With multiple machines, that electricity bill quickly goes up by hundreds... its a key difference between residential computer use and business.
I don't think it's as bad as you suggest. The amount of energy, and thus cost, does increase with the number of machines you're running. But the amount of money you don't spend by getting an older donated machine vs. buying a new one also goes up by the number of machines you're running.
My QaD estimate of energy costs per older machine using the 140W figure above would be around $30/year/machine with electricity at $0.11/kWh, assuming the machines are only turned on during the work day. If you wanted to leave them on full time, then multiply that by about 4.
Average power consumption might be a little above the "idle" power draw, this would be an interesting experiment for someone with a kill-a-watt and an old P4 to measure that.
So if you had to spend $1000 to buy a more efficient computer, your payback time could be 4 - 12 years -- assuming your not-for-profit had the capital lying around in the first place to buy new.
But no matter what I say -- or any of us here -- you've got to run the numbers for the exact situation you're considering to make a good judgement.
Change the penalty for moving violations from a monetary fine to a mandatory community service.
The incentive for police to write frivolous tickets will disappear, and people who are caught will be made to spend real time helping their community in some way, benefitting them, and costing them time, which is more valuable than money.
But how do you give the speed camera operator 40% of that community service? They expect a cut in exchange for installing and operating them.
Do people object to slowing down to 25mph near a school where children are walking? or is the argument about being fined when you choose to go at a higher speed there?
If you're objective in installing the cameras is to get people to slow down for safety reasons but instead of compliance you get the dollars rolling in, then you've got to ask yourself what problem did you solve? "The town needs more revenue," or "the town needs its children to be able to safely cross the street"? If the cameras were working, then you'd expect to see the fines taper off, and you'd be satisfied in the knowledge that you've improved municipal safety. But what speed camera company would be interested in a deal like that? Are you essentially using the village children as "ticket bait"?
It doesnt make a mention of why the cameras are ineffective.
The people are aware there are cameras.
They know the speed to go.
They are getting caught.
PANIC?
It's implied that the cameras are ineffective simply because they continue to be a source of revenue rather than slowing down the traffic. If drivers moving too fast is actually dangerous, the solution is to get them to slow down. If, instead, you're getting a stream of money coming in, you're not getting increased safety, because you're not changing the behavior of the drivers.
Change the penalty for moving violations from a monetary fine to a mandatory community service.
The incentive for police to write frivolous tickets will disappear, and people who are caught will be made to spend real time helping their community in some way, benefitting them, and costing them time, which is more valuable than money.
But how do you give the speed camera operator 40% of that community service? They expect a cut in exchange for installing and operating them.
Sorry, I wrote my own in 1992. It's unintentionally similar to the ISO standard. My only goal was to make timestamps easy to sort using alphanumeric methods available to a BASIC interpreter on a barcode scanner while still being mostly human-readable.
My unintentional and unauthorized contribution to the proliferation. I assume plenty more examples also exist.
Again, sorry. At least I never submitted it to any legitimate standardization body.
. . . incredibly burdensome laws actually make it so that we must spend less time with the patient in order to complete documentation. Incidentally, we don't get paid any more for this extra work, though we are responsible for paying for the software and then losing time in order to complete it.
Don't know if it would apply to your practice or patient population, but have you looked into "meaningful use" incentives?
Increased record-keeping requirements can be a burden, I understand. When industry was being pushed into implementing ISO 9000 (etc.) starting a couple decades ago, many people saw the extra record-keeping as a pointless exercise and needless expense. (They weren't totally wrong: broad requirements are certainly going to impose some irrelevant hassles and costs while providing no value.) Plenty of affected businesses only "went through the motions," complaining about the extra work and doing it just for the sake of the meeting the requirement and getting the certification. Employees went around putting stickers reading "For reference only: calibration not required" on their desk rulers and other passive-aggressive stuff. On the other hand, some firms recognized that since the requirements were coming whether they liked it or not, and decided that since they had to do it, they might as well do it in a way that would benefit the business. After all, it costs either way, why not get some payback?
If we got rid of it, what would we substitute for it every spring and fall? Certainly a discussion of the latest Ubuntu release wouldn't be nearly as satisfying.
Look at the millions each year they are exposed to narcotics alone in a hospital that never become addicts, if it were really the medical professions fault then every single one of them would become an addict but that isnt the case. They make themselves addicts because they have an addictice personality which has nothing to do with the medical industry.
This is, sadly, the attitude of many physicians. A tendency to get addicted to narcotics is a moral failure on the part of the patient, whereas, e.g., an allergy to penicillin is a legitimate, organic, condition that should be addressed in considering treatment.
