* Posts by Adrian Midgley

68 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2007

Page:

Antarctic Xmas punch-up airlift cost £45k

Adrian Midgley

"Caused by a woman"

What, she actually beat both of them up and the casualties didn't admit it?

Political correctness be damned, the cause seems unlikely to have been external to at least one of them.

Tories offer NHS IT rescue plan after major patient data losses

Adrian Midgley
Linux

General Practice has done this well for years

And we have patient records for groups of around 2000 (per GP) to 30 000 (largest Practice at present. They have since 1900 or so been intended to be cradle to grave records, thus having extracts of hospitals' etc records in them. With electronic records one may be a bit more clever.

There is something to be said for automating access by other healthcare entities to the record held by the Practice, among other things it significantly increases the difficulty of obtaining the record of a specific person, if some finite number of holes exist, and it vastly multiplies the effort of getting all the records, or trawling all or some of the records for particular profitable information. (The address of someone for instance who has reason not to want to be found by someone non-official. Oh, and who has what as well).

For making queries about disease tracking and other bits of epidemiology there are a couple of considerations:-

1. It is actually more economical and more virtuous to send the query to everyone, than to collect all the data from everyone and then run the query on it...

2. Medical records like other records tend to be very bad at answering questions that they were not designed or intended or used so as to be able to answer - random data mining is something that is presented as solving problems and valuable, but many of us are unconvinced as yet.

Compare and contrast "Send me all your medical records on everyone, I wish to count the cases diagnosed and coded as Typhoid" and "How many cases diagnosed and coded as TYphoid have you?"

One gets a gigabyte, the other gets "0". (Or in the context of an epidemic, perhaps a small set of names and addresses and geocodes.)

I quite like "loose" for what has happened - I've not seen the detailed reports to know whether the people involved were clinicians (whatever they are - I'm a doctor and there are another 100 000 or so of us, and then a bunch of people playing doctor whose informational needs and abilities may well be very different) and the 300 000 users for the NHS Net seems a low number to me, actually, given the access via Whitehall and the porters' lodge. Think 1 000 000 as a start, I'd say.

The data is not lost. That construction is one with the RIAA and FAST and the like. It has indeed been let loose. The media have been lost. Precision in talking about NHS IT was lost long ago among the politicians and managers, and is worth trying to recapture here.

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia

Adrian Midgley

knitting tightly until recently

"Tight knit groups". I suspect throughout history most failures have come from small tight knit groups, as well as most successes, because anything bigger was hard to produce.

New Ebola strain kills 16 Ugandans

Adrian Midgley

I may never see anyone with Ebola...

but I can reaosnably expect to see many bacon sandwiches.

The trick is to be able to tolerate more than one person thinking about more than one thing.

Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs

Adrian Midgley

we don't buy PCs/laptops every year

The 130 000 can reasonably be expected to buy one PC each per 5 years.

That makes 40 000 in part of the first year look like a rather high proportion[1], not that there is any information on the concurrence between the suggesters and the buyers.

[1] more than 100%, not 30% not that I'd rely on the rate remaining constant

Virgin Media stops the rot

Adrian Midgley

works for me, unlike BT

BT got seriously confused (and likely still is) so I fired them. Virgin has worked very nicely on both people and machinery basis.

Start-up sued in US courts over GPL 'violation'

Adrian Midgley

Invert "What can you do with it"

Turn it around, rather than "what can the reader do with it" consider what the company could lose.

Nothing, so far as I can see.

Therefore their reason - if it is reasoned rather than simply an inability to deal with a demand they conform to a licence condition of software they are using which would carry its own message about the wisdom of dealing with them as a business partner or investor - appears to be something else.

IE they are incompetent as a business, or they are deliberately picking a fight over something which has no value to the company.

The latter also might interest actual or potential shareholders, if the company management can't show an income for picking that fight, and an expectation of profit from it.

It seems too stupid to not be malign.

Large databases are not safe enough, says stats boffin

Adrian Midgley

conclusions may be drawn without identification

Consider for a moment general practice medical records, which are presently stored in 10 000 systems of around a dozen different sorts in a like number of places.

A question such as "How many people have Diabetes, of which types, by age and sex distribution and what medicines are they prescribed?" can be approached in at least two ways.

One way is to construct a large computer system notionally placed in Richmond House, Whitehall, suck all information from the 10 000 systems into it, and then make an SQL query against it.

Another way is to write two lines of Perl for each of those dozen sorts, which launch a (possibly SQL, possibly M, possibly procedural) query against the system to produce an answer, a small table of figures, ship that to a rather smaller computer notionally in RIchmond House and with another two lines of Perl aggregate them into a table of figures.

The first is more popular with the suppliers of large, and rather fanciful, computer systems, the civil service, and allegedly MI5. The latter has certain advantages, such as being known to be possible, easy even, cheap and as a small but topcially relevant feature, of not transferring identities from here to there or concentrating them into one place.

Nuke-frying raygun 747 all ready bar the raygun

Adrian Midgley

all satellites are faster than all missiles

If a missile was faster than a satellite, it would be less useful on terrestrial targets. Even anti-satellite missiles are likely to be slower than their targets, they only need to place a cloud of bits in front of the target just as it arrives, not match orbits.

The interesting thing about a State launching a satellite is it proves that they can throw something that size to any point on Earth.

Have people stopped being embarrassed at displaying ignorance in public?

NHS outlines NPfIT milestones

Adrian Midgley

surprisingly good news

I think my colleagues may find it hard to recognise the NHS in this.

Perhaps it is some other nation, a different sort of health or an alternative use of "service" which describes the organisation whose huge ambitious IT project is going so well.

If so I expect everyone in it is acclaiming the clever people and virtuous companies running and providing the IT.

Alternatively ...

Think again, FSF tells Microsoft on GPL3

Adrian Midgley

Microsoft has distributed GPL'd software for years

Microsoft has been distributing GNU GPL'd software in the Interix (now Services for Unix package) -- in particular the gcc compiler.

The download includes GPLv1 and GPLv2 text; some of the tools are licensed "GPLv2 and later". The source code, or where to find it, is not apparent.

Perhaps Microsoft has felt itself above copyright law these past few years already?

Link

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&DisplayLang=en

Adrian Midgley

Precedents for GPL enforcement

There have been in Germany, I think.

Patch Tuesday update triggered Skype outage

Adrian Midgley

The US telephone system crash

Many years ago there was a crash in which, I'm told, each telephone switch rebooted, and started sending messages to others, which caused them to reboot, the system eventually grinding to a halt.

So perhaps not the first example of such failure modes.

Investigator ridicules UK visa site

Adrian Midgley

No, we've been citizens for decades now

First subjects, then last century the official description became citizen-subject and later on citizen.

Better than being denizens I suppose.

Wanna stick USB 2.0 to your network?

Adrian Midgley

Smartcards?

Can this remote a smartcard reader?

Wi-Fi spam man avoids can

Adrian Midgley

"Can I have a bag?"

If you stick your head into a supermarket giving away carrier bags, and ask if you can have one, _please_, then I'd be surprised if the answer was no.

If you ask for a hundred, then it seems to be a business transaction.

If you pick one up that has been dropped outside, and use it, then it would be odd if the state or the shop objected.

The Michigan case seems more in the range of the first and last, but not completely.

Brit IT millionaire dies on Chinese mountain

Adrian Midgley

Viagra

Correct.

Men jailed for inciting terrorism on the internet

Adrian Midgley

Switzerland and the third dark age

Switzerland is also notable, surely.

As is the optimism which labels the next dark age the second. Still, it may not come.

Page: