Did you ever think of how powerful Linux could be? In your daily lives? Yes? No?

Well, going one step farther than most students, [Rhythm Reloaded], four engineering students at Calvin College are designing an electronic stethoscope that will:

• Record high-quality audio data from a patient’s body
• Store this audio data in a convenient format
• Use a USB interface to transfer the audio files to a computer
• Reduce the amount of ambient noise that a doctor hears
• Be simple, accurate, and easy to use!

(source:RhythmReloaded)

The operating system of choice for the project is µClinux, a very small open source Linux operating system that will run from flash memory! Check out the really cool screenshots of the project and the kernel compiled here: Project page

For those who don’t know much about the OS, µClinux includes kernel releases for 2.6 as well as user applications, libraries and tool chains. To learn more about µClinux and to see whether you can use it in an application somewhere check it out at µClinux.

Edit: I have been informed (via email by David of Rhythm Reloaded) that uClinux also has kernel releases for 2.4 (which they are currently using) and 2.0.

Tags: CoolWarez

 In 2004, McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing its efforts on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and nedical offices.

The cure they found and implemented was to switch to Linux! This made a lot of immediate sense since the money could be used to buy less expensive hardware available in the market instead of expensive mainframes. Today, the company offers around 50 applications ranging from billing to surgery scheduling to physician order entry systems runnning on Linux. They have also officially announced their partnership with the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform.

The main cost reducing factor is the replacement of mainframes with basic servers running Linux. This showed immediate results as far as reducing the customer’s maintainence and operational costs. They have also offered their software to RedHat enterprise Linux! Estimates show that the switch allows the companies to reduce costs by around 60% when compared to what they were spending earlier.

About 75% of McKesson’s customers are on board as far as the move goes although 15% still are dead against it. The main problem of course lies in the fact that Oracle is still the database that most legacy customers use and running open source alternatives like MySQL will take some time getting a share of the Oracle pie…

Another Linux Business come good! Are the rest listening?