Many of these people get them for 'free' from medicare as they do not have a job. Then claim 'I am not a dealer'.
"Meet me behind the Manor Gardens Retirement Home tonight at 6pm. Don't hang around earlier, folks'll get suspicious if you're back there before bedtime."
Split the record into a "data" section and a private "remarks" section. Patients get unrestricted access to their own data sections, but require a court order to see the remarks. Establish clear rules for what can go in the remarks section: everything else must go into data, and inappropriate use of the remarks section itself counts as a minor form of malpractice.
This should strike an appropriate balance. Patients can still get at the significant stuff, and they have recourse to get the rest if it's truly necessary. Doctors can continue to comment frankly about patients-from-Hell, without having to worry about being embarrassed unless they already have much bigger problems.
They're just not prepared for this. The whole idea of digital records and sharing them is pretty new for doctors compared to every other profession. In the US, they're being dragged kicking and screaming into the 1960s. Jiffy Lube was decades ahead of the medical world in electronic record keeping.
A programmer, engineer, etc. gets asked to share some source with a customer, he doesn't freak out because there's comments in the code like "Added this confirmation dialog because Steve at Penetrode is a fucking moron". He just runs it through his favorite code sanitizer and restores the essential documentation from version control. They don't teach that a med school or residency. They teach them that you never let the PT see the charts.
But witholding this data offends me more than anything that could be inside it, and damages the relationship between me and my doctor. If my doctor cannot be completely honest with me, how can I be completely honest with her?
When you do see them, it can be pretty ugly. (I've seen mine as a result of making an injury claim.) I'm not trying to contradict anything you're saying, either. Your model of an ideal relationship with your doctor does sound like it would be beneficial, but physician training teaches them to write notes with the assumption that the patient never sees them. Therefore, the idea of being open about them with the patient is burned into their brains as a bad thing. It'd be a challenge to find a doctor with a more open philosophy, who's on your health plan, and close enough to visit when you need them, etc.
"Patient is an addict, faking symptoms in order to get painkillers."
This one actually happened to an old friend of mine. He had in the past had issues with substance abuse and it had made its way into his medical records. Fast forward a couple of years and shows up at the ER with a pretty nasty injury after chopping wood and they outright refuse to give him any painkillers except ibuprofen...
Took 24+ hours before he and several others were able to convince the doctors that he needed real pain relief.
A number of states now have databases of patients that doctors label as such for other doctors and pharmacies to watch out for.
Unfortunately, doctors are generally woefully unequipped to treat pain, particularly long-term pain. Plenty of addicts are made by the medical profession, something they don't like to admit.
Not really. But kill your cable. If your cable company is forcing you to use equipment that doesn't work well, and preventing you from tuning, recording and time-shifting with the system of your choice, fire them.
I assume the problem with that is it's a tough sell for whoever in your house isn't gonna get to watch what she wants. Tough spot.
What exactly is the programming that you haven't been able to find elsewhere? Maybe someone here knows the answer to that more specific question, i.e. where to find the particular stuff you want.
You could do it with high gain directional antenna on the base station . . . Keeping line of sight, and having the base antenna track it are the hard parts.
Yes. "Hard parts" is even a bit of an understatement.
I don't nor does anyone I know under the age of 50 have a landline.
I've been seeing more people getting land-lines again after having kids. They cite such reasons as: having a phone a smaller child could call 911 with, being able to reach a babysitter (including grandparents) that didn't have his or her own mobile, power outages and so on. One friend even ported his cell number (which he'd ported long ago from a land line) back to a home number. I haven't done it myself, but every so often my wife brings up the subject of "shouldn't we have a home phone?" so I suppose it's imminent.
But, recently there have been issues where we lost power + internet/data, yet will had access to a phone. In which case, I guess it's useful then.
If you've still got cell service -- even if (especially if) you don't have data service -- text your query to 466453 ('GOOGLE') and get an answer by SMS.
Use mailinator.com
That should save you some hassle.
Now we only need "phoninator". That might be a heck of a business opportunity for someone who could figure out how to make money at it. Or at least convince someone to buy them up before the bills come due.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving a P4 to the poor is evil. The cost of running it can easily cost more than a brand new computer.
If you run the numbers, you might be surprised.
With multiple machines, that electricity bill quickly goes up by hundreds... its a key difference between residential computer use and business.
I don't think it's as bad as you suggest. The amount of energy, and thus cost, does increase with the number of machines you're running. But the amount of money you don't spend by getting an older donated machine vs. buying a new one also goes up by the number of machines you're running.
My QaD estimate of energy costs per older machine using the 140W figure above would be around $30/year/machine with electricity at $0.11/kWh, assuming the machines are only turned on during the work day. If you wanted to leave them on full time, then multiply that by about 4.
