Recently in tech Category

I was always taught that no meant no. Now, I supposed there may be circumstances where people are fooling around that is not the case. I just never thought one of those cases would involve a jury. However, it seems that SCO has decided that the jury may have meant something else when they said no. Now, considering the shape SCO is in. It makes sense to through the Hail Mary. You never know. The judge may throw them a bone and give them another chance to get the unix copyrights back from Novell. It is still unlikely they'll ever win any money but you never know how long they could drag this out or how much money they can spend on it.

I recently switched email over to Google mail for savings. I have to say that it is worth the price, but not more than that. Their obsession with cluttering my mail with crap I wanted deleted makes it difficult to use IMAP. I archive my mail locally so i can work around it. It is just annoying.

It has reinforced my opinion that Google is a classic example of success as a result of success not merit. Sorta like Paris Hilton is famous because she's famous.

It is the fault of all of us really. We'd rather deal with a big name idiot than a small name of any kind.

Recently a local hospital started touting their switch to electronic medical records. The idea is to improve efficiency, lower costs, etc. However, there's always the question of theory and practice, the design plan versus the as-built. This brought up the memory of a few examples where the practice didn't work out so well.

The first one was a hospital that for the first time in a hundred years had to turn away patients. They had a computer failure that affected their ability to access their electronic medical records. They became so backed up that they started diverting ambulances to other hospitals. The diversion wasn't terribly long and they still took walk-in patients. It is still the kind of thing that will make you think twice about your current infrastructure. I would hate to be the guy who had to explain what happened.

The other article was a mention of a Harvard study. The basic idea of the study was that there were no cost savings with electronic medical records. The idea is that in practice the costs outweigh any cost savings. The real benefit settles in on things like reducing medical errors. That of course still relies on the ability of an organization to implement a system. We all know how well large projects like that go, don't we?

Security is a real issue and Microsoft is not taking it seriously. Things like and the weekly credit card breach are going to be more common. Microsoft has too much money, smart people, and market share not to take this more seriously. They do not even have to do it for altruistic reason. Pure greed should motivate them as well. If the market turns against them over this they will never recover.

I love how the SCO lawsuit has destroyed what was once a reasonable company. The latest is that SCO has "abandoned rehabilitation" and the judge won't let them sell to some consulting outfit. Unfortuantely, the judge has also refused to convert their Chapter 11 reorganization to a Chapter 7 liquidation. Instead, he's appointing a trustee. This should be good for a few more delays.

The gory details.

Don't trust the three week thing.

The interface is lousy.

It is overpriced.

No one cares about email encryption. They should but they don't.

I'll spare you the details.

Yeah, you heard me, gigabit Token Ring. They not only had 100 meg standard. They also released a gigabit standard. There are apparently no implementations of the gigabit but you can still get the 100 meg. The fact that someone even decided to standardize the gigabit standard is amazing. You have to wonder what those last meetings were like. Were they just going through the motions or did they actually think they might sell some gear.

There's an interesting way of searching for cheap or at least good value hard drives at http://forre.st/storage

We all get spam. In fact, most of us get so much spam that that nuemrous technologies have sprung up to try and replace it. IM, social networking, texting, etc are all just variations on email. The real question is why would anyone buy from a spammer. Do they really think that they're going to get good top notch products and services from a spam message? It turns out that they do.

The gory details.

This is insane:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20081107092520601