Sure, but that's no justification for splitting MS.. I mean, if MS ceased to exist altogether, even that would be good for Apple.
This would be good for Linux.
Same point as above -- that doesn't really justify splitting MS.
It absolutely does justify the DOJ taking action to split MS. If the MS vertical monopoly (OS, web browser, email client, office suite) is hampering open competition, then splitting up that monopoly creates a healthier market place, which produces better, cheaper products for consumers (at the expense of profits for the leading company). That's the entire POINT of antitrust laws.
"Lucky"... because our monthly pass costs a higher multiple of our individual fare? Ours costs the same as two fares 25 days a month (well, 24.something actually). Since we occasionally work from home or one of us drops off or picks up the other, it's far cheaper for us to pay individually, though it's far less convenient.
You can also attend board meetings at 5:30pm on the 3rd Thursday of each month at the Citilink Offices, 801 Leesburg Road. Meetings are open to the public.
Ok, I know that not everyone reads the summary before posting, but seriously, did ANYONE read it?
They're only going after students and employees, not the general public. And there probably is another dimension to this: there probably ARE people in those groups using free email addresses for school-related activities.
I'm guessing what's happening is this: they have issues with their school email system. Maybe it's too hard for students to get an address. Maybe the maximum message size is too low. Maybe the webmail is poor or absent. Maybe the tech support for email software setup is crappy or lacking.
For whatever reason, they probably have a large number of faculty, staff, and students who are working around these issues by using gmail or yahoo accounts to submit or accept assignments, to plan study groups, notify about classes, or otherwise do things that ARE legitimate school activities. And this is a bad thing. See what happened to Sarah Palin's Yahoo account last year. You shouldn't use email services outside of the organization's control to conduct official business. There is also a greater risk that people will be duped, if the process is rampant; for example, if your professor has the email address Prof_Murgle_SRJC@gmail.com, and you get an email from Prof_Murgle_SRJC@yahoo.com, it's entirely possible you'll fail to notice the domain and will think the email is from your professor. You might then divulge information to an unknown party that could damage you or someone else.
But... when people are doing that, it's almost always for one or more of the reasons I suggested above, or some other usability issue that is properly addressed by the CIO's organization. Instead, he's threatening lawsuits to get people to stop.
So, yes, there's a problem with the tactic, but it's not the problem everyone seems to think it is.
Won't someone stand up, and tell the fscking business world that the internet was not created just for them?!?!
Seriously, it wasn't built for businesses to make money, sell things or what-have-you. Sure, you can do it, but, that was not (and hopefully will not) be its primary purpose.
What on earth are you talking about? They're threatening people with a valid affiliation with the college, not random Joe Blow who put "srjc" in his e-mail address because he wanted it to say "Señor Jesus" or whatever. The issue is that people who *do* have an affiliation with the college might be confusing people as to the officialness of a particular email channel, which definitely could cause problems.
Of course, the *real* issue here is that people create yahoo, gmail, hotmail, etc. accounts with their employer or school name in the username if they CAN'T USE THEIR OFFICIAL EMAIL ADDRESS. That is usually due to draconian spam filtering, poor support for email reading software, excessive downtime, small inboxes, or other technical or procedural issues that fall under the (you guessed it) CIO's purvey.
It is a real problem when people use free personal email boxes to conduct official business; see Sarah Palin's Yahoo account. But it's up to the technical leadership of the organization to make their own email domain useful enough that people have no good reason to do this.
Don't know what bus you have been on, but on all the ones I have been on, its been anything but relaxing or regenerating. You sit down next to some person who smells, listen to half a dozen phone conversations, see someone who you just know has every type of communal sickness imaginable, etc.
Usually, the bus that stops four blocks from my house, and stops right outside my office building. It's quite a nice route. I've certainly been on buses with those issues, but generally am able to avoid them. If commuting by train (aside from the New York subway) the smelliness quotient is even lower.
On the other hand, in my car I can mostly control the noise level, can choose my route to route around traffic or construction areas, and I don't have to be near annoying people.
