My daughter was born 3 months premature (1 lb 14.5 oz) last year and was in the hospital until her due date, so I have a lot of experience trying to get doctors to listen to me. My experience is that doctors will listen, but not always at the right time and definitely not without being assertive and well-informed.
I firmly believe the best approach is to receive a diagnosis from the doctor, do as much research as you can from a reputable source, then return to the doctor with intelligent questions. You know your body (or your child's) best, as well as your medical history and how different treatments affect you. Your doctor is best at diagnosis and treatment. Things work ideally when you work as a team. Obviously, minor colds and such don't usually require a doctor's intervention.
Take advantage of the requirement that a consent form be signed before major procedures. My daughter had a surgery that didn't work the first time. The neurologist just sent a nurse to get us to sign the consent form for a second surgery without even talking to us. We refused to give our consent until all of our questions were answered by the doctor. He was mad about having to postpone the surgery for 20 minutes to come and talk to us, but now he respects us and we have a great working relationship.
Don't be afraid to suggest a modification to your treatment due to common sense. Just one example is when my daughter had a pretty bad diaper rash at one point in the hospital. One of the things they did to treat it was an oxygen tube through a hole in her diaper to dry the area out. It cleared the rash up but her temperature kept dropping, so they were going to discontinue the treatment. I made the common sense suggestion that they compromise by turning the flow rate down. Sure enough, it worked. The idea had never occurred to them, but I was able to think of it because I spent so much time thinking about just one patient. Similar events happened throughout my daughter's hospital stay.
Don't be afraid to question a provider's competency or make demands that are in the best interest of yourself our your child. We had one nurse that neglected our daughter, missed feedings, and fabricated results on the regular blood pressure/temperature/etc. checks she didn't do. We complained and never had that nurse again. We only felt bad because that meant one of our friends got stuck with her all the time, but she was watched very closely after that. Don't make an accusation without just cause, though, or you hurt your own credibility.
Don't be afraid to point out something you think is important to your doctor. It may not be, but at least they will have all the information they need. Doctors make a lot of assumptions based on what you don't tell them as much as what you do, whether they are conscious of doing so or not. Thinking that if it was important the doctor would have asked is a good way to delay getting the best treatment possible.
It all boils down to being well-informed and assertive, but not overbearing. I won't say we have perfect communication with our doctors, but things have been a lot better since we learned how to deal with them. Just yesterday, my daughter had an outpatient procedure after which they were having a hard time keeping her from chewing on the IV in her right hand. If they had just asked us, we could have told her she was strongly right-handed and they wouldn't have a problem if they put the IV in her left hand. Next time we will proactively make the suggestion.
Believe it or not, most doctors like patients who are well-informed, and patients who are well-informed usually worry less and get better treatment. Just don't take it to extremes.
The vast majority of average users didn't choose their operating system and didn't plan to migrate to a new one. Their new computer was different, so they just started from scratch. So why not use the same plan most average people used to migrate to windows on their home computer? Have Linux come pre-installed on almost every PC in almost every store.
We both know that will probably never happen, so I just introduce people to Linux one computer at a time. Just last night, I introduced my brother-in-law to Knoppix. All I hope is that one day he will respond to a disparaging remark about Linux by saying that one time his hard drive crashed two days before a paper was due, when he didn't have time or money to replace it, and Linux came to the rescue and was very easy to use with nothing but a CD-ROM and USB flash drive.
Businesses are a different issue altogether. I will just say that businesses who migrate to a single-vendor solution without an easy means to migrate away from it are shortsighted and deserve what they get if there are any problems.
As far as interoperability goes, I don't think you even want to go there. Free software developers spend an enormous amount of effort in this area and have near 100% interop with Microsoft products with very little to work with. If Microsoft opened up their specifications, we would have full 100% interop within a month.
Good grammar, spelling, and punctuation is not only about communicating a message. It is about the quality of the link. Reading should be as pleasant as talking face to face with an old friend in a quiet room. Using bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation is more like yelling into a cell phone at a ballpark. There is no doubt that communication takes place, but it could be a lot better.
I must disagree about a phone keypad not suiting morsing. I passed my 5 wpm amateur radio morse code exam 4 years ago, but have never actually made a morse code contact. (The test is required even to use voice on the long distance HF bands).
Recently, I have become interested in taking it up and actually using it on the air. I don't have a straight key or a paddle yet (planning an ebay purchase soon), but my rig does have a feature where I can send morse using 2 buttons on my microphone, which is about the same size as a cell phone with the same type of buttons. Basically, I hold it in both hands with my thumbs on top. My left thumb sends the dahs and my right thumb sends the dits.
