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NHS Awards Contract to Microsoft
ChocLinux writes "Microsoft has won a £500m nine year contract to supply software to the NHS, a week after the OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
I think "Microsoft has also agreed to carry out £40m of research and development to provide guidelines and toolkits that will allow ISVs to deliver an NHS-specific user interface" is the candy here.
MS probably knows it can still compete in customised applications with its almost unlimited resources.
--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer [iclod.com] and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Only because the roll-out and retraining of hundreds of I.T. staff would have cost them millions in time and lost productivity. This is not entirely surprising, and the primary reason that Linux and open source OS's are not being adopted by the main stream large organisations. It has nothing to do with the stability,functionality and quality of the actual products.
NHS - National Health Service
OGC - Office of Government Commerce
£500 million - $924 million
You have any idea how long they were probably in negotiations? You think a week could make a difference? Please.
.
Even if Linux is better/cheaper/faster...
Decisions like that one from the NHS take a lot of time and effort. The sales cycle is measured in years. Microsoft excels at this process. They have people talking to people and organizations constantly, feeding them material to show their bosses and committees.
Who is making the corresponding effort for Linux?
Nantucket High School?
/.'er from Nantucket,
I once knew a
who's......
Nevermind.
Microsoft has won a nine-year contract, worth an estimated £500m, to put its software on 900,000 National Health Service computers, the Department of Health announced today.
So Bleasdale, open source advocate in UK, gets it absolutely right. The current system is already based on MS products, and to try to replace that with Linux all at once would cost more than the half a billion pounds that the new Microsoft license costs.
However, NHS probably doesn't need all those licenses and MS has them over a barrel with regards to the number of licenses (though expanded by almost 100% in this latest contract). The great number of "cheap" licenses is a disincentive to move to other currently non-supported platforms.
The key here is that Microsoft has no hold on them to stay with Windows in the long run. Every 3 years the contract comes up for reapproval and during that time if NHS deems it worth switching some systems to Linux, then they can renegotiate for fewer MS licenses at that time. After 9 years, you'd hope that NHS has implemented a solid system framework that can handle a heterogeneous environment of Windows and Linux systems.
That said, I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much. Support for Windows by private consulting companies is far greater in numbers than support for Linux. Linux of course is not tied to a single vendor, but then again it isn't really that big a deal whether the money goes to Redhat or Microsoft, is it?
The fact is that they will need service on the systems whether they be Windows or Linux. In the short term, Linux is more painful because of the upfront application porting costs involved in switching, but in the long term Linux is still more expensive because of the higher cost support fees demanded by non-Windows consultants.
This contract is a win/win for all involved. NHS gets the systems it needs, Microsoft gets a boatload of money, and Linux advocates are not barred from introducing Linux systems into the NHS systems.
The contract was probably written and approved long before the study was made available... So why try and stir up yet another controversy with such a starkly contrasting headline?
From personal experience, government contracts like that can often take years to design and bid.
Well, I'm not terribly surprised that a contract would be awarded to Microsoft, especially if they are the current provider, but nine years!? That's more than a bit extreme. Three would have made sense, as that's the average lifespan of a Microsoft OS before Microsoft starts reducing support when the new release comes out.
A lot can happen in nine years. Nine years ago we we had just been formally introduced to Windows 95. Most of our programs were sixteen bit and didn't support long filenames. The average hard disk drive size was something like 400MB. Most new computers had eight, maybe sixteen megabytes of memory. 14400 bps modems were the shit, and vampire-tap thicknet and token ring were the most common network types. Hell, arcnet and Banyan Vines were still viable.
The biggest thing is that Microsoft wasn't the absolutely overwhelming player that it is today. Many of the big box stores that carried computers had just as many Apple Performas and Quadras as all of the PCs of different brands combined on display. OS/2 could be found on a few machines set up as customer displays displays. Microsoft was not the overwhelming monopoly that it subsequently worked to become. With the headway that non-Microsoft platforms have been making (along with the convergent evolution of Apple's OS along with the other POSIX-alike OSes), nine years from now Microsoft might not be the juggernaut that they are today.
Already Microsoft is suffering from the rot that any middle-aged empire goes through, just look at the constant, gaping holes in IE, IIS, and Windows that leave users burned by automated attacks time and again. Eventually the right people will become pissed off and the rate of corporate adoption of non-MS software will increase further than it already has.
Nine years is just way too long.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not to be considered a troll here, but there are virtually NO practice management solutions for Linux. I say "virtually" only because the ones that do exist are low-budget/low-feature solutions with limited (at best) deployment. You can't expect doctors to run Star Office and manage their patients and records using multiple applications that are hacked together to form one solution. The support margin would be huge in such a case.
Linux is great for certain things but practice management would be a disaster without custom software.
Dear Slashdot Editor,
Please approve only uplifting stories the rest of the week. I think we've had enough bad news already.
Sincerely,
Bummed about Bush
"The next 4 years could have been great leaps. Now they will be small steps."
wow, seems like you didnt do research first....
