Couchepin will Arzneimittelpreise senken

Nachdem der Bundesrat Couchepin gemerkt hat, dass die Selbstbehaltsregelung nicht ‘weiterdrehen’ tut wenn die Originalhersteller auch Ihre Preise gesenkt haben, geht es nun weiter mit der Senkung der Arzneimittelpreise. Aus der NZZ.

Reduzieren möchte Gesundheitsminister Pascal Couchepin die Medikamentenpreise überdies mit einer neuen Preisregelung für Generika. Im Herbst soll der Bundesrat zu diesem Zweck über ein zweites Paket im Bereich der Medikamentenpreise entscheiden, über dessen Inhalt Couchepin am Mittwoch allerdings keine näheren Angaben machen wollte. Jene Originalpräparate, für die ein billigeres Nachahmerprodukt angeboten wird, werden den Versicherten schon seit 2006 mit dem doppelten Selbstbehalt belastet, was zu einem sprunghaften Anstieg des Generika-Absatzes führte. Das Eidgenössische Departement des Innern stellt auch ein drittes Paket zur Senkung der Medikamentenpreise in Aussicht, welches verabschiedet werden soll, sobald das Parlament die Beratung der bisherigen KVG-Vorlage zu den Arzneimittelpreisen abgeschlossen hat.

Ebenfalls erwähnenswert ist die eHealth Strategie vom Bund. Aus der NZZ.

Neben dem elektronischen Patientendossier sollen auch die «Online-Dienste» gestärkt werden. Hier soll das Potenzial des Internets zur Stärkung der individuellen Gesundheitskompetenz eingesetzt werden. Bis Ende 2010 sollen die gesundheitsbezogenen Online-Informationsangebote von Bund, Kantonen und Gemeinden sowie internationalen Organisationen über ein gemeinsames Gesundheitsportal zugänglich sein.

Gerne erzählen wir dem Bund über unsere Medikamenten-Informations-Dienste ODDB.org und Generika.cc.

Observations about ODBA, Ruby 1.8.6 and ODDB.org

1. I’m following the memory consumption of our application ODDB.org, Ruby 1.8.6 and our OpenSource RAM-Cache-Management Software ODBA. When we have over 300 open Sessions it seems that that the GC takes far longer then 20 secs to do its job. At around 390 simultaneously open sessions my “Fasterfox” measured way over 60 sec until the application ‘returned’ in a responsive way to the user.

2. Somehow I also have the feeling that when we use more memory the GC runs faster. But that is just an assertion.

3. You can watch our memory consumption here.

4. One thing I can also say for sure is that Ruby 1.8.6 can deal with tons of more traffic. Somehow the GC has really been optimized.

5. We now know that we have some duplication of objects that we do not want to have. The objects have been identified but we do not yet know where they come from.

News is Still a Wide Open Game

Via GigaOM I found this post that I find highly interesting. The Title of the post is: “News is Still a Wide Open Game” from the post:

 – Admittedly, Topix was great until newspapers invested in it… after that it’s almost useless… but the premise / theory is great.  You almost think that it’s become the poster boy for “don’t accept money from old, old media.”

Gizmo is out for Treo 680

I just installed the Gizmo for Treo 680 and I must admit that the installation went flawlessly. Also disconnecting from GPRS is very easy, not like with some other “Treo Email Applications” where you can not find the disconnect Button and have to navigate via the Network Settings. I will give this a try for sure and test the quality of the service. I am quite curious what this will bring.

Some more observations on Ruby 1.8.6 and ODDB.org

Ok, since we installed Ruby 1.8.6 the GC (Garbage Collection) does not take 50 secs (or more) to do its job when our Application is around 2 GB big. The time is down to about 20 secs – and – the Speed at witch the queries are delivered is up up up! Thank you for fixing this, Dear Ruby Community.

Update: I must actually elaborate a bit. The GC used to force us to do a restart because it took such a long time to do its job. With Ruby 1.8.6 the memory usage still “grows” throughout the day. This just has less impact on our Service as we have 12 GB of memory on your server. We still want to find out what increases the memory consumption of our software, though. We owe that answer to Ryan Davis.

Interesting posts about Ruby and Memory Leaking

1. Signal handling causes memory leaks.

2. Memory leak in ruby code. Two presentations mentioned in the previous link:

More on Ruby Memory-Leak

I found some more interesting posts:

  1. Memory leaks in my site
  2. Rails memory usage case study
  3. bleak_house
  4. Finding open file descriptors: ‘lsof’ is a neat utility for listing open ports, sockets and files on a per process basis.
  5. The WeakRef and WeakHash.

Still I put it as following: I believe Ruby has a serious memory leak problem that is not been taken seriously. It is not even only about the memory leak. It is the GC that takes to long once the memory reaches a certain seize. Once our Application uses more then 2 GB of Memory the GC takes more then 50 secs to do its job. Then we have to do a restart of our Application because our Application should not be unresponsive for the User for 50 secs or more. PS: We got 12 GB of memory for Ruby on our server.

Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3

The right of choice is a modern right. Quote: And it does that exactly by *limiting* the license to only that one work. Not trying to extend it past the work.