Final Rule on Meaningful Use Certification Process released!
The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) released 6/18/10 the first of the Final Three Rules due out under HITECH. This one, the Temporary Certification Program, describes what vendors need to do to put their products through Meaningful Use Certification in 2012. The Permanent Certification Rule will go into effect for 2013 and that Rule has not yet been released by ONC.
Generally, the announcements were just what most vendors expected. The important takeaways are as follows:
- ONC will be accepting applications as early as July 1st from organizations who what to become Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies (ATCBs). The ATCBs will be the ones to certify EHR technology for the HITECH stimulus package
- The announcement on who is selected to be an ATCB, yes there will be more than one, will be made by the end of August. At that point, those organizations can begin preparing to conduct certification testing.
- The first certifications will be completed by some point in the mid to late fall, depending on the ATCBs ability to quickly implement the process.
- Importantly there will be no grandfathering of CCHIT approved products. All CCHIT approved products will have to go through the standard ONC certification process. That is the great market equalizer. No one is ARRA certified yet, and this is the certification that will matter.
What does all this mean? It means that all vendors are equal right now that the first to get certified will have a leg up on all the competition.
It also means that if you are a doctor or hospital that will be affected you need to start looking at your existing network and IT to make sure that you are ready for your vendor’s software and the new HIPPA and HITECH standards that dictate security of your patient data. CubeJumpers, L.P. can help. CubeJumpers is the Right Prescription for Business IT. We can do a full analysis of your current network, identify where it falls short of the HIPPA and HITECH rules, and fix any issues. Make sure that you get your full $44,000 from the government stimulus, call CubeJumpers today 877-247-5867(JUMP).
Call of Duty World at War Windows 7 issue solved.
At Cubejumpers.com we are gamers just like most of the tech field. I’m just glad I get to do it and call it a job sometimes. I have been running Windows RTM for the last month with no issues running Call of Duty World at War. Then after making some updates on Oct 22(Windows 7 go live) it would crash on me. So I searched thru the patches that were done and figured out it was the video card drivers. I manually went into the game and set the graphic controls and everything is working better than before. My theory is that Call of Duty World at War doesn’t set the video card right on windows 7. Try it and let me know if it worked for you.
Google Now Hiring People To Work From Home
The billion dollar company has never opened it’s doors to hire from the public before. As of January 2009 the company was worth approximately 220 billion dollars and is the most used internet search engine in the world.
Today they have openend their doors and will be hiring thousands of people to simply posting links from the comfort of their homes.
Read All of it at: http://www.news3insider.com/finance/google-hiring-you.html
Why I think Windows 7 will be an amazing OS.
Over the years Microsoft has had horrible software and great software. I have to admit I’ve made a career on Microsoft products so I can’t complain. But I have noticed a pattern to their madness when it comes to OS creation. This view is just something I’ve noticed with consumer OS products. I know I could have an article just on the different from Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, but I’m trying to keep this focused.
1. Roughly ever three revisions of Microsoft consumer desktop software is great. So if you look at 95, 95a, 98, ME, XP, Vista, and Windows 7, you will see that 95, ME, and Vista are the three that have most the issues. Now if you notice they are also the versions when MS starts to try new and exciting things. From 3.1 to 95, 98 to ME, and XP to Vista was all major steps in concepts.
2. When they have a bad OS it is over hyped. I can’t tell you how many times my Linux, Unix, and MAC friends can’t wait to explain why they are superior. Now during the bad OS I have to grin and bear it, but are they really bad? If you buy a laptop with approved software from the vendor then you don’t usually have any issues with any version. The hardware vendors take great care to make sure everything they sell you works correctly. At www.cubejumpers.com we even go beyond that to test equipment with a neutral attitude and only sell what truely works. We don’t want you buying hardware/software that causes you more problems.
In Windows 7 they are making sure Windows Vista drivers will tide you over until a Windows 7 driver is written. This helps to bridge the change gap, and gives hardware manufactures more time to get a better working driver. I personally am excited about Windows 7 and have been running RTM for awhile. If you have any questions, please contact me at lifemaster@lifesoffice.org.
A logical look at Social Networking
I’ve been working on my small little piece of the social networking world, and something interesting occurred to me. I’ve read posts about how to do it, and seen where you can pay for seminars to learn how to be “effective”. But really social networking is like standing int he dark with a bunch of people screaming for the lights to come on. I guess that is how it is in all advertising. Some people are funny, some are serious, and other are just plain lucky. Or if your have the money you pay a lot to be seen everywhere. This is what I have boiled down social networking to be. Maybe I”m oversimplifying it, but as a technical person I am dedicated to the tangible, and have to admit this is very much out of my scope.
Even now I’m blogging about blogging. Isn’t that funny. If anybody does have an ideal on what works, please let me know. I”m going to try, a few ideals I have, to see what they can do for me.