And you have to stay alert, deal with annoying people who ALSO are putting your life at risk by cutting in front of you, without the ability to even tell them off (or get them kicked off the bus!), and stare at the Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish on the Ford Explosion of the family of 12 in front of you (because you can't see anything else).
(I live in the suburbs and work in a larger suburb so riding the bus isn't exactly an option unless I feel like walking 25 miles to the nearest bus stop when work is only a 30 mile drive)
You mean, it's not an option unless you live somewhere with transit access. There are inaccessible places in Los Angeles, too, but we didn't choose to live in them.
In our case, we don't purchase an unlimited pass; it's actually cheaper for us to pay per ride. But otherwise, the calculations are correct for us. We sold a car six years ago and have been a one-car family ever since. We're likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future... Possibly until our almost-five-year-old gets his license and we have THREE drivers in the house.
Granted, time not spent at work is valuable too, and I make choices that allow me to spend more time with my kids and stuff.... but your $41/hour equivalent may be exaggeration.
Finally, I can read, talk on the phone, etc. while I'm on the bus or walking. Can't do that in the car. The time I spend driving may be shorter, but that time is spent accumulating stress, not relaxing and regenerating.
My husband recently ran the numbers on buying a second car. We sold my car in 2003, because we frankly weren't using it. We haven't had an absolute *need* for one since then, though there are times it would be convenient. And at $1.25 each way for bus fare (passes would cost even more with our usage), transit isn't *cheap*.
Turns out, though, if we got an older car for $2,000, spent about $200/year on maintenance, with gas for commuting, it would take almost ten YEARS for us to be ahead on that (and such a car probably wouldn't last that long). Then I reminded him that our insurance went down $100/month when we sold my car. Granted, it was a "sports car," but we'd still pay another $25-50/month to add a car to our insurance.
Meanwhile, we get more exercise, which also lowers our health care costs in the long run.;-)
We also (due to short commutes; we both work about 4 miles from our house) qualify for a low-mileage discount on our insurance. People who switch a car commute to a transit commute may find themselves also saving some on insurance even if they don't get rid of the car, just by lowering the mileage.
I can totally understand why these systems were still running NT or 2000. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
But if it ain't supported anymore, and it's completely closed-source, you literally CAN'T get fixes for vulnerabilities discovered later on. At least with an OSS product, you'd be able to hire a developer to fix the specific vulnerability on the existing system.
If he used the recording made for the Muppet Show, the copyright for that rendition would be held by whoever holds the Muppet Show copyrights (and I'd be surprised if that was Warner Bros.... might be Disney, or Henson's estate, though).
Since the copyrighted work is a clip from the original muppet show, and the muppet show episode being longer than 2:29 minutes, I fail to see the reason why this is not fair use.
Exactly. The sketch was a component of a half-hour television show, and was never created as a standalone work. Songs that are individual tracks on a CD or released as singles certainly are intended to be performed as a standalone work, but back in 1976 or whenever, I doubt Jim Henson and his crew thought of the show as a compilation of independent works.
No, specific records can be copied from EHR systems through bribes or social engineering more easily than paper records.
This is true... if your copy machine also requires a username and password to access. But most copy machines are far easier to use than EHRs, and paper has a very low learning curve.
There are more ways of approaching the system,
Fewer, actually. Most EHRs are proprietary client/server software; you have to have the software installed on the computer, then you have to log in to the server through that software. To copy the data, you either download it into a proprietary format that now requires software to read, or you print it out... and now it's paper again, with all the same access issues as a paper record.
OTOH, you can't put a privacy screen on a paper chart. Most very literate people can read upside down or sideways at a large fraction of the speed they can read normally. A chart can be tucked under a bulky coat or in a handbag and perused at leisure. Often, information has to be copied out of the chart or the entire chart has to be sent off to pharmacies, labs, and imaging departments (and often the latter is chosen for privacy reasons, which means the guy who trained as a lab assistant at ITT Tech can look at the record of your abortion or nervous breakdown).
more people and terminals have simultaneous access than a paper record existing in only one place.
If that's how it's configured, they can. Or not, as the case may be. Besides which, this is also one of the biggest ADVANTAGES to an electronic record... your chart won't be "out" when the doctor needs it.
