+1 to above. This is exactly my complaint. Lots of doctor-hate above which is weird, but look at the flip side, from a doctor who also does programming and studied CS. The EMRs are TERRIBLE. All of them. However, I don't rant about the incompetence of the IT programmers, because it is a gulf that we both need to address (physicians and IT designers).
I don't see this staying this way forever, but fixing usability issues are long overdue. In one Epic Fail system (those in the industry know what I mean), there is difficulty in even searching for a drug, you have to do old-style SQL type queries "starts with" or "contains", and spell rythmol as rhythmol and it can't figure it out. Obviously there are dangers to auto-correct with drug names, but finding the correct drug with a simple verification should be facile.
The UI designers also think that "clicking" is easier, but when you do something 100 times a day, as others have said, having full keyboard control is desired.
Finally, to load a patient or switch a context might take 20 seconds. Imagine that you have time-sensitive tasks and each time you do something there is 20 seconds of not-really-usable time wasted where you have to sit there and check the screen to see if it is updated? It is beyond frustration and doesn't work into the workflow of seeing patients.
Granted, I had the same complaints in 2005, and can't believe 11 years later I have the exact. same. complaints.
Nothing at all. That is just the "PC Card" that is played whenever rude or abusive people don't like to be told they are acting like wanton children. It's their excuse to act as rude as they like for the sake of the attention it brings them.
Back when I was in college, the concept was known as Political Correctness, Multi-ethnic Cohesiveness, and Inclusiveness Actions, which people attempted to encourage in business settings. It got shortened to "PC Card" in the early 2000's.:)
You two have a good understanding of the tradeoffs involved with decision-making. Unfortunately, many people do not and see suboptimal outcomes as "errors" in a very black-and-white world. I think the IOM report fed into many fears.
I am continuously annoyed about the IOM report -- as other posters have said, it is now out of date, and sensationalist IMO in the way it counted mistakes and deaths / errors. An "error" that had no effect in a critically ill patient who died 3 days later was counted as a fatal outcome. On the other hand, the sensationalism at the time might have been a bit warranted -- doctors are often very complacent and perhaps the attention was needed / desired to get large scale action. However, it had the side effect of the erosion in trust in those that work very hard, diligently, and conscientiously every day.
I very, very rarely use handwritten prescriptions. Certainly as inpatient (patients who are currently in the hospital) essentially all major medical systems have computer order entry as of 2012. In my outpatient clinic (people just coming for a doctor appointment) it is 100% computer medical scripts with automatic interaction and allergy checking. All of my hospital system is this way.
I can't remember ever having ANY medication or dosing error. Obviously I can't know about it if I don't catch it, but computer order entry, automatic checking, and the many layers of check from doctor, nurse practitioner, pharmacist, and nurse, (and patient!) does provide a safety net.
Can we do more? Well, banning handwritten prescriptions would be a pretty bad idea (if I'm in a community clinic wanting to give a patient some antibiotics for an ear infection, I think I should be allowed.) There are side effects to every initiative. Encouraging computer use is indeed being done, but limited by cost concerns.
If you are legitimately speeding (safely) to perform an urgent operation, the police may escort you to the hospital, enter with you, verify you are about to do an operation, then leave you without a ticket (it happened to several of my colleagues, usually late at night.)
Just being pulled over and showing your hospital badge / white coat is not going to help you 99+% of the time. *Especially* if you were driving in a dangerous fashion. One of my friends has a funny story on how he tried it after being pulled over, and his ID says:
"......., MD DERMATOLOGY"
The police officer laughed and gave him the maximum fine.
Totally agree with you. I'm a cardiologist, and this article just is full of alarmist oversimplification. Leaders in this industry are not complete idiots, and currently all of the connectors that they describe ARE incompatible (except, as you note, the intrathecal, as it is often essentially stock IV tubing, but ports are covered with a big warning / sticker.)
Making "special" tubing, as the article glosses over, may make the problem worse (e.g. situation:
Nurse: Quick, we need an IV in this patient in the ER, his pressure is low. Tech: We don't have any IV tubing in this bay, but there is some black intrathecal tubing. Nurse: Let's just use that for now (a tube is a tube) for the IV and change it later. It is an emergency. Tech: Ok.
