Dentrix has started shipping their newest version G5 to a limited number of users. The “Official” release is scheduled for the Hinman meeting in Atlanta March 22-24. However by starting now with limited numbers they can ensure tech support for users installing the new version and catch and fix any unforeseen bugs before general distribution. That’s a good thing

Dental Software – Dentrix.

A short list of G5 enhancements includes:

• Electronic Explanation of Benefits (eEOB) lets practices receive, review and automatically record remittance advice in the Dentrix Ledger.
• eClaims Attachment Notifications warn users to include attachments on insurance claims for carriers that require them, reducing rejected or delayed claims.
• The new Screen Capture utility lets users drag over any part of the visible screen to create a new document and save it to the Document Center.  This is especially useful for creating claims attachments.
• Sequentially Numbered Daysheets record each time the Daysheet is printed or previewed.  When combined with logon passwords it creates a gapless record that shows who has accessed the Daysheet and when.
• Dentrix Dentalink is a new add-on feature that provides secure instant messaging, letting users easily communicate throughout the office with minimal disruption to patient care and workflow.
• The new Dentrix Mobile upgrade is an add-on product that presents an improved interface designed specifically for Apple iPad and Motorola Xoom tablet users.

More to come.

Did you know that you can use keyboard shortcuts to accomplish some of the most common tasks in Dentrix? Using shortcuts saves you time and speeds up your daily routines, which helps you make your office more efficient.

via Dentrix Tip Tuesdays: Appointment Book Keyboard Shortcuts.

I will be presenting a half day program at the Yankee Dental Congress January 28, 2012

Everyday dentists are faced with remarkable new high tech products that do everything from finding caries to making a crown. Digital technology is revolutionizing every aspect of dental practice including how we make clinical decisions and how we communicate. A great high tech digital office will never happen just by accident. Planning starts with the essentials for the doctor and the team. That is, knowing what to buy, how to use it, and how to make it all pay off.

via . Yankee Dental

Online Video CE The High Tech Power Practice

Five Modules

• Essentials
• Paperless
• Advanced
• Internet
• Stuff

DentalEDU.tv

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The Buzz: Video Games speak their own language, and not everyone understands.

The Anti-Buzz: Video Games actually live and die by being easy to learn and understand.

If you are a parent, it seems likely that at some point this holiday season your children received that greatest gift of all: video games. There could be a series of articles on how the gaming industry drives advances in consumer electronics. The most obvious avenue is graphics; it would not be hard to convince you that as game makers sought to make their games more attractive than the competition, you gained the ability to turn your X-Rays into 3D models of your patients’ mouths.

In this post-holiday calm, it seems likely that you are either watching children play some sort of electronic game, or you are playing those games yourself, (or both). If you catch yourself wondering what the value of such activity is, I’m going to give you something new to think about: the gaming industry is on the cutting edge of user interfaces.

Even in academic circles, a lot of attention is given to studying how users interact with their technology, and how that interaction can be improved. User-friendliness is something I wrote generically about a while ago. What gets missed by both users and developers alike is that the gaming industry is a ruthless proving ground for exploring user-friendly interfaces.

If you think about, it makes sense. If video games don’t appeal to you, you might dismiss them as confusing or absurd, but in reality, much as games might compete over graphics and try to out-pretty each other, they are also competing to be easy to understand and learn, (This is not the same as being easy to master or easy to complete – just easy to dive into). With hundreds of app stores and flash libraries out there, another game is just a click away, so if yours is unnecessarily annoying, or trips over itself, you will lose your audience.

Gone are the days of the instruction booklet. Today, games teach you how to play them, often very gradually. This is referred to as “player training” and it models exactly what other software developers wish they could do with their products: train their users. Games do have some psychological advantages over, say, practice management software, but at the end of the day engineers too often ignore what game developers achieve in regards to user-training and intuitive interface design.

A rather famous and easily digestible example of player training is the game Portal, which might be the game that gets you into gaming as it is short, exercises your brain in unique ways, and very gradually teaches you how to play without you realizing that it is teaching you how to play. In fact, the game is so short that it is sometimes joked that the game is actually about player training because by the time you learn everything, the game is over. The real reason I mention this game is that it comes with a DVD-style developer commentary that provides what might be some of the best consumer-digestible insight into what I’m talking about, and it affirms the notion that game developers are very concerned with how accessible their game is to the user. Portal is almost “User-friendliness: the Game” except apparently the game also has something to do with portals, I guess.

Depending on your background as a gamer, this article may or may not resonate with you. It is just one of many such blog entries by game developers discussing the planning that goes into making their games. The quick summary is that the game “cheats” on behalf of the user, correcting small mistakes for the sake of making the game more intuitive and playable. This is hardly the first game to do such a thing, but this developer’s articulation of the philosophy is somewhat profound: Take input from the user, figure out what they want, then make it happen. This translates pretty well to software development in general.

