The Buzz: The tablet doesn’t have real computing power.
The Anti-Buzz: It doesn’t, and that doesn’t matter.
Why: Because a tablet has a perfect view of the cloud.

One last Tuesday in January, one last look forward.

If you were making general tech predictions for 2012, and wanted to play it safe, the rise of the tablet is rich ground to make some inferences from. I think tablets are at the point cell phones were seven or eight years ago; there is going to be a race to the price floor, and an explosion of features.

The feature-splosion will not look the same as it did on cell phones because “apps” are the real features on your tablet. Sure, maybe you’ll get some solid voice recognition on there, and a few other interface enhancements, but the cool thing about the tablet is that tablet users are the ones who make the features. The device itself is going to cost 100 bucks one day, but the real spike is going to be in the usability.

Consider this scenario. I walk into a store, make my purchase, and am rung up on a tablet, not a register, which has small card reader plugged into it that swipes my debit card. The tablet is offered to me and I sign on it and give it back. The catch here is that this isn’t a hypothetical, this is an anecdote. This already happened. It’s happening right now. The war’s already over. Tablet won.

The tablet isn’t a “real” computer in a lot of ways, but it does enjoy the same open-ended modularity. It’s not really just about browsing the web and throwing some birds at some pigs, it’s about all the little pieces of data in our lives having a nice place to rest. Soon you’ll go to a restaurant and the server will take your order on a tablet, and then they won’t even return to the kitchen because now your order is also on the cook’s tablet. This is already happening somewhere, I’m sure. Within the next 5 years it will be normal, and in within the next 10 it will be in McDonald’s.

The basic advantages of computing can be enjoyed on a tablet, and in a form more digestible by “non-computer people” and so the process by which the tablet will swallow a chunk of the PC market has already begun. We won’t get the same schadenfreude we got with newspapers and booksellers and print in general because PC makers are either already entrenched underneath the Android platform, or they are jumping in quick with something. There will be no toppling of empires here, but we can enjoy the happy irony that Barnes and Noble, a bookseller, might one day be in a position to steal a piece of Dell’s market with the Nook.

Of course, a future of iPad restaurants is both a safe bet and an easy one. The mistake a lot of people make is that they believe technology is something that only other people develop. Apps are going to becoming increasingly varied, increasingly niche, and increasingly cheap and it’s not going to be long before you will need to get your fingernails dirty and research what’s out there. These stores that are already swiping cards and taking orders on their tablets are no different than you. They are business owners who have sought and found these solutions themselves.

Is it so far fetched to think that your office could have a tablet in every room instead of a computer? Yes, an office has large needs, and your database won’t fit on a tablet, and neither will the software that renders your x-rays, and large screens will always be of use to you too. So for now you are free to indulge in the fantasy that, hey, you’ve arrived, you have a nice big practice management suite and a fleet of strong computers and you never need to overhaul how you conduct business again. But a tablet is the perfect window into the cloud; in fact, these usable pocket computers are the perfect enabler of the cloud. Finally there is a platform that demands computation to be done elsewhere. A tablet can’t hold your database but it doesn’t need to because it just needs to give you results through a browser. Imagine showing a patient an x-ray, zooming neatly on that dual-touch screen. Imagine tablets instead of clipboards. Imagine your office looking like the halls of the Starship Enterprise.

It’s really not that far away. If I were a developer of practice management software, I would be racing to figure out how I could deliver my product on three computers and ten tablets. Your employees will like it more, will train to it easier, it will take up less space, require less maintenance, and it will cost you a lot less. The modern computer really can do anything, and a race to the price floor in tablets is a race to the price floor in everything.

The article linked below discusses a number of ways older computers can be re-purposed. Many of these ideas could be put to work in a dental office. For example an out of date treatment room computer could be re-purposed as a media center to provide on demand music for patients.

However if you must get rid of an old machine not only do we have a duty to dispose of electronics responsibly, as dental professionals we have an even bigger obligation to insure that personal patient data cannot be recovered from any items we dispose of.

It is not enough to simply erase the data or put it in the “Recycle Bin”. Data in the recycle bin is not really erased it is just orphaned with no pointers to find it, but it is still there and an expert can easily recover it. You need to completely destroy the data by writing over the disk segments multiple times or reformatting the disk.

Doing this yourself is tricky so unless you are geekish either get your IT support team to do it for you or check out an application like KillDisk.

We buy a lot of electronics in this country, and that means we throw a lot of electronics away, as well

via How to Reuse or Recycle Your Old Tech | PCMag.com.

From PC Magazine.

