Posts by Doctor Syntax

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch

"Sort of like what parents did in the olden days."

That might be an assumption too far for some parents.

Grumble Pai: FCC boss told by House Dems to try the novel concept of putting US folks first, big biz second

"He is not a politician but a civil servant and as such is obliged to explain his actions to Congress."

I can't help thinking that a useful weapon to have in dealing with refractory public servants would be the ability to put them under a degree of financial micromanagement if their relevant oversight committee becomes displeased with them. Each month they are required to report back to the committee on what they've done in regard to their key objectives and their monthly pay is only signed off if the committee is satisfied with what they're reported. Obvious precautions could be taken to verify the reports from time to time.

OK, it's early 2019. Has Leeds Hospital finally managed to 'axe the fax'? Um, yes and no

"can we cull the people who write a Word document and email it as an attachment when plain text would have been entirely adequate"

Yup, just as soon as we've finished culling all those who write emails in HTML without embedded links to graphics (we cull those after we've culled those who include links).

Re: paper records

"Photocopiers are your friend."

If you don't have one handy you can always fax yourself a copy.

Re: Problem ?

"Don't you remember the days that when you wanted to piss off your mate you just sent him a 100 page empty fax?"

No; at least I don't remember mates like you. I trust you're not making any decisions that affect the NHS.

Re: What about scan to email?

"But as always they blame goes back onto the staff for using this method"

And as always the blame would go back onto staff for not using the now withdrawn method when an alternative was unavailable for any reason.

I'd like to think that front-line NHS staff had a strong preference for any working method that came to hand rather than the recommendations of a Whitehall committee.

Are you saying the use cases of the NHS are those of primary schools?

Re: paper records

"Almost all prescriptions require signed paper documents. Most pharmacies expect to get these faxed to them by doctors for confirmation."

It's over a decade since I had anything to do with prescription systems so I've no idea what the back-end of the current ePrescriptions is but I'd be surprised if it was fax.

However the current system seems to depend on the patient having a specific pharmacy registered to the prescriber, the latter being a GP practice. This means that other prescribers such as dentists will still rely on paper. Also, at least in our case, the registered pharmacy is not the one next to the surgery so if a doctor wishes to write out a new or one-off prescription they will write or print off a paper script as this is a lot more convenient than chasing off to our registered pharmacy.

Slightly OT: Years ago our then GP's receptionist had a printer next to the PC. They obviously couldn't be bothered going to buy regular printer paper so they loaded it with FP10C, the fan-fold prescription forms, face-down. All prescription forms were produced as secure stationery, ordered by a secure process and consequently much more expensive than regular fan-fold. Even when it had print-out on the back the paper coming out of that printer would still have been valid prescription forms; the waste should have been securely disposed off if they weren't going to turn it over and print scripts on it.

Re: paper records

somebody still relies on "paper records" ?

When your email system went down and you didn't have a backup and the patient died the coroner might want to see them.

Re: What about scan to email?

"why are you holding that bit of paper you want to scan-to-email in the first place?"

Because it contains important hand-written notes. They were hand-written because all the computers were down because of the latest virus infection.

And you don't actually want to scan-to-email. You just want to transfer it to someone else quickly and reliably. Start from the requirement, not the solution. "Quickly" probably leads to some electronic means of transmission. "Reliably" strongly suggests having a fall-back. "Quickly and reliably" means that sending a courier to the consultant 50 miles away isn't the best backup.

It's just as well to remember that when it all goes wrong you'll probably need the hard copy for the coroner's court.

"never underestimated the enormity of the task"

enormity

noun

1. the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong.

2. a grave crime or sin.

eFax had to be "part of our digital transformation journey"

That little word* "had". Whatever happened to "could"? Did anybody ever decide whether removing fax was feasible or do they wait until their network goes down to discover that?

* The bigger word "journey", of course reveals the entire statement to be wanker-speak.

Thanks for all those data-flow warnings, UK.gov. Now let's talk about your own Brexit prep. Yep, just as we thought

Re: Time to have another public Brexit vote?

it's way overdue for you chaps to hold a second *binding* referendum

An excellent idea. Boris could launch the pro-Brexit campaign with a rousing speech in Sunderland.

