For me, one of the biggest letdowns of this new generation of Macbook Pros was the fact that the optical drive was still a necessity, there wasn't an option to swap out the optical drive with an SSD. Come on Apple, it's 2011, how many people actually use optical drives anymore, esp. on the go? External USB dvd burners are now a dime a dozen, there is no reason I need to carry one with me everywhere I go.
Just take the stupid thing out and put another drive in it. Yeah, it would be nice to have optical free setup from the factory, but there are third party frames that hold the HDD and plug into the SATA line. Takes about 20 minutes. You really don't need a CD with OS X as long as you have a firewire or USB external drive that supports Target Mode.
Not a coincidence. I've discovered that I can live without "buying" music, and I will be damned if I give them another penny. Plus as many others have pointed out, the music sucks balls anyway. Who wants to listen to 90 year old "rock stars" cough up a lung, or pre-pubescent teenagers sing about the "angst" of a life they haven't even begun to live yet, or stupid "look at me being a gangsta is so cool but all my friends are dead or in jail" crap. They can keep it.
You know, there are other music genres besides Country & Western.
The ability for someone to see the contents of those records in transit is irrelevant because the owner of the information has requested it be sent that way.
While the patient has requested that they see their records, they did not request that anybody that can pick off the email in transit can see them.
Nice try, but that argument is roughly the same as telling the patient they won't understand them so its dangerous to give them to the patient. The user has requested them, you are required to supply them, period.
I have no idea why you think that requiring secure email is connected with whether on not the patient understands their medical records. It's simply using an insecure method of communication for material that by nature is intensely private is not a good idea. Yes, you have to give the records to the patient (that was the issue in TFA) but the medical provider does have some leeway in how they are delivered and plain old email isn't allowed.
My wife is pregnant and pregnant women aren't supposed to be around mercury. So I'm actually replacing some CFLs in my house with incandescent bulbs.
Tell your wife not to eat either the CFLs or the incandescents. What do you think happens, the mercury in the bulb jumps out and attacks you? And for sure, stay away from Tuna fish and coal fired power plants.
No, you can get incandescent heat lamps that are (somewhat) more efficient than using a regular bulb for heat. If all you're using is a 40 w bulb, you're not needing much heat and then a basic heat tape should work. A bit more expensive but probably safer in the long run.
Every space geek ought to memorize that footage. Absolutely astounding. I just wish one could get a high res version in DVD format. They edited an enormous amount of film to get the video. I'd just as soon stare at the whole thing for hours.
Me: "Could you email me a copy of my (digital) xrays?"
Them: "Sorry, that would be a HIPAA violation."
That would be since your name is one them and, as we all know, email is basically and electronic postcard. You certainly can make secure email systems and larger health care organizations often have them. Smaller places just don't want to bother with it yet. Keep whining at them.
Me: "Could you copy them to my flash drive then?"
Them: "Sorry, that would be a HIPAA violation."
That's not a HIPAA violation, that's a obvious security issue. Nobody in their right mind would let you plug some random flash drive into the hospital network.
Me: "Okay fine, could you print me a copy?"
Them: "Sorry, we can't print from this system. We set it up that way to save the rainforests."...
If that's really true, then the health care provider is bullshitting you. Everybody has the capacity to print on xray film - that's the current 'lowest common denominator" for radiologic data. The other common way is a CD and pretty much anybody I've seen can at least do CDs of CT or MRI data (since that is always digital anyway).
HIPAA is currently being used as the common excuse for not wanting to do something in Medical Records. It's a handy little boogyman. There has to be some upside to Governmental regulation.
Are there any studies out there about how much HIPAA compliance costs?
Probably. They won't mean much. HIPAA is the new boogyman so any 'compliance cost' estimate will be full of untested assumptions, incorrect assumptions, wild ass guess and gonzo statistics. It's really NOT all that hard to follow most of the HIPAA rules. DHS has made it clear that they're not going after each and every little mistake that people make but are instead going after willful, major violations, such as the one in TFA.
