Posts by Doctor Syntax

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

Re: Mega-projects

H/W becomes obsolete. S/W becomes obsolete.

Data should live on. The key to that is open standards.

I guess the problem is a single big outsourced operation. It needs in-house to set the standards, say batches of extra interface specs every 6 months. Given that there are, I believe, a number of suppliers for systems to be interfaced there would be competition to keep them relatively honest - "That's the spec, you've got 3 months to go-live. The others will be doing it, so it's on your market reputation if you can't."

Years ago - so long ago I've forgotten most of the details - a client of mine had a contract with the NHS. If you lived in England and Wales back then you've probably benefited from the end product and the recollection was part of the thinking behind my OP.

Somehow - I wasn't involved with the details - we got the server an email address on NHS.net (or maybe there was some predecessor) and received data by encrypted email. I then had to parse these emails to load into the ERP system. The record formats hadn't been put together with enough planning and the ad hocery as more use cases got added got to a familiar point: "If I'd known that's where you were going I'd have started it differently." If the contract hadn't ended about the same time as I retired I'd have refactored it.

It didn't need anything special in respect of email clients. AFAICR the existing Unix mail handling sufficed to drop the files into the processing so no need to write email clients.

So much can be done with local processing and message passing with agreed formats.

Re: meh

I had this incident in mind: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18497161

I remember the hospital because it used to be just along the road from my lab which meant that during the rotating power cuts in the troubles we were spared them because the hospital power had to be kept going.

Over the past few year or so my wife's cardiac and, particularly the last few weeks, blood pressure problems - together with a few of my own have given me chance to observe the local hospital trust and especially the local A&E.

Firstly they do have a trust system. It has links to a national system so they can look up NHS number from name, DoB & post code (as can online booking for flu & covid jabs). The only connected printer in evidence at A&E reception spits out a wrist band with name, NHS number and a QR code. That solves the patient ID as they're moved around. BP testing devices have an RJ45 so presumably could be networked but aren't - it would probably be impractical - so readings have to be typed in but doctors and nurse practitioners can review what's been done. The cardiac ward in the other main hospital in the trust has hand-helds which look like smartphones but I suppose might not be which are used to register the readings. I'm not sure how the doctors review this on ward rounds but in the A&E offices they can review everything without needing a paper record. On the face of it it appears that this trust is largely if not entirely paperless apart from the wrist bands, at least on a functional level although it's possible there might be a paper back-up. I don't know the origins of the system but I doubt it's written in house; it will be bought in.

Our GP also has a practice system so they also are largely if not entirely paperless, at least on a functional level. I know this is system is bought in, in fact I'm pretty sure it runs on the provider's server.

The need for paper, then, seems to be communicating between trust and GP and possibly between trusts (SWMBO was sent elsewhere for a TAVI last year). This set me thinking: bearing in mind that perfection is the enemy of the good, let alone the workable, is it possible to build a bottom-up system instead of some grand plan, especially one to be handed over to a major data-broker? How does email work, or the web, or any effective communications system? It has scarcely any central requirement other than data standards - communication protocols and defined message formats and a hierarchical, distributed registry. There's no need for everyone to use a specific client. There's no need for MSPs to use the same server software. Providing the clients and servers follow the protocols and handle the same message format everything works. It should be possible to build something on those principles.

A quick online search shows that there's a lot of information about medical exchange message formats. Pick one, preferably one that's extensible. Specify a core amount of information and a go-live date. It doesn't matter how different the internal databases of the various providers are, all they have to do is to provide an interface to read or write that subset of data to that format. Now we have to decide how to exchange data about the patient. As the system evolves extensions for extra data can be defined and added in phases.

On the basis that the patient is registered with a GP (not all patients may be but let's start with what's practical) the GP (in practice the GP's service provider) is the obvious place to exchange information; it's the GP who will refer patients a lot of the time and even if a hospital trust encounters the patient as an A&E walk in the GP will need to know eventually. Clearly a network is needed to transmit messages securely and I'm assuming that NHS.net can provide this and that most, if not all, trusts and GPs have NHS.net addresses. Again "most" can be the starting point.

What the network needs to provide is a central registry to provide identify the patient's GP and I'd be somewhat surprised if the system which already provides the lookup for NHS number didn't already include this; and a store and forward message handling system which looks remarkably like email. It may well be that the GP service providers could handle the latter

TL;DR A system could be built bottom up. No massive central contract is needed. Software would be an add-on to existing medical record systems by the providers of those systems. Not every patient nor every possible item of data might be served by this but the system could start earning its keep from go-live and grow out from there. Perfection is the enemy of the workable.

Re: meh

You think the entire paper record couldn't get lost? Or become part of the overflow of an overflowing bin somewhere?

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Re: Location?