I cant speak for fedora core, only played with it a little bit, but debian...
even the installer for woody (debian stable) is not particulary hard to use, but the installer for sarge (debian testing) is incredibly easy to use. The installer for testing asks like 3 questions if you arent using it in "advanced" or "expert" mode (which I usually do). Testing runs with amazing stability, and the package repository that debian has makes installation of software a cinch.
why dont you try sarge and say again the terrible installation. While I'm not sure that linux is ready for the desktop yet (general users should not have to drop into command line every so often to get things done), it certainly is capable of doing what you wanted
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
A few years ago, pirating MS software in the government sector was relatively commonplace. Along comes Microsoft and says: "Either you commit to our systems, or we force and audit and retrospectively sue your arse off for breach of copyright."
:v)
Lo and behold, government departments find themselves locked into expensive Microsoft "deals" thereafter, even though FOSS would be more beneficial to them.
Paranoid delusions? Well, it's not a decision based on the quality of the code, or the support, and it's not the TCO.
Vik
Windows 1.0 came out in I think 1984, Windows 3.0 came out in 1989. How many large-scale industrial contracts did Windows win then? Zero. How did Windows get to this point? It started with replacing departmental level servers and workgroups, and proved itself there for ten years or so.
So, Linux should do the same. Can't expect to be birthed ready to run a marathon.
This isn't the right situation to even think about implementing open source software. The system is already running on MS software, and it would be financial suicide to switch the whole thing over to an entire new system, due to labor costs, retraining, etc. As much as I dislike microsoft, if I was making the decision here and I already had a big system based off MS's products, I'd choose to stay with MS.
And don't forget Gordon Brown's recommendation to get Bill Gates knighted. There is more to this contract than meets the eye - it stinks corruption - and the taxpayer (i.e. me) foots the bill, as usual.
Thankfully none of the medical equipment is going to be running Microsoft products. Otherwise, people would really get the blue screen of death.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
"The OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
Unfortunately, the report sounds like a recommendation. Just because you recommend Linux to someone doesn't mean they will use it. Especially if that someone is a large government body that has the speed of a banana slug.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Actually, my experience with Linux was completely the opposite, and I started using it with absolutely zero experience and no one to really guide me. Distro choice may have been a large part of what caused you to come away with such a bad feeling overall.
I personally feel that Mandrake linux is a better choice for a lot of applications, it's got a free download version that I run at home and is also used on production servers at work, and it has well done and understandable graphical config tools, a really easy installer, and great hardware support. In addition, package management is excellent.
It absolutely can be done, and you dont have to be a 'sysadmin' to use it. I say that with confidence, because my mother (a normal end user who had never seen anything but Windows) uses Mandrake Linux 10 at her home. She had no trouble setting up her dsl connection, printer, etc using the Mandrake config tools.
Debian isnt the friendliest distro around, and with Fedora being a testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise, broken stuff happens. It's a shame you had a bad experience, but when I installed Mandrake for the first time in january, (my first time using Linux) everything "just worked" out of the box, and that's why I started using Linux in the first place.
Mandrake Linux DownloadsModded troll in minutes. Record time. Congratulations to those who choose to cover their ears and chant "la la la la la".
In part because it was largely an anecdote that ran counter to a lot of peoples experiences of modern distros. I could tell you horror stories I had with trying to install Windows on a machine and failing to get it to boot properly for hours trying all manner of things - the problem eventually solved by booting the damn thing with GRUB instead of the windows bootloader. That doesn't mean Windows sucks nor that it isn't ready for the desktop, it just means I had a sucky experience.
If you could actually cite some clear specific reasons (as opposed to vague "everything is unstable/broken/hard" or anecdotes of something not working right for you that usually works fine for everyone else) people might actually listen. You could try making arguments about the ease of 3rd party software installation, or the current infancy of the efforts to provide compatability between KDE and GNOME apps, or the lack of certain significant applications for various major fields (accounting, CAD, whatever), or the lack of Linux support from hardware manufacturers. Then again, all of those issues are undergoing steady improvement, or could change rapidly if there was any significant uptake of Desktop Linux, so maybe they don't let you rant quite the way you want...
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Well, after hearing the election results, Microsoft figured the dollar was going to tank soon....
I dont understand why with all the issues Microsoft products face, that any large corporation would choose them and actively endorse their promotion. I've looked at the TCO of MS products vs others (linux, osx, etc) and that combined with the liability issues just stuns me. WHY Microsoft? For an end user, fine, for an enterprise, WHY?
Oops, sorry, wrong OS troll....
Great comment. I'd mod you up myself if I could.
It seems to me that all the contracts Microsoft offers with great savings, such as this one, to anyone who says they will *seriously* consider using somehing else, totally undermines their argument that their TCO is comparable to anything else.
More rambling that I don't care too comment on, as it applies only to you............ Why not? Most garden variety end users don't try low level troubleshooting of windows. There are many distros that need to be babied less in the beginning than Debian, which is still very much an enthusiast's distro. Why not try one that is being sold? Perhaps even sold specifically for the desktop (such as Xandros)? Heck--a majority of end users could almost survive off of live CDs such as Knoppix for most of there work & not touch
Don't worry, this is just a small part of the estimated £30 billion ($54b) that the NHS is going to blow on IT over the next few years. Money is no object when it comes to IT spending it seems.
