* Posts by Adrian Midgley 1

502 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

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NHS England DIDN'T tell households about GP medical data grab plan

Adrian Midgley 1

watched for it, got Domino's menu but not

the leaflet.

I'm one of the doctors who thought some aspects of the idea and its implementation were suboptimal.

GPs slam NHS England for poor publicity of data grab plan

Adrian Midgley 1

I'm a GP

I didn't get a leaflet.

I'm opted out.

I'm rather keen on IT in medicine and healthcare.

But not this instance of this class of scheme operated this way.

NHS England is quite ... new.

Similar schemes were pushed in 1990-2002 IIRC and we rejected them.

At that time the idea of effective end to end encryption was resisted - successfully - for reasons unclear to us then.

This is presented as the first effort and only way to achieve various goods.

It is neither.

Whitehall and Microsoft negotiate NHS Windows XP hacker survival plan

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: How about

No actually. Centralised.

Gene boffins: Yes, you. Staring at the screen. You're a NEANDERTHAL

Adrian Midgley 1

Human

You might want to be more precise in naming there.

Hominid, hominid, home sap etc.

UK picks Open Document Format for all government files

Adrian Midgley 1

Munich experience indicates savings and

other benefits.

I'd expect a steady improvement here as well.

A BBC-by-subscription 'would be richer', MPs told

Adrian Midgley 1

Binds society

The BBC is part of what holds society together.

The cheapest way to fund it is through direct taxation.

The disadvantage of that is that it makes politicians intermediaries.

Capita are well-worth losing.

THOUSANDS of UK.gov Win XP PCs to face April hacker storm... including boxes at TAXMAN, NHS

Adrian Midgley 1

NHS England incorrect on General Practices as quoted

Some years ago the NHS declined to fund GP IT any more via Practices, but made a set of deals with suppliers on our behalf, and set up area IT teams to supply and maintain hardware and operating systems, etc.

They were really keen to do that and declared it would be better and cheaper.

NHS England is a bit new, and actually doesn't know a lot about how things are running or have run or why or what went wrong last time idea X was tried. In their role that sort of knowledge may seem a handicap, it being far more fun to start as if from scratch.

XP alas. All the Practice's own stuff hangs off a Debian box in a rack, but the NHS stuff is scattered Windroids.

Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong

Adrian Midgley 1

Colour copies of passports

are illegal, IIRC.

Boffins agree: Yes we have had an atmospheric warming pause

Adrian Midgley 1

Stern

had a go at that a while ago.

His conclusion was that not fixing it is more expensive than fixing it and the longer we wait the bigger the difference.

Call it a first approximation.

Adrian Midgley 1

major yes volcano no

The latter is already known, and the trope is a denialist sham.

Major is a term of art, I regard the rise in CO2 as a major change, and once you realise it is larger than the change from a major volcanic eruption you should as well.

FREEZE, GLASSHOLE! California cops bust Google Glass driver

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: @rcorrect cyclists have tgeir own paths/roads

And after they got them nice and smooth last but one century a few people put cars on them and then a lot last century.

Share, carefully.

NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source

Adrian Midgley 1

Logical

That is all.

New Terminator-style 'bots can self-assemble, leap, climb and SWARM

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: Not Terminator

Aggressive hegemonising swarm.

'I don't trust Microsoft' after NSA disclosures says former privacy chief

Adrian Midgley 1

but you don't really make tgat point

with your argument.

The point you make is that even when one has the source code (including the source code for the compiler) one cannot absolutely trust the resulting binary.

You argue that therefore one should trust binaries for which source code us concealed. This is not logical.

Better to argue that the concealment of the source code is an easy marker for something to distrust, and if possible eschew, but that even those programs where source is provided are not absolutely to be trusted only because of that.

'Modern warming trend can't be found' in new climate study

Adrian Midgley 1

and no, figures since 1990 don't show

that.

Outlook.com adds IMAP, OAuth

Adrian Midgley 1

Microsoft adopts standard!

Well gosh.

Apple quietly revives iPhone charging and syncing docks

Adrian Midgley 1

Good on Palm

and the device just dropped in. I also miss it, although not with an iPhone now.

David Attenborough warns that humans have stopped evolving

Adrian Midgley 1

Isle of Won't now?

I think we have overflowed Zanzibar now. As noted in the eponymous book.

Gov IT write-off: Universal Credit system flushes £34m down toilet

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: fixed this for: but there is no alternative offer and

it is far from obvious that it would be more sensible to build one bedroom dwellings rather than two even if building them had been permitted since Thatcher.

Microsoft's VDI deals make Windows Server cheapest desktop OS

Adrian Midgley 1

simpler to move to FLOSS?

Bite the bullet. Escape. Reimplement on Linux.

Russian spyboss brands Tor a crook's paradise, demands a total ban

Adrian Midgley 1
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"Good cannot exist without evil"

Bollux. (Philosophically)

Google cursed its own phones with wacked Wi-Fi, say Nexus users

Adrian Midgley 1

nexus 4: working very well

WiFi Bluetooth to Mercedes after the Merc had its service, all fine and stable.

Skype is Microsoft now, nobody should be surprised if other companies' operating systems and applications encounter new faults in successive editions of it.

'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail

Adrian Midgley 1

thuggery isnt it?

We don't like what you do so your property will be broken.