It's an on attitude isn't it? These machines will house your entire business. If they go down so does your business. Collectively they represent your entire business, whatever you value that at. Where do you put them? Somewhere where they'll be treated with the respect that that value deserves or whatever small space that you'll begrudge least, however unsuitable?

Remember the shop was a cop shop so they ran the jail.

The boss, of course, would be the cowboy.

Same house, most of the wiring was wooden conduit like that except those wires were gutta-percha with fabric covering. Metal conduit chased in down the walls.Only two wires of course. What to do when 3-pins were installed? Easy. Thread an extra wire down the metal conduit then twist it round the top of the metal to earth it. Or round a 6" nail hammered into the joint between two courses of brick. No brickwork handy? Hammer the nail into a wooden joist. I found all three options in that house.

When you hear of some of these installations you wonder about the installers. Did they not flag it up as an unsuitable installation? Maybe they'd strayed into the wrong genre - cops and robbers when they should have been in cowboys and indians.

"twisted-fabric electrical cables"

You had fabric? Luxury! We moved into a house where some of the cables were lead-sheathed with paper insulation in the last stages of rotting away.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Re: Someone else's computer

Alternatively there should be regulation to require sufficient money from the original purchases to be put into a trust to invest to finance continual running of the service. If there's money available to run the service it will be worth somebody's taking on the job.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: "I wonder if someone... might use this to sue Microsoft under the Trades Descriptions Act."

"and widely reported."

But no widely reported contradiction. But never mind: plausible deniability.

Re: Advert

"Windows never has printing hiccups"

Hmmm. I remember having to help out a cousin-in-law. He'd got an HP inkjet (OK, first mistake). Windows couldn't see it. That was because the Windows setup for it had configured it to a completely different subnet address.

"a subscription model"

That'll be W12. It'll be interesting to see what that does to the home PC users. Will it finally turn them to something else? If not and users get used to paying a subscription to use their PCs will that ease the social media site users into paying subscriptions?

Re: not happening

"Companies will not spend man-hours to upgrade and retrain"

If you want a UI that doesn't require periodic retraining of users - nor requires them to just take UI changes in their stride without retraining - then you're a lot better off moving to Linux.

Do the retraining once and from then on enjoy the stability of UI. Between KDE 3 & KDE 5 there's only been one change that's really annoyed me and that's the fact that I can no longer confine un-hide of the panel (task bar to you) to a corner. I suppose for Windows users that would be classed as a minor annoyance given what Microsoft have wrought on them over that time.

Unfortunately a few applications, particularly browsers have changed their UI for the worse. That's because they've followed what happens on Windows and, believe me, that imported lack of stability bugs me no end.

Re: So0rry, Linux still is nowhere near ready to replace windows.

Unspecific claims from an A/C are soooo convincing.

Re: Needless, wasteful churn (aided and abetted by less-than-helpful media types)

"As in, it will suddenly go away or stop working at Micros~1's whim and wish??"

Are you giving them ideas? The upgrade that installs W11 if the hardware meets spec or wipes the PC if it doesn't?

Re: "A collective shrug from PC users"

" It was supposed to be the last version until Redmond got an aneurysm and decided to do another one."

I wonder if someone faced with a large, otherwise unnecessary, replacement requirement might use this to sue Microsoft under the Trades Descriptions Act.

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

"it's seventy three competing GUIs"

You say that like it's a bad thing. But one size does not fit all. Liam reviewed Elementary here the other day. I'm sure it has users who find it to be just what they want, likewise Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome, Unity or whatever. If I personally find KDE fits my way of doing things then I don't have to use any of the others (a couple of which would be an extremely bad fit for me).

To take just one aspect of it - the versions of Windows from 95 to 2000 had a fairly configurable and on the whole user-friendly hierarchical start menu organised on more or less functional lines. Over the years since it has changed into what appears to be an inflexible lumpen mess ending up resorting to alphabetical ordering because nobody seems to recognise that functional organisation is what's needed. I understand that many users resort to typing the name of the program they want into search - they've reinvented the command line in desperation. The Linux desktops I've used have retained the functional organisation and improved on it. KDE, the one I'm most familiar with is fully editable to achieve the arrangement that best suits the user and has remained that way as long as I've used it and has also sprouted a couple of extra choices as to how the user wishes to view the menu.

It's a world away from the Windows approach of use this whether it works well for you or not, until the next one which might work in an entirely different way. I can have something I can tailor to my needs and enjoy consistency of UI from one release to the next.

That choice of desktops isn't a reason to avoid Linux - it's actually a very good reason to use it.

The desktops are over a clone of a 50 year old minicomputer operating system? Fine, there were some very clever people about 50 years ago. Even back then I preferred the one that was cloned for Linux over the one that was cloned for Windows.

Cisco warns of critical flaw in Emergency Responder code

"The inclusion of hard-coded credentials is a textbook security flaw."

Good to see developers following the textbook.