The biggest problem with HIPAA, IMHO, is that the free pass it gives insurers to send your private medical information to any of their friends, er, business partners. No, they can't just post it on the Internet, but the first time you're medical record reflects anything more serious than a bladder infection, be assured that every insurance broker in the country will know about it. But the general privacy rules are a reasonable balance between patient privacy and medical workflow.
I think it would be useful for somebody to figure out who commissioned the AIM Group for this "study."
Took all of 30 seconds.
The AIM Group has just completed a research project for Oodle, a Craigslist competitor, cataloging crimes that have been linked to Craigslist. And the results surprised even us.
Amazing. A competitor gets a 'research' project funded that says nasty things. The mind boggles.
Exactly this. Although, as Scent Cone points out, his appointed lawyers do have to give him a fair and spirited defense, the US government is playing dirty by putting him in solitary and limiting his access to counsel and the world. Even if they are obeying the letter of the law, the government has lost the spirit of it and in many ways, lost the case in the wider court of world public opinion.
I thought OS X didn't 'need' trim? I believe that was something I read about here so it's sure to be incorrect.... But I use an SSD / spinning media combination in 3 Macs, two laptops and a MacPro - seems to work fine. Even iTunes is smart enough to let the music files exist somewhere else. The biggest pig I've found is Parallels as it insists on stuffing images on the main drive. Haven't really looked around to see if I can move them though.
Adobe stuff doesn't seem to mind anymore so if they can do it, anybody can.
I think you've got it. This isn't 'power user' stuff. It's designed to make someone who's first introduction to computers was an iPad happy. As long as they don't screw up 'normal' OS X, then it's fine. But it doesn't seem to do anything that I would be interested in.
When my UPS squeals because it detected a transient spike, or if it's just a cheap Chinese capacitor having a bad day, it doesn't open up my garage doors, set off sirens and start the generators. I'd be a tad miffed if it did that all the time. Some false positives are easier to deal with than others.
I think you're correct (I read TFA, as usual it doesn't help).
The big question will be the false positive rate. If you're randomly opening up doors / turning on large, expensive generators and scrambling OR teams on a regular basis, it will get shut off like all of the OTHER alarm systems that cry wolf repeatedly. Presumably, this bit of wisdom has been considered by the engineering team and it's acceptable (if not dozens of Slashdot posts will helpfully remind them). Be nice to have more details.
I was hoping Apple would do away with those across the pro line and replace it with something that's ACTUALLY an important extra like additional mass storage
You can do this yourself in your spare time. Get an SSD from Otherworld along with a 2.5" HDD adapter for the optical drive. Stick the old HD in the optical port (or get a brand new 1 TB one) stuff the SSD in the main drive and incredible instant upgrade. It's a really weird feeling to have 1.25 Terabytes of storage in a laptop. I remember when... Oh, I'll shut up now, it's time for the nurses to bring my meds.
You're supposed to be working. Not doing political stuff. While it's a dick move, I rather doubt it's a first amendment violation or the end of the world (as is suggested by TFA).
There is a real disconnect between the single picture and the article text. The picture posted in the NYT shows increased diffused uptake, perhaps a predominance on the right side (the side with the active cell phone) but it's anything but obvious. From all of the chatter surrounding the article, I hope to hell that the actual quantitative results are better founded and the picture just isn't very useful.
TFA claims that the study is high quality and if they can get reasonable results from 47 people, they had to see a substantive difference. Still and all, it's a relatively easy experiment to repeat and I assume that is in progress as we speak. I'd like to see some better controls (both left and right active, a determination of how repeatable the fMRI values are in a given person over a couple of hours just to name two off the top of my head).
As everyone has been taking great pains to note, this doesn't show anything but a putative effect of putting an active cell phone next to your head - it's neither good nor bad and it's not necessarily due to the radio emissions (that's an assumption).
