Overheard talking about Google Health

In a perfect world, Google, Microsoft and other major services — Dossia and Revolution Health Group LLC are also in the game — would develop a sort of “plug-and-play” interoperability standard that will simplify the process for both patients and IT staff. Dr. John Halamka, as quoted in Personal health records latest concern for CIOs

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Google Health

Overheard talking about government agencies in the cloud

“For many agencies today, email seems to be the sweet spot for the cloud.” Susie Adams, Federal News Radio interview

Susie Adams is the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Federal’s Civilian business.

Overheard talking about TechStat

“Given the size and complexity of the multi-billion dollar Federal IT Portfolio, we must relentlessly focus on the health of IT investments across the government.” Vivek Kundra, TechStat: Improving Government Performance

Vivek Kundra, the first federal chief information officer, is in charge of a network with 24,000 Web sites and 1,100 data centers. The US federal government is the largest single buyer of technology in the world at $71 billions dollars annually.

As the President said in his inaugural speech “those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.” The IT Dashboard and TechStat Accountability Sessions are both critical tools in delivering better value and results for the American people.

[TechStat sessions enable the government to turnaround, halt or terminate IT investments that do not produce dividends for the American people. Investments are carefully analyzed with a focus on problem solving that leads to concrete action to improve performance.]

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vivek-Kundra/56152836529?v=wall#!/pages/Vivek-Kundra/56152836529?ref=ts

Overheard talking about government IT in the cloud

“The last thing we want are separate clouds that are built on infrastructures that do not talk to one another or have languages or protocols that won’t speak to one another.” Peter Tseronis, as quoted in Don’t look down: The path to cloud computing is still missing a few steps

Peter Tseronis
Deputy Associate CIO, U.S. Department of Energy
Chairman of Federal Cloud Computing Council
peter.tseronis@hq.doe.gov

http://twitter.com/Tseronis

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-tseronis/1/129/289

Overheard talking about health informatics

The growing role of health information and communication technologies (HICT) has created the need to broaden and deepen the pool of workers who are able to help organizations deal effectively with their investment in information technology… American Medical Informatics Association,  Informatics Fact Sheet

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is health informatics.

Overheard talking about Fedora

The fundamental difference between Red Hat Advanced Server or Enterprise Linux and Fedora is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is meant for commercial use, while Fedora is for the developer community and for those that want Linux for personal use. Kenneth Milberg, What are differences between Red Hat Advanced Server and Fedora Core?

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Fedora.

Overheard talking about clean installs

There are several ways to install a clean version of Windows 7 on enterprise desktops.  And regardless of the method, the process may be easier than upgrading from Windows XP or Windows Vista. Mark Brownstein, How to install a clean version of Windows 7

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is clean install.

Overheard talking about Zookeeper

In 2006 we were building distributed applications that needed a master, aka coordinator, aka controller to manage the sub processes of the applications. It was a scenario that we had encountered before and something that we saw repeated over and over again inside and outside of Yahoo!. Benjamin Reed, An Introduction to ZooKeeper Video

Today’s WhatIs.com is the Word of the Day is Zookeeper.

Overheard talking about compressed air energy storage

If stored wind or solar energy instead of natural gas plants can be used to generate power when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining, less natural gas will be burned to provide dispatchable power. Dr. Joseph Romm, The Holy Grail of clean energy economy is in sight: Affordable storage for wind and solar

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is compressed air energy storage.  The definition is adopted from a blog post by Dr. Joseph Romm called “The Holy Grail of clean energy economy is in sight: Affordable storage for wind and solar.”

Overheard talking about ransomware

“Turning hijacked computers into cash is still hard work for most computer criminals.  They’ve got to trick the infected PC into sending spam, then trick a recipient into buying a useless product — or they have to steal online banking passwords, log onto a victim’s account, bypass the bank’s money transfer fraud controls and so on. It’s much easier to just demand cash directly from infected users — a crime that’s the Internet’s equivalent of kidnapping.” Bob Sullivan, Give me your money, or your computer gets it

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is ransomware.