6 ways to work more effectively on a virtual team
I received this great link today http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/collaboration/virtual.aspx
that I thought I would share with everyone on how to work more effectively when you are virtual. It has some great tips. I know I use all of these tips plus some, and I save those for next time.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope it helps. Let me know what you think!
College Back to School Success!
Back 2 School
College is some of the most exciting times of your life; New people, teachers, and challenges to meet. When you are unprepared it can also be one of the most stressful. You can ensure that this doesn’t happen to you by following some simple and effective guidelines to ensure your success.
- Face the facts: The days of Mommy and Daddy calling you into class are over. College is more sink or swim than high school. It’s time for you to step up and give it your all. The only one to blame is you. So don’t make excuses, your dog is at home, not in your dorm room. If you make a mistake, learn from it. Do what you need to do.
- Work out a schedule. This way you know what needs to be done ahead of time to succeed. Use a calendar on your PDA or go get a day planner from the store. Whatever works for you, but you have to use it.
- Don’t let the freedom go to your head. People get carried away sometimes. This is college; there are parties all the time. You will not be able to attend them all even if you tried. So if you have to miss some to study you’ll be okay. Set your priorities, and stick to them. You are your own person, be someone that you would be proud of.
- Make sure that you have the right tools to succeed.
- The right computer gear, you only need one place http://www.cubejumpers.com/ they have everything that you need in one stop. Done.
- Plenty of socks and underwear, underwear and socks magically disappear never to be seen again in college. It is one of the unsolved mysteries of laundry.
- Roller blades or scooter, when you’re late nothing will get you to class faster than a pair of roller blades. Remember the faster you can get to class the longer you can sleep.
- Microwave and/or a hotplate. These are essential to college life. Remember to stock up on Raman noodlesJ
These simple steps can help you have one of the most memorable times of your life. Make the right choices and you will succeed.
To your success,
The Freedom Master
2009: Year of the Solid State Drive
OCZ Vertex EX Series SATA II 2.5" SSD
It looks like 2009 is the tipping point year for solid state storage. Most notebook manufacturers offer solid state drives as options on business-oriented laptops (e.g. Dell, Lenovo, HP, and others), and high-end gaming PCs have them too (think Apple MacBook Pro, Alienware M17x).
SSDs offer a number of benefits to computer users. The best units consume only 0.1 watts of power at idle vs. 0.5 to 1.5 watts with traditional “spinning rust” hard disk drives. At max performance, the gap is even wider. Those spinner metal platters in your laptop are also vulnerable to damage if dropped, where SSDs can take 1500 G’s of shock (a stress test most people can’t even create at home). The biggest risk in dropping your laptop was your HDD scraping the platters and destroying your data. Today, the main worry for an SSD-equipped laptop is a cracked display. Besides all this, SSDs are blazingly fast with access times approaching 0 ms. Read throughput of 200+ MB/s is commonplace, and the best part is: throughput scaling is almost linear in a RAID-0 configuration in these recent benchmarks. Arrays of mainstream SSDs have faster I/O than last year’s mainstream enterprise SANs.
I consider this another step toward No-Moving-Parts computing. Hard disks have always been the slowest components in computers. As an IT infrastructure professional, over the last 20 years, the most common components I’ve seen fail in all computers are: hard disk drives and power supplies–the components with moving parts. Since SSDs also generate a fraction of the heat compared to HDDs, less power is needed to cool your PC with fans. Since heat makes electronic components degrade over time, your next SSD-equipped laptop may also last longer than your last one.
Why Is Customer Service So Important?
Why Is Customer Service So Important?
By: FreedomMaster
One may think that in today’s ultra competitive market place that companies would be fighting hard to keep or retain customers. A recent incident I had with a big vendor for my business made me feel very insignificant to them. Like my business didn’t matter. We had an order come through and according to what we were told by our vendor they would receive their package by a certain date. We relayed this date to the customer. The next week we checked the order status and it is now more than a month later then what we originally promised. I called my account rep and they apologized but yet nothing was done. I finally canceled my order and ordered with someone else. This new order will be shipped ahead of when promised and the customer has a better machine. On top of that we sent our customer a loaner machine so that they would not be without a system while they waited. We also paid for the loaner to be setup for them. We now have exceeded our customers’ expectations, and in his words he is a customer for life. On the other hand a main vendor of ours lost money, respect, and we are rethinking using their products at all.
This whole event has left me thinking what has happened to customer service. How hard would it of been for our vendor to go out of their way to deliver when promised? How many business miss sales everyday for not providing world class service to their customers? So to drive home my point here are some stats:
- Good customer service allows you to keep new customers, which is cheaper, quicker and easier than finding new ones! It costs at least five times as much to win a new customer as it does to keep a current one. Much of the profits of most businesses rely on repeat customers. Some as high as 50%
- The Harvard Business Review reports that if you can prevent 5% of your customers from leaving you, you can increase your bottom line profit by 25 – 95%.
