Instead of spending R&D $ to fix the issues with their aging OS, they "invent" another piece of hardware that neither me nor any of my coworkers want to have to carry around. We already have notebooks.
Palm has officially jumped the shark, IMHO. Looks like I'm getting a Blackberry soon.:(
There is still the problem of steady growth and the consumption of finite resources. Even if we come up with some new and novel way of producing/extracting energy, the exponential growth problem does not go away.
There's an interesting lecture by Al Bartlett that covers this quite well, IMHO.
"In the summer of 1986 the news reports indicated that the world population had reached the number of five billion people growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. Well your reaction to 1.7% might be to say that that's so small nothing bad could ever happen at 1.7% per year. So you calculate the doubling time you find its only 41 years, now that was back in 1986, more recently in 1999 we read that the world population had grown from five billion to six billion . The good news is that the growth rate had dropped from 1.7% to 1.3% per cent per year. The bad news is that in spite of the drop in the growth rate, the world population today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year.
Now, if this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just seven hundred and eighty years and then the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just twenty four hundred years. Well we can smile at those, we know they couldn't happen. This one make for a cute cartoon, the caption says, "Excuse me sir, but I am prepared to make you a rather attractive offer for your square".
There's a very profound lesson in that cartoon. The lesson is that zero population growth is gonna happen. Now we can debate whether we like zero population growth or don't like it, its going to happen whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not. It's absolutely certain people could never live at that density on the dry land surface of the earth. Therefore today's high birth rates will drop; today's low death rate will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. That will certainly be in a time shorter than several hundred years...
In the words of Winston Churchill, "sometimes we have to do what is required." First of all as a nation we have to get serious about renewable energy. For a start we ought to have a big increase in the funding for research in the development and dispersion of renewable energy. We have to educate all of our people to understand the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth's finite resources. We must educate people to recognise the fact that growth in rates of population and growth in rates of consumption of resources can not be sustained. What's the first law of sustainability? You've heard thousands of people talking endlessly about sustainability; did they ever tell you the first law? Here it is, population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. That's simple arithmetic Yet nobody that I'm encountering will tell you about that when talking about sustainability. So I think it's intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment, which is sustainability, without stressing the obvious facts that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for saving the environment and for sustainability."
"that, plus if they post in chinese and you can't understand it, you may very well be hosting a government "agent provocateur""
Actually, I've found that the Google Toolbar translation tool does a decent job w/ translating web pages in Chinese into English. Enough so that you should be able to get the gist of what they are posting.
But the problem is that we'll probably be using this sort of stuff on the baby boomers that have already done plenty of damage to their bodies by now. We are going to need this sort of technology because when all the boomers start getting sick, we're not going to have enough room in the hospitals to keep 'em all.
And what if I buy something while on vacation in another state that has a different tax rate than my home state?
Also, if these web sites are owned/run by people in the USA, could the state that they live in or incorporate their business in go after the taxes as well?
"After more than 60 years of being enslaved, pillaged, and raped by the French and then by the Americans, the poor Vietnamese were told officially by American oil multinationals that their country was barren; that western 'cutting edge' technology had failed to find anything to help them recover financially from the mess left behind by American bombs, Agent Orange, and a host of other delightful gifts from Uncle Sam. This of course was exactly where America wanted the Vietnamese to be: desperately poor and unable to take action against their former invaders.
The Russians had other ideas and a very different approach. After telling the Vietnamese that the Americans had lied to them, oil experts were flown in from Moscow to prove this startling claim in a no-risk joint venture, meaning the Russians would provide all of the equipment and expertise free of charge, and only then take a percentage of the profits if oil was actually found and put into production. Vietnam had absolutely nothing to lose, and swiftly gave Russia the green light.
The Vietnamese White Tiger oil field was and is a raging success, currently producing high quality crude oil from basalt rock more than 17,000 feet below the surface of the earth, at 6,000 barrels per day per well. Through White Tiger, the Russians have assisted the Vietnamese to regain part of their self respect, while at the same time making them far less dependent on brutal western nations for food-aid handouts.
All of a sudden in a very small way, Vietnam has joined the exclusive club of oil producing nations, and a stream of cynical U.S. Senators and Congressmen have started making the long pilgrimage to Ho Chi Minh City in order to 'mend fences'. Predictably perhaps, the Vietnamese are very cool, and try hard to ignore their new American admirers.
Welcome to the White Tiger oil field in Vietnam. Observe the truly amazing oil flares, in an area the Americans officially declared 'barren' of oil reserves !
