Cody Taylor

theodp writes “As GE, Google, Intel, IBM, Microsoft and others pile into the business of computerized medical files in a stimulus-fueled frenzy, BusinessWeek reminds us that electronic health records have a dubious history. Under the federal stimulus program, hospitals can get several million dollars apiece for tech purchases over the next five years, and individual doctors can receive up to ,000. There’s also a stick: The feds will cut Medicare reimbursement for hospitals and practices that don’t go electronic by 2015. But does the high cost and questionable quality of products currently on the market explain why barely 1 in 50 hospitals have a comprehensive electronic records system, and why only 17% of physicians use any type of electronic records? Joe Bugajski’s chilling The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me suggests that may be the case.”

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The NYTimes is running a piece on the dilemma faced by Web entrepreneurs, particularly in social media companies: the developing world is spiking traffic but not contributing much to revenues. The basic disconnect when Web 2.0 business models meet Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East is that countries there are not good prospects for the advertisers who pay the bills. “Call it the International Paradox. Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results. … Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there. ‘I believe in free, open communications,’ Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. ‘But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.’ … Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which [an analyst] recently estimated could lose 0 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month.”

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CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements — particularly if you want to reduce your server load. And if you haven’t heard

As Philip Elmer-Dewitt reminds us, Steve Jobs owns a mansion in Woodside, CA, that he’s been trying to have demolished for years. Why? Because he hates the place.

The operator of a technology discussion forum has sued Apple, claiming that the company used US copyright law to curb legitimate discussion of its iTunes software.

Full Linux for the Embedded Systems. Let us explore how to install a full Debian distribution on an emulated ARM926 machine with QEMU.

narramissic writes “A Dutch university has received a .3 million grant from the European Research Council to fund 5 more years of work on a Unix-type operating system, called Minix, that aims to be more reliable and secure than either Linux or Windows. The latest grant will enable the three researchers and two programmers on the project to further their research into a making Minix capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected, said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit. ‘It irritates me to no end when software doesn’t work,’ Tanenbaum said. ‘Having to reboot your computer is just a pain. The question is, can you make a system that actually works very well?'”

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