/ ne ws/2004/10/12/nnhs12.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
Deleted
. . .the Linux community is asleep at the wheel trying to find an sales model that works
The two distros that you have recently tried have solved this problem very neatly by devoting zero attention to the issue and simply giving the stuff away.
Linux businesses are another issue, but they are primarily aligned with the business community, not the Linux community (just ask their bankers and stockholders).
Not entirely coincidentally, they are also not distros targeted at the typical, garden variety end user. Linux may or may not have its rough spots as a desktop enviroment, depending on just what it is you expect it to do, but that determination really ought to be made on the basis of using an 'end user' desktop targeted distro, such as Mandrake or Linspiredows.
Since you are an experienced Slack admin setting up a CVS repository (not something a garden variety desktop user is prone to do), why not just use Slack (or Red Hat) like a pro instead of Debian like a newb?
I don't get it.
KFG
Linux, at least when we are talking about it being provided as a solution by a company, isn't free. Regardless of who develops the system, and regardless fo what OS it's based on, they are going to want money to do it. So one cannot assume that Linux is cheaper in this case. Not saying it isn't just saying you cannot assume that it is, you'd need to look at the quotes.
Also peopel are missing what the OGC said. They didn't say Linux was a better OS, just that it was a viable alternative. There's a real difference between the two. Saying it is a viable alternative means that they found it can do everything that it needed and thus can be considered. That's real different from saying it is the superior alternative and should be used.
I think people need to realise that when you talk big custom contracts that involve support, OSS isn't always cheaper or better. It can be, but it's not automatically. Companies are going to want something to develop and support your environment, and they are going to want it regardless of if they use a free OS as the basis.
This goes double when the solution provider is also the developer of the commercial OS. If IBM offers a solution based on zOS, it doesn't cost them any more in licensing than a solution on Linux, since they own zOS and Linux is free. Likewise it doesn't cost Microsoft any licensing fees to use Windows.
Another legit worry is what will happen to Linux. Windows has a very big, very stable company backing it up. There's not really a question that it will continue to be developed and supported in the forseeable future. Linux is developed by a group of peopel working on it because they want to. What happens if they decide to stop, and no one steps up to take their place? Yes I realise that's extremely unlikely, but it's a legit concern for companies.
Oh, I'm sorry madam, the life support system is running a microsoft OS and it seems it just 'Blue Screened', we're aufully sorry about your husband !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
England changed massivly during the second world war. Although food supplies became for more limited because they were now rationed out the fast majority of people actually got a better diet. It also saw the start of the National Health Service. The idea that everyone should have access to the same kind of good medical care without having to pay huge bills. To the americans, this is not such a bad idea because healthy workers can worker harder and longer.
However a NHS is also expensive. Of course the long, intelligent and complex view is that like a public transport system or social services they kinda pay for themselves. While they do not make a profit it is because they reduce the cost of others. A NHS makes sure people are sick less often and don't die so early so they can pay taxes as workers for longer. This is simple. Every kid costs the state money. The same amount wether this kid is a tax payer for 20 years or 40 years. Public transport takes people of the roads. For all those car drivers cursing about money spend on trains while you are stuck in traffic. Just imagine how long the jam would be if the people in the train were on the road with you.
However certain types of goverment seek election by promising to lower taxes. This works on the simple minded voter. You can't of course lower taxes without spending less and the NHS or public transport are easy targets. Invest a little bit later. Freeze salaries. What will it hurt for 1 term of office eh?
England now has an NHS wich is a shadow of its former self. "Efficiency" programs have the amount of managers running out of control while the NHS is bleeding developing nations of its nurses while british nurses are going stateside (language is a problem but the pay is better). Health care has gone down the crapper again with it costing more and more for those who are least capable of paying for it.
Funny thing is that all those cuts on the NHS happened to lower taxes. I wish I could have everyone who voted for lower taxes and who ended up with a higher monthly burden flogged in public for being to stupid to live. Get a clue, it don't matter what you taxation is. What matters is the monthly bill. Simple example. $100 tax bill + $0 medical bill vs $50 tax bill $100 medical bill. Doesn't tax an economic genius to figure out wich is cheaper eh?
Anyway Blair is a MS fanboy and the NHS is famous for making the totally wrong decission. Buying MS at huge costs because it is cheaper seems business as usual.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Quit whining, you apparently wrote the parent saying that you knew you'd be modded troll and now you're whining about it. I hope your subsequent post gets modded as flamebait, because it certainly is.
/etc or much besides /home, certainly not be installing it themselves).
You should think more about why you were modded as troll. Its not just people are Linux zealots, quite a few people post threads that are not complimentary, but are modded up. Normally though, these threads are either contructive or well thought out, bearing some point which they can justify. One anecdotal story of your experience, then an ultimatum on the feasibility of desktop Linux is hardly conclusive. Think more carefully about what you right. How many distributions have you seen, have you ever seen a modified kernel in use, have you ever worked in an organisation or SME that uses Linux as their desktop machines? I'm willing to bet that most of these answers are no. If they were yes, they would have adding credence to your article.
One of your points is to not expect users to be able troubleshoot problems with Linux at a low level. Hello? What organisation has their garden variety Windows user troubleshooting problems at a low level.
