Posts by Alan Brown

Re: The UK can no longer afford nor staff a viable health service.

If it can't afford to run a viable government operated health serrvice it sure as hell can't afford to run a privatised one where the emphasis is on PROFIT, not health

There's a reason the NHS was created - the USA model was what prevailed pre WW2, followed by "charities" operating healthcare systems which weren't much better

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

"more of missing the 'this is a drill' parts, but noticing the 'this is not a drill' parts that followed"

How hard is it to have a transparent overlay saying "this is a drill" ?

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

On some menus I've seen it given a blank space either side...

Re: "all GP practices have changed to appointment booking solely via an online portal"

"This is clearly discriminatory against the old, or other people who do not use the Internet"

Even if you DO use the Internet, if you're blind it's utterly unisable - and the amount of 3rd party javascript gives pause for thought

The ICO really needs to have a dedicated team for GDPR-breaching public/large utility websites

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

That, and the toxicity of manglement structures causing burnout (not just IT staff - NHS medical staff are even more badly affected)

As mentioned upthread, the "new NHS portal" is a shining example of "how not to do things" and a big step backwards over the previous ones used (like SystemOne, which was awful, but the NHS one has taken it to new depths)

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

Joke or not, it's still vastly better (and safer, and gives more reliable answers) than doing anything complex on Excel

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

"I found a couple incorrect formulas that inflated the project cost by a quarter million"

Which means there's that much padding in the outcome and people get congratulated for coming in on time and under budget

It's vastly worse when they give a figure that's wrong in the other direction

It's inadvisable to exceed 65C in most cases (fumes) although softening is a problem for both PVC and Polyethelene at 80C, ABS is rated to 105C but I've encountered warped boxes which supposedly didn't get hotter than 80, so hotspots must factor into it

Re: Fun with magnets.

I've seen monochrome monitors with magnetised frames which needed degaussing

Re: As AI use continues to grow, the race to find alternative ways to power datacenters accelerates

"As domestic users of energy we're being expected to invest heavily in energy saving measures, better insulation, different heating technology, alternative fueled vehicles."

For the moment.

A nuclear fission (molten salt) system has the potential to reduce build/operating costs by around 80% (in addition to all the other advantages) and that kind of cost reduction would make it cheaper than EVERYTHING else (Current water-moderated uranium nuclear started off more expensive than coal and has only become more expensive - it really only existed as a way of justifying the uranium separation process and was pushed for military ends (Whilst we refer to uranium enrichment, _depleted_ uranium is the precursor material to weapons plutonium production. the concentration on enrichment and "weaponisation of civil power" is a classic distraction technique from the REAL weaponisation paths)

Re: Where from?

Hydrogen manometers have negligable pressure in them and they were being constantly topped up

Modern reticulated gas systems are operating at substantial pressures in the distribution network and even in street mains, with pressure reduction to a 2-3psi (or less) just before the residential meter - which is why you don't see pressure dropoff when everyone fires up their central heating, (such dropoffs were a regular feature of the old days of town gas)

Re: Where from?

White hydrogen is generally mixed with a lot of other noxious gasses and geological predictions are that it's _rare_

Relying that as a future fuel source is unwise

Re: Where from?

"hydrogen is more difficult to light than methane"

wtf are you smoking?

The explosive range in air of methane is 5-17% (LEL-UEL)

The explosive range in air of hydrogen is 4-75% - and it requires a MUCH lower ignition energy source (you can set it off with a red-hot object. Methane needs a spark)

(The minimum ignition energy (MIE) of a hydrogen–air mixture is only 0.019 mJ, whereas that of other flammable gases such as petrol, methane, ethane, propane, butane, and benzene is usually on the order of 0.1 mJ according to Lewis and von Elbe)

Hydrogen NOW is hideously expensive and it's extracted from hydrocarbons.

Green hydrogen would need oil to be well past $250/bbl to be viable - and only if the input energy can't be used in other more efficient ways (which is highly unlikely)

In short: Hydrogen is a classic example of "Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD"

"until we develop a source of large scale, ultra low cost electricity. There are no candidates of which I'm aware."

TMSR-LF1 - look it up (It's a rebuild of ORNL MSRE but started on thorium from the outset)

If it work as expected there's a good chance that renewables farms might end up being largely abandoned as far too expensive to operate (in addition to not being remotely capable of meeting the generation requirements for full decarbonisation)

"I strongly suspect most providers would rather be generating electricity to be used later than not generating at all..."

At some point renewables operators are going to have to assume the "backing store" and "interrmittency" costs. The South Australian Battery has proven that it works but it needs to happen at a farm-by-farm level

It takes about three times as much energy to liquify hydrogen or compress it for transportation purposes as it does to produce the hydrogen in the first place

That _really_ badly knocks the end-to-end efficiency

The embrittlement issues are another matter and I really don't want to be within 1/4 mile of a serious Road Crash involving a COPV hydrogen container

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

Getting in/out of the building is the easy part when it's empty. The hard part is where the valuables are kept (See: Hatton Gardens)

Re: With apologies to Phil Collins

There's nothing _wrong_ with being a technician and "Engineer" has been degraded by wanton usage

When an "engineer" sent out could be anything from a barely trained script monkey to someone with a couple of degrees and 30 years experience under his belt you're in a position where every car is a "Toyota" regardless of who made it

