Discussions

Manip wrote:

Maurits wrote:Indeed - there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Prove it.

PS - I hope you're aware that is a libellous remark and you can be sued for it.

Actually, it's a paraphrase of a quote by Benjamin Disraeli .
Given your "uk" banner on your avatar, one might think you'd know that.

Manip wrote:

Yes. 1hour 40min's to travel to the nearest station then maybe an hour across London ...

Oh TELL ME you didn't just compain about a 3 hour trip. (never mind, I re-checked my facts. commas inside of numbers are important) LOL.

Although I don't know if I'd drive across the bridge to Redmond for a Microsoft launch so I can understand your pain.

On-topic. I may head over to the local Apple store tomorrow after work to take a peek at the freakshow. I've already pre-ordered Tiger through Amazon, but I'd like to see what an OS launch is like. It's been sooooo looonnnggg since the last big MS launch. If I do, I'll post pictures at my site.

LarryOsterman wrote:

I'm going to answer the question anyway.

Apple doesn't have a large problem with piracy because:
  1) OSX doesn't work unless you've already paid Apple for the hardware.  So there's no huge economic benefit for piracy.
  2) With a 2-3% market share, it's not worth the professional pirates time

Larry nailed it here, but he left out one thing that the small market share implies. Loyalty. Mac users are more loyal to Apple and are willing to pay for Apple quality. Now, as those same Mac users shelling out $130 for Tiger if they paid for their copy of Adobe Photoshop.

Plus, in my personal opinion, Apple generally treats their users better than Microsoft and that instills quite a bit of loyalty.

LarryOsterman wrote:

And, having said that, I bet if you check the P2P networks you'll find ISOs of Tiger out there already.

I know several people who have already installed pirate versions on their machines.

Yeah, but I bet most of them are Mac supporters and probably just didn't want to wait for Tiger. I bet the majority of them end up buying Tiger once it is out.

rjdohnert wrote:

Client Version -- Full version OEM....$250.00
                          Upgrade .................$100.00 - $150.00
                          Family License (install on 5 PC's) $500.00

whoa, put down the pipe son. OEM does not mean what I think you think it means. OEM is the no packaging, shrink-wrapped, nothing but a CD and the license software that Dell, HP, and your local computer shop installs on  your PC when you buy it from them. If I can buy a computer for $500 I'm sure not going to pay $250 for the software to run on it. I think you mean the full, shrink wrap version you can buy at Best Buy.

The lack of smarts Microsoft has shown in the licensing arena, especially when it comes to server products, has been on display for some time. I don't expect to see a family pack license scheme anytime soon.

Rossj wrote:

And I am still waiting for someone from MacBU to look at my questions and maybe even consider answering them,

I know it's outside of C9, but you might try contacting Rick Schaut here. http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/default.aspx.

He's a dev in the MacBU and might be able to answer your questions or at least send them on to someone who could. He's a really nice guy and has put out an open offer to answer questions, if possible. Check out this post where he talks with an AbiWord developer.

 http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2005/03/13/394808.aspx

 BugBug: It's still stripping all line breaks in Safari and not formatting the HTML. Works fine in FireFox on the Mac.

'Object Thinking' is pretty low on my list. It's sitting on the bookshelf just to the right of me, but I could hardly stand to read through it. I managed, but it was hard. Very conceptual and 'hippie-esque' in terms of it's thinking.

Must have IT book.

"Code" by Charles Petzold - Takes you through how computers actually work from Boolean algebra down to how the registers and RAM actually store data. Great "big picture" book for any computer programmer.

++ for the "Pragmatic Programmer".

If you have to deal with ASP.NET at all, "Essential ASP.NET with examples in <C#||VB.NET>" by Fritz Onion is a great reference.

"Essential XML" Don Box, Arron Skonnard, John Lam - Still holds up after all these years. Thank god XML is frozen. hehe

edit: Almost forgot, algorithms in C. Even if you don't program in C, you should be able to read it and translate these algorithms to whatever language you program in.

ScuzzMonkey wrote:

That's why prototyping 50 beds is a lousy idea... it's not so much the small roll out as a demonstration of technology feasability (which is a good idea) but the thought of charging into it without dotting every I and crossing every T.  The bugs that we considerable inevitable will condemn the entire project from the point of view of the medical staff who have to work with it; and word travels quickly.

Exactly. Would you want your loved ones vital signs to be monitored by beta code? Generally, people that enter a clinical research protocol, and experimental protocol, don't have much of an alternative.

At any rate; don't assume that the failure rates which we have come to accept in other industries are tolerable here

And don't assume that every failure of the paper system would have been caught by an electronic gizmo (to use an industry term). If a doctor wrote down the wrong blood type for a patient on the paper chart, what makes you think that the doctor would have entered it correctly into an EMR? What kind of assurance do you have that the EMR that you get from another hospital is accurate? Are you willing to bet your patients life on it? Or are you going to run a test to check the patients blood type anyway? What happens if your database is corrupted and then propagates the corrupted data into the system? If it's financial data, you can probably go to a backup and restore it. What if it's lab data for a patient in the hospital? That kind of data might need to be pulled up if the patient goes south and it would need to be pulled up real quick.