The problems you experienced, an experienced admin wouldn't have problems with. Additionally these are not problems likely to experienced by the regular user. Most places don't require the end users to install their own software. Your own experience sounds little more like you regard using a single box with root as administrating a box. This is not the same as either administering a corporate server or working as an end user on a desktop machine. So in this scenario, your story doesn't even relate to realistic analysis of either the roll out of a new system (except from the point on a newbie admin) or from an end user (most end users won't have write access to anything within
Linux not stable? Now thats a bad install.
So what? It's not like Red Hat will answer the phone, or return your phone calls, even when all you want to do is throw money at them.
Exercise for the reader: figure out who your Red Hat rep is and ask them for a price quote on one of their products. Get this done within two weeks. Ready... go.
I have worked with two programs for designing buildings (Finite Elements Method) - one was designed according to the Windows(tm) Interface Design Guidelines - working with this program was a nightmare, while the second was designed to naturally mirror the steps engineer takes - and it was real pleasure to work with it. However the second one could never qualify for a certificate of conformance to Windows GUI standards.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
The reality about the NHS is that they are strugling in most hospitals to cover costs with spiraling law suits and other issues plauging the system why would they go out and commit to such a long term contract when in reality will the NHS be around in the same form in 9years? If it is they will be x grade hospitals instead of b grade hospitals with few exceptions.
Not a qt/gtk developer myself:
:-)
I think the issue is not to centralise some 'uability priesthood' that would oversee design decisions in an open source project, but to educate and motivate developers... I think this is happening to a degree.
There are many resources out there, such as apple, kde and gnome usability and style guides, but the whole issue of usability is so tightly bound into overall program design that a centralised group would do nothing.
A site that brought together all development resources for usability and allowed people to sign up as usability testers (d/l app, run, do tasks, report) and also sign up and usability report interpretters (convert the information into a concise usable format - like a bugzilla report) would be more usable, accessible and accepted by the majority of OSS devs in the world today.
The last thing you want is some guy saying : "You didn't want to do that, no, you wanted to do this!"
Now, I said I am not a qt/gtk/??? developer, but I feel that the libraries should be assessed to see if they allow for usability and ACCESSIBILITY at an easy level [IE, high contrast interfaces easy to develop and skin... I think this is the case right now.. again IANAQT/GTKD.]
ASIDE from that, the $40m of research for a blah blah custom interface?
That could mean anything! Like, lets blow $40m on some interns to boost our university image, and then get them to hack a VB program in a cold room while we ignore them, and then give the obligatory tatty report to the guy who gets paid enough not to read it...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
That is using Biztalk and C# as its interface and business logic layers. And truth be told, the more I look at Biztalk 2004 the more impressed I'm getting.
Now while you could replace Windows with a Linux desktop and Windows servers with Linux servers I'm not fairly sure Biztalk runs on Windows only. And if your major software base is Windows why on earth would you use something else, elsewhere.
The story.
"IAAUD -- I Am A Usability Designer/HCI major."
Hallaluya! A real live HCI, on Slashdot!!! That's almost as rare as an OSS artist.
Seriously I'm one too. However the problem I've found in open source (and to a similiar degree in closed source) is the contempt you're held in.
Note all the disparaging remarks made about psychologist, and psychology (part of the foundation for HCI, naturally) around here. Note the dumping that Eugenia gets when she makes suggestions. Note how hard you have to fight in corporate america to get even a simple change through.
Grow up, and look up flamebait in a dictionary while you're at it.
And by the way READ MY POST ***BEFORE*** you trash it. Its 2004. You shouldn't need to be an experienced sysadmin to run a desktop OS.
And by the way if you think only sysadmins troubleshoot windows desktops you're living in fairy land matie.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
i would assume that the business analysts that concluded that going with microsoft with a nine year deal found that doing so was the best business decision in the long run. as much as i enjoy linux on my desk top, i would never trust any open source applications for my business. i can barely rely on the calender or even calculator programs. i'd rather pay for something and then if doesn't work have my secretary (not me) call and bitch and get them to fix it. that way i can concentrate on my business not on the software or tweaking the source to improve the software. in the long run i make more money by paying for reliable software and support. i think that is the case with most businesses and also with the nhs.
If you could actually cite some clear specific reasons (as opposed to vague "everything is unstable/broken/hard" or anecdotes of something not working right for you that usually works fine for everyone else) people might actually listen.
Typical!!! You don't like my post because its not a detailed but report????
I'm talking vanilla Debian Woody, and Fedora Core 2 under VMWare. Not brain surgery. Picking options from the installer.
I installed on a total of 4 machines, under both emulated and stand alone environments. My experiences were not good. My point was it isn't getting better. Its actually taken a step back in the last few years.
To anyone with mod points, mod me whatever the hell you like. I'm going to call it as I see it. If you think I'm writing this to flame that's your problem.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's a shame you had a bad experience, but when I installed Mandrake for the first time in january, (my first time using Linux) everything "just worked" out of the box, and that's why I started using Linux in the first place.