Access logs are seldom implemented in a way that can't be gotten around or will be effectively reviewed.
But sometimes they are, as opposed to paper charts, where access logging isn't feasible at all. Best you can do is record whose badge opens the chart room door.
The security of EHR systems is almost entirely dependent on obscurity and a belief that no one really wants to break in, anyway.
As is the paper chart security. Except in the most conscientious of organizations... and those have more tools at their disposal to secure electronic charts than paper ones.
Many providers, staff, system administrators, and programmers will have access to records,
As they do with paper charts...
and some of them will have access to each others' open sessions and passwords.
At least there are sessions and passwords.
It really can't be secured as well as a paper record.
Patently untrue. It *can* be secured much better. It often isn't... but that's an implementation issue, and paper charts suffer from many of the same problems.
Plus HIPAA gives effectively open access to wide classes of government employees and insurance companies can get whatever they want by threatening to withhold payment.
And they can demand records from your paper chart just as easily as from your electronic one.
A system that only gives information relevant to your care cannot be constructed - it will have silos that prevent needed information from being shared between departments and programmers determining by general rules what will be shared rather than the real professionals dealing with specific cases who need a broad overview to be able to act intelligently. OTOH irrelevant information will usually be too much of a pain in the ass to access without a good reason, or even with a good reason, so your information is safe (though you aren't).
Forgive me; what I mean is, for example, an electronic system can send the exact order to the lab, without including any other information that might be divulged if the paper form is illegible and your chart is requested. A case manag
Though the migration towards Office 2007 (whatever version it is that comes with Vista installs) has been going on apace,
It has?
Migration to Office 2007 causes a severe productivity hit. I mean, I'm an expert Word user, and generally great at picking up a program I've never used before and figuring it out, but I'm feeling like I could use a couple hours of formal training on the new interface. I just spent a good two minutes looking for how to turn on my ruler that was on by default in the last several versions of Word, for example. And I'm the test case... after I've been using Office 2007 long enough to feel comfortable with it, *then* we'll roll it out to some other folks in the company and I'll probably teach them how to use it.
I mean, maybe the new interface is going to be a good thing in the long run, but I don't see what was so broken about the concept of File Edit Format Tools View Help that they had to scrap it and start over.
Of those, your company may have been billing 1,500 of them for some sort of electronic system... but that doesn't mean that they had a "comprehensive EMR system" as stated in the article.
Um... for our organization (six clinics, eleven outreach/satellite locations), it's about half a million dollars, *after* the discounts we get for being an FQHC. That doesn't include the staff required to implement, or even the hardware... just the one-off and MRC licensing costs for the first year.
That's expensive. We could hire six mid-level providers (PAs, RNPs) for that.
Wouldn't it be better to spend that money on diagnostic equipment, and outfitting small town clinics. I would rather have a piece of paper that says "repaired cerebral aneurysm" than to have an electronic file that says "died waiting for MRI".
For $3 million, you can get an MRI machine at a small-town clinic that serves a few thousand patients a year, only a fraction of whom will actually need MRIs.
For the same $3 million, you can outfit that clinic and six or seven others with a full-featured EHR, which BTW will allow you to send the MRI results electronically between the imaging center and the small-town clinic. Plus, the EHR system provides benefit to all the patients at the clinics, not just a handful with need of specific imaging studies.
So when deciding whether to spend $3 million to help 100 patients a year or 30,000, it's no wonder you're traveling two hours to get your MRI.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be good for Apple.
Sure, but that's no justification for splitting MS.. I mean, if MS ceased to exist altogether, even that would be good for Apple.
This would be good for Linux.
Same point as above -- that doesn't really justify splitting MS.
It absolutely does justify the DOJ taking action to split MS. If the MS vertical monopoly (OS, web browser, email client, office suite) is hampering open competition, then splitting up that monopoly creates a healthier market place, which produces better, cheaper products for consumers (at the expense of profits for the leading company). That's the entire POINT of antitrust laws.
Isn't that what I said? ;-) That's what I was trying to say.
