Mac OS 10.7 Lion Review

I have been using the developer preview of Lion for a few weeks now and I have just installed the GM release and I have to say visually Lion is no different then Snow Leopard but I see many improvements.  I really like the multitouch gestures on both the magic mouse and the touchpad.  Everyone of them is useful and I already find myself using them on a regular basis.  Right now Crossover isn’t working but I’m sure the will be fixed in a patch from Codeweavers.  I have to use smb to connect to my home NAS, the version of AFP on my Western Digital NAS is incompatible with Lion.  I’m sure Western Digital will release a patch in the near future but right now I’m just using SMB to connect to it and it is working just fine.  So far Time Machine seem so to be the same, so far I haven’t had a need to try the new versions but I have played with it and well the user experience is great.  When I have to buy my wife a computer this year it will be a Mac.  I almost decided to put her on Linux and buy a cheap laptop but after seeing this Macbook Air here I come.  Her number one problem is losing a document or needing to go back a few revisions, thanks Apple for delivering autosave and versions that a non-technical person and use.

On the technical pieces, finally I can virtualize Mac OS.  I already could with server but I don’t need to buy server to do it.  This will be very useful for software testing or if I just want to play around and dig a little deeper into the OS without touching my everyday OS.

I may now sound like an Apple Fan boy, but with out apology I like their products.  I support free and open source software but when it comes to my everyday computing Apple gets it and does everything I need and more.  I love linux but Apple just delivers a better end user experience.  Once Linux can consistently come out of sleep on a laptop, I will ditch the Mac and start buying cheaper hardware but until then Mac hardware and Mac OS it is!

Why aren’t there more Open Source Health Care projects

There are open source projects at are focused around the health care industry such as Mirth Connect and OpenEMR. These are very mature products. I have played with both in fact I have implemented mirth at a company I once worked for and have recommended it in the company I’m currently working for as a replacement for SeeBeyond. For some reason there should me more competing projects. We need more EMR/EHR systems and more projects that can deal with HL7 and X12.
There are a lot of propriety products out there but I feel that the open source community can do much better and I feel can make the software do much more then the current leading proprietary products. I work with software that uses a lot of open source components but the software itself is proprietary but I the company I work for would just open source it. Most of the money made on he product is on support or on professional services. This is a product that makes total since to open source and let the community help develop it. Community help equals free development and free QA.
So why are there more open source projects based around health care? The health care industry doesn’t know why open source is. So many of them are suck in the stone age of paper or line feed files from mainframes. Most are vendor locked in and can’t change the way they do business.
How can this change? There needs to be a company the comes in and totally shakes up the industry like Red Hat and SUSE did to propriety Unix systems and Windows. This company should show the health care industry the value of free and open source software and why it should adapt to the open source philosophy.