Texas has the right idea, but it's really too late to rescue the term

Re: Safety Factor

Safety factors keep people alive

If people aren't in the splash zone, then catastrophically breaking something results in expense and embarrasment but no injuries

(In the case of lifts, there's at least a 3:1 safety factor and they're derated for "live" vs "dead" loads (Anything moving around adds shock stresses to the load which may exceed the stress margins. The "jumping up and down in the lift" stunt can cause shock loadings well in excess of safety margin maximums (at which point Mr Otis's safety system deploys pawls into the shaft notches and the lift is LOCKED into position)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgEL6aeGUrQ

Alternatively you put the lift into service mode and avoid that kind of issue in the first place (There's usually a service call option at each floor, normally keylocked)

"I'd have to swap out some parts to work at 60Hz...."

The Fuser. That's all

Re: How was "Pig Iron" originally installed?

" Paying out say $100k to have a new $1m system installed is one thing, paying out another $100k to have system moved to another floor…"

Most of the time the $1M included installation. Decommissioning/moving was chargeable

Re: Never. Here is a solution

"Majority of businesses and organizations are not sufficiently secure. This will NEVER change."

Personal legal liability of manglement for breaches would focus attention. One of the biggest problems IT bods face is that the people with the resources don't see the need for improving security until an event has already happened

Re: How did they allow themselves to get into this position anyway?

"lower cost bids that meet the letter but not the spirit of the tender"

Often with the active collusion of those supposed to be in charge of the Tender

The number of times tender requirements have been "rewritten" by procurement is legion. Always go over things with a fine tooth comb before approving what they send out

Re: How did they allow themselves to get into this position anyway?

"I can easily believe they've lost the source (or toolchains) for an awful lot of stuff, too."

I've worked on a number of science cases where the source or toolchain may be available, but is so expensive that RE is preferable in order to work out what it's doing and reimplement it (This is why a lot of places don't like using proprietary software. Opensource means that you can (eventually) rerun tests 30 years later, etc)

I was onboard with the idea of REing old software so it can be updated/replaced but the idea of "patching binaries" will fail anything which is cyptographically signed and is unnecessary if you own the equipment it's running on

This clearly has applications in government-sponsored malware (if it hasn't already happened elsewhere) but I can see a burgeoning use case of much older proprietary software being pulled apart by those wanting to reimplement it (and others wanting to snark the likes of Adobe, etc)

speaking of software

My GP has just switched to the THIRD vendor of front-facing customer software

It's still using google-analytics and various other 3rd party javascripty things that send data overseas, without disclosing it

THEY may not be leaking data, but that's no guarantee whatsoever that 3rd parties is not - and we know that Google and FaceAche both aggressively harvest whatever they can get their grubby mitts on

" I've had to work with developers who think the code is more important than the functionality of the product"

Plus more than a few developers whose response is "Why would you want to do that?" and refusing to consider it

That kind of attitude resulted in several crashed Airbusses.

Pilots want to do "that" to test the systems are working properly when things go pearshaped. Users frequently want to do "that" to ease their workflow or test worst case scenarios

I can't upvote this enough

Furthermore, if users can't change/customise their view AND SET IT AS DEFAULT, the system is already unfit for purpose

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

Wordstar predates all of those and its keybindings are STILL in common use today, nearly 50 years later

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

"trace elements of Genesis that are common with Mesopotamian/Sumerian creation myths"

Erm, like large chunks lifted wholesale from the Gilgamesh Epics (themselves having been written down about 1000 years earlier but dating back at least another 1500 years) and tweaked only slightly from the original

You can see the garden of Eden/apple/serpent story, Flood, Exodus and others in the early poems

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

In my expereience: They frequently learn nothing anyway, unless threatened with pain (financial is almost as effective as physical, but emotional works best. People HATE being ridiculed in front of their peers but if someone's constantly ignoring what the users want then it's an effective tool)

I think whiffle bats should be mandatory in any development environment

"if you digitise and automate a shit manual process/cottage industry it becomes a shit digital process"

It's ALWAYS worth analying every step along the way anf find out the hostory of why something that doesn't make sense is included in the process.

It's usually a hangover from kludging around something broken that was fixed decades ago. Once you can point that out it's easier to get buy in on changes

Another thing to bear in mind is that apart from management's near patholigical need to see people "busy"(*), people themselves don't like twiddling their thumbs and anything which halves their time to do a task may result in pushback unless there are other ways to keep them occupied

(*) This applies to maintenance staff in partucular. The guys you see sitting around playing cards are "on call" waiting for something to break. If they are able to play cards all shift then something is going right(**) The guys you can't find when you go to their office may be down a hole somewhere clearing out drains or in a roof inspecting for rot. They're seldom skiving off in the bogs as many micromanagers seem to believe

(**) This applies to things like backup systems too. My robots had 6 tape drives and a hundred slots, not to speed up backups but to ensure rapid restores when the shit did hit the fan. The mangler who only sees 2 drives and 8 slots in use on a daily basis overlooks that requirement

OR if what's in use is cumbersome and what replaces it REDUCES effort

One of my pet bugbears has been when I've brought in a system which has XYZ all built in and manglement insist on tasking people to go develop XYZ all over again (usually badly, for all the usual reason expounded here - users are utterly crap at giving a full list of requirements)