"Lucky"... because our monthly pass costs a higher multiple of our individual fare? Ours costs the same as two fares 25 days a month (well, 24.something actually). Since we occasionally work from home or one of us drops off or picks up the other, it's far cheaper for us to pay individually, though it's far less convenient.
Thank you. Yes, I did in fact read the article too, to make sure it wasn't just a bad summary.
Then how would I go about making the public transportation in my area less unpleasant and inconvenient?
You could contact the General Manager with your specific concerns. Before doing that, though, you may want to peruse the minutes of the last couple board meetings and the transit development plan (both at the bottom of the page).
You can also attend board meetings at 5:30pm on the 3rd Thursday of each month at the Citilink Offices, 801 Leesburg Road. Meetings are open to the public.
Ok, I know that not everyone reads the summary before posting, but seriously, did ANYONE read it?
They're only going after students and employees, not the general public. And there probably is another dimension to this: there probably ARE people in those groups using free email addresses for school-related activities.
I'm guessing what's happening is this: they have issues with their school email system. Maybe it's too hard for students to get an address. Maybe the maximum message size is too low. Maybe the webmail is poor or absent. Maybe the tech support for email software setup is crappy or lacking.
For whatever reason, they probably have a large number of faculty, staff, and students who are working around these issues by using gmail or yahoo accounts to submit or accept assignments, to plan study groups, notify about classes, or otherwise do things that ARE legitimate school activities. And this is a bad thing. See what happened to Sarah Palin's Yahoo account last year. You shouldn't use email services outside of the organization's control to conduct official business. There is also a greater risk that people will be duped, if the process is rampant; for example, if your professor has the email address Prof_Murgle_SRJC@gmail.com, and you get an email from Prof_Murgle_SRJC@yahoo.com, it's entirely possible you'll fail to notice the domain and will think the email is from your professor. You might then divulge information to an unknown party that could damage you or someone else.
But... when people are doing that, it's almost always for one or more of the reasons I suggested above, or some other usability issue that is properly addressed by the CIO's organization. Instead, he's threatening lawsuits to get people to stop.
So, yes, there's a problem with the tactic, but it's not the problem everyone seems to think it is.
I just created a new Gmail account with SRJC in the name. Let's see if I get a nastygram from one of the college's shy^H^H^H lawyers.
Are you enrolled there? Because they're only going after students and employees/faculty. (I know, I know... RTFS is too hard.)
Won't someone stand up, and tell the fscking business world that the internet was not created just for them?!?!
Seriously, it wasn't built for businesses to make money, sell things or what-have-you. Sure, you can do it, but, that was not (and hopefully will not) be its primary purpose.
What on earth are you talking about? They're threatening people with a valid affiliation with the college, not random Joe Blow who put "srjc" in his e-mail address because he wanted it to say "Señor Jesus" or whatever. The issue is that people who *do* have an affiliation with the college might be confusing people as to the officialness of a particular email channel, which definitely could cause problems.
Of course, the *real* issue here is that people create yahoo, gmail, hotmail, etc. accounts with their employer or school name in the username if they CAN'T USE THEIR OFFICIAL EMAIL ADDRESS. That is usually due to draconian spam filtering, poor support for email reading software, excessive downtime, small inboxes, or other technical or procedural issues that fall under the (you guessed it) CIO's purvey.
It is a real problem when people use free personal email boxes to conduct official business; see Sarah Palin's Yahoo account. But it's up to the technical leadership of the organization to make their own email domain useful enough that people have no good reason to do this.
Don't know what bus you have been on, but on all the ones I have been on, its been anything but relaxing or regenerating. You sit down next to some person who smells, listen to half a dozen phone conversations, see someone who you just know has every type of communal sickness imaginable, etc.
Usually, the bus that stops four blocks from my house, and stops right outside my office building. It's quite a nice route. I've certainly been on buses with those issues, but generally am able to avoid them. If commuting by train (aside from the New York subway) the smelliness quotient is even lower.
On the other hand, in my car I can mostly control the noise level, can choose my route to route around traffic or construction areas, and I don't have to be near annoying people.
And you have to stay alert, deal with annoying people who ALSO are putting your life at risk by cutting in front of you, without the ability to even tell them off (or get them kicked off the bus!), and stare at the Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish on the Ford Explosion of the family of 12 in front of you (because you can't see anything else).