 Tablets are becoming thinner, lighter, more powerful, and more affordable than ever. Whether it’s a new dual-screen form factor, transforming dock, or sub-$200 price tag, tablets are poised to make significant strides in 2012.

via 5 Great Tablets at CES 2012 – Slideshow from PCMag.com.

Tablets were big news at CES last year. They are still big news however the fact we are still talking about them as a future technology indicates we still haven’t really incorporated them into everyday work.

In dentistry I see tablets as a valuable extra but not as a replacement for desktops in the treatment rooms. A tablet will be the computer each team member caries with them from room to room to read and write notes view images and communicate with the rest of the office. However we will still need a treatment room computer to capture and process diagnostics such as x-ray images.

Related iPad 3

Good to know.

LG plans to unveil an 84-inch 3DTV at January’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which the company said will be the world’s largest.

LG said the TV will include 8 million pixels and boast a resolution of 3480-by-2160, four times the resolution found on full HDTV sets. LG has dubbed it “Ultra Definition.”

via LG to Unveil 84-Inch 3DTV at CES | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Imagine looking at a 3D image of a molar that is 84 inches wide.

Online Video CE The High Tech Power Practice

Five Modules

• Essentials
• Paperless
• Advanced
• Internet
• Stuff

DentalEDU.tv

Do some deep and serious soul searching and answer this fundamental question; are you a nerd? Are you the person all your friends, family, neighbors and colleagues come to with their computer problems? Or are you the target audience for all those technology for dummies books?

It would be nice and simple especially for the “dummies” if there was one, can’t miss, magic bullet, super wow technology that you could buy that would instantly assure you immeasurable success as a dentist. Unfortunately that super wow technology does not exist. To the contrary the most important technology you need to invest in is a plain old boring wired network with a server and work stations in every room.

Wait a minute; you may be saying to yourself especially if you are an “nerd”, a plain old vanilla network, that is so last century. I want a wireless cloud based system I can access on my oh so cool iPad. If you are thinking this way there is a one word answer; Betamax.

There is nothing that will provide greater functionality and pay off faster than a complete network.

I am playing the role of Santa this week. I have brought you a sack of toys. Well, a sack of topics anyway. There are things in the spirit of this column that don’t really lend themselves to a full article, but I’m itching to address them. So prepare yourself for a series of mini-buzzes.

The buzz: Macs are not PCs.

The anti-buzz: PC stands for “Personal Computer”

So unless Mac fans want to admit they aren’t using a real computer, this distinction is erroneous. It would be like Budweiser launching a “Bud Light vs. Beer” ad campaign; we’d all chuckle and ask, “so you admit that Bud Light isn’t beer?”

I’ll grant that referring to non-Macs as PCs is a pet peeve of mine and I’ll grant that I’m being a little pedantic by making light of it, and I’ll also grant that Apple isn’t entirely responsible for the labeling anyway, even if it was their ads that popularized the nomenclature. But there really is more at stake here. A few years ago the “Mac vs. PC” dichotomy was relatively harmless. Now consumers are offered many alternatives to personal computers, notably tablets and smart phones, and further gray areas forged by e-readers and music players.

Smart consumers need to be aware of what a personal computer is, and what it offers that tablets and smart phones don’t, (and vice versa). Smart consumers need to stop thinking that the opposite of a PC is a Mac, because it isn’t.

The buzz: Half of everything is above average.

The anti-buzz: No, half of everything is above median.

More from the math/science/statistics rant scene, the misuse of the word “average.” Perhaps it is not really misuse, but unfortunate ambiguity.

“Average” is actually a broad term, but it is colloquially used to indicate the arithmetic mean. It is not actually wrong to say “average” when you mean “median”, but it is not what most people understand when you use the word that way. A lot of people conflate properties of mean and median and lump them under the superconcept of “average” and then start to infer or say misleading things.

A thought experiment: Assume there are only 10 dentists in the world, and that you can score these dentists from 0 to 100. Assume that 2 of them score at 100, 3 of them score at 96, 3 of them score at 80, and 2 of them score at an embarrassing 11. In this world, the average dentist scores at 75, and 8 of 10 (or four out of five dentists if you like) dentists are above average. What gets lost here is that the dentists who score 80 are among the worst half of dentists. Most people understand all this when you tell it to them so simply, but their day-to-day intuition always seems to revert back to thinking that “average” and “median” are the same thing.

The buzz: Unix is an old-fashioned, text-only operating system.

The anti-buzz: Today, Unix is a standard, and many things follow it.

