You had a bunch of competing standards that barely interoperated at all. Over time, one became dominant and everyone lined up to support it.
The government has (with help from private industry) given us a unified TV standard, a unified FM and AM radio standard, even standards for transmitting fingerprint information. We have unified traffic signs and signals and a unified electrical system. These all work on a standard that a TV (or radio, or cell phone, or Ethernet card) in Hawaii will work exactly the same if it gets picked up and moved to Florida. But suddenly everyone is scared of the government trying to unify health records, even if there's few competing standards at the start?
What, you think Ethernet was the only networking standard out there? There were at least 3-4 other competing standards for data transmission (forget physical layer). It all got worked out.
CIO of Harvard Medical School, among other jobs writes pretty frequently about electronic healthcare records. He's also the one that got an RFID chip in his arm and got his genome sequenced a few months ago.
What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate.
I've looked through the VA's code for VISTA. What unreadable garbage. MUMPS has supported functions and variables with names longer than a few characters for years now. The spaghetti-code logic is terrible. It's pretty apparent that the software was developed by multiple contract agencies over several decades when, quite literally, the left hand didn't know what the right was doing.
Some of that I won't dispute (the spaghetti code - I still have dreams^Wnightmares about a 'three slash stuff'). At the time, the issue was there were still VMS systems from the '70s that were still in use and had limited features.
That being said, the coding standards that were used were first-rate. I learned a lot about proper coding and code review at the time. I'm not a coder by trade anymore, but I almost never see code to those standards anymore.
There was a facility for getting payments from insurers (it was a revenue source for them at one time). It's been 15 years since I did any work on it, so a lot of my memory on it is a bit fuzzy now. Then again, perhaps some of my code still lives on.
I'm failing to see the problem here. This sounds no different than photocopying a set of printouts. The HIPPA laws only cover leaking records to people who aren't authorized to see them. Since it's your wife's records, you don't fall in that category and should be allowed to see them.
I'd say that if you want an electronic records infrastructure that works well, check out what the Dept of Veterans Affairs has been doing. Most of their records have been 'online' (at least in a computer) for well over 20 years.
And in case you're worried about the security of the code, almost all of it is available via FOIA and is available online.
ObDisc: I used to work for the VA in the early '90s and worked on their FOIA code release.
but makes perfectly fine cables from what I saw. I generally don't do it anymore unless I have a very custom length as pre-made are really inexpensive and over 10 cables I usually have to re-crimp at least one end. Does your boss have any proof that hand-made cables are inferior?
This and this. We've been using Tivo since 2001 and I'd say our viewing is the exact opposite of what the Economist says.
I think the only reason we see ads anymore is when my daughter is watching a pre-recorded show from Disney Channel or Cartoon Network - she can't work the fast-forward yet.
It's just so great not to have to be tied to the network's idea of when I should be watching TV. Have a meeting on Monday nights? No problem, Heroes, 24, and House will be there waiting for me in full HD glory.
It's a 2.5Ghz 64-bit processor, dual GigE. If you're talking concurrency, don't forget OS overhead for each of those 21 systems. Each has a kernel, cache, kernel- and user-land processes running. For modern PCs it's not that big a deal, but it adds up for tiny PCs (consider the NSLU2 which can get overwhelmed running dhcpd and bind).
Again, I'm not saying that this is a bad idea, I think this implementation isn't much compared to what's out there now.
256M per node times 21 nodes equals 5GB. 84 watts is nice, but I just built a home server with 4GB of RAM and 2 1TB drives that has a low power AMD chipset in it. At idle, it's about 70 watts, and gets to about 100 watts when under load. Replacing the two 1TB drives with an 80GB SSD would probably be closer to what if represented with FAWN.
Figuring $100 for the motherboard and parts makes that total system cost $2100. My server was about $500.
Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting idea. Using an Atom can get you a lot more performance for not much more power use, and you can go up to at least 2GB RAM per node. But there's a limit to how small you can make a single item in a cluster before you're duplicating effort without much benefit.
Does this version come with the lpia kernel? I recently got a Dell Mini and am still using the lpia-enabled 8.04 distro it comes with. I'd like to give Netbook Remix a go but I'm concerned that the stock x86 kernel will reduce battery life (which is already not quite as great as I'd hoped for).
Anyone know the status of the lpia stuff?
I have 8.10 running the lpia port on my mini 9. I found some site online that showed how to install and configure the UNR components so that it looks like the 8.04 version.