5 minutes later, somebody comes along with spinal anesthetic, and now that it is "safe" with a color-coded tube, doesn't trace the tube to the insertion and just injects it into the patient.)
All safety legislation / efforts have consequences, and may not actually make people safer. Here, the situations described are *EXTREMELY RARE*, and frankly, likely due to negligence (I don't have exact details for each instance, but likely the person did not trace the tube, or jury-rigged incompatible connectors together.) Safety cabling may lead to a false sense of security, and current connectors are already incompatible. There is no shortcut or excuse for constant vigilance.
Probably a lot of books written on it -- Atul Gawande did a pretty big "study" with safety checklist prior to OR activation. We have several checklists (independent of anesthesia) before starting any invasive procedure, so this is kind of behind the times. It is more targeted at foreign hospitals or places that have a lot of mid-level providers that are not used to things. If you are interested, the full study can be found here:
gbutler69 writes: >Says who? Citation Please? [snip a bunch of rhetorical questions]
From your questions I infer you are completely out of touch with this field in any sort of form. If you want a citation, do a tad of research on your own and you will discover things; I won't spoon-feed.
Poke around here to start (but some of this might be biased the *other* way.) Do a good deal of academic reading and you will get a good feel of what is going on:
>you should be excited every time you hear a doctor is being sued for malpractice.
You have got to be kidding; that statement is simply ludicrous. I don't engage in some sort of weird schadenfreude when somebody gets sued, even if it were somewhat legitimate. Medical school is relatively difficult to enter, selects for the most driven people, and is a long process where several dozen people work with you and gauge your progress and abilities. *OF COURSE* bad doctors need to be stopped, just like "bad pilots" or "bad computer programmers." Indeed, a lawsuit is one of many ways, in fact a poorly targeted way, of doing this. There are many other options including board registration, hospital credentialing, and outcomes monitoring. Life is not black and white.
The second paragraph of your post makes little sense. Can't have it both ways? Are you advocating ruining the career of good physicians in the hope of catching bad ones with a broad net? I am not advocating increased lawsuits, as the *vast majority* of them are groundless. That is not an opinion.
And yes, I am a doctor. You can check my long posting history for a bit of confirmation or at least support.
Ok, I'm responding to a troll, I know. But here goes. The post has a core of truth, but like all Slashdot-postings the "It's so simple I could just figure it out and do better" high-school naivety predominates.
>Doctors and surgeons routinely **** up on the most basic things, like which side of the body they're operating on, often in some VERY serious, permanent operations, like amputations.
- I have done thousands of operations and never a wrong-side operation. It is something that is taken *extremely* seriously, and we have at least three checks that guard against this. With over a billion procedures done per year, yes, there will be many that make the news, not unlike planes taking off on the wrong runway, etc., etc.
>Doctors and nurses, time and time again, have been shown to not practice the most simple procedures for infection control, like washing their hands before/after every patient.
- True again to a small degree, but everybody at my hospital does this. It probably could make a bit of difference if done nationwide, but again, this is taken extremely seriously.
>A couple of doctors in the Boston area have a)left patients on the operating table (opened up!) to run an errand at the bank b)shown up drunk or high for operations c)been beyond unprofessional to staff 'below' them (screaming, throwing things etc.)
- a) I was a resident at the very same major hospital when this happened. I know the inside story, and it was nowhere near as simple as it sounds.
- b) ?? The MD would be promptly fired. I don't understand what kind of life you imagine we lead.
- c) Yes, I agree this is a problem. This is a very big problem that the medical "culture" has some deficiency with. Equally bad is an antagonistic attitude by people "below" the MD who try to passive-aggressively sabotage things or "protect the patient" by alienating the rest of the staff. We need to work as a team, and at my hospital I strive to make sure that is always done.
> When the *** up, the malpractice covers the lawsuit.
Again, you have some sort of "fantasy" about M.D.s that is not remotely grounded. I'm guessing you wanted to go to med school and never had the wherewithal to go through with it? Or maybe had some unfortunate experiences as a patient?
- Nobody, NOBODY wants to get sued. The idea that we just sit in a lounge and make patients wait, etc., is pure nonsense. I work my a$$ off every day, and my friends with similar education and ethic get paid twice what I do. I am far from "among the most highly paid in society."
I'm surprised nobody brought up -- needless encryption makes a *huge* headache for running diagnostics on any sort of server. If any sort of script is not working, there is difficulty in evaluating what is happening, and even network diagnostics is much more complicated.