If a guy like me who hasn't touched morse code in 4 years can send at 15 WPM after a few minutes of practice using my microphone buttons, surely someone who does it all the time can do much better on a similar cell phone setup. I'm not saying it's the ideal way to send morse code, but it is certainly useable. And the most difficult part of morse code, the receiving and decoding (I can only receive 5-8 wpm), is already handled for you by the phone.
Since I regularly pick up stations from a large
part of the world on the 20 meter wavelength band
on my ham radio, I don't think it is too useful
for position information. However, a statistical
analysis of the proportion of callsigns I hear
leads me to believe I am somewhere in the
western half of the continental United States.
Could someone please give me directions to the nearest
gas station?
I'm still bitter about the project that beat mine in the 8th grade science fair. (Jason, is that you?) His conclusion box said, "No conclusions could be made due to the non-existent results." He had some experiment about ants and they all died or escaped before his experiment was done. However, I have to admit that his hypothesis and background were extremely well presented.
I wish that would count for as much at work. "I know I didn't get the project done, but as you'll see in this beautiful presentation, I could have easily finished if I hadn't spent so much time on slashdot."
I may have misunderstood, but it seems like you are describing what Gentoo calls slots and services.
When two versions of a software package can coexist and are necessary to satisfy dependencies, they are placed in different slots. Services let the user choose between different system loggers, cron daemons, kernel versions, X servers, etc. Defaults are chosen, but are only installed if another package providing the service isn't already installed.
Don't ask me about their implementation, but I know the result is that Gentoo is highly upgradeable. If I remember correctly, when I first installed Gentoo I had gcc 2.95.x, gnome 1.8.x, xfree86, and a 2.4 kernel. I now have gcc 3.3.x, gnome 2.10, x.org, and a recent 2.6 kernel. I've never had to do a clean reinstall. I have just upgraded the individual packages as they became available.
I always find it interesting when people wish for features that are already available in one distro or another. If your distribution isn't meeting all your needs, shop around. You just might get what you are wishing for.
I've never heard that about Amazon.com. In fact, I have had the exact opposite experience so I have to believe that if it was true, they completely turned around many years ago. I buy all sorts of things from them (even a pair of pants once) several times a year, and frequently check their prices at work where they don't have my cookie. Almost every time I have pre-ordered a DVD or book, they have sent me a refund a couple of months after delivery because they have had a good sale on the item.
I once bought a textbook through their marketplace from an independent vendor who failed to deliver it. Amazon promptly refunded my money no questions asked even though they were just the middleman and were taking a complete loss by it. That was the only problem I have had out of dozens of orders with them.
I am constantly telling people to exercise extreme caution when buying something on the internet, but I never hesitate to recommend Amazon.
Posting obscenities and a bad example as anonymous coward is a great way to convince people. The BBC is an order of magnitude less "British-centric" than any American news agency is US-centric. I speak as an American who gets his local news from CNN and has to find out what is going on in the world from bbc.co.uk.
The BBC had excellent coverage of the US presidential election last year. Do you even know who the new prime minister is that was elected May 5th? I'd give you a hint that the same man was re-elected to another term, but you probably still wouldn't know.
I would have a difficult time coming up with a background for politics more easily reconizable than a flag, and an American flag is as good as any, especially for a site hosted in the US. That is why I took the original comment as a joke.
However, the real tragedy is that there is always someone who takes it seriously and responds with an arrogant and vitriolic comment that only serves to lower the opinion of Americans in the international community. The most patriotic American is able to see how great the United States is without resorting to ignoring or insulting the rest of the world.
I didn't mean to disparage the middle click scroll feature. I find it useful myself sometimes. It's only frustrating when I intended to do something else. I experience the same frustration when word processors don't respond to vi commands. It has nothing to do with the software, only with how I absent-mindedly try to use it.
Well, I imagine you had to find a setting to make middle clicking open a new window in the first place. I'm constantly bringing up that stupid scroll icon when I absent-mindedly middle click in IE at work trying to open a link or paste some text.
What about home users? Have you ever had to explain to someone that the FBI wasn't the one that shut down their computer because it performed an "illegal operation"?
Re:Probably most companies will make a profit
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 3, Funny
It's okay. Most of the IT staff at the company I work for think there are too many managers and executives.
I don't know if you were trying to be funny, but your argument is based on a false premise. Just because free software programmers don't receive money in exchange for their efforts doesn't mean they receive nothing of value.