This could be an article by itself, but it would easily be the most boring thing I have ever written. It can be a tendency to think of old text-and-arrow-keys applications when you hear the word “Unix.” When a modern operating system claims to be Unix, it can seem laughable to think that some enthusiasts are hunched over a blinking rectangular cursor and calling themselves “power users.” And if that were actually the case then Unix definitely would be laughable.

However, Unix is really just an operating system standard. Mac OS X is a Unix system. Linux is a Unix system. Google’s Chrome OS is a Unix system. For the typical user, all of the similarities are under the hood. Explaining it all is beyond the scope of this column.

If you want a quick takeaway on what the Unix standard means, the inside joke is that in Unix, everything is a file. The pipe between two processes is a file. The stream of data from your hardware is a file. All of your keyboard input is a file. Folders are files. Everything is a file. Now you know!

The buzz: Science is either good (right) or bad (wrong).

The anti-buzz: Actually, a lot of science is just mediocre.

I took up arms over common misinformation in popular science and statistics, but there is a broader, more abstract misconception that plagues the popular notion of science. Psychological studies on why male college students like pancakes more than female college students are easy enough to dismiss as harmless, regardless of their veracity. A lot of pop science is fluff.

However, sometimes it is not fluff. Sometimes it becomes politicians arguing over the results of studies on greenhouse gases. Sometimes it affects public policy, and when science becomes political, things get polarized.

So it is easy to forget that scientific results and scientific dialog are rarely so black and white. Most science is mediocre; one wonders why a particular strategy was used, or if a set of results isn’t a little underwhelming, but rarely does it happen that research is deemed “correct” or “incorrect”. Insight into universal truth rarely comes, and dismissal of “flawed” research would stymie a lot of progress.

The buzz: Virtual Memory allows you to have as much RAM as you need.

The anti-buzz: And you can just keep hitching trailers to the back of your car and have as much trunk space as you need too.

Many people are excited to learn that memory is interchangeable. It is. To a computer, all memory is just memory. You need temporary memory to juggle the tasks at hand, and you need permanent memory to store your files and data and applications for later use. And to this end you can use part of your hard disk as “virtual” memory – memory that bolsters your temporary memory, commonly referred to as “RAM”, (although “random-access memory” actually applies to everything that is rewritable and arbitrarily navigable, from magnetic tapes to solid state drives).

So, it’s true, your machine can effectively have more RAM by setting aside part of your hard disk. The revelation is that you don’t really want to. Such “virtual” memory, (scare quotes because there is nothing virtual about it – it’s memory), is for emergencies only. Hard disk access is sloooooow. If we slowed down time, and let one processor cycle take one second, then the amount of time it takes to retrieve data from traditional RAM is about 15 seconds, and the amount of time needed to retrieve data from a hard disk is 300 years. The difference is indeed that stark.

So the next time you take solace in your virtual memory, remember that the opposite is actually what happens more often: Parts of your hard disk are cached into your speedier temporary memory and manipulated there, written back to the real hard disk only when it is convenient. This gives a huge performance gain, and it is also why doing things like shutting off your computer without selecting “shut down” from some menu, or yanking out a flash memory stick without properly “ejecting” it can result in the loss of data. What you really need isn’t virtual memory, it’s virtual hard disk.

A nice overview of photo printers from PC Magazine.

The first thing you should understand is that photo printers fall into two categories: dedicated also known as small-format and near-dedicated photo printers. Dedicated photo printers can print nothing but photos. They are typically limited to a maximum paper size of 2-by-3, 4-by-6, or 5-by-7 inches or panoramic variations on these sizes, but the category isnt defined just by its limits.

via Top 5 Best Photo Printers | Roundup | PCMag.com.

Not all dentists need good quality photo prints. For many things like insurance documentation or basic treatment presentations good color ink-jet prints are quite adequate. In fact increasingly we are just using digital images either on the screen or as an attachment.

Never the less if you are presenting and delivering high quality cosmetic cases a good photo quality print can be valuable. Prints can be used to show possible results prior to treatment using imaging software. Or they can be used after treatment for before and after portraits.

Many dentists have built a succesful cosmetic practice based on effective use of photography. Providing high quality photo prints is part of that and conveys an image of quality and competence.

This is a nice compliment to this. Phone apps that let you compare prices while you shop reviewed by PC Mag. Just in time for some weekend shopping.

Shoppers can simply scan a product’s barcode using a smartphone app that pinpoints the lowest prices and shares ratings and reviews from other shoppers.

via The 10 Best Shopping Apps to Compare Prices – Slideshow from PCMag.com.