Open source might prove to be the wrong answer to the health care mess. But given the VA’s success with VistA,ghd mk4, President Obama should be spending pennies on the stimulus dollar with VistA before he looks elsewhere for solutions. It’s already written. By all accounts, it works well.

Scratch the surface, however, and you quickly run into a major problem with VistA: MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System). MUMPS is the archaic programming language in which VistA was written, and which perpetuates its inflexible architecture.

It’s already paid for.

It just needs to shake the MUMPS out.

Open source, not $19 billion, may be best health care stimulus

Book rights holders have until next Friday, September 4, to decide if they want to opt out of the proposed settlement and prevent their books from being displayed in Google Book Search. The U.S. Department of Justice is also looking into the Google Books settlement to determine if “anticompetitive practices” were used in the formulation of the settlement.

Some object to the unchecked publishing power granted to a single corporation,ghd, some are concerned that rights holders are not getting a fair shake under the deal, and some just don’t like Google. On the other hand, there are some rights holders who are excited by the idea of gaining recognition and perhaps revenue for books long out of print.

Open Book Alliance to oppose Google Book deal

With unemployment high and expected to keep rising, households are setting aside less money for yearend holiday shopping. That means the late-November shopping surge may not last, retailing experts say. "People could be spending a lot of their budget up front," says Jeffrey Grau, senior analyst at online marketing research firm eMarketer. &quot,uggs sale;Things are going to slow down as people have less money to spend, and they are going to exhaust their money earlier.&quot,ghd iv salon styler; The average consumer plans to spend $682.74 on goods purchased online and offline during the holidays. That’s 3.3% less than last year, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey of 8,431 consumers conducted in September and October. Despite the recent brisk traffic, online sales for all of November and December may still rise by only 5.4%, to $30 billion this year, according to eMarketer.

Deeper, Wider Discounts This Year

Lured by steep discounts, consumers showed a propensity to spend as yearend shopping got under way after Thanksgiving. By late afternoon on Nov. 30, the day’s online sales were up 11% from a year earlier, according to online marketing firm Coremetrics. That matched the percentage increase registered on Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving, when Web sales climbed 11%, to $595 million, according to researcher comScore (SCOR).

Online Retailers: An Early Holiday Peak?

The World Health Organization does not seem terribly worried about the effects of cell phone use on health: “None of the recent reviews have concluded that exposure to the RF fields from mobile phones or their base stations causes any adverse health consequence.” But this statement–last updated nine years ago–relies on precisely the kind of data these watchdogs suggest is flawed.

The paper’s main conclusions are: There is a “significant” risk of brain tumors from cell phone use; EMR exposure limits that have been used by governments and supported by industry are based on the false premise that EMR has no biological effects except for heating; and design flaws of the Interphone study include selection bias, insufficient latency time to expect a tumor diagnosis, unrealistic definition of what makes a “regular” cell phone user, exclusion of children and young adults from the study, exclusion of many types of brain tumors, and exclusion of people who had died or were too ill to be interviewed as the result of brain tumors.

Several other studies, many of which are referenced in the book “Cancer Biology,” including one of 195,775 workers manufacturing and testing cell phones, indicate no association between EMR exposure and brain or other nervous system cancers. But again, this book was published in 1995; time for an update?

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor,Cheap North Face Trouser, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Fierce assaults on Obama’s agenda, including his ambitious health reform plan, were one factor in the Republican victory in a Massachusetts seat last week that stripped away the Democratic supermajority in the Senate.

Obama to call for partial budget freeze

Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

Nvidia on Thursday posted a smaller loss than the year-earlier period but the graphics chip supplier is still grappling with costs related to a chip defect first addressed by the company last July.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the president and chief executive officer, said the company’s “business is recovering. Product demand is improving, and our strategic investments are leading to new growth.” Nvidia expects revenue in the third quarter–ending October 25, 2009–to be up 5 to 7 percent over the second quarter.

In July 2008, a $196 million reserve was accrued for the purpose of supporting affected customers around the world. The weak die/package material combination is not used in any products currently in production, the company said.

Nvidia reported a second-quarter loss of $105.3 million, or 19 cents a share, better than the year-earlier period when it posted a loss of $120.9 million, or 22 cents a share.

However, Nvidia’s results were negatively affected by an additional net charge of approximately $119.1 million “to cover costs related to a weak die/packaging material set that was used in certain versions of its previous-generation chips. Although the number of units impacted by this issue remains consistent with the company’s initial estimates a year ago, the cost of remediation and repair of impacted systems has been higher than originally anticipated,” the company said in a statement.

Nvidia loss reflects lingering chip defect issue

Shares of the Santa Clara,ugg sales, Calif.-based company were up in after-hours trading.

As early as 2007, Hewlett-Packard listed laptop models affected by the defect. In August 2008, Dell also listed affected models. And Apple said in October that it would repair faulty graphics chips.

,buy ugg boots

North Korea Detains Second US Citizen

What our data shows is that the number of considered users looking at notebooks climbed 31 percent from July 2007 to July 2008 and–despite Depression 2.0–the number of these users climbed another 25 percent in the past 12 months (sorry, the data guardians at CNET won’t let me publish the actual totals but I’m working on them). That’s healthy growth that could be the result of several factors. As the site editor, I’ll list the two I think are most plausible: our superb laptop editors, led by Dan Ackerman, are cranking out more reviews than ever before, and our SEO team has made sure their reviews rank extremely high on Google and other search engines. Even if people aren’t buying as much in this economy, they are certainly researching for when they are ready.

The big winner has been Asus, which Ackerman calls “masters of the Netbook.” And right now, Netbooks are hot on CNET. After unveiling its first Eee PC in late 2007, Asus has climbed from 2 percent in July 2007 to 13 percent a year later to 20 percent in July 2009.

