CES 2012 Keynote: A Look at Windows 8
Tami Reller, Chief Marketing Officer, Windows, shares a preview of Windows 8 during the Microsoft keynote at CES 2012 in Las Vegas.
Physicians can access hospital on Blackberry Playbook with Citrix Receiver app
The Blackberry Playbook has been much maligned in the news as of late. Problems including no native email application and a barely populated app store have overshadowed many of the good features of the tablet device.
“With the Citrix Receiver, users can access virtual desktops on servers running Microsoft Windows, as well as an organization’s enterprise apps, enabling standalone app virtualization. This is huge for industries such as healthcare that rely on Citrix virtualized systems.”
The biggest legal danger for open source? Patents or copyright?
Not a particularly deep or wide river, but due to the geographic history of the Midwest, a river with a bottom full of massive pits and dips, dug out by glaciers and the debris they shoved around this part of the world 15,000 years ago. Because of these formations, this particular river is rather dangerous to be in for swimmers–at any point, an undercurrent can drag you under the surface, to be trapped in whatever pit or dead tree lies beneath.
It looks calm on the surface, placid even. But it is not.
There is an undercurrent of legal issues troubling the open source world these days. While things are going great in some aspects–cloud, mobile, server–there is a definite potential for trouble from litigious attacks on any of the successful technologies open source has helped create.
If this sounds like fear, uncertainty, and doubt, it is assuredly not. But if there’s a bear in your house, you can’t just ignore it and hope it will go away. You call animal control.
FUD is the obvious intention of those who have instigated the various legal troubles on open source practitioners. Fear specifically: ramp it up to intimidation, and you’ve got a potential licensing revenue channel on your hands.
Such troubles, from the scores of software patents that are used to “protect” intellectual property, are obvious.
But no less troublesome, I believe, is the issue of copyright and copyright assignments.
e-Health Ontario agency review scrapped
The Liberal government has quietly scrapped a mandatory review of a new health bureaucracy.
Premier Dalton McGuinty says the legislative review, which was to have taken place by the end of March, was dropped because Ontario’s 14 Local Health Integration Networks (or LHINs) are not yet fully operational. The LHINs took effect on April 1, 2007.
“As it turns out, all of the responsibilities that we wanted the LHINs to take on, they have yet to take on,” he told the legislature.
“In particular, a big part of their new responsibilities would be long-term care (and they) have not yet done that.”
Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak said the review was much needed in light of a recent spending scandal at eHealth Ontario. Millions in untendered contracts were handed out at that agency, which was criticized as the worst-managed agency Auditor General Jim McCarter had ever seen.
Hudak contends health bureaucrats at various LHINs have handed out at least $7 million in untendered contracts. “I suspect Dalton McGuinty’s motivation is clear,” he said. “He does not want to have any more scrutiny of the growing rot at his LHINs, which resembles very much the kind of scandalous spending we saw at eHealth.”
The province designed LHINs to enable better local health planning and more local freedom in distributing health dollars to the neediest recipients. Ottawa is part of the Champlain LHIN, which co-ordinates and funds hospitals, community care access centres, addictions and mental health agencies, community support services, community health centres and long-term care homes across eastern Ontario. It is headed by Dr. Robert Cushman.
Cancer advocacy group calls for e-health records for patients, more drug funding
By Anne-Marie Tobin (CP) – Mar 24, 2010
TORONTO — As Donna Hammill-Chalk undergoes treatment for breast cancer, she can log onto the website at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, type in a username and secure password, and gain access to her medical records.
In Prince Edward Island, her mother, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in December, doesn’t have electronic records – but if they existed, it would be easier for her to share updates on her condition and treatment with her four grown children living in different parts of the world.
“Cancer – you lose all control and you can get some control back by having access to your information,” Hammill-Chalk said in an interview Wednesday from her home in Markham, Ont., where she is recovering from a mastectomy.
“I think in this day and age, patients need to take ownership and accountability for managing their own care. And you can’t do that if you don’t have the information.”
She tells her story in a report card on cancer, released by the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada. The report also calls for more funding for cancer drugs, bans everywhere on smoking in cars with kids and more genetic testing so treatments can be targeted to those who will benefit.
Dr. Pierre Major, chair of the report card committee, said the electronic records system at Sunnybrook, known at MyChart, is the only one he’s aware of that’s available to cancer patients in Canada.
Physicians there have told him they’re happy with it, he said.
“It’s great because patients look up in their chart what the results are, and it saves phone calls. The patients are happy because they can access their results or even change their appointments.”
It’s something that Marlene Nicholson, who lives in Bedford, N.S., can only wish for as she helps her mother navigate the health-care system. She’s Hammill-Chalk’s sister, and has made the three-hour drive to Lower Freetown, P.E.I., on numerous occasions in recent months to support their 69-year-old mom, Margaret Hammill, during her medical appointments.
With one sister in Ontario, another in Bahrain, and a brother in California, she has to relay a lot of information, Nicholson said.
“When the siblings are at a distance, yes, it would be great to be able to just say ‘OK, go here’ or ‘Mom has a password’ or whatever it takes, or if we could send a file … everybody can have access to it.”
Walk-In Doctor Clinics in Toronto