My first experiences were text installs on a 486, and back then it was an experimental OS and was awesome to play with. No one talked about it being ready as an end user OS. When I was using Redhat 7.x things were much better than they are now. So this talk of Linux as desktop ready is amazing to me. Way to put off your userbase forever.
I'll probably download and pay with Sarge at some point soon. I won't use Mandrake for the simple fact that its not as commonly used, and I'd have little or no support if things go wrong. Other people swear by SUSE as well. Neither distro has a free (as in beer) server version. Part of the problem is the infinite choice of distro. Linux is not the OS, the distro is.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Essentially it seems like that they are getting operating systems, office products, servers/server software for about 60 pounds per machine per year, which I presume includes some level of support and 40 million of custom software.
Open Source if not quite ready for prime time, is already showing its power in competetive situations..
Not every opinion that isn't yours is a bad one. I knew I'd be modded troll because of the fanatacism here and because I'm saying something that people here don't want to hear (but I believe need to, because I'd LIKE to see Linux go where it should).
I posted because I had something to say - popular or not.
End users NEED to be able to trouble shoot their OS to some level - otherwise you'll never get people running it at home.
I tried Fedora Core 2. That's probably the best migration path from Redhat. (I've used 8 and 9 but only briefly).
Different people want different things from an OS but apparently a lot of end users are in desperate need of an OS that requires a B.Sc. in comp sci to get it up and running right?
CVSNT is an application - it is not the OS. When's the last time you got MS-Word 2003 running on Linux native? Why can't CVS (pserver) be ported to Windows? It can, but the developers don't want to.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Since you are an experienced Slack admin setting up a CVS repository (not something a garden variety desktop user is prone to do), why not just use Slack (or Red Hat) like a pro instead of Debian like a newb?
Simply because the last time I ran Slackware was about 7-8 years ago. There'll be a learning curve for me no matter what distro I use.
Here's the thing though. If you want Linux to take off on the desktop, you need a free (as in beer) desktop version that the masses can admin. There use to be one - Redhat was getting there. I haven't tried them all but the ones I'm seeing so far are aweful.
By the way a distro that requires you fix things going wrong that shouldn't is bad no matter what. I shouldn't need to know the guts of XWindows and mouse drivers just to get it running.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"Not to be considered a troll here, but there are virtually NO practice management solutions for Linux. I say "virtually" only because the ones that do exist are low-budget/low-feature solutions with limited (at best) deployment."
Virtually all programs start out that way.
"You can't expect doctors to run Star Office and manage their patients and records using multiple applications that are hacked together to form one solution. The support margin would be huge in such a case."
I should point out that while there can be improvement in this area, Linux does have the infrastructure to do it. I should also point out that a lot of doctors offices do use the core apps (MS Suite) with custom templates, and VB code written on top. The same can be done with Linux apps (or haven't you been noticing the scripting trend lately?)
"Linux is great for certain things but practice management would be a disaster without custom software."
So tell us what's unique to practice managment apps, that no one else has?
That should have read:
Typical!!! You don't like my post because its not a detailed BUG report????
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
A week after the report was released? What, governments can respond quickly and efficiently to new information now? Meh.
Whatever anyone else says about the costs of switching to Open Source, the fact is that long term, a Microsoft licensing deal costs a whole lot more than an OSS solution and that is good money that the NHS should be spending on giving better salaries to the nurses, GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Add to that the fact the patient care is still suffering and that people are dying as a result of superbugs due to poor cleaning routines in our hospitals, I don't know how that crook Gates can sleep peacefully at night.
I am absoultely disgusted with my government.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
There's the option to leave the contract every three years. That's part of the deal. From Wednesday's London Times (horrid signup for non-UK residents): "The NHS has the right to terminate the deal every three years."
So our doctors and nurses are now going to spend minimal time on an OS that just does stuff and maximal time on actually fixing people, rather than letting people waste away while they spend hours trying to figure out why the hell copy and paste doesn't work.
Linux couldn't have actually won this bid without being able to demonstrate working healthcare management systems running on Linux, they don't exist.
As for the 9 years part, my own experience with the NHS would suggest that that is their approximate hardware replacement time. On my last trip I experienced multiple 80286 based computers in regular day to day use. Its not a long contract by NHS standards.
. . .you need a free (as in beer) desktop version that the masses can admin.
Last time I installed Mandrake I had to click on "Yeah, whatever" about three times. That was it. Up and running on the network, and it's free as in beer.
Can't recall ever having to drop to command line to do anything, although I frequently find it more convenient to do so, just as I often do in Windows.
And for whatever it's worth, I put a certain amount of food in my stomach because the garden variety user can't install or admin Windows either. Based on my customers I'd have to say that even the vaunted Mac isn't quite as intuitive and 'user friendly' as Apple would like you to believe.
Some of the rest of the food comes from the fact that they also can't fix their own cars, bicycles or even cobble up a flyer in Word.
I really don't see anything wrong with certain things requiring a certain amount of expertise and hiring experts to do them. I don't do my own plumbing. My plumber doesn't install operating systems. Takes all kinds to make a world.
I shouldn't need to know the guts of XWindows and mouse drivers just to get it running.
I'd have to say that depends on what it is you're trying to do, although I personally havn't seen a major distro that requires this in many years, but I've never tried Fedora.