The idea isn’t as simple as it sounds. In fact you might be asking, “Isn’t that what all software does?” The answer is no, it doesn’t. What software does is take input from the user, interpret that input very literally according to a strict set of rules about how that piece of software works, and then makes those things happen. The idea is that sensible intuitive things should happen in reaction to your input. This is, admittedly, much easier to implement in a game than it is in practice management software. Most of the time, a game developer can make assumptions about what the player’s goals are, (hint: the player is trying to win). A user’s goals in Dentrix are not always clear. Practice management software is orders of magnitude more complex than a game, and your use of it is pretty open-ended. Inferring what you might want to see happen is something, that, well, still requires a lot of research.

I attended a lecture on research being done to improve typical GUI components and this came up. It is usually easy to guess what button/scrollbar/text field the user means to click on, but there are a lot of objects that the user rarely uses that litter the screen, and this obscures how to make good guesses sometimes. On the other hand, I’m amazed at how my big fat fingers can mush into my iPod and it figures out what I want. It’s all a work in progress.

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.

Gina Dorfman, DDS is a dentist with a very busy practice in Santa Clarita, California. She was frustrated by the time and energy wasted in her office as she and her team members tried to communicate with each other and the patients. That is a problem faced by all dentists, however unlike other dentists Gina has a resource the rest of us don’t. She has a family of computer programmers and technicians. Together they developed a computer application to fill all the gaps in communication and increase efficiency. They called their creation YAPI (Yet Another Practice Interface).

At first glance YAPI looks like an in office computer intercom system. However when you look at the details it offers a lot more.

In a nutshell YAPI digitally follows a patient through an office visit. It starts by checking them in at the front desk. Then it follows them to the treatment room. Then back to the front to check out. Along the way the office team is alerted as the where the patient is, how long he or she has been there and when the room needs to be cleaned or is ready for another patient.

YAPI also provides reminders. That is do we need to collect an e-mail address from this person or update the medical history on that one. It provides a system to attach information to the patient visit for future processing, such as a check out note, post-operative instructions, care call or reminders for future treatment.

The Buzz: Operating Systems are a brand, inseparable from the machine they are sold with.

The Anti-Buzz: Operating Systems are just mediators, and more interchangeable than you might think.

So for me last week was finals week, which means I forgot to write an article for you guys, (you might have noticed?). So last Tuesday, instead of waxing philosophic about computers, I was preparing for and taking an exam on operating systems. And while I failed to pull together an article for you, it did occur to me that a good thing to cover here would be just that: operating systems. My recent impulse to babble about math and science is probably better tempered by a practical topic now and then anyway. So, operating systems: How do they work? What is their relationship with your hardware?

Where is the operating system?

The first thing that might come to mind for most people is that when they think of operating systems, they probably only think of two options: Mac and Windows. This is fine, but it does ignore the fact that your smart phone, (even if it is a “Windows” phone), has an operating system, as does your tablet and your Kindle. Of course, pointing this out only exacerbates the first common misconception I’d like to destroy, which is that the OS has anything to do with your hardware. If your observe that the iOS is only on iPhones, Mac OS is only on Macs, and Windows is only on “PCs”, (those scare quotes will be explained next week), you’d be forgiven for thinking that the OS was in fact part of the hardware itself, that it was encoded, at least partially, in the actual transistors of your machine.

No, all operating systems are 100% pure software, and they 100% live on your hard disk. They are just programs, not unlike all that other software you use. They are, however, incredibly reliant on the hardware they work with, so in some way specialized cases, such as your smart phone, both the hardware and the operating system were designed with each other in mind. However, computing hardware and software have become increasingly modular in design, so it is likely that all of these components can be made interchangeable, with some work, (That is, iOS on your PC, Windows 7 on your Kindle, whatever).

In fact we have seen this already to some extent, as it was widely publicized that a little elbow grease could get Chrome OS installed on a Nook Color, effectively turning it into a tablet at a fraction of the cost. In a brilliant stroke of 21st century thinking, Barnes & Noble responded by saying “Cool, we’ll just sell them this way,” instead of the usual, paranoid protect-our-product-from-our-customers that we are used to seeing from the entertainment industry, (I wouldn’t be surprised if, being a bookseller-that-survived-the-great-reckoning, B&N has a better set of priorities than many software companies).

Anyway, less surprising, (But maybe you did not know?), is that you can install Windows on your MacBook, and Linux too if you are so inclined. Some of you might be a little surprised to think of a machine with multiple operating systems, (you just pick which one you want to use when you boot up), but that should drive home the point that operating systems are just software, and all your things: photos, music, documents are just data. In my case I listen to the exact same mp3s when I am using Windows as I do when I am using Linux – it’s just data, and the operating system is just a portal to that data.

How does the operating system use the hardware?