My computer is like the "pocket watch" in "Gangs of New York". I leave it out in the open and invite people to mess with it. Yet they don't... because they know, if they do, there will be repercussions... and they will be horrific.
And the rest of us just clean the cheetos off occasionally.
And BTW, the medical field is not dripping with dollars. Despite the incredible costs many hospitals / clinics are running in the red. It makes little sense, but there your are. If I thought this thing was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I would have to argue passionately to get it funded and likely be dumped way down the list since we can't bill for keyboards.
The Das Keyboards I could probably get IS to buy a couple of out of petty cash just to be mean.
Isn't a simple inactivity timer just as effective? Just set your PC's inactivity timer to whatever you'd set your motion sensor inactivity timer to (5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever) and you've removed most of the threat of computers running unattended all day without the added complexity of a motion sensor (which, if it works as well as my office light sensor, will lock your computer out 5 times a day until you jump up from your chair and wave your arms so it can see movement).
Actually, that's not a half bad idea if I can get one to work in XP. I'll have to look around for that.
So your employer won't install a smart card system, but will install motion sensors linked to your computers?
No, they won't do either but the smart card system has been nixed for the moment because various ancient bits don't work with any we've looked at and / or are too expensive (too expensive being a rather low bar). Many of the rooms all ready have motion detectors on the lights as an energy saving strategy. It probably would be relatively easy to tap a signal off the detector (or even just use a light detector) and then build a box that that pretends it's a UPS to tell the computer to shut down or restart. But nobody is going to let me build things and attach them to hospital computers. They're crazy but not particularly stupid.
And don't get all excited. Of course there is no one size fits all (unless you use Apple things). I might actually show the thing to our IS folks to see if it raises their pulse rates. They like shiny toys to play with and they're tired of the iPad they bought last month (CEOs being the clueless creatures that they are....)
Actually, I was thinking about hospital work. In the real world, we don't just jealously hunch over our screens. blocking access with our heads. Walking through the nurses station I can see a half dozen screens and I was truly arsed I could read everything on all of them. The data is never that sanitized since most of us are working on the same patients and anyway have the same applications at our station.
What I worry about is a PC left on in a side room which isn't staffed continuously and some bored teenager gets drawn to the Glow of God. Auto shut down in that scenario makes a lot of sense. Not so much if I just get up off my chair. A token system would be nice but we need something that keeps everyone from keying their usernames / passwords in a dozen times a day.
Simply instruct your employees on the importance of not leaving a workstation unsecured (i.e. locked, logged off, etc.). Use a 3-strike system, if you must. There really shouldn't be a need for such fancy equipment.
In the end, though, I guess it comes down to whichever method of prevention is less expensive, or less time-consuming..
Bigger problem: The whole concept of logging in / logging out doesn't work well for lots of people. Let's say I have to key some data in or look something up - OK, log into the system. I then have to move away from the terminal to do something (just a reminder to Slashdotter's - not everyone is physically chained to their desk nor locked in the basement all day). I do this day in and day out. If the system logged me out every time I moved away from the keyboard or I had to log out every time my head didn't block the screen I would be one annoyed camper.
Sure, there are 'technical fixes' - use a laptop (doesn't work well if I'm standing), use a tablet (none one them yet work with clunky Enterprise software that will not be significantly upgraded in my lifetime), use a smart card system (we don't have one, aren't likely to get it). So yep, there are security holes all around the place but you always have the balance between security and usability.
A more useful system, IMHO, would be one that automatically logged off every PC in a room after a motion detector noted a period of inactivity. We do have issues where people leave for the day, go into another area or just close the door and leave systems up. That's a much bigger attack surface than leaving a PC logged in with 8 other employees wandering around.
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For me, one of the biggest letdowns of this new generation of Macbook Pros was the fact that the optical drive was still a necessity, there wasn't an option to swap out the optical drive with an SSD. Come on Apple, it's 2011, how many people actually use optical drives anymore, esp. on the go? External USB dvd burners are now a dime a dozen, there is no reason I need to carry one with me everywhere I go.