I make regular but small contributions to one open source project. In exchange I get everyone else's contributions to the project plus the contributions to the 834 other packages installed on my system. That's a pretty good return on investment. The fact that some people get the same software for nothing is immaterial. I help make the system work and what I get is worth far more than what I contribute.
What is Joe Computer Guy supposed to say when the e-mail server won't work... "Uh, lemme google some stuff and post to some message boards and get this worked out"?
What do you think the Red Hat tech is going to do? It's not like he wrote the software or has some secret insider information. If something really bad happens I would rather have the middle man in-house, especially if I have to pay IT staff anyway. The trick is to hire someone who knows the right questions to ask to the right people, which I suppose is where Red Hat excels.
It's not that I think Red Hat isn't doing a good job at what they do or that they don't have some growth potential, but I don't think they are poised to be "the next big thing". The reason? A decent in-house C programmer who has run Linux exclusively on his home desktop for a few years and knows how to navigate the mailing lists can provide better support than Red Hat can for similar cost.
I'll concede that it's a huge paradigm shift and that I'm doubtful as to whether it will ever happen on a large scale. However, there are enough additional risks associated with switching that I believe most organizations would not see a benefit in paying a different company for external technical support. In other words, I don't see a massive Linux migration happening without a massive paradigm shift in the way software is supported. Either way, Red Hat gets left out of the loop except for the niche they already fill.
Is there a version of GPL where you don't have to GPL your code if all it does is link to a GPL library?
Yes, it's called the LGPL. There are very few programs designed to be linked as a library that are released under the regular GPL. A notable exception is the mysql libraries.
However, the GPL depends upon copyright law. In my opinion, it would be difficult to prove that a program is a derivative work if it is only dynamically linked. In other words, since it does not modify the original binary in any way and isn't represented as a monolithic piece of software, is it really a derivative work? Does someone who makes a frame designed to perfectly complement a painting violate the copyright of the artist? As far as I know, the precise boundary of a derivative work of software has not yet been tested in court.
I don't think you can use body count as a metric of how violent a movie is. It's more how they die that matters.
Of course that doesn't keep me from trying to use kiss_count + characters_with_foreign_accents as a metric for a romantic movie when deciding whether it's my turn or my wife's to pick a movie.
"But honey, if you want to watch a romantic movie, The Bourne Identity has more kisses in it than Sense and Sensibility, he fights all those people because he's protecting the woman he loves, and almost everyone has foreign accents."
Thank you. Reminds me of the people who could accept genetically engineered creatures in "Lord of the Rings" but not a cherry tomato, or who quibbled over differences between the book and the movie because "that's not how it really happened".
They should focus on the really important details like why spaceships don't have bathrooms, why most user interfaces don't have labels on the buttons, the deplorable lack of network security on the death star, and why spoken galactic basic sounds like english but the written language is totally different.
You haven't lived if you have never owned a car that only yourself could drive properly without instruction.
We used to have a car that would die on every right turn (something to do with the tighter turn radius). The trick was to shift into neutral, brake with your left foot while putting a few extra revs with your right foot, then putting it back into drive after finishing the turn. Turning right after a stop was similar, but involved some minor whiplash. I'm still overly cautious turning right on red.
Is this college tradition dying? I noticed recently that the vast majority of cars in the local community college parking lot are late model with a large sampling of relatively expensive SUVs. Are college students driving daddy's car more often, or just sacrificing food money to keep up with their peers? Has anyone else noticed this trend since they were in school? It seems like kids expect to have what their parents have as soon as they move out, without realizing that their parents worked 20+ years to get where they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I firmly believe the best approach is to receive a diagnosis from the doctor, do as much research as you can from a reputable source, then return to the doctor with intelligent questions. You know your body (or your child's) best, as well as your medical history and how different treatments affect you. Your doctor is best at diagnosis and treatment. Things work ideally when you work as a team. Obviously, minor colds and such don't usually require a doctor's intervention.
Take advantage of the requirement that a consent form be signed before major procedures. My daughter had a surgery that didn't work the first time. The neurologist just sent a nurse to get us to sign the consent form for a second surgery without even talking to us. We refused to give our consent until all of our questions were answered by the doctor. He was mad about having to postpone the surgery for 20 minutes to come and talk to us, but now he respects us and we have a great working relationship.
