Posts by AndrueC

Re: Why a specifically NHS problem?

It's not specifically the NHS. It's a common problem all over the world. Efforts have been made to break down the barriers. HL7 and as I jokingly referred to in an earlier reply the latest incarnation FIHR. But of course other standards exist because why would you ever need just one?

But this takes time (has taken decades and is still a work in progress).

A lot of it stems from the large sums of money that private companies can get from governments for health care related systems. That makes them reluctant to allow interoperability. Adapting standards like HL7 isn't easy either. Even if you're willing to do it as we were it's a big resource commitment both to implement and then to support. There's enough wiggle room in the standard to mean you're almost forever having to deal with edge cases. That's a lot less common with FHIR since it uses RESTful but HL7 could be a pig and a half when setting up communication between different systems for the first time.

Re: What do we expect?

Yeah, I could go with that. Perhaps it should just have been 'the trick to avoid getting into financial difficulty'. But I'd suggest that following my advice is a good start (option 3 being the most difficult one). For sure if someone doesn't follow that advice you won't stand a cat-in-hells chance of paying off your mortgage early and will struggle to even get in the position of having one.

Re: Too much complexity

Just like goooooooogle searches, for which one has to find the exact combination of very specific words in order to have any remotely relevant results returned.

Eh? Maybe if you're looking for something very, very specific. I know it has inbuilt biases so what it returns might well not be exactly what you want (or at least not on the first page) but I can't remember the last time it returned results that were irrelevant.

It would be very unusual for me to rephrase a search in order to get relevant results. Rephrase to refine, yes - sometimes the results will make me realise I've used the wrong name for something.

I just did a search for 'what device controls my house temperature'. Right above the search results is a summary and link to the Wikipedia article on thermostats. The results themselves are articles on how thermostats work, then comparisons of different types of thermostats. All extremely relevant and a near perfect response.

'What do you call the metal rods that connect wheels on old locomotives'. Right above the results is a summary of and link to the Wikipedia article on coupling rods. The results include articles on coupling rods (and one relating to motor vehicle stabiliser struts). Further down the results are articles on locomotive counter-weights which would be a very logical next question to ask.

I don't want to get into an argument about Google the company or how it operates but it surprises me that so many people here seem to be saying they struggle to get relevant answers out of the search engine. Perhaps someone can give me an example?

Re: not efficient market functioning

It's a ponzi!

Re: Easy choice Elon

Anyway, my point was just about free speech. We should be allowed to discuss these things. But we weren't. And any voices loud enough to matter were suppressed, particularly on Twitter.

I don't think you understand what free speech is. It's a contract between citizens and the government. As a privately owned and operated organisation Twitter is not required to adhere to the principle. When you participate on Twitter you are doing so under their terms and conditions. You either accept them or take your business elsewhere.

Posting a message on Twitter is like saying something when you're in my house. If I don't like what you're saying I have every right to make you leave. Free speech stops at my front door. It also stops at the point when you arrive on a Twitter page.

I wouldn't trust the human anyway. They might parse the text wrongly. Or someone might have changed the type but neglected to update the name.

int szWibble; // Will compile just fine.

I think it's far better to rely on the IDE (in conjunction with the compiler) to sort all this stuff out because it won't make a mistake (at least not with a type safe language and frankly God help those using one that isn't). A lot of modern languages let you declare a variable without knowing the type eg; C#

About the only time I care about the type is when defining DTOs and they tend to be a one off deal soon forgotten. The rest of the time the IDE deals with it - especially if supplemented by ReSharper. It takes two keypresses to create a field from a ctor parameter and I neither know nor care what type R# uses. I know it will be 'the right one'.

And with well written code it should be fairly obvious anyway. Why do you need to use the identifier name to tell you that a a function takes an ASCIIZ string? Even back when I was working with C++ (over twenty years ago) the IDE would highlight any attempt to pass an int as an argument to a 'char *' parameter. Either an argument is compatible with a parameter or it isn't and a modern IDE will tell you if it's iffy.

For decades now I've been able to work on the principal that if the IDE doesn't underline an assignment of some kind then it's safe and all my IDEs have been able to autocomplete based on the currently available choices (though VC wasn't as helpful there as Borland Builder since the latter did a full context analysis).

I don't give a damn if you call something szWibble because I don't trust you. Sorry ;)

Re: SDR? Why is there any wireless comms used here at all?

There is I suppose one scenario where car-as-payment-device doesn't really work. That's where a car is shared by multiple unrelated people. Husband/wife/partner sharing is probably still fine as they can just share a household vehicle account. But if you're in the habit of letting random friends borrow your vehicle it won't work so well.

Then again in the UK at least that kind of random sharing is difficult anyway due to insurance requirements.