It is truly amazing how quickly good news travels [outside of CNN], and in a very short space of time China was also engaged in a joint super deep venture with Russia. Nor did it end there.... intelligence reports that the Russians have already moved three deep-drilling rigs into impoverished North Korea, where they intend to repeat the Vietnamese production cycle by drilling thought solid granite and basalt, with not a single trace of the 'decaying marine life' so essential to blinkered western geologists for the 'accepted' production of crude oil. It may take a while, but ultimately the North Koreans will be able to go about their sovereign business without the Zionist Cabal in New York being able to blackmail them over a few ship loads of food-aid rice. Yes indeed, Korea will eventually have an oil surplus of its own, allowing it to tell the latest in a long line of terminally insane "New World Orders" to go to hell."
With just one of our small systems, we have over 80 tasks automated. We added up the time it takes to run each task and figured out it would take a person sitting at a PC.8 FTE's (1664 hours) per year to run all the tasks. Plus, our tasks run at all hours of the day/night/weekend. We get an email and a page if a task fails and we get emails on all successful tasks. The absence of a failure message doesn't necessarily mean that your process completed. When we get failure notifications, it even tells us at what step the task failed.
The software we are using (Automate Professional Edition) cost us $395 for a single machine license - pretty cheap for almost a "man year" of work!!
It's not just the doctors... it seems to me that many healthcare providers (doctors, pharmacists, nurses, etc.) don't like having their workflows messed with. It is much quicker and easier for any of the above mentioned professions to pull a pen out of their pocket and scribble something on a piece of paper in a chart than it is to find a workstation, log in, and then several mouse clicks later, finally be at a screen where you can type in your note, click on your orders, etc.
The problem with most EMR (electronic medical record) systems that I have seen is that on the front end, they don't end up saving you any time. The actual data entry into a computer will frequently take more time to enter than if you had scribbled it in a paper chart.
Where you really reap the benefits is more on the "back end" of the process through electronic processing of orders - potentially reducing errors, improved billing/payment procedures, data analysis/mining that can be used to identify quality improvement opportunities (such as improved utilization of resources or decreasing infection rates), etc.
In my experience as a nurse, there is some limited benefit on the "front end" for when you're giving patient care such as lab alerts; graphs showing trends of lab values, vital signs, etc.; and being able to actually read the physician's notes!:) But, the reality is that it often takes longer to compose your patient documentation on a computer than with pen and paper.
Adding to this problem is issue that the healthcare industry keeps asking the providers to "do more with less", but then they want to introduce some computer systems that take more time to use.
There are other issues such as the nursing shortage, the fact that the average age of a nruse is in the mid-40's, and that the aging baby boomer population will soon start to place a crushing load on the healthcare industry as they begin experiencing the onset of chronic disease such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Also, I have been involved with healthcare information systems for the past several year, and the user interfaces and system configuration tools need a LOT of work! You can put all the nifty infrastructure in place that you want, but if you can't configure an acceptable, efficient workflow and user interface for the user, the system will either fail miserably or be poorly/inappropriately utilized.
I think part of the problem is that for popular words, there are quite a few "junk" ads that will show up. For less popular/more specialized terms - terms where you may get 5-6 ads per page - it actually works quite well.:) Some of my lowest CPC ad words are my best performing ad words because they are so specific/focused.
I can't believe I missed this the first time around...
I've been an ANSOS One-Staff user for a little over 5 years now. The software development has been a little slow over the past few years but seems to be picking up. They have some new leadership in key positions (product director and VP) as well as some new development resources.
Hook me up with some ImmortoTech and stick me in a big lead box bound for the stars!
Of course, all of the supporting technology for that sort of journey still needs to be worked out.. but by being immortal, I could afford to wait around for it.
The Wham-O Air Blaster. I had such fun with that as a kid in the early 70's.. of course, the cats hated it.. Since my currents cats have not had the pleasure of experiencing the Air Blaster, I may just have to build my own.
I also enjoyed my Whee-lo - especially trying to see how fast I could get it to go...
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to tell this guy about the First Law of Holes: "When you find yourself in one, stop digging!!"
oh.. wait! uh.. nevermind...
Sounds like they got the Seinfeld writers to come out of retirement to do the series finale episode.
FTW?
:(
Looks like Jeff Hawkins is so confident in the Fooleo that he decided to dump 15000 shares of PALM.
Instead of spending R&D $ to fix the issues with their aging OS, they "invent" another piece of hardware that neither me nor any of my coworkers want to have to carry around. We already have notebooks.
Palm has officially jumped the shark, IMHO. Looks like I'm getting a Blackberry soon.