Additionally, encryption wastes a lot of CPU cycles if not needed. Although a small argument, this slows down networks and costs $$$ by burning fuel.
Finally, you have to make sure encryption is done right to be secure. If you encrypt everything, it is more difficult to see where there might be a vulnerability because there is more to audit. Think of the analoy to personal encryption -- unless you work for the NSA or something it is much better / easier to encrypt a directory on your disk with personal stuff than trying to encrypt your whole logical volume.
Which would be easier to recover from if you had a hardware fault / disaster?
I thought the headline of the article was actually a joke; these systems are found in almost all major hospitals. There are companies that will install them:
this is an established industry, and nothing new... Each hospital in the conglomerate that I work in uses a pneumatic tube system.
Weird that somebody picked up this Stanford "press release" and found it suitable for Slashdot...
Patriot success rate was likely extremely inflated
on
Why Computers Suck At Math
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I know that I'm arguing with a trolling AC, but for the other readers of slashdot, you should know that the grandparent's post refers to the controversy regarding the analysis of the Patriot system during the first Gulf war. There was a huge propaganda machine behind the Patriot's "successes" which turned out to be very near zero indeed. This was covered in a series of hearings in the early 90's...
It was at Harvard in the mid 90's, but I don't think the course is THAT unique (I know that MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, and numerous other colleges have similar courses.)
The schematics for the computer we build is available -- appears that they still build the same computer!
This is almost exactly what Woz did -- after the course you still have a wonderful respect for him, but at the same time realize that it is humanly do-able, not taking anything away from his great work. Some of the subsequent projects other groups in our course did were incredible; one guy built a custom video D/A output with sprite-drawing subroutines so you could play his custom assembly-written pacman with the hex keypad on a standard oscilloscope. I still have photos of mine in action somewhere.
Agreed. This is little more than assembling something from a recipe (IKEA, anyone?) that teaches you little. The descriptions "solder that resistor" and the fact he clearly doesn't understand the details of things makes it a less interesting experience.
I would recommend a course on digital electronics instead -- many of these courses (including mine in college) have you assemble a 6502 computer yourself from components, and then you will understand the role of the memory and data buses, counter, memory addresses, A/D converters, in addition to understanding CPU timing, latches, machine code, and elementary programming, etc., etc. We built one that displayed output on an oscilloscope and hex LEDs. It will be 10 times as much effort, but infinitely more rewarding. One of the most difficult yet fun courses that I took in my life.
Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning, development, marketing, capital, and a lot of, well, work.
I was at Harvard when facebook was "born." I was persistently skeptical about the whole thing, as the concept was not new *at all*, and friendster was reigning supreme, which I kind of thought was a silly fad. I was subsequently astounded over the years how facebook has taken off. (I am still astounded.) But, had the founders listened to me, or saw that their idea was "taken," it would have gone nowhere.
That being said, I wouldn't give a highly established potential competitor research data that you have gotten to get your idea off the ground. Despite my words, I also hold a few patents, but these are mostly defensive positioning and required by my corporation.
Nebulous "ideas" have an insignificant chance of being "thought of" already. What you need to do is get honest feedback about the barriers to implementation, then just go and do it!
I am happy to see some thought go in to "routine" matters like this -- too often I feel that laptop keyboards have abominable designs, such as shrunken space bars and control keys, miniscule arrow keys, or nonstandard placement of arrow keys, etc.
However, I would say the esc enlargement on my Lenovo is unneeded -- its location above the other keys means it is struck accurately. I would venture to say the same for the delete key, which I could locate with my eyes closed by its characteristic placement. I think the aesthetics of the vertical extension of these keys is going to be negative.
For my money, I wish they would just lay off the IBM keyboard design. Thinkpads should not have a Windows key.:)
Yes, it is an annoying debate tactic but weak and relatively easy to recognize. Diligent readers can recognize this though, and the glaring errors often come painfully to light in the discussions.