- US News and World Report did a study and found that the average American business loses 15% of its customer base each year.
68% of customers who stop buying from one business and go to another do so because of poor or indifferent service.
14% leave because of an unsatisfactorily resolved dispute or complaint.
9% leave because of price.
5% go elsewhere based on a recommendation.
1% die.
82% goes somewhere else because of a customer service issue!
Again, 82% of the customers who leave one business and go to another do so because of service related issues… and what’s really key and sad for you and me is that most of those customers don’t bother to complain. They just leave and don’t come back. And then you’re stuck spending a bunch of time and money trying to get new customers into your store, when with some consistent and persistent messages and training to both your team members and customers they would never have left in the first place.
This is huge! This means the big box stores, the warehouse stores, Internet, are making it harder for you to survive. But what is the reason that 82% of customers leave on store for another? Customer service! This is where you can crush you competition…including the big boys.
So take your new found attitude and go concur the world remembering to keep the customer first!
Backup meets the cloud
Have you had a hard disk drive fail–without having a backup? Me too. Do people really backup their data? I’ve asked my colleagues who are IT professionals this question, and most stutter and mumble, “Uhh…not really.” Why is it that so many people don’t protect their important data–even IT people who are supposed to know better?
It hasn’t been easy enough. Every external hard disk drive comes with its own backup or sync software, which becomes yet another thing the user has to learn before it helps. These backup apps either backup on a schedule or during idle time, but the external HDD must be connected for backup to occur. Sure, you backed up at the office, but you’ve been on the road for several days creating and updating important documents–and probably adding new pictures, audio, or video files. Can you afford to be unprotected until you get back to the office? Personally, I don’t like carrying more devices when I travel. My backpack is too heavy even before stuffing a portable hard drive inside.
Several months ago, I began testing online backup services to get around these problems. I have a fast Internet connection at home (Comcast “Ultra”), so I wanted to see how much of that fat pipe these services would actually use. While this isn’t a review, my testing included Norton Online Backup (consumer), Symantec Online Backup (business), MozyHome, MozyPro, and Carbonite. Talk radio listeners these days can’t go an hour without hearing some host endorse Carbonite or Mozy.
All these services do the job; most trickle your data up to the “cloud” over a period of days (or weeks) until all your data is backed up. The business model assumes once you have a full backup, subsequent backups will be very brief–because they’ll only include data that is new or changed. So if you’re willing to wait for that first full backup, you’re sittin’ pretty. Most services let you throttle the upload to save your bandwidth for other activities; some seem to cap your upload arbitrarily no matter how much bandwidth is available. By default, none back up your operating system, applications, temporary, or system files. Most have free trial periods of 15-30 days (even longer if you enter a radio talk host’s promo code).
The real differentiators are simplicity, performance, and price. All services seemed to slow my system down when actively backing up except Carbonite, but Carbonite also took the longest to complete my initial full backup. Consumer services have flat-rate subscriptions with unlimited storage, but prevent backup of network shares and external drives. Business services charge per gigabyte, plus more if you need a certain data retention period (HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley anyone?). Restoring data with Carbonite begins quickly. The other services I tested needed some minutes to “stage” or “reassemble” the data before a restore could begin. Once staging is done, restores go very quickly. I was most satisfied with Carbonite mainly because it’s so simple to use–meaning, it’s the kind of product you’d have your mom or grandmother use and still feel confident they won’t need to call you for help. File and folder icons have a green dot overlay if they’re backed up, a yellow dot if backup is pending, and a green “donut” if some folder contents are protected and other files are pending.
The time for online backup is right now. I now consider external hard disk drives as tertiary storage, only for large files that won’t fit on thumb drives (there are fewer every day). I use external HDDs for Windows Easy Transfer when I switch to new test hardware, or when I need to backup extremely large files that online services don’t handle well (a one-byte change = backup a 12 GB file all over again). Moving between the latest builds of Windows 7 (64-bit), I let Carbonite bring back down 20 GB into several user profiles, rebooted, and was working as though nothing had changed. I couldn’t have asked for more.
Top reasons to use online backup:
- It’s completely automatic. There’s nothing to remember to do. No schedule to set.
- No external hard disk drive to carry, or to connect so your backup job can run. Your new/changed data gets protected everywhere you have an Internet connection!
- Restore to any computer.
- Easily transfer a subscription to another computer.
- Example: You’re traveling and your computer is somehow DOA. Thanks to your comprehensive warranty and accidental damage protection, your new laptop arrives tomorrow morning. You reinstall your online backup client, and use your hotel broadband to bring your world back down. It could take a while, but life is good.
What have your experiences been with online backup? Do you still cling to your portable HDD? Please share your comments and ideas.