HP: IDC shows HP hovering at around 25 percent for the past couple of years,timberland for sale, with a jump to about 30 percent in the first quarter of 2009. CNET also shows HP tracking at around 25 percent until October of last year, when it topped 30 percent (where it has remained since).

After notebooks, we’ll be collecting the data for the other key categories on CNET, particularly TVs and mobile phones, and coming up with novel ways to incorporate the information into the site. For example, we can see which phones are popular with people who live in your area.

The macro numbers are interesting, but the more intriguing stuff can be found in the micro picture. Within the notebook category, the two-year trend lines reveal how the major manufacturers have fared versus their competition. For example, in July 2007, Dell products or prices were viewed by 40 percent of all considered users on CNET, but that number dipped to 25 percent last summer and it has continued to sink in 2009 to less than 20 percent.

Apple: IDC has Apple ranging from 7 percent to 11 percent for the past couple of years. CNET also shows Apple in a similar band, with the notable exception of some sharp monthly spikes around the publication of new product reviews (which typically occur within a day or two of a new notebook being released on the market).

As a result, we think you will find the CNET numbers to be another piece of the puzzle when trying to determine which notebook to buy. Just like a single product review, or user opinion, or even a friend’s recommendation, they aren’t the whole or the final answer. But they are useful for seeing in a very timely way which notebook manufacturers are getting most of the attention on our site and how they are faring each month. (CNET also produces lists of specific products that users are interested in,Discount North Face Shoes, but this new data focuses on manufacturers to provide another view into the current market.)

This is where CNET can help, if you’re willing to stretch your definition of “friend.” Each day, hundreds of thousands of like-minded people click around our sites doing research and deciding what to buy. If you could see what these people are viewing most often, wouldn’t you find that to be valuable information? It would be like walking into a Best Buy or Wal-Mart and seeing a throng of people gathered around one or two laptops on display. Of course you would join the pack to see what the buzz is about: is it a low price, hot new hardware, or both?

Of course, this data is only part of the picture, and one obvious question is how closely CNET’s numbers track actual sales figures. For those numbers I’ll turn to IDC, which issues quarterly shipments for the major notebook makers, and compare four notable names:

For now, our foray into this new area is modest–just this blog post and the above charts. In the near future, we will be injecting this data into the site in various ways. For example, the product-filtering tool on the notebook category door and elsewhere will show how certain manufacturers are trending on CNET (the manufacturer choice is the most commonly used filter in this tool, so we know readers are concerned about who is making their hardware).

Imagine that you’re looking for a new laptop and you ask your friends what they own, what their experience has been with that manufacturer, and whether they would buy the same machine again. Chances are the responses will be useful, to a point. It’s likely your friends have not purchased a notebook in a while, so they have little insight into the current crop. And their experience with breakage and customer service–whether it’s good or bad–is valid but anecdotal.

Notebook shopping, with help from CNET's friends

Apple tends to hover at about 10 percent, but its share can spike to 15 percent or 20 percent when new models are reviewed. Other manufacturers also see such spikes around new products, but they aren’t as pronounced. (See the above chart, which tracks the major manufacturers and calls out newly published product reviews that resulted in traffic spikes.)

CNET tracks what it calls “considered users,” defined as visitors who clicked on a product review, like this one of a new Sony Vaio, and/or on a pricing link on the review page or elsewhere on CNET. In industry parlance, the people reading product reviews, checking out specs, viewing a video, and so on, are described as being “up funnel” because they are thinking about buying something but are still in research mode. “Down funnel” users are those who have clicked on a pricing or merchant link, because they are that much closer to making a purchase. In either case, they are all “considered users” because they are considering a product.

But we’re also realists. We know that a CNET review is just one part of the research that goes into picking out a new phone, laptop, or TV–especially in this economy. The other sources you’re likely to turn to include other review sites, manufacturer information such as specs, reviews from other users, and advice from friends.

U.S. notebook shipments by manufacturer

As you can see, the trends observed by CNET and IDC are similar. The key difference is that CNET is tracking people while they research and shop, and IDC is following actual shipments. CNET is also compiling stats each month, versus quarterly for IDC. The two reports together are very complementary, but CNET is tracking the consideration phase, so we theoretically can spot trends before they manifest in actual sales, and sooner.

Dell: IDC shows Dell peaking at nearly 28 percent during the last three months of 2007 and then steadily drifting down to 23 percent in the first quarter of this year. CNET shows Dell at about 30 percent in the final quarter of 2007 before sliding to between 24 percent and 26 percent during the first three months of 2009. Since then Dell has slid further to its current 19 percent.

The online equivalent to seeing what people are checking out in a store is CNET’s Business Intelligence group, which crunches a “Matrix”-worthy amount of data about activity across CNET’s many sites. Their reports are typically used by the sales team to demonstrate the power of the CNET brand and its influence on buyers. Now, however, we are taking the first steps to making that information available to you as one of the tools we provide to meet our core mission: connecting buyers and sellers.

For years, CNET has had you covered on all those points except the part about friends. Well, we’re aiming to change that.

Asus: According to IDC, Asus has risen from almost nothing a couple of years ago to 3.5 percent in the first quarter. CNET’s monthly numbers for the first three months show Asus running between 7 percent and 10 percent, and as of July it was up to 20 percent. (It’s my guess that CNET is a leading indicator when it comes to the popularity of Netbooks and that Asus will show a jump in IDC’s second-quarter numbers–perhaps not as dramatic as the 16 percent to 20 percent seen on CNET, but a nice gain nonetheless.)