(I live in the suburbs and work in a larger suburb so riding the bus isn't exactly an option unless I feel like walking 25 miles to the nearest bus stop when work is only a 30 mile drive)
You mean, it's not an option unless you live somewhere with transit access. There are inaccessible places in Los Angeles, too, but we didn't choose to live in them.
In our case, we don't purchase an unlimited pass; it's actually cheaper for us to pay per ride. But otherwise, the calculations are correct for us. We sold a car six years ago and have been a one-car family ever since. We're likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future... Possibly until our almost-five-year-old gets his license and we have THREE drivers in the house.
You get paid for your car commute?
Granted, time not spent at work is valuable too, and I make choices that allow me to spend more time with my kids and stuff.... but your $41/hour equivalent may be exaggeration.
Finally, I can read, talk on the phone, etc. while I'm on the bus or walking. Can't do that in the car. The time I spend driving may be shorter, but that time is spent accumulating stress, not relaxing and regenerating.
My husband recently ran the numbers on buying a second car. We sold my car in 2003, because we frankly weren't using it. We haven't had an absolute *need* for one since then, though there are times it would be convenient. And at $1.25 each way for bus fare (passes would cost even more with our usage), transit isn't *cheap*.
Turns out, though, if we got an older car for $2,000, spent about $200/year on maintenance, with gas for commuting, it would take almost ten YEARS for us to be ahead on that (and such a car probably wouldn't last that long). Then I reminded him that our insurance went down $100/month when we sold my car. Granted, it was a "sports car," but we'd still pay another $25-50/month to add a car to our insurance.
Meanwhile, we get more exercise, which also lowers our health care costs in the long run. ;-)
We also (due to short commutes; we both work about 4 miles from our house) qualify for a low-mileage discount on our insurance. People who switch a car commute to a transit commute may find themselves also saving some on insurance even if they don't get rid of the car, just by lowering the mileage.
I guess he hadn't heard yet that the new slogan was "News for Nerds... Stuff that Natters."
Damn me and already posting in this thread! Honorary +1 Funny.
"and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers"
How much time do you spend watching lawn mowers or ..now.. goats ?
Aren't Google employees required to spend 10% of their time staring out the window?
What the fuck is $h17?
Isn't it the contents of the h17 variable in a PHP script? Or something like that; I'm not a web developer, I'm just married to one.
Granted, it'd be better to use less cryptic variable names, but as long as you document properly...
I can totally understand why these systems were still running NT or 2000. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
But if it ain't supported anymore, and it's completely closed-source, you literally CAN'T get fixes for vulnerabilities discovered later on. At least with an OSS product, you'd be able to hire a developer to fix the specific vulnerability on the existing system.
If he used the recording made for the Muppet Show, the copyright for that rendition would be held by whoever holds the Muppet Show copyrights (and I'd be surprised if that was Warner Bros.... might be Disney, or Henson's estate, though).
Since the copyrighted work is a clip from the original muppet show, and the muppet show episode being longer than 2:29 minutes, I fail to see the reason why this is not fair use.
Exactly. The sketch was a component of a half-hour television show, and was never created as a standalone work. Songs that are individual tracks on a CD or released as singles certainly are intended to be performed as a standalone work, but back in 1976 or whenever, I doubt Jim Henson and his crew thought of the show as a compilation of independent works.
No, specific records can be copied from EHR systems through bribes or social engineering more easily than paper records.
This is true... if your copy machine also requires a username and password to access. But most copy machines are far easier to use than EHRs, and paper has a very low learning curve.
There are more ways of approaching the system,
Fewer, actually. Most EHRs are proprietary client/server software; you have to have the software installed on the computer, then you have to log in to the server through that software. To copy the data, you either download it into a proprietary format that now requires software to read, or you print it out... and now it's paper again, with all the same access issues as a paper record.
