently, with the pseudocompetition going on there is no quality of service guaranty like there is for leased lines. Making DSL the telco's alternative to T1 and related technologies might really be good inasmuch as it makes it possible both for state enforcement officials to pursue regulation of service quality and also for the telcos to make service level agreements possible. With the Covad vs. Verizon vs. whoever else still owns DSLAM thing going on, it's not in the best interest of the telco to make DSL work well and with bulletproof reliability. The other thing that might be good about this reclassificaiton is that there is a very real possibility that telco owned ISPs might not be able to provide data service to DSL as that might be considered providing long distance services.
I certainly don't think that changing the current mess that is DSL into something else is necessarily bad and likely no worse than the current silliness.
This likely won't have much impact on Apple as a whole. Frankly, after trying to make older hardware useful spending countless hours failing to have successful installs of LinuxPPC and Yellowdog Linux, I was thrilled to see that I can in fact have BSD albiet Darwin flavored without agony (and, of course, my old hardware remains unused).
Apple's ultimate desktop success with Darwin/OSX will be because users who need that kind of OS power can now have it without the niggling driver details that plague Intel OS distributions. It amazes me that Linux has been as successful as it has with the agony that users have to endure to successfully install the OS. The bar is much higher now. Users can expect their OS install to just happen and still have the power tools of compilers and real server software without the electronic equivalent of repeatedly stabbing themselves in the leg with a fork.
Of course, the die hard slashdot crowd will always prefer Linux, but it seems to me that things are shifting to a new and friendlier approach.
As someone who has a professional degree (I'm a physician), has helped establish 2 venture funded companies, run a small IT department, worked in the private sector in IT, security and sales just for starters, I can't say enough good things about a well rounded education. I think that any idea of specializing early in life is misguided. Sure it produces narrow thinkers who can't manuever when push comes to shove. When major economic changes come or even life changes, you need to be able bob and weave like a metaphorical boxer.
That ability can't be had by specializing. My liberal art emphasized collegiate education is at least partly to thank for my successes. Hooray small colleges. If nothing else, a broad education preps the mind for accepting new ideas, something that a narrow educational perspective just can't be credited with.
Like creating a starship named Enterprise prior to ToS and eliminating the United Earth Space Probe Authority of Captain Pike wasn't enough rewriting of Trek histroy, they give Klingon's lumpy heads as well... Figures...
HP has a market cap of about $1.5B, CPQ has $24B. HP will have to issue 25x their current float to make the acquistition which leads one to wonder why CPQ isn't the acquirer. It strongly suggests that CPQ is a mess.
The net result should be a collapse of both stocks in the premarket. But then i've never been able to predict these things.
If I wanted to end up providing tech support to my neighbors. I can think of no less effective use of my time.
That's what chapter 11 meant for Northpoint and Rhythms and even wireless provider Metricom. Only the telcos will survive DSL and heck based on my experience north of Seattle, they may not bother to deliver at all.
This piece pretty much ignores the fact that in most states DSL services were already pretty much unregulated which is what allowed the babybells to run roughshod over Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms. There is simply no consumer recourse for being hosed over by the telco on data services once you cross into the realm of the unregulated services. Sticking to T1s and ISDN at least holds things in the realm of tariffed and therefore state regulated services. This has to date been the only reason that these services haven't been totally consumed by the telcos as DSL has been.
The consumer has already spoken in the marketplace only to find their DSL providers driven into bankruptcy at least in part due to predatory practices by the telcos. Predatory monopolies are bad, mkay.
It's the mess left by lazy admins who can't be bothered with security patches a month before a worm comes out to exploit them. Shame on the NT admins.
According to court documents available at Metricom's website, all the bidders had to provide Letters of Intent to participate including provisional bids by 5p on Aug.1. Any lead bidder will be announced on Monday Aug. 6.
All of the sale paperwork will be in place for the lead bidder before the auction on Aug. 16 and the deal will close on Sept. 7.
With all the wheels currently turning, it seems even less likely that the network will go dark.
It may be wishful thinking, but since it's a tech writer that wrote the story at go2mac, it's possible that the network engineering staff has been retained until the auction. The network becomes much less valuable at auction if the court ordered total layoffs and the network goes dark so the 50k customers get hosed.
According to metricom, the entire operation is being auctioned off, not just the hardware so I suspect that we'll see Worldcomm step in and get a wireless network on the cheap.
Hardly, I think it was pretty clear that the MacHack ideal was something that he understood. The alienation of the audience is questionable as well. There were many in the audience who appreciated the lively and admittedly sometimes heated interchange. In fact, many were heard to be talking about ESR's keynote after the happy reminicense of this year's Mac engineering reunion.
Few, I think, haven't taken advantage of open source efforts as they have worked to migrate onto the BSD framework of OSX. So while the idea of open sourcing software product may rub some the wrong way, there's no denying the advantages of using open source as a starting point for development efforts, even if just as a learning tool.
In this regard, the Mac developer community has grown up over the last year, and IMHO ESR's keynote got the ball rolling.
Ultimately, the best part of the bizarre business deal that merged Apple and NeXT was the acquisition of Steve Jobs. For all his megalomania and at best offbeat management style, it's the singular vision of the The Steve that has brought Apple to where it is. Their hardware has, for sure, never been better. There is some definite question as to whether OSX can grow from a decent commercial UN*X to something more consumer oriented. My mom can't use it yet, that's for sure...
