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Andy blogs at:
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The network neutrality debate: It all depends on what you fear
August 30 2010
Network neutrality confuses a lot of laypeople because of all the different levels on which it's being argued and the opposing ways language is used by different participants. Andy Oram takes a look at the loaded words in the net neutrality debate. read moreMakara deploys virtualized applications, tracks session activity
August 24 2010
What I found particularly interesting is their performance monitoring. It offers quite fine-grained reporting. read moreThe software behind the VA health care transformation
August 19 2010
The Veterans Administration's efforts have become health care industry buzz, and its illustrious VistA software often makes the news. In this post, Andy Oram reviews Phillip Longman's VA book "Best Care Anywhere," and examines VistA's influence on software and development. read moreOn re-reading Steven Levy's "Hackers"
August 17 2010
Spiffing "Hackers" up for the book version has paid off by delivering a new dimension to the book that readers are reporting back on favorably. Here I offer my reactions to re-reading the text after 25 years and a discussion of the links we added to the electronic version. read moreWhat I get and don't get about the Google/Verizon proposal
August 11 2010
I don't see the proposal being adopted in any regulatory context--it's too vague and limited--but it's interesting for what it says about Google and Verizon. read moreCouchDB and MongoDB announce new products involving replication
August 10 2010
CouchDB announced an Android app that downloads a CouchDB database to the device, while MongoDB adds auto-sharding and replication sets to its product. read moreAugust 06 2010
DebConf 2010 was held in New York City. This blog covers several interesting presentations and some general observations about the Debian community. read moreMasterminds of Programming book wins JOLT award
August 04 2010
Masterminds of Programming is a unique book, and I was thrilled yesterday to find out that a bunch of people at Dr. Dobbs' JOLT awards recognized the historic offering it represents. read moreWrap-up of the health care IT track at O'Reilly's Open Source convention
July 27 2010
The first health care track to be included in an O'Reilly conference grappled with the task of opening up health care. Two contradictory trends make the field difficult for IT to advance. read moreVistA scenarios, and other controversies at the Open Source health care track
July 23 2010
The history and accomplishments attributed to VistA, the Veterans Administration's core administrative software, mark it as one of the most impressive software projects in history. Still, lots of smart people in the health care field deprecate VistA and cast doubt that it could ever be widely adopted. read moreDay one of the health care IT track at O'Reilly's Open Source convention
July 22 2010
Nine talks representing the breadth of a vital programming area can't be summarized in one sentence, but for me the theme of the day was open source advocates reaching out to solve pressing problems that proprietary vendors will not or cannot address. read moreBeware the march of the IP trolls at the House Committee on Small Business
July 21 2010
What new massacre of technological and cultural innovators is being planned behind closed doors? read moreOpenStack offered as Rackspace's answer to calls for an open cloud
July 20 2010
When Rackspace and NASA announced OpenStack, I thought of it as either a PR or yet another attempt to impose some pet project on the world as a standard. But it may actually a newsworthy intervention into the furiously evolving cloud industry. read moreReport from 2010 Community Leadership Summit
July 19 2010
The topics we covered were deep and serious: how to prod established community members to leave room for new ones and encourage their growth, how to involve women and minorities in technical projects, how to raise funds and whom to accept funds from. The conference could also get personal. By the second day of… read moreHealth Care Challenge combines patient empowerment and data crunching
July 15 2010
Two unifying threads ties together all the challenges, indirectly showing the way the health care field is heading: involving the patients in their own care, and collecting and sharing data. read moreHealth and Human Services finalizes meaningful use for electronic health records
July 13 2010
Technologically, meaningful use requires support for data sharing, patient access, structured formats, and decision support. read moreThe potential of Healthcare.gov
July 01 2010
Healthcare.gov from the Department of Health and Human Services provides an example of the goals behind opening up data--not data for data's sake, but data as a tool people can use to get more involved in policy, have an impact on civic life, and hopefully make their own lives better along the way. read moreOpen source and the VA's health transformation
June 29 2010
Joseph Dal Molin, co-founder of the WorldVistA project and a speaker at the upcoming OSCON convention, discusses the Department of Veterans Affairs' VistA system and its expansion as an open source effort. read moreAnalysis: Three privacy initiatives from the Office of Management and Budget
June 28 2010
The U.S. government took three large steps toward sophisticated privacy and identity policies last week. They involve federated identity, storage of personally identifiable information, and the use of social networks. Andy Oram takes an in-depth look at important parts of the new policies. read moreRed Hat Overhauls the Enterprise Software Stack
