Forgot to mention that if you use the software vendors presales support team and one of their Known Good configurations support will be a LOT easier to get from them.
My company decided it wanted a new FEA machine. They decided to stay with the existing software company, so I called up the company and explained the situation and asked for the department that provided pre-sales support, specifically hardware recommendations. Turns out they had a strong bench of people ready to help with that and detailed Known Good configurations for each major hardware company. We simply decided looked at the software licensing costs, the hardware costs and how long our average scenario would take under various software/hardware configs and sized it to handled the existing number of jobs plus expected growth.
We decided what we could live with in terms of how long an average job would take (we decided we could live with 24 hours as an average). We then decided what sort of tradeoffs we could make in terms of hardware (an up front sunk cost amortized over many years) versus the annual software license fees. A little more spent on hardware up front meant we could save on software licensing costs by taking a step down in numbers of processors permitted. We then presented this decision to their presales people to get it vetted and asked for suggestions. In our case we took the suggestion that we archive saved results to our enterprise grade disk array and put the money into Raid 0 SSD's to speed up the overall job time. As always, RAM was the cheapest upgrade so we maxed that out.
Everyone signed off, we took the specs to a local system builder with a good reputation, told them no changes of ANY sort to any component, negotiated a price that included acceptance testing to ensure compliance and made sure they had enough of a profit margin so as to discourage shortcuts. They delivered, we tested, it gave expected performance results, we accepted it and paid them. That system is installed today and delivers the results it was designed for.
I would suggest a similar course for you. 1. Decide on the software first. Make darn sure it will do what you want. 2. Decide on how fast jobs need to be finished and how many per week/month/year to prevent over specing 3. Call presales support to get hardware recommendations 4. Make the decision on hardware cost versus software licensing cost versus number of jobs to be done 5. Do your homework! Understand what you are specing, talk to others, particularly customers. 6. Take your new found knowledge back to presales a few times to make sure you did not miss any improvements and you truly understand what you are doing, you are betting your job on this. 7. Find a builder, local or the hardware manufacturer, negotiate terms. Make sure you leave a decent profit margin to avoid the temptation to skimp. 8. Test, test, test. Confirm all configuration decisions with presales support. 9. Pay 'em and install the machine. 10. Don't forget to follow up to ensure it continues to work as designed and that procedures are being followed. In my case, we checked that all runs were backed up on our enterprise disk array.
Here are a couple of things to add to your dream system:
1. The ability for the patient to upload lab results from other doctors. People with chronic conditions DO change doctors and having a baseline is vital in disease management.
2. The ability to download those same lab results so the patient can keep a personal file for use by another doctor (or themselves) in the future.
3. A "WARNING, DON'T PRESCRIBE ME THESE MEDS" section. My wife has been prescribed more meds that conflict with others or worse, been prescribed meds that should NOT be prescribed to anybody with her condition than you can shake a stick at. C'mon guys! You ain't perfect, stop acting like MDeity's and let's work together to minimize medication problems.
4. A description (maybe a picture?) of what each med should look like along with the script. This would help avoid the wrong meds being dispensed by the pharmacy.
5. Automatic sending of prescriptions to the pharmacy. (Hey, some docs already do this electronically.)
6. Putting your copy of the PDR CD-ROM online and available to your patients.
7. Putting your copy of the Drug Interaction Guide online, yada yada.
8. A place for the patient to make notations on each medication prescribed (call this an annotated medication history). Currently my wife does this manually on the computer, but it makes a lot more sense to make this available to the doctor NOW, rather than having to wave it under their nose during the 2 minutes they have to decide on which med to try next.
9. A place for speciality patients (high blood pressure, pregnancies) to chart information such as daily BP's or weight gain, etc.)
10. TIGHT, TIGHT! TIGHT!!! SECURITY
11. The ability to change or delete info if the patient becomes uncomfortable with the service. Such as if your computer got hacked, I'd bail out until you got your act together.
12. FYI, the more serious the patient is about controlling chronic conditions that more knowledgeable and more motivated they are to use your services and the less likely they are to change doctors. Remember, the less patient turnover you have, the more money you make and the better the outcome is for the patient.
13. Access to the physician portions of all those good web sites like Web MD as well as links to sites looking for volunteers for new meds.
14. A clear and cogent explanation of each test, what is being accomplished by it, what the results mean, etc. A patient with diverticulitis would love to know what a hematocrit is, why you keep taking it and what it means when the bottom drops out of the numbers.
Fine it's not NIMBY. Now, when the old powerplant goes offline and the bare lot takes it's place Morro Bay can go back to living without electricity except for what it can generate within the town limits. I hope you like it.