For those who have attended MacHack, ESR included, there is an understanding of the spirit of what's going on. The hack show is about rediscovering what it is that makes engineering and software design fun to begin with. Sure, some hacks are derivative and some are pure presentation with little or no coding involved. Heck, some the most legendary hacks have been pure showmanship. The reason that things like the Password sniffer went over well is because of the presentation. Blackmailing the entire audience serves as excellent marketing.
Judging a hack on merits of utility or even total originality isn't fair. That's just not what this event is about. There's more here than merely recompiling dsniff to run on OSX. I would have thought that the whole thing would be fairly obvious to the slashdot crowd at large. Clearly, some get it and some don't.
Now I need to figure out why I'm awake at 6a PDT on the Monday following 72 hours with very little sleep.
Not because it's open source, but because of the way it's open source. It's forced places that Linux might be used commercially to pursue other avenues because all proprietary development efforts are at risk of having to be completely open sourced because of the letter of the GPL. Other licenses such as that for BSD allow a more limited sharing of a company's proprietary "magic" so contributions can still be made to the community without torpedoing commercial software development.
This isn't about a religious BSD vs. Linux OS war, it's about a sensible open source license versus one that is far too limiting to be practical. Yes, Linux is where the noise is, but just because lots of people use it doesn't make it the right choice. It just means that Linux is the Windows of open source.
Maybe this means that the BBC will cut loose of the official copies of some Dr. Who stories that were never finished or in a couple of cases filmed at all. I hate to have less than reverence for the dead, but the idea of getting much of the Dirk Gently material as it originally appeared in the script of the episode "Shada" that was never finished thanks to a BBC stike is just exciting.
Running Explorer 5.1 preview for OSX seems to let you in quite nicely. No sense of not working at all. I could test more, but fact checking isn't the readers job...
Life grinds on in the technology based startup world. There's less capital to make it happen and we keep stuggling to meet deadlines and ship product. Some companies had real value 18 months ago, some still do. Sure it'd be nice to be shopping for the yacht now, but as the rest of the startup world burns, it's nice to have work and keep pluggin'.
I watched from the sidelines during the boom. I watched options traders start companies with no management experience save their connections with wealth. I watched naive programmers' fortunes rise and fall with the market. I know a number of millionaires from the boom, I know a number of guys left nearly penniless. Technology marches on.
Rape of the environment
Corporate profits over human rights
Legal regulation of bedroom behavior
Crushing of labor unions
The supremacy of the almighty dollar
Bludgeoning non-believers with the Bible
A gun in every pot
Sure this list is extreme, but 18 is too young to be that conservative. Of course, if Mommy and Daddy's trust fund is what you're out to defend then it makes sense, your wealth over everyone else's.
Ok, it's time to delurk for a while. It's not often that the Slashdot crowd proves that their usually at least minimally knowledgable selves have no clue about something.
Firstly, I am a physian. I still hold a valid license, full rights to prescribe and perform surgery and all that. I have taken a step into the private sector and now work as a technologist.
Most GPs, which are the docs that most geeks see regularly, don't make jack when you consider that they have 4 years of undergraduate education, 4 years (minimum) of medical school, and 3 years (minimum) of internship and residency. Add to this that private practice docks have all the debts and liabilities associated with running a business and are paying off six figure student loans that thanks to the first bush administration have been running up interest those last years of training.
General practice/family practice physicians make on average $130k/year which sounds like a lot except that is not a salary. Docs are nearly always self-employed legally due to requirements that they maintain their independent status. Combine this with the fact that normal benefits still have to come out like health insurance and retirement planning and the income is markedly less. I know a number of family practice docs who start their taxable income well under-six figures.
Whither the Lexus? There is a physican mystique that docs, right or wrong maintain. Since there is a definite 'boys club' for hospital priveleges the air of success and professionalism is a maintained facade. They buy expensive cars even if they can't really afford it so they look successful enough not to raise eyebrows in the doctors' parking lot. That combined with the fact that many patients would be entirely non-plussed to see their physician driving around in a '77 pinto with a brown hood and a blue door tends to push toward trendier rides.
Doctors don't know jack about technology. It's true. I labored unsuccessfully throughout medical school to get a small software venture off the ground. You can't really sell this stuff into a market that doesn't understand. That combined with the lack of money available to fund development of really good back end office apps means that only a couple of vendors exist and frankly, they suck.
Really good medical software would automate charting in a way that's intuitive to physicians. The stuff that's out there requires that the physician learn new techniques. This is no good at all. I wouldn't even build a clinic with much more than a billing back end right now because the charting software sucks so bad. On the other hand, there are paper based charting forms that are built around the way docs were taught to think that work great. Not a retrievable as electronic, but pretty darned good for a start.
I'm not a lawyer, but email and IM of patient data is a minefield under the new privacy guidelines that frankly I haven't been able to figure out yet. That combined with the liability issues of giving out advice without examining the patient makes these technologies a total disaster.
In short, I'd get a solid billing system and wire the office but not install machines everywhere. I would likely do wireless networking to a PDA for writing presciptions just for legibilities sake. I would not do email or IM for patient care, period, let somebody else set the legal precidents.
Dr. Warren Magnus