I suppose you could sign users into the car but that's worse than just requiring them to have a phone connected.

Re: Employee memo number 2

Musk should brace for being told to fuck right off.

Re: Cache

things like jumping from one chat to another just get slower and slower.

It's like people are using a different application. There is a (perhaps) tenth of a second delay in switching but it's consistent and doesn't matter whether it's from a busy channel or a quiet one. I just tried with our continuous delivery channel (several dozen messages an hour at times) and it's fine.

I'm not trying to be a fanboi but am genuinely puzzled at the experience of some people. It implies to me that it's not Teams that's at fault but instead something about those user's configurations that they should investigate.

Re: Heating

With a shovel and a pick and a bucket full of sick?

Re: Different ending?

And as a born and bred Briton I feel obliged to quip that there might be more chance of finding intelligent life on Mars.

Re: Pumped hydro is NOT "green"

I agree with most of what you've written except for this bit:

..the UK government, whose responsibility is to UK voters (ie consumers)...

Have you seen much responsibility of late? And as a 56 year old I struggle (and fail) to put any great faith in anything governments do. I've been let down too many times.

where a private company feels it can slurp billions out of UK taxpayers without much, if any, accountability or oversight.

The government has slurped a great deal of money out of us already and looks set to take even more over the next decade. Where is this accountability you speak of?

Re: A digression, but

Assuming you're a developer for Google, Facebook, AWIN etc, I just want to talk. I want to point out all the million ways that the interfaces you work on suck at their jobs and why they make my life harder and more frustrating than they need to be.

I feel the same way about Visual Studio. Gets in the way almost as often as it helps.

Sure that shouldn't happen, and sure you shouldn't have to reinstall your OS occasionally as a matter of routine, but you do. In the name of sanity quit buying a new PC every 3 years, that's absurd.

I can't remember the last time I had to reinstall Windows. You're doing something very wrong if you need to do that. This laptop is over 3 years old and I have had to re-install. My work machine is now over 6 years old (because I'm close to retiring and because I trust it I don't want a new one). That machine has been hammered by a software developer throughout that time (three Linux VMs and typically three or four Visual Studio instances loaded all day) and is still just fine.

You don't even need to reboot. My laptop only reboots once a month when an update requires it. My work machine gets a power cycle over the weekend but otherwise (VMs and VS instances included) is just hibernated when I'm not working including lunch breaks.

Re: One in three chargers that is bundled with these products are never opened.

If you have an extra charger, leave one!

Sure, I'd trust a random charger that I picked out of a bin.

The closest alternative I can find is a Sofabaton X1. That is close but appears to fail at the final hurdle because it doesn't have a numeric keypad. Also the remote just doesn't have as many hard keys so that might be an issue.

Re: Thanks, but no thanks

My Dad always used to say that talking to yourself was the first sign of madness.

But I do say 'thank you' to him when I'm reminded of how lucky I am to be experiencing life.

Re: This is ridiculous.

If anyone who drives the M40 has ever wondered what that 'castle tower' is alongside near Bicester. It's a water tower for Bucknell (now decommissioned). I used to work in Bucknell and a lot of lunchtimes I'd walk out to Trow Pool, then along Ardley Quarry and back along a footpath through the fields. Quite a nice walk really unless Ardley was being especially pungent.

Re: cloud pc

So why would we ever need a new local pc. All it has to do is be an RDP terminal.

What goes around (in IT) comes around. I've been saying this for a while now.

Mainframe+terminal -> local PC -> Cloud+terminal -> local PC

The only thing that changes is the power of each component. I therefore predict that sometime over the next 50 years some seriously powerful kit will appear to service some application that just has to be done locally. Or maybe a flaw will be found with cloud computing. Either way there will be a shift of data back toward local processing.

Automobiles have some great failure modes. I have twice witnessed a vehicle losing a wheel because the axle sheared off.

I missed my chance to see that. Several years before the bicycle incident we got held up on the M5 heading north from Exeter when the axle fell off a dumper truck and bounced along with two wheels into the fields. Sadly I missed the whole thing (probably lying down in an attempt to minimise motion sickness).

The only thing I can remember is my Dad being pleased because we were towing a caravan and the brake had successfully operated.

Re: I'm amazed! I really am!

That, in the light of this fairly unsubtle shakedown by Micro$oft, businesses have still not switched to Linux.

Indeed. Maybe Linux doesn't offer as many advantages as some people think.

I mean - how long have people been waiting now for 'The Year of Linux on the Desktop'? All those years and still nowhere in sight. Makes you think, doesn't it?

;)

Re: It's the brexiter anti-growth coalition at it again

I'd mock them but the challenge is gone.

..cheaper than connecting it to a power socket.

India have a lot of potential to do greater things. The only thing that stops India right now is politics.

Isn't that true for most countries?