Re: Brexit updates ...

"the remainer PM"

I never believed that. She's a brain washed Home Sec who'd like to get out from under the ECHR let alone the ECJ.

"the remainer civil service"

That'll be the folks who actually have to try to advise governments on what's practical in the real world. I wonder why they'd be remainers (except for the HO thinking about those pesky European courts).

Re: There is a solution!

"Who needs data transfer and fancy IT?"

Data transfer and fancy IT are two different things. I hope you're not running a business on the assumption they're not. Your data can exist in any form including hand-written. Your data transfer can be anything from handing someone that hand written not upwards. Your data processing can be shuffling through that pile of paper on your desk.

"However having fully implemented GDPR then the European Commission could very quickly agree adequacy of data protection whether there is a deal or not"

How quick is quickly? And your argument suggests that GDPR is implemented. The current DPA contains various weasel clauses to allow HMG a good bit of wrggle room. If the examiners don't like them then a new DPA is needed.

"I don't think anyone stopped using US servers when it was found that Safe Harbour was not adequate"

They went to relying on contractual clauses which are again under attack in the courts. In the case of HMG's data there probably isn't a contract in place. How do they get round that?

Re: a second *binding* referendum and cancel the madness that is Brexit.

In other words your bright idea has brought us the worst of all worlds.

Yup, there's a lot that's wrong with it but some of us contrive to avoid bringing sharp knives near our faces if we don't like what we see in the mirror.

Re: a second *binding* referendum and cancel the madness that is Brexit.

"The really old ones, who are old enough to remember WW2, are solidly remain. The baby boomers are leave"

Some of us are in between. Too young to actually remember WW2 but too old to be boomers. Damn categorisers!

Re: a second *binding* referendum and cancel the madness that is Brexit.

a write in option, with prizes for the most creative entry anything that looks as if it stands a chance of working.

FTFY

Techies tinker with toilet-topper to turn it into ticker-tracker

Re: a representative sample

"before you move on to all the tricky cases you hope to work with eventually"

Such working out who it is that's sitting there.

Tedious Service Bulletin: No prizes for guessing which UK bank's services are DOWN for business users

"it was primarily meant to be set up as a challenger bank on its own merits"

Management misread that as "challenged".

Re: Why do they still have customers?

"Lloyds were obliged to shed a bunch of customers because of government ownership. They could simply have offered incentives"

They actually used an alternative - being so bad some of us went elsewhere of our own volition.

Re: Why do they still have customers?

"But anyone who still maintains an account with them despite plentiful alternatives"

It was the behaviour of the former TSB that led to me abandoning Lloyds but as to the "plentiful alternates" they're only plentiful in terms of approximately matching awfulness. Awfulness includes all of them closing branches where I'd prefer to bank. Do actual branches matter? Yes, especially when you get online banking falling over and then telling customers to go to the local branch which doesn't exist for any acceptable value of local.

"Twitter-handlers suggested users head into a local branch"

What's a local branch?

Our vulture listened to four hours of obtuse net neutrality legal blah-blah so you don't have to: Here's what's happening

Re: "Appointed people shouldn't be in the business of making rules. "

"You can't really expect Congress, or any Parliament, to bear the full burden to create each and every specific and detailed rule, often in fields elected people have really no clue about, and rules that may need to change faster than the legislative process allows."

As far as Parliament is concerned it passes legislation that empowers the relevant minister (in practice, of course, the minister's department) to make the rules. The minister is answerable in Parliament, directly and via the relevant Select Committee, and the rules can be challenged in court if the legislated powers have been exceeded. See the discussion above.

To what extent, if any, are the Federal Commissioners answerable to Congress?

Re: So where is Congress in all this?

"super bright headlights"

Headlights? These days even the sidelights are a problem.

Re: So where is Congress in all this?

"Actually the UK also has regulations made by government departments."

Yes. Statutory Instruments. The word "statutory" is key. The statute lays down what the minister can do and if the minister oversteps the mark the regulation can be challenged in court by anyone who gets bitten by it. The minister is also answerable to Parliament.

To whom are these Federal Commissions answerable?

Re: So where is Congress in all this?