There is still the problem of steady growth and the consumption of finite resources. Even if we come up with some new and novel way of producing/extracting energy, the exponential growth problem does not go away.
There's an interesting lecture by Al Bartlett that covers this quite well, IMHO.
"In the summer of 1986 the news reports indicated that the world population had reached the number of five billion people growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. Well your reaction to 1.7% might be to say that that's so small nothing bad could ever happen at 1.7% per year. So you calculate the doubling time you find its only 41 years, now that was back in 1986, more recently in 1999 we read that the world population had grown from five billion to six billion . The good news is that the growth rate had dropped from 1.7% to 1.3% per cent per year. The bad news is that in spite of the drop in the growth rate, the world population today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year.
Now, if this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just seven hundred and eighty years and then the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just twenty four hundred years. Well we can smile at those, we know they couldn't happen. This one make for a cute cartoon, the caption says, "Excuse me sir, but I am prepared to make you a rather attractive offer for your square".
There's a very profound lesson in that cartoon. The lesson is that zero population growth is gonna happen. Now we can debate whether we like zero population growth or don't like it, its going to happen whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not. It's absolutely certain people could never live at that density on the dry land surface of the earth. Therefore today's high birth rates will drop; today's low death rate will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. That will certainly be in a time shorter than several hundred years...
In the words of Winston Churchill, "sometimes we have to do what is required." First of all as a nation we have to get serious about renewable energy. For a start we ought to have a big increase in the funding for research in the development and dispersion of renewable energy. We have to educate all of our people to understand the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth's finite resources. We must educate people to recognise the fact that growth in rates of population and growth in rates of consumption of resources can not be sustained. What's the first law of sustainability? You've heard thousands of people talking endlessly about sustainability; did they ever tell you the first law? Here it is, population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. That's simple arithmetic Yet nobody that I'm encountering will tell you about that when talking about sustainability. So I think it's intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment, which is sustainability, without stressing the obvious facts that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for saving the environment and for sustainability."
And you expect /. readers to know this?
So how do you get your x-box replaced if they're all sold out?
"that, plus if they post in chinese and you can't understand it, you may very well be hosting a government "agent provocateur""
Actually, I've found that the Google Toolbar translation tool does a decent job w/ translating web pages in Chinese into English. Enough so that you should be able to get the gist of what they are posting.
The Light Saber Safety Video can be found right here
Meh. I'll just Tivo all the stuff I was gonna watch this week and watch it next week. 8^)
No. This is the /. crowd - they need all the help they can get in getting a piece...
But the problem is that we'll probably be using this sort of stuff on the baby boomers that have already done plenty of damage to their bodies by now. We are going to need this sort of technology because when all the boomers start getting sick, we're not going to have enough room in the hospitals to keep 'em all.
And what if I buy something while on vacation in another state that has a different tax rate than my home state?
Also, if these web sites are owned/run by people in the USA, could the state that they live in or incorporate their business in go after the taxes as well?
that's what I do! :)
An excerpt from Joe Vialls : Russia Proves 'Peak Oil' is a Misleading Zionist Scam
... intelligence reports that the Russians have already moved three deep-drilling rigs into impoverished North Korea, where they intend to repeat the Vietnamese production cycle by drilling thought solid granite and basalt, with not a single trace of the 'decaying marine life' so essential to blinkered western geologists for the 'accepted' production of crude oil. It may take a while, but ultimately the North Koreans will be able to go about their sovereign business without the Zionist Cabal in New York being able to blackmail them over a few ship loads of food-aid rice. Yes indeed, Korea will eventually have an oil surplus of its own, allowing it to tell the latest in a long line of terminally insane "New World Orders" to go to hell."
"After more than 60 years of being enslaved, pillaged, and raped by the French and then by the Americans, the poor Vietnamese were told officially by American oil multinationals that their country was barren; that western 'cutting edge' technology had failed to find anything to help them recover financially from the mess left behind by American bombs, Agent Orange, and a host of other delightful gifts from Uncle Sam. This of course was exactly where America wanted the Vietnamese to be: desperately poor and unable to take action against their former invaders.
The Russians had other ideas and a very different approach. After telling the Vietnamese that the Americans had lied to them, oil experts were flown in from Moscow to prove this startling claim in a no-risk joint venture, meaning the Russians would provide all of the equipment and expertise free of charge, and only then take a percentage of the profits if oil was actually found and put into production. Vietnam had absolutely nothing to lose, and swiftly gave Russia the green light.
