t ful
why the objection to MTU engines? Don't forget that in an earlier life they were known as Maybachs and a lot were assembled by Bristol Siddeley. Oh for the sound of a Western at full chat...knocks a Deltic totally away
38 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2009
Much hot air been expended here by people who should know better. Its amazing how much gibberish the pairing of "NHS" and "IT" creates.
There are a number of underlying issues here, but the two main ones are due to the various goverment's fractionalising policies over the last 15 years which have led to reduction in size of organisational units, and the depletion of management skills. The worst of these was the dismembering of the PCTs and their replacement with GP-led CCGs. What did that achieve? The emasculation of any decent management within the NHS and its replacement by a bunch of empire-building ego-driven GPs, each with their own little private fiefdoms. There are several quality software suppliers to the NHS trying to bring order to the current chaos by offering upgrade routes, but finding themselves blocked by inept NHS management.
So why the delays in implementing Windows 7?
1) GP-led CCGs not seeing it as a priority. They prefer to spend their money on fancy offices
2) Fragmentation. There are too many contact points within the NHS to deal with, making finding someone to whom we can sell an upgrade solution damn difficult
3) Software issues. While most of the major clinical recording software packages will run on Windows 7, some will not, even now. Thats one of the reasons CSC left the GP market two years ago. Other suppliers have had a torrid time - one widely used package uses partly 8-bit CP/M code running in an emulator. Happily that package is now in the process of being killed off and replaced with a cloud solution, but its a hard job weaning the users off the old code.
Many other examples exist: a lot of plug-in software such as online test requests only work with Internet Explorer 7 or 8. IE9 or 10 kills the java routines. The NHS identity card software will only work with Java 6 v17. Anything newer kills it. The depreciation database used by a lot of Northwest trusts as a Citrix application will not work with a version of MSOffice newer than 2007.
The list goes on and on.......the problem is each trust has its own collection of software, much of it with a relatively small number of users on a national scale, but significantly locally. And many of these routines duplicate each other pointlessly. How many different labelling programs do you need? How many clinical systems do you need?
Its time for the government - or someone in authority to pull rank, knock heads together and order the CGGs what to do - with the threat of sanctions / sacking if they don't
Are these Cybus Cybermen or Mondas Cybermen? If Cybus do we get another incursion from Pete's universe through the wormhole in the Torchwood Tower? Thats not so far from St Pauls.
Maybe another visit from Pete and Rose hunting transdimensional Cybermen is on the cards for next week?
'twas total crap.
The science doesn't even work. We all know what caused Tunguska, and it wasn't a coronal mass ejection
As for the kids.......aaaargh please shoot them
Given the school setting for this series, maybe they should consider bringing back Ian Chesterton and Barbara White. THEY knew how to keep children under control
Going to be a problem for the NHS. Most of their GP surgeries still run 2003 for their clinical servers, and Exchange Server 2003 for e-mail - which in itself causes headaches with Win 7 clients.
Most of the clinical systems will work with Win2008R2 server, but not 2012.
OK, not as big a problem as the NHS has at present, trying to upgrade the clients on a shoestring, but its going to be a logistical nightmare - theres not many who know the clinical software and how to put it all together
what bothers me is how are the various bits of front-end software from Emis, iSoft and others going to interface with it?
all very well introducing a new Spine, but you may be forcing a rewrite of the patient booking and recording systems as well. And for some of the older systems thats not going to happen...
the problem is not bombing houses - its bombing enemy combatants in close hand - to - hand fighting. No tanks in those hills, so the aircraft have to act as airborne support artillery. The blast radius of even a 50kg bomb would in many cases be more than the contact distance between the two sides. Add that to the natural inaccuracy (even LGBs can miss) and the risk of killing your own forces is too high. There have been well documented instances of UK troops pinned down by enemy fire, needing air support and all was available was a bombed-up Harrier - which was rendered impotent by the close contact distance
One overlooked problem with Julian Thompson's argument. The most important weapon a close-air-support aircraft can have is a gun. The Sea Harrier had them. The old Falkands -era Harrier GR3 had them. The Tornado has them. The current generation of GR7/GR9 Harriers do not due to technical problems, even though the yanks successfully mated guns to their equivalent AV-8B Harriers
Its not so long ago that this very website was quoting a British commander as describing the current Harrier's support capabilities as "fucking useless" due to the missing guns. The problem is that combat is at such short range that using bombs or rockets would be too inaccurate, besides which they're a "one shot" weapon: miss and you've nothing left. With a gun you can come back for a second attempt
In reality the ideal air platform for use in Afghanistan would be a stealthed version of the Argentine Pucara. Take one of those, redesign the fuselage and wings using materials and structures developed from stealth drones and you'd have a stable, accurate weapons platform with little chance of being detected
This thing is going to have a problem in that the power to the two forward props will have to be asymmetric to balance the rotational torque of the rotor. As the rotor speeds up/down the problems in keeping the thrust of the two props balanced to stop torque rotation is going to be damned hard. As there is no tail rotor the props are going to have to be turning even at ground level to stop spin. No chance of safe exit in an emergency
He never came to the Time Factory - which was in Simonstone anyway, miles away from Bolton
He never came, so we never met him, and his adverts did sweet FA for our sales, though they cost us a packet in fees. After that all we could afford for the next advert was a scruffy old drunk who we called "Captain Apocalypse". Between the two of them they scuppered sale so well we nearly went bust four years before we finally did
As someone who has worked in both computer repair and the manufacture of research chemicals, I for one know that cigarette tar IS toxic/carconogenic and I for one will not touch machines that show any significant degree of contamination with it
I used to work for Time Computers and they had the same rule: if the machine was deemed a health hazard it did not get fixed. It was sent back to the customer to clean out and remove any nicotine tar traces. Once that was done, then we'd repair it
its also worth pointing out that fag smoke also is responsible for a lot of system failures: it causes havoc with CD floppy and hard drives, and can short out motherboard sockets. I've also seen many cases where it has caused PSUs to flashover and burn with quite significant fire hazards
During my chemical career we used to take nicotine tar, and extract chemicals from it and sell the result as a carcinogenic standard. Basically it was used to test how toxic different batches of tobacco were. The stuff we produced had a known toxicity: it was known exactly how quickly an animal population subjected to it would take to develop cancers. (note the time period was days. Not weeks or months or years. Days)
Tar and residue from smoking is a biohazard and must be treated as such. To do otherwise opens an employer to all kinds of legal problems from a Health and Safety perspective