I literallly just discovered today Calibre which is "a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books." I bought a B&N Nook a few months back and have been getting most of my ebooks from Project Gutenberg, manybooks.net, etc and have been frustrated with incorrect/lacking metadata, or finding ebooks elsewhere in formats I couldn't readily put on the Nook. This software seems pretty damn slick, especially with fetching metadata from Google Books or isbndb.com (didn't even know they existed before!) and it can convert damn near any format to anything. So until we do get a universal ebook format, perhaps people can check out Calibre.
OSXBMC is a port of the fabulous Xbox Media Center for Mac OSX. I'm running it on a 1.8Ghz Mac Mini with 512meg of ram and I have no problem playing any HD videos I've got. I highly recommend it!
I was in Billings, Montana and saw an article in the local newspaper about a business that hired school teachers to teach English to Koreans over the Internet via videochat. Koreans learned basic English in local classrooms but could get one-on-one tutoring, mostly to help with pronounciation, something that needs a native speaker to help with.
This was only possible because the local telco had rolled out fiber-to-the-home (yes, fiber in Montana, something I can't get in Nashville, TN, a major metropolitian area). The company paid great salaries, like $60k/yr, people could work at home, the service could eventually be expanded to anywhere in the world, all because of ubiquitous, high speed, low cost Internet access.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You're not allowed to make thoughtful, informative posts. Especially, with correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. So not cool...
I just came in here to point and laugh at your idiotic critique of who sounds like a wonderful high school physics teacher. If I had mod points, I'd make sure your comment was no longer "+5 Insightful."
here just in case there's any trouble with the The Sun's link. As someone pointed out to me yesterday, notice that Homer's car is lefthand drive while Marge's is righthand drive.
I got an ipod nano before Xmas and was frightened by all the reports of scratched screens. A friend told me about InvisibleShield (www.invisibleshield.com) so I ordered one. They're a bit expensive at $19.95 but it's a one-time application. My friend even had to send his ipod video into Apple under warranty and he got a replacement and IS sent him a free replacement shield (not like plastic and postage costs that much) even though it was not their fault. It changes the feel of the ipod, it's not smooth slick like it was, but I'm quite happy that I'm not getting any more scratches.
I am a biomedical engineer for Cardiology at a top 25 hospital in the US, and a trained LVAS engineer for the WorldHeart Novacor LVAS system. We see 3-4 implants a year with this system*. The patients who are referred for implant come in literally with one foot over the threshold of death. It's amazing any of them survive the surgery at all. Doctors are scared to death of the devices. We have had attendings refuse to admit a patient once they learned the patient had a LVAD. Yes, some of the side effects can be severe. You have about as great a chance of dieing from a stroke caused by a massive clot in the device as you do of heart failure, but the reason to take that risk is quality of life. This man here is one of our patients. He has been on pump for four years this month. That's four years of quality life, enjoying his grand- and great grandkids. Hell, we have photos of him putting a roof on his barn while standing in the front end loader on his tractor. Our other patients go back to work, or at least can live on their own in their home, without 24/7 nursing care or constant hospital stays like patients who do not get a pump.
These devices are mostly used for "bridge to transplant" meaning it is used to keep them alive and healthy until hopefully they get a heart transplant. Unfortunately there are like 2,000 donor hearts a year and 50,000 people who need one. So many of these companies are aiming to be certified "destination therapy" which means the person gets a pump and that's it. If/when it wears out, they get a replacement, but they won't get a donor heart. Which is fine, because the patients who get donor hearts are back constantly for biopsies and caths to check that their donor heart is healthy (since only arteries/veins get connected between the person and donor heart and not nerves, they can't feel chest pain if they have a heart attack) and are on anti-rejection medication regimens.
* - Our hospital also does the Abiomed AB5000 and Thoratec HeartMate, but these are short term (days to weeks) support devices where the patient does not leave the hospital and are supported by the Perfusion team (the people who run the heart/lung bypass machines during surgery). The Abiomed device sits on the freakin' outside of your body and it's clear so you watch your own blood pump through it. It's actually clear so the clinician can look for a "flash" which is when the device completely empties of blood after a stroke and you see the white membrane inside. The console used during surgery is roughly the size of a dishwasher and the "travel console" is like a piece of carryon luggage. The Thoratec HeartMate I is approved for destination therapy, but we don't use it as such. Their HeartMate II is going into clinical trial, and is totally implantable. Hopefully it will pass the FDA's approval for destination therapy and we can save 48,000 lives a year...