Anyway, the Airbus systems have multiple levels of computer massaging of the pilot's input, called different "flight laws." Read up about it here:
In the most direct law, yes, the system will still not allow you to do things like rip the rudder off the airplane (A300 was not FBW) or clearly overstress the aircraft and destroy the wings. This is a good thing -- of course, there is perhaps some imaginary situation where it would be better to destroy the aircraft to ameliorate some aspect of an impending crash, however, the vast majority (all ever recorded in an actual crash?) of inputs that can destroy aircraft are not intentional nor required. Also, the 'direct law' will allow a pilot to potentially overstress the aircraft in the event of computer failure or discordant input.
The role of conflicting pilot input is also well thought out (described in the link), and the airbus designers were aware of these (pseudo)philosophical objections to excessive computer control. I do not think there is much of a conflict among people familiar with the operation and implementation.
I spent many years in medical school doing research work on viruses, including work with SIV. This article is very optimistic in some of its summaries. HIV and SIV are qualitatively different in the extent of "hypervariability" in their surface proteins. It is generally accepted to be "easier" to create antibodies to SIV, which has been done for many years.
The technique described is very interesting, don't get me wrong, and I hope it works. However, there are *already* many techniques that appear to immunize against this HIV analog, which do not work for human HIV. The two are significantly different.
Yes, I totally agree. Linux has many, many critics, from users, "prousers / powerusers", developers, and other corporations e.g. M$ (although agreed, these are more often just attacks.)
Where I thought his article was very insightful, however, was the typical response "Linux is free..." where I agree with his analysis. This, however, reflects on us, the Linux community. I cringe when I see somebody say, "It is free, what do you expect?" or "you have no right to complain." Users have every right to (nonabusively and in a civil fashion) criticize software.
If Debian (stable) suddenly stopped working, my organization would lose thousands of person-hours of lost productivity. In many ways, doing somebody a half-favor is often worse than doing them nothing at all:
Imagine if I volunteered to repair your garage, but then did a half-assed job and quit halfway through. It would cost you MORE in the end to clean up and switch to another provider. Would it be then ok to say "I did that for FREE, how can you complain?"
Obviously this is a continuum, and many of the criticisms are unfounded or just whining. But, as a whole, if we want Linux to continue to succeed we, as developers and users alike, should listen and respond constructively ourselves to any (also constructive) criticism that is provided by the community.
Agreed totally. I wish more people realized this and thought like you.
I, too, can write obfuscated code and appear "genius-like." It is a whole lot harder to bring *everybody* along than to rocket yourself ahead, make yourself appear to be esoteric and "invaluable," and, in a sense, bully everybody else into compliance. Now, we don't have enough details on the particular story to know if his colleagues actually were bad.
However, I spend a good deal of every day helping people that may be not as quick or sharp as me in many ways, but that is my job.
Finally a point regarding documentation -- I'm sure that every programmer here has come back to code that he/she wrote, and thought, "Man, this guy (me) is a genius. However, it just took me 30 minutes to understand how I did this!"
Early on in my programming life, I thought this was indicative of my awesomeness as a programmer. Now, I just think it is poor documentation, and largely a waste of time. If I can't figure out how I did something a year ago, it would take other people twice as long... They may appreciate the clever implementation, but in the large scheme of things that is not efficient, nor awesome.
I was totally with you until your (faulty) conclusion. Creating a draconian police-state is not a way to improve productivity, and will just make people hate you. I would not work at any place where they check my bags at the exit (other than the FBI/NSA/CIA, etc.)
Our hospital had the same problem as you - they gave us all SecureID RSA keyfobs, and everybody hated it. It was annoying to have to have something with you all the time.
What they did to replace it, is (IMHO) a very good compromise - VPN access with a system of "recognizing" the computer (Juniper proprietary -- I assume it is some sort of certificate) and enforced strong passwords. You have to answer a bunch of questions to register the computer, but then afterward it is simple username/password signon. Secure enough for banking online, and secure enough for our corporation / hospital.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 to above. This is exactly my complaint. Lots of doctor-hate above which is weird, but look at the flip side, from a doctor who also does programming and studied CS. The EMRs are TERRIBLE. All of them. However, I don't rant about the incompetence of the IT programmers, because it is a gulf that we both need to address (physicians and IT designers).
I don't see this staying this way forever, but fixing usability issues are long overdue. In one Epic Fail system (those in the industry know what I mean), there is difficulty in even searching for a drug, you have to do old-style SQL type queries "starts with" or "contains", and spell rythmol as rhythmol and it can't figure it out. Obviously there are dangers to auto-correct with drug names, but finding the correct drug with a simple verification should be facile.