Average power consumption might be a little above the "idle" power draw, this would be an interesting experiment for someone with a kill-a-watt and an old P4 to measure that.
So if you had to spend $1000 to buy a more efficient computer, your payback time could be 4 - 12 years -- assuming your not-for-profit had the capital lying around in the first place to buy new.
But no matter what I say -- or any of us here -- you've got to run the numbers for the exact situation you're considering to make a good judgement.
Change the penalty for moving violations from a monetary fine to a mandatory community service. The incentive for police to write frivolous tickets will disappear, and people who are caught will be made to spend real time helping their community in some way, benefitting them, and costing them time, which is more valuable than money.
But how do you give the speed camera operator 40% of that community service? They expect a cut in exchange for installing and operating them.
Make the crims install speed cameras!
There you go! What could possibly go wrong?
Do people object to slowing down to 25mph near a school where children are walking? or is the argument about being fined when you choose to go at a higher speed there?
If you're objective in installing the cameras is to get people to slow down for safety reasons but instead of compliance you get the dollars rolling in, then you've got to ask yourself what problem did you solve? "The town needs more revenue," or "the town needs its children to be able to safely cross the street"? If the cameras were working, then you'd expect to see the fines taper off, and you'd be satisfied in the knowledge that you've improved municipal safety. But what speed camera company would be interested in a deal like that? Are you essentially using the village children as "ticket bait"?
It doesnt make a mention of why the cameras are ineffective. The people are aware there are cameras. They know the speed to go. They are getting caught. PANIC?
It's implied that the cameras are ineffective simply because they continue to be a source of revenue rather than slowing down the traffic. If drivers moving too fast is actually dangerous, the solution is to get them to slow down. If, instead, you're getting a stream of money coming in, you're not getting increased safety, because you're not changing the behavior of the drivers.
But, yes, they could have said that explicitly.
Change the penalty for moving violations from a monetary fine to a mandatory community service. The incentive for police to write frivolous tickets will disappear, and people who are caught will be made to spend real time helping their community in some way, benefitting them, and costing them time, which is more valuable than money.
But how do you give the speed camera operator 40% of that community service? They expect a cut in exchange for installing and operating them.
Sorry, I wrote my own in 1992. It's unintentionally similar to the ISO standard. My only goal was to make timestamps easy to sort using alphanumeric methods available to a BASIC interpreter on a barcode scanner while still being mostly human-readable .
My unintentional and unauthorized contribution to the proliferation. I assume plenty more examples also exist.
Again, sorry. At least I never submitted it to any legitimate standardization body.
You change time twice a year?
You're kidding, right? That's the funniest idea I've heard today.
Please tell me you change your time a non-zero, odd number of times per year. Because that would be really cool . . .
Mod parent up
Done!
. . . incredibly burdensome laws actually make it so that we must spend less time with the patient in order to complete documentation. Incidentally, we don't get paid any more for this extra work, though we are responsible for paying for the software and then losing time in order to complete it.
Don't know if it would apply to your practice or patient population, but have you looked into "meaningful use" incentives?
Increased record-keeping requirements can be a burden, I understand. When industry was being pushed into implementing ISO 9000 (etc.) starting a couple decades ago, many people saw the extra record-keeping as a pointless exercise and needless expense. (They weren't totally wrong: broad requirements are certainly going to impose some irrelevant hassles and costs while providing no value.) Plenty of affected businesses only "went through the motions," complaining about the extra work and doing it just for the sake of the meeting the requirement and getting the certification. Employees went around putting stickers reading "For reference only: calibration not required" on their desk rulers and other passive-aggressive stuff. On the other hand, some firms recognized that since the requirements were coming whether they liked it or not, and decided that since they had to do it, they might as well do it in a way that would benefit the business. After all, it costs either way, why not get some payback?
No! It's a royal pain in the ass. Get rid of it!
If we got rid of it, what would we substitute for it every spring and fall? Certainly a discussion of the latest Ubuntu release wouldn't be nearly as satisfying.
This article just in time for the yearly "Should we keep DST? No, but we'll keep it anyway" cycle.
I was starting to get worried that we weren't going to get to have this little twice-a-year bitchfest here on Slashdot this Spring.
Some traditions are important. They help keep you grounded and define your culture.
Look at the millions each year they are exposed to narcotics alone in a hospital that never become addicts, if it were really the medical professions fault then every single one of them would become an addict but that isnt the case. They make themselves addicts because they have an addictice personality which has nothing to do with the medical industry.