You want power? Put up a plant of whatever type and design you like, BUT be willing to pay a FAIR price for the juice from it. Probably double to quadruple what you are paying from the Duke power plant now. And yes, I know Morro Bay.
Don't like either solution? Then it is NIMBY because you are trying to foist your problem onto somebody else, somewhere else, without any regard for finding or PAYING for a solution.
Along similar lines, there are millions of reel to reel tapes out there. When we convert them to another format for archival purposes to be read on another machine some decades in the future are we not breaking DMCA big time? The tools we use convert the old reel to reel format to a CD format and while the information may be the same the format is not and it is a definite hack to convert it. Would the CIO's of the Fortune 500 step forward to be handcuffed?
Today a snow storm swept through Hell paralyzing all traffic and causing great damage. The governor of Hell, Satan Merkatrig, was quoted as saying "if Microsoft withdraws litigation again I'm going to be up to my horns in snow!"
The governor has asked for a Federal disaster declaration and FEMA has responded by opening a branch office in the region and is busy staffing it. It is said that Bill Clinton will make an inspection tour of Hell tomorrow and while an entry visa has been issued, whether the Governor of Hell will issue an exit visa to the President is in doubt.
Um, as I understand it, failing to change your encryption key allows your friendly spooks at the NSA to decrypt your messages in too damn short a period of time.
Using an encryption key once and then changing it prevents this.
And just how do you think these nano machines are going to know what to fix? Hmmmmm? The genome project will be very useful in understand what's wrong from the ground up instead of the top down.
Suggest you use www.mailstart.com or www.webbox.com to send mail from work. Your messages are kept OFF their computers and only a web address is usually kept, not each full page you receive or send from the net. If they intercept your password to hack your email outside the DOE then it's a federal crime.
Also, use your arrow keys to create noise if they are using a keyboard buffer. Sand in the gears baby!
I repeat... They are going to sell millions of these to parents who have already purchased NetNanny and other "save my child from the Internet" products.
Slashdot Mirror
Forgot to mention that if you use the software vendors presales support team and one of their Known Good configurations support will be a LOT easier to get from them.
My company decided it wanted a new FEA machine. They decided to stay with the existing software company, so I called up the company and explained the situation and asked for the department that provided pre-sales support, specifically hardware recommendations. Turns out they had a strong bench of people ready to help with that and detailed Known Good configurations for each major hardware company. We simply decided looked at the software licensing costs, the hardware costs and how long our average scenario would take under various software/hardware configs and sized it to handled the existing number of jobs plus expected growth.
We decided what we could live with in terms of how long an average job would take (we decided we could live with 24 hours as an average). We then decided what sort of tradeoffs we could make in terms of hardware (an up front sunk cost amortized over many years) versus the annual software license fees. A little more spent on hardware up front meant we could save on software licensing costs by taking a step down in numbers of processors permitted. We then presented this decision to their presales people to get it vetted and asked for suggestions. In our case we took the suggestion that we archive saved results to our enterprise grade disk array and put the money into Raid 0 SSD's to speed up the overall job time. As always, RAM was the cheapest upgrade so we maxed that out.
Everyone signed off, we took the specs to a local system builder with a good reputation, told them no changes of ANY sort to any component, negotiated a price that included acceptance testing to ensure compliance and made sure they had enough of a profit margin so as to discourage shortcuts. They delivered, we tested, it gave expected performance results, we accepted it and paid them. That system is installed today and delivers the results it was designed for.
I would suggest a similar course for you.
1. Decide on the software first. Make darn sure it will do what you want.
2. Decide on how fast jobs need to be finished and how many per week/month/year to prevent over specing
3. Call presales support to get hardware recommendations
4. Make the decision on hardware cost versus software licensing cost versus number of jobs to be done
5. Do your homework! Understand what you are specing, talk to others, particularly customers.
6. Take your new found knowledge back to presales a few times to make sure you did not miss any improvements and you truly understand what you are doing, you are betting your job on this.
7. Find a builder, local or the hardware manufacturer, negotiate terms. Make sure you leave a decent profit margin to avoid the temptation to skimp.
8. Test, test, test. Confirm all configuration decisions with presales support.
9. Pay 'em and install the machine.
10. Don't forget to follow up to ensure it continues to work as designed and that procedures are being followed. In my case, we checked that all runs were backed up on our enterprise disk array.
Here are a couple of things to add to your dream system:
1. The ability for the patient to upload lab results from other doctors. People with chronic conditions DO change doctors and having a baseline is vital in disease management.
2. The ability to download those same lab results so the patient can keep a personal file for use by another doctor (or themselves) in the future.