The UI designers also think that "clicking" is easier, but when you do something 100 times a day, as others have said, having full keyboard control is desired.
Finally, to load a patient or switch a context might take 20 seconds. Imagine that you have time-sensitive tasks and each time you do something there is 20 seconds of not-really-usable time wasted where you have to sit there and check the screen to see if it is updated? It is beyond frustration and doesn't work into the workflow of seeing patients.
Granted, I had the same complaints in 2005, and can't believe 11 years later I have the exact. same. complaints.
It said "Virgin could take on Tesla", so I thought it was about a fellow Slashdotter forming his own company.
Nothing at all. That is just the "PC Card" that is played whenever rude or abusive people don't like to be told they are acting like wanton children. It's their excuse to act as rude as they like for the sake of the attention it brings them.
Back when I was in college, the concept was known as Political Correctness, Multi-ethnic Cohesiveness, and Inclusiveness Actions, which people attempted to encourage in business settings. It got shortened to "PC Card" in the early 2000's. :)
There were insufficient bathroom breaks; European in the seat.
You two have a good understanding of the tradeoffs involved with decision-making. Unfortunately, many people do not and see suboptimal outcomes as "errors" in a very black-and-white world. I think the IOM report fed into many fears.
I am continuously annoyed about the IOM report -- as other posters have said, it is now out of date, and sensationalist IMO in the way it counted mistakes and deaths / errors. An "error" that had no effect in a critically ill patient who died 3 days later was counted as a fatal outcome. On the other hand, the sensationalism at the time might have been a bit warranted -- doctors are often very complacent and perhaps the attention was needed / desired to get large scale action. However, it had the side effect of the erosion in trust in those that work very hard, diligently, and conscientiously every day.
I very, very rarely use handwritten prescriptions. Certainly as inpatient (patients who are currently in the hospital) essentially all major medical systems have computer order entry as of 2012. In my outpatient clinic (people just coming for a doctor appointment) it is 100% computer medical scripts with automatic interaction and allergy checking. All of my hospital system is this way.
I can't remember ever having ANY medication or dosing error. Obviously I can't know about it if I don't catch it, but computer order entry, automatic checking, and the many layers of check from doctor, nurse practitioner, pharmacist, and nurse, (and patient!) does provide a safety net.
Can we do more? Well, banning handwritten prescriptions would be a pretty bad idea (if I'm in a community clinic wanting to give a patient some antibiotics for an ear infection, I think I should be allowed.) There are side effects to every initiative. Encouraging computer use is indeed being done, but limited by cost concerns.
The cupcake is a lie.
Very nice. A friend of mine just wrote an easy to use cloud app that does many of these steps automatically. Free yourself from GoDaddy!
https://laterdaddy.herokuapp.com/
This is simply not true.
If you are legitimately speeding (safely) to perform an urgent operation, the police may escort you to the hospital, enter with you, verify you are about to do an operation, then leave you without a ticket (it happened to several of my colleagues, usually late at night.)
Just being pulled over and showing your hospital badge / white coat is not going to help you 99+% of the time. *Especially* if you were driving in a dangerous fashion. One of my friends has a funny story on how he tried it after being pulled over, and his ID says:
".... ..., MD
DERMATOLOGY"
The police officer laughed and gave him the maximum fine.
Totally agree with you. I'm a cardiologist, and this article just is full of alarmist oversimplification. Leaders in this industry are not complete idiots, and currently all of the connectors that they describe ARE incompatible (except, as you note, the intrathecal, as it is often essentially stock IV tubing, but ports are covered with a big warning / sticker.)
Making "special" tubing, as the article glosses over, may make the problem worse (e.g. situation:
Nurse: Quick, we need an IV in this patient in the ER, his pressure is low.
Tech: We don't have any IV tubing in this bay, but there is some black intrathecal tubing.
Nurse: Let's just use that for now (a tube is a tube) for the IV and change it later. It is an emergency.
Tech: Ok.
5 minutes later, somebody comes along with spinal anesthetic, and now that it is "safe" with a color-coded tube, doesn't trace the tube to the insertion and just injects it into the patient.)