I am a biomedical engineer for Cardiology at a top 25 research university medical center. One of my primary responsibilities is maintaining the cardiac PACS for the medical images we create. We generate about 2TB of data a year, and Radiology does probably ten times that amount. Our data, stored in DICOM format, is static; by law, we cannot change it (the patient demographic information is included in the file header and if a nurse mispells a patient name, etc, we only update the image location database, not the image file itself). Once created, the images are accessed several times a day until the patient goes home, when it might not be retrieved for weeks or months at a time. However we have a legal obligation to keep the image available for seven years (for kids, it is until they turn 21) so cheap storage is a good thing for us. The current DICOM standard archive media is DVD-R and we use 200-disc rack-mountable changers. We researched going with an EMC Centera NAS unit but our cardiac PACS vendor wouldn't certify it because data flows through and is altered by a gateway server. If we had direct access to cheap storage, we wouldn't be affected by the performance imbalance.
It's a collaboration between Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Texas, and Harvard/MIT, using a $10mill NIH grant, to establish a curriculum for Biomedical/Biological Engineering. Vanderbilt is leading the group, mostly because of the fine Peabody School of Education that is part of the university, and I interned over one summer with the group ('02 graduate with a BE in BME).
vanth.org]
Sadly, as a clinical engineer in a cardiac cath lab, I can tell you that the x-ray equipment, hemodynamic monitoring system, and even the image archive system all run on Windows. The brand new pacing system in the EP lab (where they put in pacemakers/ICDs) runs on WinXP, and has a nasty habit of throwing fatal errors; not what you want to see when they just put you into a fatal arrythmia and then can't stimulate you out of it. Luckily, the anesthesia machines in the OR don't run M$... =P
And Froogle has been in "beta" form for how long? It seems I've been using that heavily used and freely available service for years. The Wayback Machine has it going back to Feb 2003. Maybe Google thinks keeping "Beta" appended to all their web services will absolve them of responsibility if it fails?
The data ports are typically located under the dashboard on the driver's side. Stick your head down where your brake and accelerator are, and look up, you should see it. Unfortunately, from what I've read before, most of the data coming out of the port is in codes which are not published by the manufacturers. This keeps your local, independent mechanic from being able to easily diagnose what's wrong with your car and forces you to go to the dealership's more costly repair shop. There's a whole lot of concern over whether hacking these codes would be a violation of the DMCA. I think there was even mention of a bill in Congress to force manufacturers to publish their codes. Also, see this earlier Slashdot post.
I am a biomedical engineer at a USN&WR top 20 hospital, working in the cardiology-related departments. We do have medical devices, including patient monitors, that run in Windows OS's. One is the Witt Biomedical monitors we have in our adult cardiac cath lab. The software was originally written to run on MS-DOS and really only runs on Windows 2000 to provide a GUI for the nurses to point-n-click. It uses Windows file sharing but doesn't even utilize print services. The whole thing should have been rewritten about ten years ago but Witt already has over 25% market share and is trying to compete with the big dogs like GEMS (GE Medical Systems) and Siemens. The old Siemens Cathcor monitors we used to have ran on *nix but the brand spankin' new GEMS Combolab we got for our pediatric cath lab runs on Windows XP for the nursing stations and Windows 2003 for the servers. The Siemens Axiom Artis x-ray angiography systems in our adult cath lab runs a mix of OS's, such as Windows NT (soon to be XP) on the Host-PC, Vertex on the Real Time PC, Neutrino on the Real Time Controller (the truly patient critical part), and Windows CE on touch panels and displays. Siemens will tell you all about their "revolutionary OS" called Syngo that will, to paraphrase, "provide one user interface for all imaging modalities" but it's really just running on top of Windows NT/XP. The intravascular ultrasound machine that we have, a Boston Scientific Galaxy runs on Windows NT. Even the Kodak laser printer we have for printing on x-ray film has a DICOM server running Windows NT. All of this runs on the hospital's open network and has been disconnected for either being actively infected with a virus or for not being patched.
Now a lot of our stuff is not Windows based. Most of it I don't know what OS it does run on (perhaps proprietary information) but I can say it doesn't appear to be Windows. Philips Intellivue MP90 networked patient monitors, Datascope CS 100 intra-aortic ballon pumps, and Worldheart Novacor left ventricular assist sytem (think artifical heart) all have their own software. Some systems that use 3D modeling, like the Endocardial Solutions Ensite 3000 use SGI workstations and software.
