Posts by Not previously required

Re: She was a good one

I am very much hoping that Jeremy Corbyn, as a recent leader of HM's loyal opposition, will be invited to the funeral etc, and that Boris, as a disgraced criminal, will not. Thank goodness HM held on long enough for the small improvement that Liz Truss represents. Tough gig for Liz, 48 hrs in, whatever one thinks of her.

Re: 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste

I'm prepared to have a thicker phone with a removable battery so that I can use it for a longer-than-designed lifespan.

You are describing Fairphone 4 - but it's not much thicker Andi don't notice it.

OTOH my new shorts do not have pockets big enough for any recent phone to sit comfortably

Standards

My encapsulation of that is

"If standards are so great, let's have several different ones for people to choose from"

But then I'm using a different languages from xkcd ...

Re: Way Back...

Why are you writing this in the past tense? I receive a large number of stupid forms to complete and return that are still formatted in ways that only make sense if you print, write in pen, scan back. One company required a "wet signed" document (singed in ink). It looked identical to the scanned signature I use, apart from the embedded "Electronically signed" text I include in the latter. For the other filth, I delight in reformatting them, breaking the character limits and saying what I want to say without the restrictions. (Of course I bin anything I don't want to complete at all)

Re: Browser Profiles vs Containers

I think you can only use one profile at a time, but Firefox has a new feature (via a plugin from Mozilla) called Containers. These are brilliant! Colour coded tabs so you can see which is which, with own cookie store, history etc. I can log into different MS email accounts at once. If you launch Teams from one of these it still gets a little confused sometimes, but luckily I mainly use Zoom.

And yes, that's Teams in Firefox in Linux.

The only thing I dislike about containers is that so far you can't associate a container with a url in the bookmark system. Containers can be set for urls, but with MS or gmail its often the same url for multiple accounts.

Re: Note to El Reg

Even if you apply both opt-outs, "Your hospital, community, mental health, social care records" are sent to "NHS digital data linkage" and then "Dissemination of Anonymised & Pseudonymised linked information about you" occurs.

I don't know what the NHS digital data linkage is. As a working hospital doctor I can tell you it doesn't help me when a patient is seen at all 3 or the local hospitals for much the same thing. I don't always have practical access to consultations in my own hospital, because things don't join up properly yet. Despite nearly every PC now sprouting two screens.

Clearly there are huge potential benefits from running the complete NHS database through some AI. The NHS should expect to pay for the processing of the data, but the nation owns the data and should not let others profit from the outcomes without some returns to us.

This project should have been trumpeted as a significant contribution to health. The fact that it is more or less hidden makes me think it is not going to be used for the public good. Given the award of PPE contracts at inflated prices for useless kit to friends of the Tories and the cavalier approach of Johnson to the law and parliament ....

Toaster / Toothbrush / Shaver

Pretty difficult to buy an electric toothbrush or shaver now without a bluetooth connection and an app to "control" it. Still needs an on / off switch. I really don't need to log the cumulative time I brush my teeth, or transmit it to Philips, or have anybody predict when I have squeezed that last annoying bit of paste from the tube and re-order more for me.

We need to oppose this nonsense which is bad for the environment and merely more data grabbing.

Say NO to the Google Toothbrush!

ps my grandchildren would defeat the marketeers - they clean everything but their teeth with the brush, and wave it around for minutes at a time in mid air.

Re: No cats but... GPs

When the kids were little we had "outdoor" guinea pigs. Occasionally they were allowed a a cuddle on the sofa and to run around indoors. The telephone engineer was very understanding about the cable they chewed through and chalked it up as IT failure so that we didn't have to pay. However they also ate part of the spine of our European atlas and there were bits of France (*) we dared not visit for years.

* = Written on the day the French have locked us out, like most of the rest of Europe. "Take back control of our Borders" - Ha Ha,

Medical facts straight

"significant lung damage and neurological problems that stem from a bad infection with this particular virus."

Quite a large number of people are going to be left with respiratory damage. Not my specialty. There are very few direct neurological consequences, which is my specialty. Perhaps I should add "so far". Of course if you are really knocked off with bad lung disease and drop your oxygen levels low enough, long enough you might sustain some secondary brain damage. Probably not as much as if you are boxing though, which is well known to cause several different types of brain damage.

Re: Amazon takes security seriously. As in my case.

Terminating the employment would be appropriate. Terminating the employee seems a little on the harsh side.

Re: We all thought the same!

Thinking it does not mean that you have to post it. Clearly inappropriate. Get a brain filter.

Re: However, we can report that Ubuntu runs an absolute treat on a Dell XPS.

Dell sell both Windows and Linux versions of their XPS laptops. I bought the Windows version and put Suse linux on as well. The only thing that doesn't work on the laptop in Linux is the fingerprint reader. I won't put it in the skip yet. The docking station is a PITA about turning the laptop on all the time. Dell seem very reluctant to support dual boot though. Minus one point to them. Still not going anywhere near a Mac!

The NHS does not really use Windows

@Dinsdale247. Much of the NHS is run using applications that look like text terminals. Whether they are browser based or some other kludge. If they don't need special Java or browser versions they could just as easily run on Linux. Many of these machines only do one job (reception in outpatients for instance).

For other systems, the changes in UI in different versions of Windows / Outlook / Office - and we have a horrible mixture - are no worse than changing to LibreOffice and your favourite flavour of Linux.

There are some very bright, highly motivated people in the NHS. I'm sure they could cope with a sensible staged transfer to Linux. It would be a huge project so of course there would be a cost and some cockups on the way. I think the end result would be better.

We could start with the government observing its own standards. We are meant to be using documents in OpenDocument or PDF formats only!

Clinician

"Clinician" is correct. Sadly. Referrals to my hospital department are sometimes made by nurses and physios with posh titles who don't know their pubo-rectalis from their olecranon.

Sometimes nurses have more common sense than doctors though - it's best not to be ill.

Some of my job can be done remotely, but best if I have close working relationship with people at the other end, not random people in different continents. For the rest I actually need to lay hands on the sickness units - or patients as the more old fashioned would say.