"litigation is The American Way."

It's a bit more complex than that. The whole system, I believe, has its roots in the English* system.

The courts sit at the sharp end. The legislature makes the laws but the courts have to interpret them. Whatever's new hits the courts first because it hits individuals (and individual businesses) first and it's the courts to which those individuals have access. The courts will attempt to fit the new reality and law together by setting precedents. They have a lot of experience in that. It's up to the legislature to come along when things have settled a bit and replace what the courts have put together with new law.

In short, courts tackle things bottom up and legislatures tackle things top down; the first is more responsive and the latter, hopefully, a more general solution. Then the cycle starts all over again.

The difference between the UK and the US seems to lie in unelected bodies such as the FCC being able to make what are effectively laws without any of the procedures that apply to normal legislatures.

* English because the system goes way back before the Act of Union, let alone the founding of the US.

Oh cool, the Bluetooth 5.1 specification is out. Nice. *control-F* master-slave... 2,000 results

Re: It's not cultural cluelessness

"Genuine offense is not something one needs to search for."

Samuel Johnson had this one nailed: “What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?”

Re: It's not cultural cluelessness

"all pronouns I use to address the group or describe students in general are meaningless"

If I were in that position I'd probably take the line that as a male I personally find it offensive that "my" pronoun has been hijacked for the general usage.

The "I'm a bigger snowflake than you" approach is likely to be one they haven't anticipated.

"it could be traced back tot he Normans"

You can probably go further back still, at least to the hegemony of Wessex. They started a tax collection system to pay Danegeld. Beware the usual saying about Danegeld. The reality was that you could get rid of the Dane but you couldn't get rid of the geld. Domesday records the valuation for geld of each property TRE, ie. at the death of Edward the Confessor a few months before Hastings. England was already a feudal country, not necessarily along the exact lines of Norman England but feudal enough.

I grew up within a couple or so miles of an area that had coal mines. Although I don't, so far as I know, have any actual miners in my direct ancestry some of my C18th and C19th relatives were. I also have ancestors with the surname Collier which probably means that somewhere along the line I'm descended from charcoal burners who would have been just as blackened by their occupation.

On these counts I find the blogger's failure to respect the occupations of those relatives and ancestors of mine to be deeply offensive. The article should be taken down forthwith.

Technical terminology has specific meanings. Irrespective of how the diligent umbrage takers may dislike terms adopted as technical (a) need to remain and retain that technical meaning and (b) should be seen as having a context of their own in which they are understood irrespective of their meanings in other contexts.

(a) For one thing existing technical documentation isn't going to be rewritten to accommodate feelings of some third party unless that third party is prepared to pay for it and the economic cost of scrapping it instead would be too huge to bear. For another as soon as the grip on strict terminology is loosened marketing are likely to muscle in, change meanings to suit themselves and suddenly we lose all ability to express anything with adequate precision.

(b) There really is no necessity, and sometimes even no possibility, to connect a term with any other context. For instance we all know what a right hand thread is but how does that meaning connect to one's right hand? Or even depend on having a right hand? Indeed, if someone finds any of these terms the OP lists as offensive they can only do so by thinking of them in some other context where they would be offensive but they shouldn't be thinking like that as it's an entirely unacceptable way of thinking to their way of thinking. They should wash their minds with soap and water.

Bug-hunter faces jail for vulnerability reports, DuckDuckPwn (almost), family spied on via Nest gizmo, and more

I'm sure crackers everywhere will welcome the news that Magyar Telecom doesn't care about its security. That may not have been the message they intended to send but it'll be the message that's received and as a communications business I'm sure they know that the message that's communicated is the one that's received.

Kwik-Fit hit by MOT fail, that's Malware On Target

Re: re: Too bad they couldn't continue operating as normal with paper records,

"They've been replaced by... a direct electronic emulation of paper flight strips (EXCDS)."

So it the system goes down they could use paper strips to emulate the system that emulates paper strips.

Re: re: Too bad they couldn't continue operating as normal with paper records,

Reverting to a manual paper process therefore means that staff are at absolute best capable of running at about 10% of normal capacity. Using an unfamiliar process that a good three quarters of the staff need training on probably means they are running about a third to half of the speed that is theoretically attainable, so real world you'd probably actually be down to about 3%-5% of normal productivity.

