There have been a number of articles about the National Health Service’s IT over the past 24 hours, most of them are about the LulzSec security breach (some of them mention how helpful LulzSec have been but most focus on the negative). But there have also been articles about the NAO report on the Ambulance Service and the Socitm report as well. The Soctim article got me to I thinking that the NHS should follow the example of nebula.nasa.gov, they are building a cloud infrastructure specifically for NASA and it’s dependencies. Then NHS departments could just bid for server time and be charged appropriately. Here is my proposal, it is probably poorly informed and politically impossible, but that has never stopped anyone writing a blog before! Read more bellow…

Continue reading “NHS IT Solutions”

 

If you’ve ever seen full frame uncompress 625line SD with component 10-bit colour then you will know that sometimes resolution doesn’t matter. At a previous employer of mine we could show normal people pictures on a Barco Grade 1 monitor and they would swear it was HD. Freeview just has poor quality because the cost of carriage is so high, especially when there are a dozen versions of BBC One or ITV1 and they have to compress everything down to the n-th degree. The reason that regionalisation costs money is that we must have a cellular transmitter design, each region has it’s own frequency (or more than one because of relays), adjacent regions can’t use these frequencies because otherwise that would affect coverage. The UK design has many “guard” frequencies to protect adjacent transmitters in this way. If every region had the same channels they we could uses a system called an “SFN”, or Single Frequency Network, in this configuration the transmitters all transmit exactly the same thing at exactly the same time at exactly the same frequency. When transmitting in an SFN if you are between two transmitters you get the signal from both transmitters, but instead of causing a problem for you it actually helps because the two transmitters actually re-enforce each other.

 

Continue reading “UK Broadcasting and Local Multiplexes”

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend towards “turnover per head” in organisations, this means that an organisation will do anything it can to increase it’s turnover relative to the number of book employees. Even sacrificing employees to outsourcing because, while costs increase, the amount of money handled per-head has dramatically increased.

Continue reading “Outsourcing effectiveness”