Many of the CT and MRI scanners I see, patient monitors we put in, anesthesia carts we employ use non-Windows operating systems, not because Windows is considered unstable or insecure, but because medical IT is so far behind due to the years it takes to get FDA approval on new equipment. Many new systems do use Windows because it's easy to work with and easily networked. For instance, one cool new system (the company and name I don't know) allows an anesthesiologist (who monitors 3-4 CRNA's in as many OR's) to see blood gas waveforms and other vital signs on one of those little clear screens three inches in front of your eye. It uses Wi-Fi to transmit the data to a Windows embedded device in the doctor's fanny pack. It goes without saying that we have incredible signal strength on our wireless network all over the OR area; you wouldn't want a dropped connection there! All of our clinical workstations and every office computer is Windows NT or XP.
Being a biomedical engineer at a top twenty US medical center, trained as a LVAD engineer for the Worldheart Novacor LVAS, I always wondered why we went to so much trouble to have pulsatile flow. We have to worry about bearings wearing out, and the internal sac sealing shut and not reopening if we squeeze too much blood out, an air vent to open the pump to atmospheric pressure, and also watch for tears in the inlet/outlet valves to the pump. A single moving part, impeller pump seems so much better in comparision. We are supposed to be moving towards the Jarvis 2000 here. Of course, the main problem with these LVAS pumps is the percutaneous line exiting from the patient's abdomen which leads to frequent pocket infections. I believe a totally implantable, continuous flow pump will be the future.
I'd just like to say I bought an album off Magnatunes after finding the site from Fark late Saturday night. I emailed John with some words of support and amazingly enough, he emailed me back an hour later. Nice to see he took the time to read his email while watching his site get slashdotted.
Slashdot Mirror
I literallly just discovered today Calibre which is "a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books." I bought a B&N Nook a few months back and have been getting most of my ebooks from Project Gutenberg, manybooks.net, etc and have been frustrated with incorrect/lacking metadata, or finding ebooks elsewhere in formats I couldn't readily put on the Nook. This software seems pretty damn slick, especially with fetching metadata from Google Books or isbndb.com (didn't even know they existed before!) and it can convert damn near any format to anything. So until we do get a universal ebook format, perhaps people can check out Calibre.
http://calibre-ebook.com/
http://www.osxbmc.com/
OSXBMC is a port of the fabulous Xbox Media Center for Mac OSX. I'm running it on a 1.8Ghz Mac Mini with 512meg of ram and I have no problem playing any HD videos I've got. I highly recommend it!
I'll give you an example...
I was in Billings, Montana and saw an article in the local newspaper about a business that hired school teachers to teach English to Koreans over the Internet via videochat. Koreans learned basic English in local classrooms but could get one-on-one tutoring, mostly to help with pronounciation, something that needs a native speaker to help with.
This was only possible because the local telco had rolled out fiber-to-the-home (yes, fiber in Montana, something I can't get in Nashville, TN, a major metropolitian area). The company paid great salaries, like $60k/yr, people could work at home, the service could eventually be expanded to anywhere in the world, all because of ubiquitous, high speed, low cost Internet access.
if you use Firefox, get the TargetAlert extension. it adds a small image after links that are pdfs, Word docs, etc. so you'll have some forewarning.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You're not allowed to make thoughtful, informative posts. Especially, with correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. So not cool...
I just came in here to point and laugh at your idiotic critique of who sounds like a wonderful high school physics teacher. If I had mod points, I'd make sure your comment was no longer "+5 Insightful."
god, i wish i had some mod points right now! thanks for my biggest laugh today!
here just in case there's any trouble with the The Sun's link. As someone pointed out to me yesterday, notice that Homer's car is lefthand drive while Marge's is righthand drive.