June 24 2010
Red Hat is openly badgering large, IT-driven organizations to move away from comfortable patterns and to adopt what they believe to be the best virtualization platform, the best cloud API, the best data storage mechanism, and so on. read moreOpen source and health care already have a history
June 24 2010
Fred Trotter, a longtime developer in the open source healthcare world and a speaker at next month's OSCON conference, discusses the history of open source and health IT in this podcast interview. read moreMårten Mickos discusses the strategy at Eucalyptus Systems
June 22 2010
Mickos responds to such questions as whether private clouds are needed, whether they are too hard to manage, and whether the Amazon API is the best foundation for Eucalyptus. read moreGiving patient data meaningful use
June 21 2010
Arien Malec, coordinator of NHIN Direct, has led a uniquely open, community-based project to define health data exchange standards. In this podcast, Malec discusses health care privacy, the difficulties of securely exchanging patient information, and the types of applications NHIN Direct can facilitate. read moreFrom Apache to Health and Human Services
June 17 2010
In this podcast interview, Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf discusses the CONNECT project and the role data can play in improving patient care and the medical system. read moreMySQL highlighted at Oracle user group conference
June 16 2010
A special MySQL track at Kaleidoscope, the upcoming Oracle Developer Tools User Group conference, should give MySQL a nice bounce. read moreEuropean Union starts project about economic effects of open government data
June 11 2010
Open source advocate Marco Fioretti has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union, with a focus on economic benefits for local businesses. Related surveys are also mentioned. read moreVMware and partners point to benefits
June 04 2010
At a VMware forum, a sense of expectancy about cloud computing seemed to be expressed more by speakers than by attendees. read moreWhat I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention
May 19 2010
The health care technology track at the Open Source convention touches on core areas for improvement: patient-centered care, the use of mobile devices, administrative efficiencies, and the collection, processing, and display of statistics to improve health care read moreCrowdsourcing and the Challenge of Payment
May 11 2010
A report on a meetup to discuss distributed work, with Jeff Howe as speaker. read moreNotes from the Politics of Open Source conference
May 10 2010
Sponsored by the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, the conference papers and a live stream are online. This article focuses on the challenges of getting open source into government agencies. read moreReport from Health Information Technology in Massachusetts
May 01 2010
When politicians organize a conference, there's obviously an agenda--beyond the published program--but I suspect that it differed from the impressions left by speakers and break-out session attendees at Health Information Technology: Creating Jobs, Reducing Costs, & Improving Quality. read moreOpen source sweeping software firms, bolstering SaaS (interview with Black Duck)
April 28 2010
Free and open source software is profiting from its own maturity, the economic recession, and the comfort level of developers for using the software, and nowhere is open source more important than in Software as a Service. read moreMySQL conference 2010: thriving as one of many
April 15 2010
The future course of MySQL in an environment with many new and intriguing alternatives to relational databases, and multiple versions of MySQL itself. read moreMySQL conference begins in the midst of industry shifts
April 13 2010
The conference comes at a time of unusual uncertainty and change for MySQL--and I'm not talking about the Oracle acquisition, which the community dealt with last year. read moreMongoDB experts model the move from a relational database to MongoDB
April 08 2010
Because the MySQL conference starts next week and O'Reilly just released a pre-publication version of MongoDB: The Definitive Guide, I decided to spice up discussion a bit by asking the authors about a common question: how to move from MySQL to MongoDB. read moreDC Circuit court rules in Comcast case, leaves the FCC a job to do
April 06 2010
The DC Circuit didn't tell the FCC to turn back. It has a job to do--promoting the spread of high-speed networking, and ensuring that it is affordable by growing numbers of people--and it just has to find the right tool for the job. read moreImagine a world that has moved entirely to cloud computing
April 01 2010
For April Fools Day: a short story about a rare skill: Hardware Guy. read moreWhy health care is coming to the Open Source convention
March 26 2010
This year for the first time, O'Reilly's Open Source convention contains a track on health care IT. In this blog I'll explain why we created the track and why OSCon is a promising venue for trends that will move and shake health care in positive ways. read moreMarch 22 2010
I just heard of the death of Robin Milner, which seems to have been quite unexpected. Professor Milner was interviewed in Masterminds of Programming in relation to his work on the ML language. read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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