OTOH, you can't put a privacy screen on a paper chart. Most very literate people can read upside down or sideways at a large fraction of the speed they can read normally. A chart can be tucked under a bulky coat or in a handbag and perused at leisure. Often, information has to be copied out of the chart or the entire chart has to be sent off to pharmacies, labs, and imaging departments (and often the latter is chosen for privacy reasons, which means the guy who trained as a lab assistant at ITT Tech can look at the record of your abortion or nervous breakdown).
more people and terminals have simultaneous access than a paper record existing in only one place.
If that's how it's configured, they can. Or not, as the case may be. Besides which, this is also one of the biggest ADVANTAGES to an electronic record... your chart won't be "out" when the doctor needs it.
Access logs are seldom implemented in a way that can't be gotten around or will be effectively reviewed.
But sometimes they are, as opposed to paper charts, where access logging isn't feasible at all. Best you can do is record whose badge opens the chart room door.
The security of EHR systems is almost entirely dependent on obscurity and a belief that no one really wants to break in, anyway.
As is the paper chart security. Except in the most conscientious of organizations... and those have more tools at their disposal to secure electronic charts than paper ones.
Many providers, staff, system administrators, and programmers will have access to records,
As they do with paper charts...
and some of them will have access to each others' open sessions and passwords.
At least there are sessions and passwords.
It really can't be secured as well as a paper record.
Patently untrue. It *can* be secured much better. It often isn't... but that's an implementation issue, and paper charts suffer from many of the same problems.
Plus HIPAA gives effectively open access to wide classes of government employees and insurance companies can get whatever they want by threatening to withhold payment.
And they can demand records from your paper chart just as easily as from your electronic one.
A system that only gives information relevant to your care cannot be constructed - it will have silos that prevent needed information from being shared between departments and programmers determining by general rules what will be shared rather than the real professionals dealing with specific cases who need a broad overview to be able to act intelligently. OTOH irrelevant information will usually be too much of a pain in the ass to access without a good reason, or even with a good reason, so your information is safe (though you aren't).
Forgive me; what I mean is, for example, an electronic system can send the exact order to the lab, without including any other information that might be divulged if the paper form is illegible and your chart is requested. A case manag
Actually, there have been times when I've had to have my husband parse out text in Vim so that I could use it in Excel.
Though the migration towards Office 2007 (whatever version it is that comes with Vista installs) has been going on apace,
It has?
Migration to Office 2007 causes a severe productivity hit. I mean, I'm an expert Word user, and generally great at picking up a program I've never used before and figuring it out, but I'm feeling like I could use a couple hours of formal training on the new interface. I just spent a good two minutes looking for how to turn on my ruler that was on by default in the last several versions of Word, for example. And I'm the test case... after I've been using Office 2007 long enough to feel comfortable with it, *then* we'll roll it out to some other folks in the company and I'll probably teach them how to use it.
I mean, maybe the new interface is going to be a good thing in the long run, but I don't see what was so broken about the concept of File Edit Format Tools View Help that they had to scrap it and start over.
There are actually 7,569 hospitals in the US according to The US Census as of 2005.
Of those, your company may have been billing 1,500 of them for some sort of electronic system... but that doesn't mean that they had a "comprehensive EMR system" as stated in the article.
Um... for our organization (six clinics, eleven outreach/satellite locations), it's about half a million dollars, *after* the discounts we get for being an FQHC. That doesn't include the staff required to implement, or even the hardware... just the one-off and MRC licensing costs for the first year.
That's expensive. We could hire six mid-level providers (PAs, RNPs) for that.
Wouldn't it be better to spend that money on diagnostic equipment, and outfitting small town clinics. I would rather have a piece of paper that says "repaired cerebral aneurysm" than to have an electronic file that says "died waiting for MRI".
For $3 million, you can get an MRI machine at a small-town clinic that serves a few thousand patients a year, only a fraction of whom will actually need MRIs.
For the same $3 million, you can outfit that clinic and six or seven others with a full-featured EHR, which BTW will allow you to send the MRI results electronically between the imaging center and the small-town clinic. Plus, the EHR system provides benefit to all the patients at the clinics, not just a handful with need of specific imaging studies.
So when deciding whether to spend $3 million to help 100 patients a year or 30,000, it's no wonder you're traveling two hours to get your MRI.