Posts by Kubla Cant 2794 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
Healthcare isn't exactly a local concern. Most countries in the world have a healthcare system of some kind. The NHS is only unique in its funding model and in its monolithic structure. The requirements should be much the same everywhere, and the data sharing problems should be, if anything, greater in less closely-integrated systems.
Most of the other requirements of healthcare seem to be filled globally. The NHS doesn't design and manufacture its own equipment, and its staff is notoriously drawn from all over the world. So why doesn't it use IT systems that are in use elsewhere?
It's not that many years since the last attempt to address all the NHS IT requirements in one gigantic project. The only output from that seems to have been a gigantic bill.
Upvoted.
But in most cases the best solution is to refactor the 80 lines of stuff to one or more well-named methods. The only exception I can think of is where it's 80 lines of essentially repetitive code, so there's little advantage in moving it to an 80-line method.
The way that human brains are wired, there is focus on a subject, and negation is not instinctively processed
An interesting related phenomenon:
In streets where pedestrians cross, the words "LOOK RIGHT" are often written on the roadway next to a central reservation or pedestrian refuge, because that is the direction the traffic is coming from when you're in the middle of the road. To avoid confusion, or perhaps just to balance things out, "LOOK LEFT" is written in the roadway at the start of the crossing (i.e. next to the pavement).
When you're getting ready to cross a busy road, you don't naturally look just in front of your feet. Your gaze naturally fixes on your destination, the island or reservation in the middle of the road. So you don't see "LOOK LEFT", but you do see "┴HפIɹ ʞOO˥".
There is no well-established convention that inverted text means the opposite of what it says, and most people can easily read two short words upside down without even registering that it's inverted. So they look the wrong way.
It's obvious various roles could never be done remotely, or are difficult at best.
Less obvious than you might suppose. Here's a story about a GP who lives 250 miles away from her surgery and works from home.
it uses a semi-automated system to link calendars with national holidays to its content creation process
Seems to imply that Kristallnacht (or, as in the message, the even more explicit "Reichspogromnacht") is a national holiday in Germany. Do they have holidays to commemorate all their appalling actions?
we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn
In pursuance of a long-standing* but mostly inexplicable feud between Trinity College and next-door Balliol College in Oxford, a group of Balliol undergraduates turfed the Trinity Junior Common Room with grass from the quad outside**.
* It was long-standing in 1967. I've no idea if it still exists. Today's pranks probably come with trigger warnings.
** I never saw the result myself, and I expect it was elaborated in the telling, with a few sods of grass turning into a wall-to-wall greensward complete with daffodils.
Yes.
At the start of lockdown I was faced with an urgent requirement for a work laptop running Windows. I bought a reconditioned Lenovo from Amazon for about £120. Arrived next day, big, ugly and scruffy, complete with SSD, USB WiFi dongle, numerous USB and video ports, and Windows 10 Pro. Still giving excellent service.
"Please print out this form, fill it in, and send back a scan."
Even worse, "Please print out this 20-page contract, sign the last page, scan all 20 pages back in, and email it to us".
So I try to add a scanned signature to the original PDF. Not allowed.
Maybe I can just print the final page, scan it and replace it in the original document. Not possible.
Libre Office can edit PDFs, but the result never looks quite like the original document.
The only solution seems to be to print the thing to 20 single-page image files, edit the final one to add a signature, then assemble them all into a new PDF. But life's not long enough, so print'n'scan it is.
Why the gratuitous disrespect for the River Ouse*? It's just across the road from my house, and I can confirm that although not fast-flowing, it's quicker than a slug.
*I appreciate that there are several rivers called Ouse, but the other Ouses are generally subject to a geographical qualification. Ours is the Great Ouse, and therefore the defining instance.
… or like everyone else their ability to investigate (and prosecute as required) has been hampered. by Government funding cuts
Not true.
When the original IR35 was introduced in 2000 there was a certain amount of panic among contractors. Then it was pointed out that HMRC (Inland Revenue as it then was) has hardly ever won an employment status case, including the odd one where they tried to prove somebody was not an employee.
No question that £sd was an inconvenient system and nearly impossible to automate.
But there's no doubt that having to spend a lot of time at primary school practising arithmetic in £sd and Imperial units was very good training. Perhaps it was time that could have been better spent on other aspects of maths (though to my limited knowledge the subjects included at O Level, as it then was, were more advanced than those in today's GCSE maths).
There's a regiment of the mealy-mouthed, mostly on the BBC, who insist on calling the delimiter in a URL "stroke". This is apparently because they think "slash" is a rude word. I feel bound to point out that if they haven't heard anything ruder than "slash" on the BBC, they haven't been listening.