3. A "WARNING, DON'T PRESCRIBE ME THESE MEDS" section. My wife has been prescribed more meds that conflict with others or worse, been prescribed meds that should NOT be prescribed to anybody with her condition than you can shake a stick at. C'mon guys! You ain't perfect, stop acting like MDeity's and let's work together to minimize medication problems.
4. A description (maybe a picture?) of what each med should look like along with the script. This would help avoid the wrong meds being dispensed by the pharmacy.
5. Automatic sending of prescriptions to the pharmacy. (Hey, some docs already do this electronically.)
6. Putting your copy of the PDR CD-ROM online and available to your patients.
7. Putting your copy of the Drug Interaction Guide online, yada yada.
8. A place for the patient to make notations on each medication prescribed (call this an annotated medication history). Currently my wife does this manually on the computer, but it makes a lot more sense to make this available to the doctor NOW, rather than having to wave it under their nose during the 2 minutes they have to decide on which med to try next.
9. A place for speciality patients (high blood pressure, pregnancies) to chart information such as daily BP's or weight gain, etc.)
10. TIGHT, TIGHT! TIGHT!!! SECURITY
11. The ability to change or delete info if the patient becomes uncomfortable with the service. Such as if your computer got hacked, I'd bail out until you got your act together.
12. FYI, the more serious the patient is about controlling chronic conditions that more knowledgeable and more motivated they are to use your services and the less likely they are to change doctors. Remember, the less patient turnover you have, the more money you make and the better the outcome is for the patient.
13. Access to the physician portions of all those good web sites like Web MD as well as links to sites looking for volunteers for new meds.
14. A clear and cogent explanation of each test, what is being accomplished by it, what the results mean, etc. A patient with diverticulitis would love to know what a hematocrit is, why you keep taking it and what it means when the bottom drops out of the numbers.
Screw cable, screw DSL. Go with two way satellite and be independent of everybody.
(plug) yes, I work for DirectPC/DirectTV(unplug)
Fine it's not NIMBY. Now, when the old powerplant goes offline and the bare lot takes it's place Morro Bay can go back to living without electricity except for what it can generate within the town limits. I hope you like it.
You want power? Put up a plant of whatever type and design you like, BUT be willing to pay a FAIR price for the juice from it. Probably double to quadruple what you are paying from the Duke power plant now. And yes, I know Morro Bay.
Don't like either solution? Then it is NIMBY because you are trying to foist your problem onto somebody else, somewhere else, without any regard for finding or PAYING for a solution.
Along similar lines, there are millions of reel to reel tapes out there. When we convert them to another format for archival purposes to be read on another machine some decades in the future are we not breaking DMCA big time? The tools we use convert the old reel to reel format to a CD format and while the information may be the same the format is not and it is a definite hack to convert it. Would the CIO's of the Fortune 500 step forward to be handcuffed?
http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/bmpiapage.htm 'nuff said
Today a snow storm swept through Hell paralyzing all traffic and causing great damage. The governor of Hell, Satan Merkatrig, was quoted as saying "if Microsoft withdraws litigation again I'm going to be up to my horns in snow!"
The governor has asked for a Federal disaster declaration and FEMA has responded by opening a branch office in the region and is busy staffing it. It is said that Bill Clinton will make an inspection tour of Hell tomorrow and while an entry visa has been issued, whether the Governor of Hell will issue an exit visa to the President is in doubt.
Um, as I understand it, failing to change your encryption key allows your friendly spooks at the NSA to decrypt your messages in too damn short a period of time.
Using an encryption key once and then changing it prevents this.
Any crypto-freaks out there care to add anything?
And just how do you think these nano machines are going to know what to fix? Hmmmmm? The genome project will be very useful in understand what's wrong from the ground up instead of the top down.
Suggest you use www.mailstart.com or www.webbox.com to send mail from work. Your messages are kept OFF their computers and only a web address is usually kept, not each full page you receive or send from the net. If they intercept your password to hack your email outside the DOE then it's a federal crime.
Also, use your arrow keys to create noise if they are using a keyboard buffer. Sand in the gears baby!
I repeat... They are going to sell millions of these to parents who have already purchased NetNanny and other "save my child from the Internet" products.
I can think of a number of good uses for this product:
1. Keyboard for the main console of servers and minis. No more wondering who did what when. (Please add a timestamp feature to this product)
2. Keyboard for programmers and regression testers "how did THAT happen?"
3. Keyboard for employees who have been written up for computer misuse.
4. Banks and other high security uses. Bet you see a lot of sales for apps that handle money.
5. My kids PC. (parents do have eyes in the back of their heads) Potentially the big money maker.
Need I go on?