Posts by Adrian Midgley 1

Is Exchange a mail system?

for 100 000 people?

I know it does email, but then all large programs do.

And the NHS use of the cleverness in MSE/O is minimal.

Public space == www

I agree much of the media commentary is poorly based but this in no way stops any of us from commenting on the data and the recipes which are in a spacemore public than any

No: "as the reservoirs refill) it'd produce nothing for six hours"

If it is designed like the Rance Estuary scheme then it will produce power for those 6 hours as the water flooding into the reservoir turns the turbines,

Backwards, you might say.

No, there are two tricky periods, around slack water, when some otehr way of storing energy has to be used if you want continuous power.

Alternatively, you could sell power cheaply when the turbines will be spinning, and more expensively when it comes from other sources, and let power-users adjust themselves.

The tides have an advantage of being predictable for arbitrarily long times into the future, so scheduling is not ridiculous.

General Practice IT was the bit that worked in 2000

It has mostly stood still since then, apart from churn and the effort to set up distant servers with wet string to connect them to the desktop at the other end of the country.

There are EDIFACT and suchlike interfaces to the GP automation for several significant data streams.

I'd blame the difficulty in connecting partly on the closed source nature of the systems, partly on the companies owning and maintaining them, and partly on the tendency of the operators of out of hours or end of life or whatever other new idea system to decide that everyone else is to read one screen and type it into another to interface systems.

They've discovered the Web, you see.

Meanwhile, if you want a tested, operational, deployed, useful system for collections of hospitals, then the US Veterans' Administration suite of software is available.

Free, as it happens. The productised version is at http://worldvista.org

In 2001 a team from the NHSIA travelled to Washington DC, and we must understand reported that writing new software for NHS hospitals from scratch would be better, better value for money, and give a better result with less risk of failure, than taking on what was free and - to be fair - adapting it to UK use.

I can see the language difference between American and English would be a problem, but I think we might have overcome it.

Its easier now...

Not a single org. More like the Internet

A national health service would certainly be an interesting idea, but we don't have one.

Within the regions the General Practices are each a separate firm, and this is good.

So the problems of connectivity, and of handling whatever a medical record may be (it isn't as obvious as the people who thought they were going to deliver the contracts may have thought) are a lot more like the problems of connecting a lot of networks and hosts in the Internet.

Cooling in space is harder

No air to blow over things.

NO: heart failure is not an acceptable cause of death

for the medical certificate of cause of death aka "death certificate".

And the difference in French and British certification practices is a major confounding factor in the statistic Orlowski depends upon.

Nor, as noted above, has there been any secret about the source of the recommendation on amounts. Or about the previous work. There is a wonderful confounder of course, in that rather a lot of teetotallers are so because they became ill while drinking a lot.

The author is surprisingly bad at this stuff.

Yes, you are totally wrong, as was

the graphics department of the Independent.

in my memory 1963

was colder.

Meanwhile, the temperature where I am is currently 25 deg C and we are feeling cold becuase it was 36 recently.

It may help your understanding of climate vs weather if you consider that the Earth has two hemispheres, and that in order for one to have personal experience of changes in climate over several decades, onne has to have lived for several decades.

3 successive years is less than several decades.