NASA taking its time unboxing asteroid sample because it grabbed too much stuff

I hope they're not in the "bringing organic materials to seed life" group. If they are William of Occam might recommend that they read up on Miller and Urey and that they have a closer shave.

X confuses the masses by removing all details from links

Re: Cats and Vultures

What on Earth were the banks thinking of to lend him money in the first place? He'd bid so much that he tried to get out of it almost immediately.

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Ferrets are too good at weaselling out of things.

Re: Won't someone think of the rodents?

"I had also had a rat for a pet previously, but that was completely unrelated to this mouse."

Obviously. Different species.

They may have said cat it to /dev/null and he used mv instead.

A cat that can type "DROP DATABASE veteran-affairs;"? With a bit of extra training it could be set to work providing it doesn't spend too much time playing with the mouse.

BYOD should stand for bring your own disaster, according to Microsoft ransomware data

"Some take the stance that it can never match the security levels of a fully managed and provisioned approach"

I have a feeling that this also describes quite a few businesses' entire IT operations without users' additions.

Canva creates $200M kitty to pay creators for stuff they feed its design-bot

Re: Manhattan

I think you missed out 6 orders of magnitude. But the bigger questions would be how do you or anyone else know what contributed to the output and if nobody knows, then nobody can be paid, can they?

In this context what does "should they opt in they can later choose to opt out" mean? If it's gone into the training data how does it get removed without running the entire training operation again? Is it a case of "you can check out but you can never leave"?

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

Re: Much todo about nothing

Outlook spam detection is odd. Sometimes it's very effective. Sometimes it's effective for everything except spam pretending to come from Microsoft itself and sometimes it just doesn't seem to be there at all.

it sounds like more and more lock in.

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

Re: In a galaxy far, far away...

Last time I ran Mint I ran it with KDE. I see no reason why thet wouldn't be available with apt install kde-plasma-desktop and your choice of extras or apt install kde-full

Re: In a galaxy far, far away...

Snap!

No, I wasn't agreeing with you.

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

"but first I have to remember where I left it"

In my case that's usually at home and I'm not going back for it.

Re: It's not a watch

Primarily it was a wrist-mounted display object whose prime function was to show, by having been purchased, what the owner could afford to by. Having been purchased and flashed about most of its utility value has been used up. Being a wrist-mounted gadget that could also tell you the time was its residual utility value (plus the melt price of the gold, of course).

Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system

Ideally a word would have a degree of local identity with the larger entities being built from them, bottom up. It lends to greater local coherence. The 1974 reorganisation is the result of what you get from the top-down approach.

Re: "The council now plans to revert ..."

They're in stock now but that's too late to save the situation.

Re: Public Sector procurement has something to answer for here too

CV polishing might have been the best solution.

Re: When will they ever learn?

"and consider their staff are people too"

Their more expensive problem seems to have been considering that some of their staff were people and some were women.

Re: Brummie here.

Seen too late - as usual.

I don't think many people in Kirklees think it works. It was a cobbling together of areas which previously had their own administrations with the West Riding County Council on top of them. The name was presumably the consequence of there being no name within the combined area which wouldn't identify it with one of the original areas to the detriment of the other. It's not a bit of accidental daftness - it reflects the underlying lack of logic.

I suppose the destabilising factor was breaking up the WRCC to create the Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire. That, of course, is the root of your Whitby/Settle issue - Settle was also part of the West Riding.

Now, for goodness sake, we've also got a West Yorkshire mayor to no obvious purpose.

Microsoft attempts to woo governments with Cloud for Sovereignty preview

But as Microsoft is a US company they're still subject to the CLOUD Act. An access under that wouldn't be for engineering so there'd be no need to enter it into the engineering log.

ChattyG takes a college freshman C/C++ programming exam

Given that there are raster and vactor editors to learn from those aren't to trick parts of the puzzle. The bit that requires imagination is how to produce a workable paint program from it. I'd like to think that if you put that problem as a test the human would start by thinking what the interface would have to look like but what would a ML do?

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

Re: Interesting that the police

"Unless, of course, this involves you running over them again with another set of wheels"

Or even running over more bits with the same set of wheels. It depends on being able to lift the vehicle without causing further damage.

From vacuum tubes to qubits – is quantum computing destined to repeat history?

Re: Cost/Performance

That's a lot of heavy lifting for two words. Which two am I looking at?

I'm a bit concerned about agreeing with someone from Gartner.

What's always puzzled me about quantum computers - well, one of the things - is this reliance on noise reduction. It sounds a bit like "Here are all the possible answers. All you have to do is work out which is right.".

Re: Applicable

"if"

Such a trivial word. However I look forward to Musk taking the lead in testing this concept.

Microsoft takes concrete steps (literally) toward greener datacenter construction

Re: For Pennies on the Pound

I thought that market had collapsed.

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

End of contract with SAP and/or the H/W it was running on?

Train crashes depend on the momentum of the train.