KFG
I mean, this is an organisation that only recently ditched X.400 email. Most of their practices are either paper-based, or use outmoded legacy systems that no-one understands anymore, because the coders responsible for their creation have been downsized long ago.
Hardly anything is designed with interoperability in mind ; I have personally resorted to screen-scraping chunks of VT100 terminal output because the other supplier had no handle on their ancient pathology system (and possibly didn't even have the sourcecode).
The resistance to change is enormous, and not without justification; the overall experience of NHS professionals of IT projects is bad.
And why? Healthcare is almost certainly one of the most challenging problem domains for IT projects in existence. Not only does it require the reliability and robustness of the banking industry, the informational complexity of the subject matter exceeds most other problem domains in human usage. Even the everyday things like the prescription and administration of drugs are horrendously complex ; the computerisation of a full medical record is something that I would describe as more challenging than a dozen Manhattan Projects.
In all, this is an area where the potential benefits are tremendous - even a small reduction of the estimated 70% of working time that a junior doctor spends doing paperwork instead of caring for patients would be an enormous boon. An hour a week saved per ward (very realistic even with basic electronic prescribing systems) essentially amounts to an average sized hospital getting a free doctor. In a cash-strapped, overburdened NHS, every little thing helps.
The potential for public benefit is enormous, and I would suggest that this should be a matter for public research. Instead of pouring these funds into the pockets of shareholders of enormous foreign companies, gov.uk should found a number of public projects, all bound over to interoperate freely, all open-source, and trial them.
But unlikely to happen, with the corporates back-handing government so effectively. With the recent funding changes for NHS IT, the funds are effectively placed in the hands of a very few huge monolithic corporations, who then decide who to subcontract to. As a result, smaller, more innovative companies are either shoved out of their niche, bought out, or try to compete on an equal footing with the giants and get crushed in the scrum. Money will haemorrhage into the pockets of foreign shareholders (iSoft, Schlumberger-Sema, etc.).
Yet another reason I'm glad I no longer work for the NHS.
Why do you feel the need to not only post your job, but also the acronym for it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean you'd have to type MORE than you would've anyway, thus taking away any point using the acronym had in the first place.
/. (Slashdot) convention. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) is the original and most common, appended as a disclaimer when doling out legal interpretation.
It's a standard
As to why use the abbreviation _and_ the full job title? IAAUD itself is probably not common enough for people to know/guess quickly what it means, so the job title is necessary. The 'IANA__' or in this case 'IAA__' formula is however instantly recognisable and serves as a shorthand giving credibility the what follows.
Yes, most of what the parent says is horrible nasty stuff and you might wish s/h/it would just go away and be nasty elsewhere.
But, FWIW, I think the gist of these comments is pretty accurate. My own doctor has made similar comments to me. My g/f works in the local hospital and overtime has just been banned for everyone in the department for financial reasons. She is a radiographer - she'd administer radiotherapy if you went in with cancer.
Now, how do you feel about her being told that she mustn't work overtime?
Well, call me offtopic, but nothing in my post had anything to do with the NHS bid.
KFG
You really expect garden variety end users to dump Windows, and learn to troubleshoot at the low level? Come on! Get a clue. So much for Linux as a desktop replacement. What a goddamn joke.
Garden variety end users don't administer, troubleshoot and configure their own boxes. They don't install Windows. They don't even know there is a low level.
Wrong crook. Try a little closer to home, how else do you explain mega-casinos?
Maybe the NHS Trust I work for, as part of the Web Development Team, is an exception, but Linux is making inroads here. For example, while our Intranet presently runs on IIS and we do have a large number of third party applications that require IIS, signficant areas (like our homegrown document publishing system) take advantage of having a Linux server in the mix.
Likewise, I often get involved with extracting useful data from huge data sources and Linux provides me with an efficient and effective way to do that. It's not just me, either. Our network still has a Novell backbone and that is of course moving towards Linux, thanks to SuSE.
It is, of course, a far cry from Linux on every desktop but the penguin is definitely in there, helping to get the work done.
Wulf
Soundcheck Poem: 1 2 was a racehorse and 1 1 was 1 2. 1 2 1 1 race and 1 1 1 1 2.
And by the way if you think only sysadmins troubleshoot windows desktops you're living in fairy land matie.
I think that if your organisation lets ordinary users (as opposed to tech staff) troubleshoot their own PC, or even gives them sufficient priveliges on the machines to do so, your troubles are far greater than mine.
there are already usability guidelines going on. Check out Gnome usability standards here:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/
I am sure they would apreciate your input and would provide valuable experiance for you to involve yourself in a real-world experiance, instead of dealing with idealised models that you are probably exposed to in your university.
Also may make a good paper or two and get your name published and out there.
It also doesn't help that implementation costs have to be covered by the hospital. The NHS IT contract only covers development. There is no obligation on the part of the hospitals or healthcare providers to actually use the system. Every GP to every hospital has to bring in the consultants and the broadband to pay for it if they want to use it.
I know of a very large hospital in southern england that has already borrowed millions to foot that particular bill.
