Fine. Aren't we talking about open source here? What is being said isn't really that people hate Poettering, but that people disagree with a decision the Debian maintainers have made.

When this happened with OpenOffice, people left and formed LibreOffice. The fact that this hasn't happened with Debian indicates that the core dev group (the people who actually work on the OS) are generally in favour of the change. So why not just fork to Febian, take the most recent non-systemd release, and move forward with it? If systemd is really so bad, the difference will be obvious to those using it and maintaining it, and eventually Debian will go the way of the dodo, to be replaced by Febian.

I fail to see the problem here, unless the problem is that there's a vocal minority who doesn't actually have the skills to maintain such a system but disagree with the way others are doing it. The minority could be correct, but it's probably not all that big a deal.

Depends... are those major leagues, minor leagues or little leagues?

Don't throw the Doctor into the classics please -- even if he's a classic himself.

But I'd like to know why he left out the crystal skulls.

I was wondering how they ended up with a 74-teraflop -- I guess that explains it. Would have been better with a terraflop though.

Yeah; I'm surprised nobody read (or at least admitted to reading) my second comment that flagged up some of that. Lotus 1-2-3 was for the IBM PC XT. Never touched the Apple II.

However, the dates/etc. are actually accurate, somewhat.
Lotus started buying VisiCalc in 1985, but the deal wasn't actually finished until 1986.
Excel came out in 1984 (I've got a copy of it), but didn't go out through distribution channels until 1985. I was going to say 1985 on this one since that's when it was officially available in stores, but then decided to go with 1984, as it WAS available.
"Excel for MS DOS 3" came with a Windows runtime; I originally had listed it as coming out for Windows in 1987, but then figured I'd go with the marketing.

And the replacement of 1-2-3 with Excel was exactly as you said -- that, and the fact that right out of the door in 1987, you could buy a GUI that would run your old DOS apps AND came with Excel. A lot of businesses thought this was a good deal.

I was thinking that the "perfect" solar cell already existed....

http://ask.metafilter.com/1430...

Hah... and so far, nobody noticed my gaffe regarding the Apple II -- 1-2-3 actually ran on the IBM PC XT IIRC; it'd been reading too many other comments and TFS and got sucked into a reality distortion field.

Interesting that you should raise the FDIV bug (which was discovered via an Excel spreadsheet IIRC, didn't read the wiki page) -- I seem to recall there was some rounding error that hit excel spreadsheets later on in life too, where the rounding rules differed in two parts of the cell operations, so that you could have data that became more inaccurate each time the page was run.

You can always leave it; romantic relationships are not a divine right. I'm a proponent of "do lots of group activities and develop relationships based on commonality, some of which may become romantic" -- traditional/e-dating tends to be a shortcut, and like most shortcuts, has its own hazards.

Arranged marriage tends to have just as high a success ratio as marriages based on formal dating. Just saying.

But then what would I run on Novell NetWare???

Thay're talking 30 years ago -- that'd be 1984.

VisiCalc was from 1979. In 1982, Lotus 1-2-3 was born. It ran well on the Apple II. That's 32 years, not 30 years. Lotus 1-2-3 includes the bits that were supposed to go into VisiCalc's front end and presentation modules, but were rejected. Excel was 1984, and was released for the Mac. In 1986, Lotus bought VisiCalc. In 1987, when MS DOS 3 was released, Excel 2.0 was ported to it and was one of the flagship packages. IBM bought Lotus in 1995, same year that Excel became a flagship Office product for Windows 95.

Quattro, Foxbase, etc. are kind of a footnote to this.

Not only that, but an area that's getting regular 3.5 quakes (although Richter went out of style a long time ago -- what kind of quakes are these?) is probably an area that's got nicely slipping plates and is unlikely to have "the big one". Unlike places like say, Seattle, which will eventually be devastated by a major quake. Regular quakes also mean that their infrastructure is likely set up to deal with quakes, which is also a plus. As long as they aren't putting the thing on oceanfront property or directly on the fault line on the subsiding side of the plate, seems like a pretty good place to put it.

I thought all faxes were transmitted and received digitally... for the past 20 years. Are there still people storing them on paper?

Normal Facsimile workflow is like this:
1) person pulls up the records, saves them as PDF
2) Person "prints" PDF to fax
3) PDF is converted to CCITT-compatible TIFF format, which is then
4) transmitted as a high quality fax (we're not talking the old 30dpi ones anymore)
5) Recipient's fax machine gets the fax with header info, saves it as PDF and emails it to the appropriate local recipient
6) PDF is saved from email, possibly printed if needed, and filed via the local EMR.

And this is why the data you're looking for is in the hospital's EMR as a PDF: it was received by fax.

Any solution that's going to change this workflow is going to need to handle TIFF and PDF formats, with ClearText-style OCR. That way, people can still use the fax workflow as an alternative to digital data transmission. The system also has to have the ability to pull up the original PDFs in the cases where the OCR failed.

It'll then take at LEAST 5-10 years for the new digital transmission system to work out the kinks and gain enough momentum to retire the old workflow completely.

...which means if it "can't be done" then you can sue the healthcare provider AND Epic for failing to comply with HIPAA. Since it's a federal offense, you don't even have to foot the bill yourself.

It must be truly horrendous software if the data store is slaved to the UI.

In a system like this, the interface should be easily rewritten by anyone who wants to, and just talk to the back end using a Standard Query Language.

This is a problem that has been solved many times, and yet you STILL get companies like this who have cornered the market with a solution that's 30 years out of date.

When a replacement system is created, it should at least be backed by a public key infrastructure and use two-factor authentication. It should use a standard back-end database with an open tokenization system, a validation system, and logical data typing.

Otherwise, it's really not much better than digital faxes or email with some analysis software tacked on the front with a pretty UI.