Don't be afraid to suggest a modification to your treatment due to common sense. Just one example is when my daughter had a pretty bad diaper rash at one point in the hospital. One of the things they did to treat it was an oxygen tube through a hole in her diaper to dry the area out. It cleared the rash up but her temperature kept dropping, so they were going to discontinue the treatment. I made the common sense suggestion that they compromise by turning the flow rate down. Sure enough, it worked. The idea had never occurred to them, but I was able to think of it because I spent so much time thinking about just one patient. Similar events happened throughout my daughter's hospital stay.
Don't be afraid to question a provider's competency or make demands that are in the best interest of yourself our your child. We had one nurse that neglected our daughter, missed feedings, and fabricated results on the regular blood pressure/temperature/etc. checks she didn't do. We complained and never had that nurse again. We only felt bad because that meant one of our friends got stuck with her all the time, but she was watched very closely after that. Don't make an accusation without just cause, though, or you hurt your own credibility.
Don't be afraid to point out something you think is important to your doctor. It may not be, but at least they will have all the information they need. Doctors make a lot of assumptions based on what you don't tell them as much as what you do, whether they are conscious of doing so or not. Thinking that if it was important the doctor would have asked is a good way to delay getting the best treatment possible.
It all boils down to being well-informed and assertive, but not overbearing. I won't say we have perfect communication with our doctors, but things have been a lot better since we learned how to deal with them. Just yesterday, my daughter had an outpatient procedure after which they were having a hard time keeping her from chewing on the IV in her right hand. If they had just asked us, we could have told her she was strongly right-handed and they wouldn't have a problem if they put the IV in her left hand. Next time we will proactively make the suggestion.
Believe it or not, most doctors like patients who are well-informed, and patients who are well-informed usually worry less and get better treatment. Just don't take it to extremes.
It meets every one of her user requirements to a tee: shiny stuff to wiggle around and click, and playing of veggie-tales DVDs (with a little help).
We both know that will probably never happen, so I just introduce people to Linux one computer at a time. Just last night, I introduced my brother-in-law to Knoppix. All I hope is that one day he will respond to a disparaging remark about Linux by saying that one time his hard drive crashed two days before a paper was due, when he didn't have time or money to replace it, and Linux came to the rescue and was very easy to use with nothing but a CD-ROM and USB flash drive.
Businesses are a different issue altogether. I will just say that businesses who migrate to a single-vendor solution without an easy means to migrate away from it are shortsighted and deserve what they get if there are any problems.
As far as interoperability goes, I don't think you even want to go there. Free software developers spend an enormous amount of effort in this area and have near 100% interop with Microsoft products with very little to work with. If Microsoft opened up their specifications, we would have full 100% interop within a month.
Good grammar, spelling, and punctuation is not only about communicating a message. It is about the quality of the link. Reading should be as pleasant as talking face to face with an old friend in a quiet room. Using bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation is more like yelling into a cell phone at a ballpark. There is no doubt that communication takes place, but it could be a lot better.
Recently, I have become interested in taking it up and actually using it on the air. I don't have a straight key or a paddle yet (planning an ebay purchase soon), but my rig does have a feature where I can send morse using 2 buttons on my microphone, which is about the same size as a cell phone with the same type of buttons. Basically, I hold it in both hands with my thumbs on top. My left thumb sends the dahs and my right thumb sends the dits.
If a guy like me who hasn't touched morse code in 4 years can send at 15 WPM after a few minutes of practice using my microphone buttons, surely someone who does it all the time can do much better on a similar cell phone setup. I'm not saying it's the ideal way to send morse code, but it is certainly useable. And the most difficult part of morse code, the receiving and decoding (I can only receive 5-8 wpm), is already handled for you by the phone.
Since I regularly pick up stations from a large part of the world on the 20 meter wavelength band on my ham radio, I don't think it is too useful for position information. However, a statistical analysis of the proportion of callsigns I hear leads me to believe I am somewhere in the western half of the continental United States. Could someone please give me directions to the nearest gas station?
I wish that would count for as much at work. "I know I didn't get the project done, but as you'll see in this beautiful presentation, I could have easily finished if I hadn't spent so much time on slashdot."
When two versions of a software package can coexist and are necessary to satisfy dependencies, they are placed in different slots. Services let the user choose between different system loggers, cron daemons, kernel versions, X servers, etc. Defaults are chosen, but are only installed if another package providing the service isn't already installed.
Don't ask me about their implementation, but I know the result is that Gentoo is highly upgradeable. If I remember correctly, when I first installed Gentoo I had gcc 2.95.x, gnome 1.8.x, xfree86, and a 2.4 kernel. I now have gcc 3.3.x, gnome 2.10, x.org, and a recent 2.6 kernel. I've never had to do a clean reinstall. I have just upgraded the individual packages as they became available.