All safety legislation / efforts have consequences, and may not actually make people safer. Here, the situations described are *EXTREMELY RARE*, and frankly, likely due to negligence (I don't have exact details for each instance, but likely the person did not trace the tube, or jury-rigged incompatible connectors together.) Safety cabling may lead to a false sense of security, and current connectors are already incompatible. There is no shortcut or excuse for constant vigilance.
Probably a lot of books written on it -- Atul Gawande did a pretty big "study" with safety checklist prior to OR activation. We have several checklists (independent of anesthesia) before starting any invasive procedure, so this is kind of behind the times. It is more targeted at foreign hospitals or places that have a lot of mid-level providers that are not used to things. If you are interested, the full study can be found here:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0810119
gbutler69 writes:
>Says who? Citation Please?
[snip a bunch of rhetorical questions]
From your questions I infer you are completely out of touch with this field in any sort of form. If you want a citation, do a tad of research on your own and you will discover things; I won't spoon-feed.
Poke around here to start (but some of this might be biased the *other* way.) Do a good deal of academic reading and you will get a good feel of what is going on:
http://www.sickoflawsuits.org/
Again, ridiculously simplistic analysis.
>you should be excited every time you hear a doctor is being sued for malpractice.
You have got to be kidding; that statement is simply ludicrous. I don't engage in some sort of weird schadenfreude when somebody gets sued, even if it were somewhat legitimate. Medical school is relatively difficult to enter, selects for the most driven people, and is a long process where several dozen people work with you and gauge your progress and abilities. *OF COURSE* bad doctors need to be stopped, just like "bad pilots" or "bad computer programmers." Indeed, a lawsuit is one of many ways, in fact a poorly targeted way, of doing this. There are many other options including board registration, hospital credentialing, and outcomes monitoring. Life is not black and white.
The second paragraph of your post makes little sense. Can't have it both ways? Are you advocating ruining the career of good physicians in the hope of catching bad ones with a broad net? I am not advocating increased lawsuits, as the *vast majority* of them are groundless. That is not an opinion.
And yes, I am a doctor. You can check my long posting history for a bit of confirmation or at least support.
Ok, I'm responding to a troll, I know. But here goes. The post has a core of truth, but like all Slashdot-postings the "It's so simple I could just figure it out and do better" high-school naivety predominates.
>Doctors and surgeons routinely **** up on the most basic things, like which side of the body they're operating on, often in some VERY serious, permanent operations, like amputations.
- I have done thousands of operations and never a wrong-side operation. It is something that is taken *extremely* seriously, and we have at least three checks that guard against this. With over a billion procedures done per year, yes, there will be many that make the news, not unlike planes taking off on the wrong runway, etc., etc.
>Doctors and nurses, time and time again, have been shown to not practice the most simple procedures for infection control, like washing their hands before/after every patient.
- True again to a small degree, but everybody at my hospital does this. It probably could make a bit of difference if done nationwide, but again, this is taken extremely seriously.
>A couple of doctors in the Boston area have a)left patients on the operating table (opened up!) to run an errand at the bank b)shown up drunk or high for operations c)been beyond unprofessional to staff 'below' them (screaming, throwing things etc.)
- a) I was a resident at the very same major hospital when this happened. I know the inside story, and it was nowhere near as simple as it sounds.
- b) ?? The MD would be promptly fired. I don't understand what kind of life you imagine we lead.
- c) Yes, I agree this is a problem. This is a very big problem that the medical "culture" has some deficiency with. Equally bad is an antagonistic attitude by people "below" the MD who try to passive-aggressively sabotage things or "protect the patient" by alienating the rest of the staff. We need to work as a team, and at my hospital I strive to make sure that is always done.
> When the *** up, the malpractice covers the lawsuit.
Again, you have some sort of "fantasy" about M.D.s that is not remotely grounded. I'm guessing you wanted to go to med school and never had the wherewithal to go through with it? Or maybe had some unfortunate experiences as a patient?
- Nobody, NOBODY wants to get sued. The idea that we just sit in a lounge and make patients wait, etc., is pure nonsense. I work my a$$ off every day, and my friends with similar education and ethic get paid twice what I do. I am far from "among the most highly paid in society."
If you want a realistic sense of what may go on during a suit, read this piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/views/29case.html?_r=1
I'm surprised nobody brought up -- needless encryption makes a *huge* headache for running diagnostics on any sort of server. If any sort of script is not working, there is difficulty in evaluating what is happening, and even network diagnostics is much more complicated.