This is, sadly, the attitude of many physicians. A tendency to get addicted to narcotics is a moral failure on the part of the patient, whereas, e.g., an allergy to penicillin is a legitimate, organic, condition that should be addressed in considering treatment.
Many of these people get them for 'free' from medicare as they do not have a job. Then claim 'I am not a dealer'.
"Meet me behind the Manor Gardens Retirement Home tonight at 6pm. Don't hang around earlier, folks'll get suspicious if you're back there before bedtime."
Split the record into a "data" section and a private "remarks" section. Patients get unrestricted access to their own data sections, but require a court order to see the remarks. Establish clear rules for what can go in the remarks section: everything else must go into data, and inappropriate use of the remarks section itself counts as a minor form of malpractice.
This should strike an appropriate balance. Patients can still get at the significant stuff, and they have recourse to get the rest if it's truly necessary. Doctors can continue to comment frankly about patients-from-Hell, without having to worry about being embarrassed unless they already have much bigger problems.
They're just not prepared for this. The whole idea of digital records and sharing them is pretty new for doctors compared to every other profession. In the US, they're being dragged kicking and screaming into the 1960s. Jiffy Lube was decades ahead of the medical world in electronic record keeping.
A programmer, engineer, etc. gets asked to share some source with a customer, he doesn't freak out because there's comments in the code like "Added this confirmation dialog because Steve at Penetrode is a fucking moron". He just runs it through his favorite code sanitizer and restores the essential documentation from version control. They don't teach that a med school or residency. They teach them that you never let the PT see the charts.
But witholding this data offends me more than anything that could be inside it, and damages the relationship between me and my doctor. If my doctor cannot be completely honest with me, how can I be completely honest with her?
When you do see them, it can be pretty ugly. (I've seen mine as a result of making an injury claim.) I'm not trying to contradict anything you're saying, either. Your model of an ideal relationship with your doctor does sound like it would be beneficial, but physician training teaches them to write notes with the assumption that the patient never sees them. Therefore, the idea of being open about them with the patient is burned into their brains as a bad thing. It'd be a challenge to find a doctor with a more open philosophy, who's on your health plan, and close enough to visit when you need them, etc.
"Patient is an addict, faking symptoms in order to get painkillers."
This one actually happened to an old friend of mine. He had in the past had issues with substance abuse and it had made its way into his medical records. Fast forward a couple of years and shows up at the ER with a pretty nasty injury after chopping wood and they outright refuse to give him any painkillers except ibuprofen...
Took 24+ hours before he and several others were able to convince the doctors that he needed real pain relief.
A number of states now have databases of patients that doctors label as such for other doctors and pharmacies to watch out for.
Unfortunately, doctors are generally woefully unequipped to treat pain, particularly long-term pain. Plenty of addicts are made by the medical profession, something they don't like to admit.
. . . i hate those clicky keyboards and wind up busting them over my knee and trashing them.
Do not, repeat, not, under any circumstances attempt the same thing with a Model M. If you do, you'll know why.
Not really. But kill your cable. If your cable company is forcing you to use equipment that doesn't work well, and preventing you from tuning, recording and time-shifting with the system of your choice, fire them.
I assume the problem with that is it's a tough sell for whoever in your house isn't gonna get to watch what she wants. Tough spot.
What exactly is the programming that you haven't been able to find elsewhere? Maybe someone here knows the answer to that more specific question, i.e. where to find the particular stuff you want.
Oil
The pretext is the part you say out loud.
. . . this kind of thing is pretty easy for a decent EE.
If, by "decent EE" you mean one with a sufficient budget, then sure. But anything's, possible with a big enough budget.
You could do it with high gain directional antenna on the base station . . . Keeping line of sight, and having the base antenna track it are the hard parts.
Yes. "Hard parts" is even a bit of an understatement.
I don't nor does anyone I know under the age of 50 have a landline.
I've been seeing more people getting land-lines again after having kids. They cite such reasons as: having a phone a smaller child could call 911 with, being able to reach a babysitter (including grandparents) that didn't have his or her own mobile, power outages and so on. One friend even ported his cell number (which he'd ported long ago from a land line) back to a home number. I haven't done it myself, but every so often my wife brings up the subject of "shouldn't we have a home phone?" so I suppose it's imminent.
But, recently there have been issues where we lost power + internet/data, yet will had access to a phone. In which case, I guess it's useful then.
If you've still got cell service -- even if (especially if) you don't have data service -- text your query to 466453 ('GOOGLE') and get an answer by SMS.
Use mailinator.com That should save you some hassle.
Now we only need "phoninator". That might be a heck of a business opportunity for someone who could figure out how to make money at it. Or at least convince someone to buy them up before the bills come due.