Just in case anyone has forgotten, here's a quick summary of recent major state-funded IT projects in the UK:
3 33 .htm
Immigration service document system (1999) - 18 months late, cost £77m, scrapped after 2 years because system couldn't cope with load
National Insurance system (1997) - delivered late, didn't work, caused a 14 million record backlog, delayed pensions payouts in 1999 and lost 5.2 million people's tax files
Passport office(1999): new system less efficient than what it replaced, caused a backlog of half a million applications, price of passport put up by 30% to fund development of replacement system
Air traffic control(1999): six years late, crashed three times in eight days after installation, complaints from controllers about difficulties with the system.
So, combine the system that created those blunders and Microsoft, a company with a terrible track record on reliability and honesty. I hope I don't need to go to hospital any time soon.
Source:http://www.computerweekly.com/Article102
i cant believe it how stupid someone signs a nine year contract, maybe M$ is never relevant in some years or the in a couple of years the price of M$ products lower than expected today. my 2 cent's ...
I understood that IBM had declared that they were doing this?
I really don't see anything wrong with certain things requiring a certain amount of expertise and hiring experts to do them. I don't do my own plumbing. My plumber doesn't install operating systems. Takes all kinds to make a world.
You don't call your plumber to flush the toilet every day either. System admin is not an infrequent thing. You don't call a mechanic to help you drive your car. You only call him when it breaks down or needs a service.
I'd have to say that depends on what it is you're trying to do, although I personally havn't seen a major distro that requires this in many years, but I've never tried Fedora.
Debian simply didn't work for me out of the box. KDE was broken in 2 out of 2 installs. (I think there are issues with the mouse driver kernel module and devices with the version of KDe. Also seen some redraw issues with the video card but I haven't looked into that). Fedora I'll have to try without VMWare before I comment more.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think that if your organisation lets ordinary users (as opposed to tech staff) troubleshoot their own PC, or even gives them sufficient priveliges on the machines to do so, your troubles are far greater than mine.
Have you ever worked in a small company?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There is a lot of Windows on our desktops, at least in General Practice (hospitals are much less computerised)
However the successful healthcare software tends to have been written in M (MUMPS as was) and is commonly appearing either in a terminal (telnet etc) with added chrome and macro buttons around it (EMIS; MicroTest), or be a somewhat evolved front end on a database that may be running on Unix VMS or whatever.
>>GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Where's your research for this statement? My wife is a Surgical Matron at a hospital with responsbility for four wards and a lot of staff. She hasn't lost ONE member of staff to the private sector.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any]. Consultants are invariably employed by the NHS and top-up their income with private work. Their is no way their is enough private work in the UK to pay the salaries of all the consultants.My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
The NHS has 9 years remaining of the largest IT project in the world today. The cost is somewhere in the region of £30 billion. The country has been split into different regions, each with a very large IT services company running the show (BT consulting, CSC, Accenture etc). Ther job is to integrate the old systems and bring on new ones to allow patient details to be shared nationally. It is a massive project, £500 million goes to Microsoft to ensure that they will support TODAYS operating systems to the end of the programme so they can get the hard job of getting it all up and working before the OS gets pulled out from underneith them. Once the system works they are in mantience mode and can port it onto the latest and greatest of the day. They have some very very old applications that only run in Windows inside of the NHS today, and they are part of the clincial application suite. The truth is that the NHS believes that Windows is unlikely to disappear in the next 9 years, I think that is a fair assumption myself. Unfortunately they have to think that long term since their software really is that complex. Besides it's all about value, redeveloping the current systems that do work will cost more than paying the licence fees.
Here is one place for starters - okay, not just the private sector but also to overseas like the USA.
Incidentally, I have nothing for the utmost admiration for our doctors and nurses and they deserve better treatment in terms of pay and conditions because of the jobs they do. I would happily pay higher taxes if I knew that money was going directly into their pockets.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any].
I have a female colleague who is a middle-manager in the NHS and travels around the country a lot. She does so always using First Class train or air travel, can expenses rooms in the best hotels, gets a huge mileage allowance and very large salary.
At least in the private sector, it's a matter of choice to pay for it or not - but my friend getting the benefits she gets when your wife (and other healthcare staff) deserve bigger salaries is an absolute travesty in a public-funded institution.
My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
This is irrelevant to my argument. I have no problem in anyone choosing to run Windows (assuming that's what she uses) but I do object to my government using my taxes to line Bill Gates' pockets when it is quite clear that high quality free alternatives are available.
The fact that she works hard into the night on paperwork justs earns my admiration even more incidentally.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
Sorry, this doesn't work for me. Why is lining Gates' pockets on IT infrastructure doing something? Surely doing something would be paying workers more, investing in hospital cleanliness, putting more into disease research, etc?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Yes.
Most of the users there would have been unable to troubleshoot Windows anyhow. They'd have called on me. There are dozens of small companies that make their living providing IT services, including troubleshooting, to other small companies.
I don't think Linux would be a "magic bullet" solution for anyone, but neither do I think that it is unusable for a small company. Different, yes. Trickier for the member of staff who happens to have a computer at home and is thus landed with the job of handling the ones at work? Undoubtedly. But the original discussion that all this came from was the NHS - hardly a small company.