I got an ipod nano before Xmas and was frightened by all the reports of scratched screens. A friend told me about InvisibleShield (www.invisibleshield.com) so I ordered one. They're a bit expensive at $19.95 but it's a one-time application. My friend even had to send his ipod video into Apple under warranty and he got a replacement and IS sent him a free replacement shield (not like plastic and postage costs that much) even though it was not their fault. It changes the feel of the ipod, it's not smooth slick like it was, but I'm quite happy that I'm not getting any more scratches.
it's right here in the article text...
sufferers... are likely to die within a month
I am a biomedical engineer for Cardiology at a top 25 hospital in the US, and a trained LVAS engineer for the WorldHeart Novacor LVAS system. We see 3-4 implants a year with this system*. The patients who are referred for implant come in literally with one foot over the threshold of death. It's amazing any of them survive the surgery at all. Doctors are scared to death of the devices. We have had attendings refuse to admit a patient once they learned the patient had a LVAD. Yes, some of the side effects can be severe. You have about as great a chance of dieing from a stroke caused by a massive clot in the device as you do of heart failure, but the reason to take that risk is quality of life. This man here is one of our patients. He has been on pump for four years this month. That's four years of quality life, enjoying his grand- and great grandkids. Hell, we have photos of him putting a roof on his barn while standing in the front end loader on his tractor. Our other patients go back to work, or at least can live on their own in their home, without 24/7 nursing care or constant hospital stays like patients who do not get a pump.
These devices are mostly used for "bridge to transplant" meaning it is used to keep them alive and healthy until hopefully they get a heart transplant. Unfortunately there are like 2,000 donor hearts a year and 50,000 people who need one. So many of these companies are aiming to be certified "destination therapy" which means the person gets a pump and that's it. If/when it wears out, they get a replacement, but they won't get a donor heart. Which is fine, because the patients who get donor hearts are back constantly for biopsies and caths to check that their donor heart is healthy (since only arteries/veins get connected between the person and donor heart and not nerves, they can't feel chest pain if they have a heart attack) and are on anti-rejection medication regimens.
* - Our hospital also does the Abiomed AB5000 and Thoratec HeartMate, but these are short term (days to weeks) support devices where the patient does not leave the hospital and are supported by the Perfusion team (the people who run the heart/lung bypass machines during surgery). The Abiomed device sits on the freakin' outside of your body and it's clear so you watch your own blood pump through it. It's actually clear so the clinician can look for a "flash" which is when the device completely empties of blood after a stroke and you see the white membrane inside. The console used during surgery is roughly the size of a dishwasher and the "travel console" is like a piece of carryon luggage. The Thoratec HeartMate I is approved for destination therapy, but we don't use it as such. Their HeartMate II is going into clinical trial, and is totally implantable. Hopefully it will pass the FDA's approval for destination therapy and we can save 48,000 lives a year...
I am a biomedical engineer for Cardiology at a top 25 research university medical center. One of my primary responsibilities is maintaining the cardiac PACS for the medical images we create. We generate about 2TB of data a year, and Radiology does probably ten times that amount. Our data, stored in DICOM format, is static; by law, we cannot change it (the patient demographic information is included in the file header and if a nurse mispells a patient name, etc, we only update the image location database, not the image file itself). Once created, the images are accessed several times a day until the patient goes home, when it might not be retrieved for weeks or months at a time. However we have a legal obligation to keep the image available for seven years (for kids, it is until they turn 21) so cheap storage is a good thing for us. The current DICOM standard archive media is DVD-R and we use 200-disc rack-mountable changers. We researched going with an EMC Centera NAS unit but our cardiac PACS vendor wouldn't certify it because data flows through and is altered by a gateway server. If we had direct access to cheap storage, we wouldn't be affected by the performance imbalance.
Hey buddy, how about providing a link next time?
Found via Google Search.
Hey UWC, I'm an '02 graduate with my BE in BME. Did you graduate from Vandy?
It's a collaboration between Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Texas, and Harvard/MIT, using a $10mill NIH grant, to establish a curriculum for Biomedical/Biological Engineering. Vanderbilt is leading the group, mostly because of the fine Peabody School of Education that is part of the university, and I interned over one summer with the group ('02 graduate with a BE in BME). vanth.org]
Sadly, as a clinical engineer in a cardiac cath lab, I can tell you that the x-ray equipment, hemodynamic monitoring system, and even the image archive system all run on Windows. The brand new pacing system in the EP lab (where they put in pacemakers/ICDs) runs on WinXP, and has a nasty habit of throwing fatal errors; not what you want to see when they just put you into a fatal arrythmia and then can't stimulate you out of it. Luckily, the anesthesia machines in the OR don't run M$... =P
And Froogle has been in "beta" form for how long? It seems I've been using that heavily used and freely available service for years. The Wayback Machine has it going back to Feb 2003. Maybe Google thinks keeping "Beta" appended to all their web services will absolve them of responsibility if it fails?