Webcam stripper strikes back at vicious 4Chan trolls after year of bullying

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: darn, i missed that one.

Michael Valentine Smith.

Queensland bans IBM from future work

Adrian Midgley 1

A(nother) pedant writes

That'd be "the state's procurement..."

A wonderful place to visit. I suspect that asking people to decide what they have earned and draw that against an eventual reconciliation would have been cheaper, more accurate, and made people happier, but that may be too much radical anarchism.

Google Glassholes to be BANNED from UK roads

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: incompatible

Tell it to jet pilots and IIRC some BMW drivers.

A head up display puts the image out where your focus should already be.

In principle an improvement on screens stuck tothe windscreen for navigation is possible.

Going under the knife? Avoid Fridays. Trust us, we asked a doctor

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: Huh?

Pick a surgeon and team who have just had 2 days rest.

Kim Dotcom claims invention of two-factor authentication

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prior art

I think exists.

Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming

Adrian Midgley 1
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can demonstrate warming with thermometers

How did you miss that?

Hunt: I'll barcode sick Brits and rip up NHS's paper prescriptions

Adrian Midgley 1

i saw this in 1999

But it was store and forward as it needs to be. The US VA separately has it working in their many hospitals and the WorldVista project has been making a product with support of an open source version of it for some years

In the UK VistA is well known by enough people to put in a Free system known to work over a population in millions.

I suspect something else had been sold though.

Judge hands copyright troll an epic smack-down

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: The IRS...

Arthur. Python.

Google Glass eye-cam to turn us all into right little winkers

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: Soon you will be required to wear "Googles" all the time as part of the Surveillance Society

Charles Stress in Halting State goes toward there. And further in 314? The sort of sequel to it.

Yet another Cabinet-level ID card farce

Adrian Midgley 1

oddly not made useful.

The general mucking about with utility bills and passports for financial things could have been eased by the state declaring it had checked identities and it was illegal to demand any other form of identification if presented with a matching ID card.

Bingo, a useful device and service to the citizen.

Boffins explain LED inefficiencies

Adrian Midgley 1

not according to Flanders and Swann

Heat is not only that which is transferred.

News Corp prez threatens to pull Fox TV off the air

Adrian Midgley 1
Happy

good

The less the better.

Microsoft leads charge against Google's Android in EU antitrust complaint

Adrian Midgley 1

nothing to stop MS and Nokia distributing Android

or any other Linux is there?

With their own setup of search etc on it.

Australia gets a space strategy

Adrian Midgley 1
Alien

unauthorised launches?

Who'd authorise a state to launch a spaceship?

Entire internet credits snapper for taking great pic while actually dead

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: And this is why...

Odd use of restrictive there. All licences permit something, and the point of the CC licences is that they are permissive in advance.

You know how your energy bills are so much worse than they were?

Adrian Midgley 1

the assumption that power is continuously available from combustion

is not fully justified.

Given that, intermittent power from renewables may be more useful than Mr Page's pages suggest.

A changeover switch may become a useful gadget to sell.

NHS IT bods 'walk out' in pay row with crashed UK tech giant 2e2

Adrian Midgley 1

FLOSS offers protection against outsourced failure

To some degree. Outsourced production and running of closed licenced software provides opportunities for barrel straddles.

Alas, the common expectation of NHS software is failure and managers may prefer to have that outsourced rather than in-house.

What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks

Adrian Midgley 1
Linux

This would be closed source proprietary code, yes?

Another reason for the academic examples being good is that they have been peer reviewed .

Internet shut-down easier, in more countries, than you think

Adrian Midgley 1
Big Brother

Cryptonomicon

an excellent novel, contains discussion of this.

I fancy a wireless mesh.

Apple tries to add Galaxy Note, Jelly Bean to patent slapfest

Adrian Midgley 1

When Apple concentrated on making great stylish gadgets

using the state of the art they were interesting and useful.

EC: Microsoft didn't honour browser-choice commitment

Adrian Midgley 1
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There;d be a reason for IE no longer being a monopoly

and this useful action is to maintain that reason.

Wonder why you live longer than a chimp? Thank your MOTHER IN LAW

Adrian Midgley 1

breast feeding opposes ovulation, but that is not

a good description of it:-

"acts as a contraceptive, in order to prevent"

It isn't designed.

It has the effect, which is selected becuase it confers a benefit.

For an article on evolution, best leave out design.

'Hypersensitive' Wi-Fi hater loses case against fiendish DEVICES

Adrian Midgley 1

Re: Inquiring minds...

Yes.

Ice core shows Antarctic Peninsula warming is nothing unusual

Adrian Midgley 1
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I suspect it shows something about PR/journalist people

actually

For the science, read the paper.

Microsoft 'didn't notice' it had removed Browser Choice for 17 months

Adrian Midgley 1
Linux

This does not reduce my trust in MS

But then, what would.

There is a consistency to that firm, is there not?

Shuttleworth: Why Windows 8 made us ditch GPL Linux loader

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Microsoft. Consistent

In some entities consistency is a virtue.

NHS trust spunks £67m on e-patient records, Twitter, Facebook

Adrian Midgley 1
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this phrase fills me with horror

> "The majority of the projects, whilst containing significant IM&T elements are fundamentally transformational in nature," the board paper says.

I'm an incrementalist.

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