Just take the stupid thing out and put another drive in it. Yeah, it would be nice to have optical free setup from the factory, but there are third party frames that hold the HDD and plug into the SATA line. Takes about 20 minutes. You really don't need a CD with OS X as long as you have a firewire or USB external drive that supports Target Mode.
Not a coincidence. I've discovered that I can live without "buying" music, and I will be damned if I give them another penny. Plus as many others have pointed out, the music sucks balls anyway. Who wants to listen to 90 year old "rock stars" cough up a lung, or pre-pubescent teenagers sing about the "angst" of a life they haven't even begun to live yet, or stupid "look at me being a gangsta is so cool but all my friends are dead or in jail" crap. They can keep it.
You know, there are other music genres besides Country & Western.
The ability for someone to see the contents of those records in transit is irrelevant because the owner of the information has requested it be sent that way.
While the patient has requested that they see their records, they did not request that anybody that can pick off the email in transit can see them.
Nice try, but that argument is roughly the same as telling the patient they won't understand them so its dangerous to give them to the patient. The user has requested them, you are required to supply them, period.
I have no idea why you think that requiring secure email is connected with whether on not the patient understands their medical records. It's simply using an insecure method of communication for material that by nature is intensely private is not a good idea. Yes, you have to give the records to the patient (that was the issue in TFA) but the medical provider does have some leeway in how they are delivered and plain old email isn't allowed.
No
My wife is pregnant and pregnant women aren't supposed to be around mercury. So I'm actually replacing some CFLs in my house with incandescent bulbs.
Tell your wife not to eat either the CFLs or the incandescents. What do you think happens, the mercury in the bulb jumps out and attacks you? And for sure, stay away from Tuna fish and coal fired power plants.
No, you can get incandescent heat lamps that are (somewhat) more efficient than using a regular bulb for heat. If all you're using is a 40 w bulb, you're not needing much heat and then a basic heat tape should work. A bit more expensive but probably safer in the long run.
Every space geek ought to memorize that footage. Absolutely astounding. I just wish one could get a high res version in DVD format. They edited an enormous amount of film to get the video. I'd just as soon stare at the whole thing for hours.
Me: "Could you email me a copy of my (digital) xrays?" Them: "Sorry, that would be a HIPAA violation."
That would be since your name is one them and, as we all know, email is basically and electronic postcard. You certainly can make secure email systems and larger health care organizations often have them. Smaller places just don't want to bother with it yet. Keep whining at them.
Me: "Could you copy them to my flash drive then?" Them: "Sorry, that would be a HIPAA violation."
That's not a HIPAA violation, that's a obvious security issue. Nobody in their right mind would let you plug some random flash drive into the hospital network.
Me: "Okay fine, could you print me a copy?" Them: "Sorry, we can't print from this system. We set it up that way to save the rainforests." ...
If that's really true, then the health care provider is bullshitting you. Everybody has the capacity to print on xray film - that's the current 'lowest common denominator" for radiologic data. The other common way is a CD and pretty much anybody I've seen can at least do CDs of CT or MRI data (since that is always digital anyway).
HIPAA is currently being used as the common excuse for not wanting to do something in Medical Records. It's a handy little boogyman. There has to be some upside to Governmental regulation.
Are there any studies out there about how much HIPAA compliance costs?
Probably. They won't mean much. HIPAA is the new boogyman so any 'compliance cost' estimate will be full of untested assumptions, incorrect assumptions, wild ass guess and gonzo statistics. It's really NOT all that hard to follow most of the HIPAA rules. DHS has made it clear that they're not going after each and every little mistake that people make but are instead going after willful, major violations, such as the one in TFA.
The biggest problem with HIPAA, IMHO, is that the free pass it gives insurers to send your private medical information to any of their friends, er, business partners. No, they can't just post it on the Internet, but the first time you're medical record reflects anything more serious than a bladder infection, be assured that every insurance broker in the country will know about it. But the general privacy rules are a reasonable balance between patient privacy and medical workflow.