The data ports are typically located under the dashboard on the driver's side. Stick your head down where your brake and accelerator are, and look up, you should see it. Unfortunately, from what I've read before, most of the data coming out of the port is in codes which are not published by the manufacturers. This keeps your local, independent mechanic from being able to easily diagnose what's wrong with your car and forces you to go to the dealership's more costly repair shop. There's a whole lot of concern over whether hacking these codes would be a violation of the DMCA. I think there was even mention of a bill in Congress to force manufacturers to publish their codes. Also, see this earlier Slashdot post.
I am a biomedical engineer at a USN&WR top 20 hospital, working in the cardiology-related departments. We do have medical devices, including patient monitors, that run in Windows OS's. One is the Witt Biomedical monitors we have in our adult cardiac cath lab. The software was originally written to run on MS-DOS and really only runs on Windows 2000 to provide a GUI for the nurses to point-n-click. It uses Windows file sharing but doesn't even utilize print services. The whole thing should have been rewritten about ten years ago but Witt already has over 25% market share and is trying to compete with the big dogs like GEMS (GE Medical Systems) and Siemens. The old Siemens Cathcor monitors we used to have ran on *nix but the brand spankin' new GEMS Combolab we got for our pediatric cath lab runs on Windows XP for the nursing stations and Windows 2003 for the servers. The Siemens Axiom Artis x-ray angiography systems in our adult cath lab runs a mix of OS's, such as Windows NT (soon to be XP) on the Host-PC, Vertex on the Real Time PC, Neutrino on the Real Time Controller (the truly patient critical part), and Windows CE on touch panels and displays. Siemens will tell you all about their "revolutionary OS" called Syngo that will, to paraphrase, "provide one user interface for all imaging modalities" but it's really just running on top of Windows NT/XP. The intravascular ultrasound machine that we have, a Boston Scientific Galaxy runs on Windows NT. Even the Kodak laser printer we have for printing on x-ray film has a DICOM server running Windows NT. All of this runs on the hospital's open network and has been disconnected for either being actively infected with a virus or for not being patched.
Now a lot of our stuff is not Windows based. Most of it I don't know what OS it does run on (perhaps proprietary information) but I can say it doesn't appear to be Windows. Philips Intellivue MP90 networked patient monitors, Datascope CS 100 intra-aortic ballon pumps, and Worldheart Novacor left ventricular assist sytem (think artifical heart) all have their own software. Some systems that use 3D modeling, like the Endocardial Solutions Ensite 3000 use SGI workstations and software.
Many of the CT and MRI scanners I see, patient monitors we put in, anesthesia carts we employ use non-Windows operating systems, not because Windows is considered unstable or insecure, but because medical IT is so far behind due to the years it takes to get FDA approval on new equipment. Many new systems do use Windows because it's easy to work with and easily networked. For instance, one cool new system (the company and name I don't know) allows an anesthesiologist (who monitors 3-4 CRNA's in as many OR's) to see blood gas waveforms and other vital signs on one of those little clear screens three inches in front of your eye. It uses Wi-Fi to transmit the data to a Windows embedded device in the doctor's fanny pack. It goes without saying that we have incredible signal strength on our wireless network all over the OR area; you wouldn't want a dropped connection there! All of our clinical workstations and every office computer is Windows NT or XP.
I cou
Being a biomedical engineer at a top twenty US medical center, trained as a LVAD engineer for the Worldheart Novacor LVAS, I always wondered why we went to so much trouble to have pulsatile flow. We have to worry about bearings wearing out, and the internal sac sealing shut and not reopening if we squeeze too much blood out, an air vent to open the pump to atmospheric pressure, and also watch for tears in the inlet/outlet valves to the pump. A single moving part, impeller pump seems so much better in comparision. We are supposed to be moving towards the Jarvis 2000 here. Of course, the main problem with these LVAS pumps is the percutaneous line exiting from the patient's abdomen which leads to frequent pocket infections. I believe a totally implantable, continuous flow pump will be the future.
I'd just like to say I bought an album off Magnatunes after finding the site from Fark late Saturday night. I emailed John with some words of support and amazingly enough, he emailed me back an hour later. Nice to see he took the time to read his email while watching his site get slashdotted.