The Vietnamese White Tiger oil field was and is a raging success, currently producing high quality crude oil from basalt rock more than 17,000 feet below the surface of the earth, at 6,000 barrels per day per well. Through White Tiger, the Russians have assisted the Vietnamese to regain part of their self respect, while at the same time making them far less dependent on brutal western nations for food-aid handouts.
All of a sudden in a very small way, Vietnam has joined the exclusive club of oil producing nations, and a stream of cynical U.S. Senators and Congressmen have started making the long pilgrimage to Ho Chi Minh City in order to 'mend fences'. Predictably perhaps, the Vietnamese are very cool, and try hard to ignore their new American admirers.
Welcome to the White Tiger oil field in Vietnam. Observe the truly amazing oil flares, in an area the Americans officially declared 'barren' of oil reserves !
It is truly amazing how quickly good news travels [outside of CNN], and in a very short space of time China was also engaged in a joint super deep venture with Russia. Nor did it end there.
With just one of our small systems, we have over 80 tasks automated. We added up the time it takes to run each task and figured out it would take a person sitting at a PC .8 FTE's (1664 hours) per year to run all the tasks. Plus, our tasks run at all hours of the day/night/weekend. We get an email and a page if a task fails and we get emails on all successful tasks. The absence of a failure message doesn't necessarily mean that your process completed. When we get failure notifications, it even tells us at what step the task failed.
The software we are using (Automate Professional Edition) cost us $395 for a single machine license - pretty cheap for almost a "man year" of work!!
It's not just the doctors... it seems to me that many healthcare providers (doctors, pharmacists, nurses, etc.) don't like having their workflows messed with. It is much quicker and easier for any of the above mentioned professions to pull a pen out of their pocket and scribble something on a piece of paper in a chart than it is to find a workstation, log in, and then several mouse clicks later, finally be at a screen where you can type in your note, click on your orders, etc.
:) But, the reality is that it often takes longer to compose your patient documentation on a computer than with pen and paper.
The problem with most EMR (electronic medical record) systems that I have seen is that on the front end, they don't end up saving you any time. The actual data entry into a computer will frequently take more time to enter than if you had scribbled it in a paper chart.
Where you really reap the benefits is more on the "back end" of the process through electronic processing of orders - potentially reducing errors, improved billing/payment procedures, data analysis/mining that can be used to identify quality improvement opportunities (such as improved utilization of resources or decreasing infection rates), etc.
In my experience as a nurse, there is some limited benefit on the "front end" for when you're giving patient care such as lab alerts; graphs showing trends of lab values, vital signs, etc.; and being able to actually read the physician's notes!
Adding to this problem is issue that the healthcare industry keeps asking the providers to "do more with less", but then they want to introduce some computer systems that take more time to use.
There are other issues such as the nursing shortage, the fact that the average age of a nruse is in the mid-40's, and that the aging baby boomer population will soon start to place a crushing load on the healthcare industry as they begin experiencing the onset of chronic disease such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Also, I have been involved with healthcare information systems for the past several year, and the user interfaces and system configuration tools need a LOT of work! You can put all the nifty infrastructure in place that you want, but if you can't configure an acceptable, efficient workflow and user interface for the user, the system will either fail miserably or be poorly/inappropriately utilized.
I think part of the problem is that for popular words, there are quite a few "junk" ads that will show up. For less popular/more specialized terms - terms where you may get 5-6 ads per page - it actually works quite well. :) Some of my lowest CPC ad words are my best performing ad words because they are so specific/focused.
I can't believe I missed this the first time around...
I've been an ANSOS One-Staff user for a little over 5 years now. The software development has been a little slow over the past few years but seems to be picking up. They have some new leadership in key positions (product director and VP) as well as some new development resources.
It's definately worth taking a look at.
Hook me up with some ImmortoTech and stick me in a big lead box bound for the stars!
Of course, all of the supporting technology for that sort of journey still needs to be worked out.. but by being immortal, I could afford to wait around for it.
The Wham-O Air Blaster. I had such fun with that as a kid in the early 70's.. of course, the cats hated it.. Since my currents cats have not had the pleasure of experiencing the Air Blaster, I may just have to build my own.
I also enjoyed my Whee-lo - especially trying to see how fast I could get it to go...
It also doubles as your coffin once you are run over by the soccer mom yakkin' on her cell phone while going to pick up the rugrats.
Has anyone else noticed the rather phallic imagery of the Saturn V launch just as Jolene Blalock's name is displayed? :)
Linux!
You're right.. it's an elaborate publicity stunt.
All will be revealed on SUNDAY!, SUNDAY!, SUNDAY!!!!!