8.04 had a few serious issues (like using ssh over wireless) that made me drop it pretty quickly. The 8.10 kernel doesn't like one of the WPA modes and will hang hard if you try to connect, so I'm looking forward to 9.04 and upgrading to that.
On a side note, I wanted to compile some software for my mini without wasting its SSD with gcc and all the development tools I need. You can easily install an lpia port in VirtualBox and it works quite nicely.
My basement door doesn't exactly seal right (my goal this year is to replace it) and we used to have mice coming into the basement all the time.
The fix was to get one of those high-frequency boxes you plug in and clicks every now and then. Ever since I put one near that door, we haven't had a mouse problem.
Second thought. If you do decide to use snap traps or glue traps, be sure to use peanut butter instead of cheese. Cheese dries out too quickly and they never eat it. PB stays good for a long time.
Third thought (yea I said two, here's a bonus). The very popular anticoagulant called Warfarin (AKA Coumadin) was originally used as rat poison.
This doesn't get rid of the electoral college. It changes how the electoral college works, but there will still be 7 people from Iowa going to the electoral college to vote for president.
Well, I'm pro-choice (and ex-Catholic), and I didn't find a problem with that ad. At least it wasn't the usual "You'll burn in hell if you have an abortion!11!!".
XP has been out for almost 8 years now, and Vista has been out for two. Microsoft has already extended the timeframe for OEMs shipping XP (my Dell Mini shipped with it). Their support for XP will extend far longer than the time they stop shipping to OEMs, so I'd wager that XP still has at least two to three years to it.
Even then, there are still places that use Windows 95 or 98. Wasn't the big news last week that the White House computers still use Windows 2000?
I'm not saying everyone using XP will jump to Linux, but to say they'll jump to Windows 7 is not certain.
Leaving your snark aside, if your point was true then we'd see a mass migration to Vista. It isn't happening, and so the future of Windows 7 remains in doubt.
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Heh. I once had my BT adapter handling audio, a EVDO connection to the Internet, and a connection to my GPS all working at once.
Yes, and therein lies the point.
You had a bunch of competing standards that barely interoperated at all. Over time, one became dominant and everyone lined up to support it.
The government has (with help from private industry) given us a unified TV standard, a unified FM and AM radio standard, even standards for transmitting fingerprint information. We have unified traffic signs and signals and a unified electrical system. These all work on a standard that a TV (or radio, or cell phone, or Ethernet card) in Hawaii will work exactly the same if it gets picked up and moved to Florida. But suddenly everyone is scared of the government trying to unify health records, even if there's few competing standards at the start?
What, you think Ethernet was the only networking standard out there? There were at least 3-4 other competing standards for data transmission (forget physical layer). It all got worked out.
You think that isn't happening now?
CIO of Harvard Medical School, among other jobs writes pretty frequently about electronic healthcare records. He's also the one that got an RFID chip in his arm and got his genome sequenced a few months ago.
What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate.
Companies can interoperate when they have to.
Take (just by pure example) computer networking.
I've looked through the VA's code for VISTA. What unreadable garbage. MUMPS has supported functions and variables with names longer than a few characters for years now. The spaghetti-code logic is terrible. It's pretty apparent that the software was developed by multiple contract agencies over several decades when, quite literally, the left hand didn't know what the right was doing.
Some of that I won't dispute (the spaghetti code - I still have dreams^Wnightmares about a 'three slash stuff'). At the time, the issue was there were still VMS systems from the '70s that were still in use and had limited features.
That being said, the coding standards that were used were first-rate. I learned a lot about proper coding and code review at the time. I'm not a coder by trade anymore, but I almost never see code to those standards anymore.
There was a facility for getting payments from insurers (it was a revenue source for them at one time). It's been 15 years since I did any work on it, so a lot of my memory on it is a bit fuzzy now. Then again, perhaps some of my code still lives on.
I'm failing to see the problem here. This sounds no different than photocopying a set of printouts. The HIPPA laws only cover leaking records to people who aren't authorized to see them. Since it's your wife's records, you don't fall in that category and should be allowed to see them.
I'd say that if you want an electronic records infrastructure that works well, check out what the Dept of Veterans Affairs has been doing. Most of their records have been 'online' (at least in a computer) for well over 20 years.
And in case you're worried about the security of the code, almost all of it is available via FOIA and is available online.
ObDisc: I used to work for the VA in the early '90s and worked on their FOIA code release.
50x LESS means you have to subtract since you have two operations going on.
50 * x = 1 .02
x =
Ok, so we solved for x.
Now since it's 50X less, we subtract:
1-x = y .98=y
1-.02 = y
So you're really using .98 units of electricity. Not much in the savings department.