Then train them. Make it part of the business continuity plan.

Even if your in a low impact industry where IT has "only" doubled the productivity of all staff, your still looking at only being able to get one half of the jobs done.

So you have the choice of getting half the jobs done or no jobs done. Ever heard the saying "half a loaf is better than no bread"?

"they did a high pressure sell on a new set of 4 tyres"

Similar experience many years ago. I had a tyre replaced. A few days later they phoned for a "customer satisfaction survey" which turned out to be a few perfunctory questions by an attempt to sell insurance. Another customer lost.

"having first jemmied the til open"

Did they put the jemmy back in stock?

Jammy dodgers: Boffin warns of auto autos congesting cities to avoid parking fees

"Because cruising is less costly at lower speeds, a game theoretic framework shows that AVs also have the incentive to implicitly coordinate with each other in order to generate congestion."

Why would they need to coordinate with each other? All it needs is for the manufacturer to provide an economical parking alternative mode and off it goes on its own.

I'm a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks' DNA data to FBI

Re: Yep

"As usual the Democrats and leftwits instinctively side with the criminal"

There's always somebody who doesn't get it.

Carter, hasn't it dawned on you that all the rules about evidence and criminal procedure are there to protect you? Not just you, of course. Me, all the rest of the elReg commentards and the public in general.

If you still don't get it, think about this. If your local law enforcement turned up at your door and arrested you for something you didn't do would you voluntarily give up all your rights to due process of law because those rights "side with the criminal" and you're not a criminal?

The lack of short cuts mean that law enforcement has to put in the work to make sure they get it right. As one who, in his time, was one of those who had to put in that work I wouldn't have had it any other way. The possibility of finding I'd taken part in a wrongful conviction was something I dreaded.

"You pay your money, submit your DNA, then get access to the database to see matches."

You get access to matches with your DNA. The FBI agents aren't submitting their own DNA, they're submitting somebody else's.

Crowdsourcing?

I don't think it really is crowdsourcing. AIUI the term means that the resource is built collaboratively. The FBI would be searching for individual records and any individual record is lights on hasn't been sourced by the crowd, it's been sourced by the individual who submitted it. It's no more crowdsourcing than a bank's accounts are.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Re: Annoying pedantry

"From what I understand there will soon be a lot more places around the world, mainly coastlines and large capital cities that will need more than IP68."

The relationship between land and sea is never stable unless you have a short term view. Raised beaches (Antrim coast), peat buried under the beach (Portrush), major port disappeared beneath the sea (Dunwich), major port now a couple of miles from the sea (Rye), ancient city sinking into the sea because its groundwater has been pumped out (Venice). If you think land/sea changes won't happen or if you think you can prevent them you're going to be disappointed.

Re: Design deficiencies

I had a gig near Gatwick and stayed in a new hotel. So new they hadn't finished the snagging. I went into the bathroom of the first room I was put in and discovered water coming through the bath overflow. Nothing through the main drain, just the overflow. I don't know how they managed that.

Re: Annoying pedantry

"because its nobody's job to say if its reasonable"

Maybe this is the case where stuff is centrally sourced. If you're running a lab. in the Civil Service and you have an annual budget you do - or at least I did - take good care to get value for money. For instance discovering that one of our more expensive biochemicals had a much cheaper source than the usual supplier and that a useful test strip worked perfectly well for our purposes when bought cheap beyond its use-by date as a medical diagnostic.

Ca-caw-caw: Pigeon poops on tot's face as tempers fray at siege of Lincoln flats

"Bicarbonate of soda"

Back in the day calcium carbide used to be readily available.

"Humans are a blight on this planet and will soon destroy all but the Tardigrades"

I doubt it. The woodlice (pill-bugs for left-pondians) and cockroaches are also indestructible.

"From what I hear, you can eat pigeon and supposedly it is quite tasty"

It is but can get quite tough. The squabs are better.

"We haven't really asked what he does with them"

You haven't bought any pies from him either?

Re: Hawks

"It's a numbers game"

Too many pigeons eaten and the peregrines starve.