I always find it interesting when people wish for features that are already available in one distro or another. If your distribution isn't meeting all your needs, shop around. You just might get what you are wishing for.
I once bought a textbook through their marketplace from an independent vendor who failed to deliver it. Amazon promptly refunded my money no questions asked even though they were just the middleman and were taking a complete loss by it. That was the only problem I have had out of dozens of orders with them.
I am constantly telling people to exercise extreme caution when buying something on the internet, but I never hesitate to recommend Amazon.
The BBC had excellent coverage of the US presidential election last year. Do you even know who the new prime minister is that was elected May 5th? I'd give you a hint that the same man was re-elected to another term, but you probably still wouldn't know.
I would have a difficult time coming up with a background for politics more easily reconizable than a flag, and an American flag is as good as any, especially for a site hosted in the US. That is why I took the original comment as a joke.
However, the real tragedy is that there is always someone who takes it seriously and responds with an arrogant and vitriolic comment that only serves to lower the opinion of Americans in the international community. The most patriotic American is able to see how great the United States is without resorting to ignoring or insulting the rest of the world.
I didn't mean to disparage the middle click scroll feature. I find it useful myself sometimes. It's only frustrating when I intended to do something else. I experience the same frustration when word processors don't respond to vi commands. It has nothing to do with the software, only with how I absent-mindedly try to use it.
Well, I imagine you had to find a setting to make middle clicking open a new window in the first place. I'm constantly bringing up that stupid scroll icon when I absent-mindedly middle click in IE at work trying to open a link or paste some text.
What about home users? Have you ever had to explain to someone that the FBI wasn't the one that shut down their computer because it performed an "illegal operation"?
It's okay. Most of the IT staff at the company I work for think there are too many managers and executives.
Some people just don't do their homework before posting. I'm more concerned about the disruption when Windows and Linux get native IPv6 support.
I don't mean to be a math nazi, but you missed the decimal point. It should be $1.002 spent for every dollar earned.
I make regular but small contributions to one open source project. In exchange I get everyone else's contributions to the project plus the contributions to the 834 other packages installed on my system. That's a pretty good return on investment. The fact that some people get the same software for nothing is immaterial. I help make the system work and what I get is worth far more than what I contribute.
I'll concede that it's a huge paradigm shift and that I'm doubtful as to whether it will ever happen on a large scale. However, there are enough additional risks associated with switching that I believe most organizations would not see a benefit in paying a different company for external technical support. In other words, I don't see a massive Linux migration happening without a massive paradigm shift in the way software is supported. Either way, Red Hat gets left out of the loop except for the niche they already fill.
Better than that. If they buy 5 computers they start turning a profit!
Yes, it's called the LGPL. There are very few programs designed to be linked as a library that are released under the regular GPL. A notable exception is the mysql libraries.
However, the GPL depends upon copyright law. In my opinion, it would be difficult to prove that a program is a derivative work if it is only dynamically linked. In other words, since it does not modify the original binary in any way and isn't represented as a monolithic piece of software, is it really a derivative work? Does someone who makes a frame designed to perfectly complement a painting violate the copyright of the artist? As far as I know, the precise boundary of a derivative work of software has not yet been tested in court.
Of course that doesn't keep me from trying to use kiss_count + characters_with_foreign_accents as a metric for a romantic movie when deciding whether it's my turn or my wife's to pick a movie.
"But honey, if you want to watch a romantic movie, The Bourne Identity has more kisses in it than Sense and Sensibility, he fights all those people because he's protecting the woman he loves, and almost everyone has foreign accents."
They should focus on the really important details like why spaceships don't have bathrooms, why most user interfaces don't have labels on the buttons, the deplorable lack of network security on the death star, and why spoken galactic basic sounds like english but the written language is totally different.
It's a story, people, not "historical documents".
We used to have a car that would die on every right turn (something to do with the tighter turn radius). The trick was to shift into neutral, brake with your left foot while putting a few extra revs with your right foot, then putting it back into drive after finishing the turn. Turning right after a stop was similar, but involved some minor whiplash. I'm still overly cautious turning right on red.
Is this college tradition dying? I noticed recently that the vast majority of cars in the local community college parking lot are late model with a large sampling of relatively expensive SUVs. Are college students driving daddy's car more often, or just sacrificing food money to keep up with their peers? Has anyone else noticed this trend since they were in school? It seems like kids expect to have what their parents have as soon as they move out, without realizing that their parents worked 20+ years to get where they are.