Yes, and I cn rd wrds tht r splld wtht vwls, but that doesn't make it right.
Argh!
It's one of the following:
1/50 the power usage
or
a standard PC uses 50x the power of this NIC
but makes perfectly fine cables from what I saw. I generally don't do it anymore unless I have a very custom length as pre-made are really inexpensive and over 10 cables I usually have to re-crimp at least one end. Does your boss have any proof that hand-made cables are inferior?
This and this. We've been using Tivo since 2001 and I'd say our viewing is the exact opposite of what the Economist says.
I think the only reason we see ads anymore is when my daughter is watching a pre-recorded show from Disney Channel or Cartoon Network - she can't work the fast-forward yet.
It's just so great not to have to be tied to the network's idea of when I should be watching TV. Have a meeting on Monday nights? No problem, Heroes, 24, and House will be there waiting for me in full HD glory.
It's a 2.5Ghz 64-bit processor, dual GigE. If you're talking concurrency, don't forget OS overhead for each of those 21 systems. Each has a kernel, cache, kernel- and user-land processes running. For modern PCs it's not that big a deal, but it adds up for tiny PCs (consider the NSLU2 which can get overwhelmed running dhcpd and bind).
Again, I'm not saying that this is a bad idea, I think this implementation isn't much compared to what's out there now.
No, I mentioned the 1TB drive that could be replaced with a single 80GB SSD.
256M per node times 21 nodes equals 5GB. 84 watts is nice, but I just built a home server with 4GB of RAM and 2 1TB drives that has a low power AMD chipset in it. At idle, it's about 70 watts, and gets to about 100 watts when under load. Replacing the two 1TB drives with an 80GB SSD would probably be closer to what if represented with FAWN.
Figuring $100 for the motherboard and parts makes that total system cost $2100. My server was about $500.
Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting idea. Using an Atom can get you a lot more performance for not much more power use, and you can go up to at least 2GB RAM per node. But there's a limit to how small you can make a single item in a cluster before you're duplicating effort without much benefit.
You'd rather have OMGPONIES?
Does this version come with the lpia kernel? I recently got a Dell Mini and am still using the lpia-enabled 8.04 distro it comes with. I'd like to give Netbook Remix a go but I'm concerned that the stock x86 kernel will reduce battery life (which is already not quite as great as I'd hoped for).
Anyone know the status of the lpia stuff?
I have 8.10 running the lpia port on my mini 9. I found some site online that showed how to install and configure the UNR components so that it looks like the 8.04 version.
8.04 had a few serious issues (like using ssh over wireless) that made me drop it pretty quickly. The 8.10 kernel doesn't like one of the WPA modes and will hang hard if you try to connect, so I'm looking forward to 9.04 and upgrading to that.
On a side note, I wanted to compile some software for my mini without wasting its SSD with gcc and all the development tools I need. You can easily install an lpia port in VirtualBox and it works quite nicely.
Xen supports live migrations too. Not sure what the big deal is.
My basement door doesn't exactly seal right (my goal this year is to replace it) and we used to have mice coming into the basement all the time.
The fix was to get one of those high-frequency boxes you plug in and clicks every now and then. Ever since I put one near that door, we haven't had a mouse problem.
Second thought. If you do decide to use snap traps or glue traps, be sure to use peanut butter instead of cheese. Cheese dries out too quickly and they never eat it. PB stays good for a long time.
Third thought (yea I said two, here's a bonus). The very popular anticoagulant called Warfarin (AKA Coumadin) was originally used as rat poison.
This doesn't get rid of the electoral college. It changes how the electoral college works, but there will still be 7 people from Iowa going to the electoral college to vote for president.
Might have meant KVM
Well, I'm pro-choice (and ex-Catholic), and I didn't find a problem with that ad. At least it wasn't the usual "You'll burn in hell if you have an abortion!11!!".
XP has been out for almost 8 years now, and Vista has been out for two. Microsoft has already extended the timeframe for OEMs shipping XP (my Dell Mini shipped with it). Their support for XP will extend far longer than the time they stop shipping to OEMs, so I'd wager that XP still has at least two to three years to it.
Even then, there are still places that use Windows 95 or 98. Wasn't the big news last week that the White House computers still use Windows 2000?
I'm not saying everyone using XP will jump to Linux, but to say they'll jump to Windows 7 is not certain.
Leaving your snark aside, if your point was true then we'd see a mass migration to Vista. It isn't happening, and so the future of Windows 7 remains in doubt.