I thought that if they don't like "slash" they should call it a solidus, so it's a disappointment to lean that the gods of Unicode consider them distinct characters. That said, I'd be surprised to learn that even the most fastidious metal fonts differentiated them.
"You wonder how they remember to breathe" seems harsh.
"Reforming" the telephone number system implies that there was an old, bad system that was reformed to the new, good system that we shall use for ever more. Phone numbers have been subject to sporadic modification since the phone was invented. The largest change I can remember was the conversion to all-figure numbers, more like 50 years ago than 30. I suppose the 1992 change must have been the additional digits required because of the unforeseen size of the address space.
Who bothers to memorise numbers in the age of mobile phones? I can recall several numbers that I haven't used for 50 years, but I don't know my wife's mobile number.
These days, GNOME Shell itself is written in JavaScript
JavaScript has its strengths, but it's a difficult language to write safe, unambiguous code in. It also suffers the inevitable performance penalty of interpreted script, even when JIT compiled. The reason that's always given for the persistence of JavaScript in web apps is that it's installed on billions of browsers so using anything else will be swimming against the stream.
The idea that a project that installs its own runtime environment and can therefore use any language it wants, would choose JavaScript, has me gasping for breath.
You'd have thought that a company the size of Google would have thought to strip formatting characters out of the data being formatted, but no.
A list of top 10 search keywords might terminate a comma if there are only 9 keywords. If no keywords, it might be all commas.
The thing that's really weird is sending a delimited list in a JSON response, when an array would be appropriate.
Because I live near a road junction, I get to hear a lot of lorries warning people that they are turning left. What puzzles me is why the manufacturers decided to have the warnings voiced by Donald Duck.
Incidentally, I thought Dabbsy lived in France. If so, it's odd that his "neighborhood" is in America.
stale 12-hour old water
I've got bad news for you. That water was probably delivered to Earth by a comet millions of years ago. It was probably zooming around on the comet for a while before that. I don't think an extra eight hours by your bed will make it much staler.
if the copies were good enough - they changed the bank notes to make it even harder
Up to a point....
The average improvement cycle for copiers, taken across all brands, is probably less than a year.
Bank of England notes get redesigned much less frequently.
SuSE looked like it could be a really great Linux bistro
That's a problem when you're looking for a distro.
It's fun to speculate on what a Linux bistro would be like. A menu offering thousands of dishes, many of them similar. If you don't like your food, you are welcome to set up in a corner of the kitchen and start cooking a variant menu. In the middle of the kitchen, a group of chefs are fighting over the right way to make stock.
It's not rocket surgery. A simple plan on one sheet of paper would suffice, even when working with Windows XP.
1. This is how I propose to apply the change.
2. This is how I will verify if the result is as expected.
3. This is how I will back out the change if it didn't work as expected.
Note that the correct answer to 3 is not "Phone the software suppliers and wait for them to send us a reinstallation disk".
I was working on Rdb systems when it was sold to Oracle. We all went to a presentation at the local Oracle office. There they cheerily told us that future support contracts were going to be very, very expensive, because that's the only way they could fund development. This may be a software fact of life, but only Oracle would boast about it.
Not just Windows. I have to WFH on a MacBook. It's a reasonable computer, but I can't understand why they're supposed to be a panacea for the technically challenged, as the O/S is like a cheese dream.
I use a USB webcam with its own mic, but the MacBook randomly decides to use its own mic even when its case is shut. It's worse with the camera: not only does it randomly choose one, but sometimes it shown nothing from either camera and has to be rebooted.
And then there's the screens. I have two monitors plus the so-called Retina Display (Why? Retinas are for seeing things, not displaying them - it's like calling the TV a camera). When the MacBook boots, or even when it wakes from sleep, it randomly jumbles the screen positions so I have to crank up System Preferences and drag them back into the right order.
But it's achingly cool, of course.
17, 33, 45 and 72 rpm records
Not 17, but 16⅔ - half 33⅓.
Despite living through the entire cycle, from 78 rpm onwards, I have never seen a 16⅔ rpm record.
It is possible there were portable valve radios
Indeed, my grandma owned one. ISTR it contained a huge Ever Ready battery that didn't last long and couldn't be recharged, so listening to it was probably an expensive activity.
Yes you are and although no one company can erase that experience, if enough return to 2019 but you're not willing...
I'm perfectly willing to return to on-site working* as long as I'm paid extra for four hours commuting, subsistence, exposure to infections (not just you-know-what - I've been free from the annual colds and flu since I started WFH).
* not really, it's just a figure of speech
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