We're widely quoted in the press, including Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
Elsewhere now being Slashdot.
They're certainly moving up in the world.
I think it would be useful for somebody to figure out who commissioned the AIM Group for this "study."
Took all of 30 seconds.
The AIM Group has just completed a research project for Oodle, a Craigslist competitor, cataloging crimes that have been linked to Craigslist. And the results surprised even us.
Amazing. A competitor gets a 'research' project funded that says nasty things. The mind boggles.
Exactly this. Although, as Scent Cone points out, his appointed lawyers do have to give him a fair and spirited defense, the US government is playing dirty by putting him in solitary and limiting his access to counsel and the world. Even if they are obeying the letter of the law, the government has lost the spirit of it and in many ways, lost the case in the wider court of world public opinion.
I thought OS X didn't 'need' trim? I believe that was something I read about here so it's sure to be incorrect.... But I use an SSD / spinning media combination in 3 Macs, two laptops and a MacPro - seems to work fine. Even iTunes is smart enough to let the music files exist somewhere else. The biggest pig I've found is Parallels as it insists on stuffing images on the main drive. Haven't really looked around to see if I can move them though.
Adobe stuff doesn't seem to mind anymore so if they can do it, anybody can.
I'm just wondering when the MacPro is going to be discontinued, what consumer needs 16 cores?
Anybody planning on running Flash.
I think you've got it. This isn't 'power user' stuff. It's designed to make someone who's first introduction to computers was an iPad happy. As long as they don't screw up 'normal' OS X, then it's fine. But it doesn't seem to do anything that I would be interested in.
Everybody off the Xeroscaping, please.
Even the desktops at my house have RAID arrays.
And your toaster has dual PSU's and a UPS. Yeah, yeah, we all know about you, Mr. I-still-have-every-computer-I-ever-bought-still-running.
Your last date was, when?
When my UPS squeals because it detected a transient spike, or if it's just a cheap Chinese capacitor having a bad day, it doesn't open up my garage doors, set off sirens and start the generators. I'd be a tad miffed if it did that all the time. Some false positives are easier to deal with than others.
I think you're correct (I read TFA, as usual it doesn't help).
The big question will be the false positive rate. If you're randomly opening up doors / turning on large, expensive generators and scrambling OR teams on a regular basis, it will get shut off like all of the OTHER alarm systems that cry wolf repeatedly. Presumably, this bit of wisdom has been considered by the engineering team and it's acceptable (if not dozens of Slashdot posts will helpfully remind them). Be nice to have more details.
I was hoping Apple would do away with those across the pro line and replace it with something that's ACTUALLY an important extra like additional mass storage
You can do this yourself in your spare time. Get an SSD from Otherworld along with a 2.5" HDD adapter for the optical drive. Stick the old HD in the optical port (or get a brand new 1 TB one) stuff the SSD in the main drive and incredible instant upgrade. It's a really weird feeling to have 1.25 Terabytes of storage in a laptop. I remember when ... Oh, I'll shut up now, it's time for the nurses to bring my meds.
You're supposed to be working. Not doing political stuff. While it's a dick move, I rather doubt it's a first amendment violation or the end of the world (as is suggested by TFA).
There is a real disconnect between the single picture and the article text. The picture posted in the NYT shows increased diffused uptake, perhaps a predominance on the right side (the side with the active cell phone) but it's anything but obvious. From all of the chatter surrounding the article, I hope to hell that the actual quantitative results are better founded and the picture just isn't very useful.
TFA claims that the study is high quality and if they can get reasonable results from 47 people, they had to see a substantive difference. Still and all, it's a relatively easy experiment to repeat and I assume that is in progress as we speak. I'd like to see some better controls (both left and right active, a determination of how repeatable the fMRI values are in a given person over a couple of hours just to name two off the top of my head).