Additionally, encryption wastes a lot of CPU cycles if not needed. Although a small argument, this slows down networks and costs $$$ by burning fuel.
Finally, you have to make sure encryption is done right to be secure. If you encrypt everything, it is more difficult to see where there might be a vulnerability because there is more to audit. Think of the analoy to personal encryption -- unless you work for the NSA or something it is much better / easier to encrypt a directory on your disk with personal stuff than trying to encrypt your whole logical volume.
Which would be easier to recover from if you had a hardware fault / disaster?
I thought the headline of the article was actually a joke; these systems are found in almost all major hospitals. There are companies that will install them:
http://www.swisslog.com/index/hcs-index/hcs-systems/hcs-pts/hcs-pts-translogic.htm
this is an established industry, and nothing new... Each hospital in the conglomerate that I work in uses a pneumatic tube system.
Weird that somebody picked up this Stanford "press release" and found it suitable for Slashdot...
I know that I'm arguing with a trolling AC, but for the other readers of slashdot, you should know that the grandparent's post refers to the controversy regarding the analysis of the Patriot system during the first Gulf war. There was a huge propaganda machine behind the Patriot's "successes" which turned out to be very near zero indeed. This was covered in a series of hearings in the early 90's...
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/docops/pl920908.htm
You can also read up on this from transcripts from the hearings after the war.
In the interests of fairness, here is a rebuttal / review.
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/docops/zimmerman.htm
I remain unconvinced -- from reading this (almost 20 years ago) I concluded that at best, the military did not know for sure that these worked well.
It was at Harvard in the mid 90's, but I don't think the course is THAT unique (I know that MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, and numerous other colleges have similar courses.)
The schematics for the computer we build is available -- appears that they still build the same computer!
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys123/classnotes/bigpic_0409_bw.png
This is almost exactly what Woz did -- after the course you still have a wonderful respect for him, but at the same time realize that it is humanly do-able, not taking anything away from his great work. Some of the subsequent projects other groups in our course did were incredible; one guy built a custom video D/A output with sprite-drawing subroutines so you could play his custom assembly-written pacman with the hex keypad on a standard oscilloscope. I still have photos of mine in action somewhere.
Agreed. This is little more than assembling something from a recipe (IKEA, anyone?) that teaches you little. The descriptions "solder that resistor" and the fact he clearly doesn't understand the details of things makes it a less interesting experience.
I would recommend a course on digital electronics instead -- many of these courses (including mine in college) have you assemble a 6502 computer yourself from components, and then you will understand the role of the memory and data buses, counter, memory addresses, A/D converters, in addition to understanding CPU timing, latches, machine code, and elementary programming, etc., etc. We built one that displayed output on an oscilloscope and hex LEDs. It will be 10 times as much effort, but infinitely more rewarding. One of the most difficult yet fun courses that I took in my life.
Exactly. People overvalue the concept of "idea" and undervalue the concept of aggressive business positioning, development, marketing, capital, and a lot of, well, work.
I was at Harvard when facebook was "born." I was persistently skeptical about the whole thing, as the concept was not new *at all*, and friendster was reigning supreme, which I kind of thought was a silly fad. I was subsequently astounded over the years how facebook has taken off. (I am still astounded.) But, had the founders listened to me, or saw that their idea was "taken," it would have gone nowhere.
That being said, I wouldn't give a highly established potential competitor research data that you have gotten to get your idea off the ground. Despite my words, I also hold a few patents, but these are mostly defensive positioning and required by my corporation.
Nebulous "ideas" have an insignificant chance of being "thought of" already. What you need to do is get honest feedback about the barriers to implementation, then just go and do it!
I am happy to see some thought go in to "routine" matters like this -- too often I feel that laptop keyboards have abominable designs, such as shrunken space bars and control keys, miniscule arrow keys, or nonstandard placement of arrow keys, etc.
However, I would say the esc enlargement on my Lenovo is unneeded -- its location above the other keys means it is struck accurately. I would venture to say the same for the delete key, which I could locate with my eyes closed by its characteristic placement. I think the aesthetics of the vertical extension of these keys is going to be negative.