Again, the OS is extremely reliant on hardware, most especially the CPU. A compiled OS will only work with one architecture, which was the real sticking point in the 90s…

 when considering the rift between Mac and Windows: they both were made to run on entirely different CPU architectures. Apple has since switched to Intel from PowerPC, and Intel rival AMD makes processors that obey the same instructions set as Intel. So Mac, Windows and Linux can all be run somewhat interchangeably on the same hardware.

Except, why do you only find Mac OS on Apple products? Because the OS is also reliant on device drivers, (Drivers, again, being pure software, that are effectively a bridge between the OS and the actual hardware). Very intentionally, Apple has ensured that Mac OS only has drivers for the hardware that their products actually use, thus ensuring that Mac OS will only work on Apple products, while Windows can be installed on a myriad of configurations, (And thus, there are myriad manufacturers), $including$ Apple products. This is why you can install Windows on your Mac, but not Mac on your PC, because Apple has intentionally created this barrier. This barrier is actually fairly small because there is no theoretical reason why Mac OS can’t be run on a larger scope of machines, and in fact there is a community based around doing just that.

So those are two primary hooks that cause hardware to limit your choice of systems, CPU model and the existence of drivers. At the end of the day, your operating system is the only software that actually has the privilege of interacting directly with any hardware, (including the CPU), and this is actually the entire point of an OS – to provide an abstraction of your hardware resources to other programs stored on your hard disk.

So why can’t I run Mac programs in Windows and vice versa?

In many cases the architecture is the same, which means that anymore there is not actually that much of a difference between compiled binaries of programs meant to run on different operating systems. However, the OS is the great mediator, and so any access to hardware goes through the OS, and each OS handles these things differently. When programs are compiled, they are still compiled to be OS-specific, even if they often share the CPU architecture, because going through the operating system uses system calls, and they are different for every OS. However, modular software libraries have made it increasingly such that making a Mac version and a Windows version of the same program is almost just a matter of just compiling twice.

The divide between operating systems is made worse by a lack of unity among file systems. A file system, at the end of the day, is just a schema for how files are organized on a hard disk, (Here, files includes your applications), and some operating systems only want to work with a subset of the file systems out there. In the case of Mac and Windows, they have to be really coaxed to even look at a drive formatted in the file system of the other.

So how does the operating system actually boot up and start running?

Terminology time! You’ve probably heard of a few of these terms, but never quite got the lowdown on what they are. Life on your computer begins with the motherboard and its firmware. On non-Apples this is referred to as BIOS, while Apple uses AFI. Firmware is software that is stored directly on a piece of hardware, (So your BIOS is not on your hard disk anywhere, it is stored in a tiny disk somewhere on your motherboard). So, the power goes on and your motherboard begins running its firmware, which in turn wakes up all your other hardware, makes sure it can see them, and then it tries to relinquish control over to some operating system, typically by looking for one on your hard drive.

When you start up your machine and get that wall of text, usually with stats about your hardware, before you get to your Windows loading screen or whatever, that is your firmware talking, and that is actually specific to your hardware, and will look the same regardless of what OS you eventually boot into.

The program that gets run by the firmware when it wants to boot up your operating system is called the kernel, (because it is the seed for everything that follows). The kernel is the operating system, these terms are practically interchangeable. This is the program that manages everything: which program runs on which processor and for how long, who gets access to what memory, and so on. All of that micromanaging required to mediate your software and your hardware, that’s what the operating system does, and that’s what the kernel does.

But what about windows and buttons and the GUI I use to start all my applications? Isn’t that the operating system?

Yes and no. Here is the other common misconception about operating systems. Users equate the abstraction of Finders and Docks and Start Menus with there actual operating system. The thing with the windows and the folders that let’s you navigate your computer and do stuff? That’s not your operating system, that’s a shell. A shell is a program that allows the user to issue commands directly to the operating system. And yes, clicking on the Start Menu and selecting a program counts as issuing a command to your operating system – “issuing a command directly to your operating system” isn’t some crazy hard-core thing that only happens on a text-only console.

So I say “yes and no” because it should be obvious that you can’t really use an operating system without at least one shell, which is why the casual user might equate them. Also, much as the firmware looks for a kernel, the kernel needs to start up at least one shell after it gets a grip on your hardware.

So, you can only be using one OS at a time, but any OS can have any number of shells. Most people just only use the one, the nice graphical one designed specifically for whatever your OS of choice is. The old-fashioned command line interface, still available on all machines, is another type of shell you could be using. But even among graphical interfaces, there is nothing to stop you from having multiple options for graphical shells, as is the case with Linux, where you can install a variety of different GUIs and use them all to navigate your files and launch applications.

I’m not trying to sell you on Linux, just trying to get you to understand that your operating system only sees things like “Start Microsoft Word” and doesn’t really care if it received that command from a user typing onto the command line or a user clicking on some icons. That thing where you click on icons is just another application, one meant specifically for you to tell the kernel what you want to see happen next.

I’m out of space here for this week, but I think I hit the basics pretty well. Next week I’ll play the part of Santa and give you a bag of goodies. Until then!