As everyone has been taking great pains to note, this doesn't show anything but a putative effect of putting an active cell phone next to your head - it's neither good nor bad and it's not necessarily due to the radio emissions (that's an assumption).
My computer is like the "pocket watch" in "Gangs of New York". I leave it out in the open and invite people to mess with it. Yet they don't... because they know, if they do, there will be repercussions... and they will be horrific.
And the rest of us just clean the cheetos off occasionally.
Better, get a bunch of these. Total security.
And BTW, the medical field is not dripping with dollars. Despite the incredible costs many hospitals / clinics are running in the red. It makes little sense, but there your are. If I thought this thing was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I would have to argue passionately to get it funded and likely be dumped way down the list since we can't bill for keyboards.
The Das Keyboards I could probably get IS to buy a couple of out of petty cash just to be mean.
Isn't a simple inactivity timer just as effective? Just set your PC's inactivity timer to whatever you'd set your motion sensor inactivity timer to (5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever) and you've removed most of the threat of computers running unattended all day without the added complexity of a motion sensor (which, if it works as well as my office light sensor, will lock your computer out 5 times a day until you jump up from your chair and wave your arms so it can see movement).
Actually, that's not a half bad idea if I can get one to work in XP. I'll have to look around for that.
So your employer won't install a smart card system, but will install motion sensors linked to your computers?
No, they won't do either but the smart card system has been nixed for the moment because various ancient bits don't work with any we've looked at and / or are too expensive (too expensive being a rather low bar). Many of the rooms all ready have motion detectors on the lights as an energy saving strategy. It probably would be relatively easy to tap a signal off the detector (or even just use a light detector) and then build a box that that pretends it's a UPS to tell the computer to shut down or restart. But nobody is going to let me build things and attach them to hospital computers. They're crazy but not particularly stupid.
....)
And don't get all excited. Of course there is no one size fits all (unless you use Apple things). I might actually show the thing to our IS folks to see if it raises their pulse rates. They like shiny toys to play with and they're tired of the iPad they bought last month (CEOs being the clueless creatures that they are
Actually, I was thinking about hospital work. In the real world, we don't just jealously hunch over our screens. blocking access with our heads. Walking through the nurses station I can see a half dozen screens and I was truly arsed I could read everything on all of them. The data is never that sanitized since most of us are working on the same patients and anyway have the same applications at our station.
What I worry about is a PC left on in a side room which isn't staffed continuously and some bored teenager gets drawn to the Glow of God. Auto shut down in that scenario makes a lot of sense. Not so much if I just get up off my chair. A token system would be nice but we need something that keeps everyone from keying their usernames / passwords in a dozen times a day.
Simply instruct your employees on the importance of not leaving a workstation unsecured (i.e. locked, logged off, etc.). Use a 3-strike system, if you must. There really shouldn't be a need for such fancy equipment.
In the end, though, I guess it comes down to whichever method of prevention is less expensive, or less time-consuming..
Bigger problem: The whole concept of logging in / logging out doesn't work well for lots of people. Let's say I have to key some data in or look something up - OK, log into the system. I then have to move away from the terminal to do something (just a reminder to Slashdotter's - not everyone is physically chained to their desk nor locked in the basement all day). I do this day in and day out. If the system logged me out every time I moved away from the keyboard or I had to log out every time my head didn't block the screen I would be one annoyed camper.
Sure, there are 'technical fixes' - use a laptop (doesn't work well if I'm standing), use a tablet (none one them yet work with clunky Enterprise software that will not be significantly upgraded in my lifetime), use a smart card system (we don't have one, aren't likely to get it). So yep, there are security holes all around the place but you always have the balance between security and usability.
A more useful system, IMHO, would be one that automatically logged off every PC in a room after a motion detector noted a period of inactivity. We do have issues where people leave for the day, go into another area or just close the door and leave systems up. That's a much bigger attack surface than leaving a PC logged in with 8 other employees wandering around.