For my money, I wish they would just lay off the IBM keyboard design. Thinkpads should not have a Windows key. :)
Yes, it is an annoying debate tactic but weak and relatively easy to recognize. Diligent readers can recognize this though, and the glaring errors often come painfully to light in the discussions.
Anyway, the Airbus systems have multiple levels of computer massaging of the pilot's input, called different "flight laws." Read up about it here:
Airbus flight laws
In the most direct law, yes, the system will still not allow you to do things like rip the rudder off the airplane (A300 was not FBW) or clearly overstress the aircraft and destroy the wings. This is a good thing -- of course, there is perhaps some imaginary situation where it would be better to destroy the aircraft to ameliorate some aspect of an impending crash, however, the vast majority (all ever recorded in an actual crash?) of inputs that can destroy aircraft are not intentional nor required. Also, the 'direct law' will allow a pilot to potentially overstress the aircraft in the event of computer failure or discordant input.
The role of conflicting pilot input is also well thought out (described in the link), and the airbus designers were aware of these (pseudo)philosophical objections to excessive computer control. I do not think there is much of a conflict among people familiar with the operation and implementation.
I spent many years in medical school doing research work on viruses, including work with SIV. This article is very optimistic in some of its summaries. HIV and SIV are qualitatively different in the extent of "hypervariability" in their surface proteins. It is generally accepted to be "easier" to create antibodies to SIV, which has been done for many years.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7865316?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=1&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed
The technique described is very interesting, don't get me wrong, and I hope it works. However, there are *already* many techniques that appear to immunize against this HIV analog, which do not work for human HIV. The two are significantly different.
Yes, I totally agree. Linux has many, many critics, from users, "prousers / powerusers", developers, and other corporations e.g. M$ (although agreed, these are more often just attacks.)
Where I thought his article was very insightful, however, was the typical response "Linux is free..." where I agree with his analysis. This, however, reflects on us, the Linux community. I cringe when I see somebody say, "It is free, what do you expect?" or "you have no right to complain." Users have every right to (nonabusively and in a civil fashion) criticize software.
If Debian (stable) suddenly stopped working, my organization would lose thousands of person-hours of lost productivity. In many ways, doing somebody a half-favor is often worse than doing them nothing at all:
Imagine if I volunteered to repair your garage, but then did a half-assed job and quit halfway through. It would cost you MORE in the end to clean up and switch to another provider. Would it be then ok to say "I did that for FREE, how can you complain?"
Obviously this is a continuum, and many of the criticisms are unfounded or just whining. But, as a whole, if we want Linux to continue to succeed we, as developers and users alike, should listen and respond constructively ourselves to any (also constructive) criticism that is provided by the community.
Agreed totally. I wish more people realized this and thought like you.
I, too, can write obfuscated code and appear "genius-like." It is a whole lot harder to bring *everybody* along than to rocket yourself ahead, make yourself appear to be esoteric and "invaluable," and, in a sense, bully everybody else into compliance. Now, we don't have enough details on the particular story to know if his colleagues actually were bad.
However, I spend a good deal of every day helping people that may be not as quick or sharp as me in many ways, but that is my job.
Finally a point regarding documentation -- I'm sure that every programmer here has come back to code that he/she wrote, and thought, "Man, this guy (me) is a genius. However, it just took me 30 minutes to understand how I did this!"
Early on in my programming life, I thought this was indicative of my awesomeness as a programmer. Now, I just think it is poor documentation, and largely a waste of time. If I can't figure out how I did something a year ago, it would take other people twice as long... They may appreciate the clever implementation, but in the large scheme of things that is not efficient, nor awesome.
I was totally with you until your (faulty) conclusion. Creating a draconian police-state is not a way to improve productivity, and will just make people hate you. I would not work at any place where they check my bags at the exit (other than the FBI/NSA/CIA, etc.)
Our hospital had the same problem as you - they gave us all SecureID RSA keyfobs, and everybody hated it. It was annoying to have to have something with you all the time.
What they did to replace it, is (IMHO) a very good compromise - VPN access with a system of "recognizing" the computer (Juniper proprietary -- I assume it is some sort of certificate) and enforced strong passwords. You have to answer a bunch of questions to register the computer, but then afterward it is simple username/password signon. Secure enough for banking online, and secure enough for our corporation / hospital.
>Cisco, NASA Plan "Planetary Skin'
I am actually pretty happy with the default theme. A lot of green, though.