furthermore, to clarify: there was nothing special about the medical camera that made it necessary. It was just a camera, made by a MAJOR electronics vendor, and rebadged by a major medical company, but requiring proprietary connectors and proprietary software to work. He had to have THAT ONE because it was part of the package he saw, even though it was 10x more expensive, and not as good as what we could have bought him from, say... Wal Mart.

Yes, but the article doesn't take into account that your average doctor knows SHIT about IT, and is often asking for the IT equivalent of us grafting a third leg onto a patient's forehead.

Perfect (true-life) example from my job: A doctor saw a package product at a trade show for $100K. He came back to us and wanted us to recreate it for $10K. We told him it wasn't possible. He went to our Account Executive, who told us that we would be doing it, and for $10K.

The crux of this project was a specialized medical camera that cost $10K, and would not work with our PC hardware. We suggested that he buy an off-the-shelf DSLR, which he refused. Again, went to the Account Executive, who okayed it. Great, now we're over budget, and we have a $10K device that doesn't work.

So, we go to the camera hardware manufacturer, who now has us by the short hairs, and they tell us that they can write us a driver for $30K. Which is again okayed. The project is now 30K over budget, we still haven't bought the hardware for it, and they have us doing the project off the clock because they haven't budgeted for any labor costs.

Two years later, it still doesn't work right. The doctor loudly proclaims to anyone who will listen about how the IT department doesn't care about his needs, and articles like this get written.

Ho. Lee. Crap.

I do IT for a major regional hospital chain, and all this time, I thought it was just my company that was this fucked up.

What you're talking about is EXACTLY what happens. Doctors, managers, vendors, whoever CONSTANTLY show up with junk hardware and software, throw it at us, and expect us to support it. The organization is so bloated around the middle that no one has the authority to tell anyone else no. We have hundreds of Access databases, SQL servers running on people's desktops, and apps that we've never heard of turning up constantly.

And it all happens so fast, and we're SO understaffed (4 IT staff for 2000+ devices in my hospital) that we don't have a prayer of keeping track of it all.

And the understaffing is a problem in and of itself. The organization as a whole has around 30K total employees, of which 700 are IT staff. Probably 10% of the IT staff does next to nothing. Another 30% does nothing beneficial to patient care, or actively makes patient care harder. 20% are redundant management. For example: my particular part of the company, staffed by 4 IT grunts such as myself, has 4 managers directly over me: 1 team lead, 2 Project Managers, and an Account Executive. All of whom often want conflicting things done at the same time. Finally, the last 50% of IT here is made up of everybody else working their asses off to make up for the rest of the crap.

No wonder heatlh care costs are sky-high. IT is indicative of the whole mess... the company is a gigantic mish-mash of hacks thrown together at the last minute to satisfy the newest bureaucratic requirement, public opinion, expensive doctor, negative news story, malpractice suit, or demands from the board or rich donors. There's no way anything like this could run efficiently.

For real? I've heard people complain that new albums only have a few good songs, and thought it was bunk... if that's the case, you're not listening to the right bands to begin with. Now old albums only have a few good songs?

What about Zoso? Dark Side of the Moon? Tommy? Van Halen I? Bookends? Electric Ladyland? Brothers in Arms? 2112? I could go into modern examples too, starting with everything Dredg has ever made, and finishing with everything Muse has ever made

There are thousands of albums that are great, start to finish. What's killing the music industry is not piracy, it's the fact that people no longer have the attention span to sit through a great album, and aren't willing to pay album prices for the singles that the radio has drilled into their heads.

That's nothin.' I recently replaced some 5-drawer IBM Infoprint 1352 printers (same as Lexmark's T6xx series) that had 1.2 million+ pages. Also pulled multiple HP 4050 and 4100s and a LJ 8150 with over a million in the past few years... and they still work. We use them as loaners now when the junk Xeroxes break. Most I've ever seen though, was a Xerox Docuprint N4525 with 1.75 million on it when retired. I have no idea how it lasted so long, as the rest of those we had died at around 500K.

But really, no one should throw stones, right? As a kid, I was always taught that it's not nice to throw stones at people. Unless of course, you were trapped in a glass house and needed to get out. If you have a pile of stones next to you, go ahead and throw them. Then you won't be trapped anymore! So really, people in glass houses are the only ones who should throw stones. Right?

Didn't the UK define terrorist to mean 'American radio presenter that we don't like?'

After reading the wiki, I think it sounds at least as plausible as Scientology. Which is to say, not at all.

They have that... I believe it's scientology.org. Wikipedia is not the place for it. If you read the scientology related articles, they do a very good job of presenting both sides of the story. The reason scientology is banned is because they have a LONG history of deleting all negative viewpoints, and even whole articles on things like David Miscavage, The Fishman Affadavit, OT3, Tommy Davis, and Xenu, just to name a few. The reason that they were banned was not to disallow them their viewpoint, but rather that they were constantly disallowing others' viewpoints.

I prefer to call them 'action figures,' or 'collectibles.'

haha, my house growing up also had a 'no toy guns' rule. I wasn't even allowed to have GI Joes... which is probably why I now own five real guns, shoot all them regularly, and carry a CC Permit.

You obviously don't have a 2 year old niece then, who screams bloody murder if she gets anything that's not pink, and throws it at her little brother. We can't even wrap her presents in paper that's not pink... she won't open them. She wasn't taught that, and the family has tried not to encourage it, but that's just how she is. Hopefully she'll grow out of it.

GM bought Opel in 1929 and Vauxhall in 1925. It wasn't like they just bought them out recently to acquire their new and exciting diesel technology. I believe that they are mostly designed in Europe though, by European GM engineers.

supposed to be the knock speeds up and he never knows when to come in.