In large companies, I see Linux being considered as a desktop alternative for cost and management reasons. The server will run whatever it needs to run in order to service the business - this is the techies problem. Linux is already being taken seriously as a server OS there.
In smaller companies, chances are they're buying computers with a Windows license and OS installed in the first place, and may not be re-ghosting them. What on Earth is the point in them putting Linux on the desktop? OpenOffice, maybe. Firefox - in a stretch, possibly. Linux? Not for some years.
However on the server, Exchange is expensive overkill. The server, being business critical, is more likely to be left to the experts. And here, Linux is making inroads. I know of a couple of companies in this area providing specialist services to small businesses - they come in, set up and maintain a Linux server and the client systems are the customer's problem.
I must stress that the NHS is in a lot of trouble right now with staff shortages and poor equipment. If they were to take the hard long-term decision to switch to Linux now, even if there is only a small amount of retraining per worker it would cause *massive* disruption. I cannot emphasise enough how angry most people are with the NHS right now with the current waiting lists let alone staff being retrained in new software.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Especially in IT Groups of 1 IT Person to 20-80 Users (Which is the normal ratio among companies) Linux fails to be as useful in that range, most companies at this range don't have the budget to pay for high quality system administrators. They often will train a tech with other specialties such as an engineer (Not computer engineering mind you) or someone else who is good at computers. Or you may also get a Jr. Administrator with a degree from a 2 year school or vocational training. Many people in this range my know about linux but don't really have the skills to lead a migration strategy to Linux. Plus for people in that Linux administration linux comes with plenty of good roadblocks, such as driver problems with hardware, a complicated file sharing system even samba. Setting up print servers can be a bit tricky as well (That is part of not having the right drivers). And finding and installing applications still need a lot of work. These are features that Windows handles quite well most companies from 20-80 just use windows servers as a File/Print Server and configuration these services only takes a right click and a couple of left clicks. While on Linux the person has to dig threw a bunch of docs to find the name of the service that they need to run. Then they will need to make sure they are up to date and then install it. Then configure it. To a non Linux users. Who would think a name like SAMBA would be for windows file sharing, LP for printing server (Yea SAMBA can do that too), or Apache is for Web Server. The Linux Interface is more then just a GUI. Even if there is a GUI application it may not be consistent with other ones. When you hit print on one application it will just print and other will give you print options, and the options are different for each program Making each application a program that you need to compleatly have to go threw.
In Large Companies where there is 1 Administrator for 100+ people that is where Linux/Unix shines. In such large scale Linux is quite useful because you have one well paid professional administrator who is savvy on what is happening in the tech world and easily adapts to changes. But most of the unix tools and remote administration is setup of large number of people w. Command Line interface speeding up a lot of processes that may need to be done with a lot of users and powerful scripting abilities a job that could take all day on a windows box can easily be done in 1/2 hour on Linux. Also with companies this size downtime is very expensive 1/2 hour down time with the average wages of $15 an hour * 150 is $1125 that is not including potential losses in sales. On Linux with the significantly less downtime any extra time it takes to administer a Linux system is still cheaper Heck $1125 would be considered a very good weekly wage for an Administrator. So having him spend 2 hours to fix a problem while keeping the system running vs. 1/2 hour of down time is much cheaper.
Also the company less then 10 then Linux is good too, the Set it up, and keep it running administration, usually done by a outside contractor and managed by them with the most computer savvy guy in charge of the most basic of administrations (make sure it hasn't crashed or power failure) In these sizes Linux is setup more as a server appliance then a true server and has a real cost advantage to the small company.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
while microsoft discontinues support for old systems, they go to extraordinary lengths... ... read raymond chen's blog...
Joel Spolsky wrote in his now famous article about two opposing camps at Microsoft, one of which he calls the "Raymond Chen Camp" and the other, the "MSDN Camp".
Flip. Flop. The strategic direction is the result of a tension amongst younger people that is arbitrated by a few central older characters.
Linux, seems to be organized along different lines. The unpaid authors are motivated by other interests and by different values. Linux may be akin to a spiritual journey for some authors. Such a force may result in a coherency over time that stems from a belief system rather than from a marketplace.
But that's just about the author geeks who create Linux. The marketing people may be on yet different journeys still.
IBM's doing well and plays a part in Linux community.
Meanwhile, the community exhibits a lot of diversity and that's both a sign of flexibility and a source of strength.
I can understand the NHS going for an MS solution due to the costs and difficulty of switching to OSS solution, but paying Microsoft out of one's own free will for 9 years sounds to me like either: MS bribed numerous officials (paranoid speculation, but not unknown at all in big business deals) or the NHS MIS is supremely incompetent and/or stupid.
I personally think it's the latter, a case of yet another group of IT bosses who barely know how to find the start button in Windows, being screwed over by very good MS marketing and sales people. I seriously doubt a competent sales manager would agree to a 9 year contract with a company as well known for its crooked business practices as MS is.
The interface. Getting an agreement to develop an approved and mandatory user interface appearance for all programs on all kit is a big wedge.
And to develop and provide the software to build that interface onto programs. Charitably put, Microsoft's lack of advertised expertise with Linux would make it seem unlikely that they will write tools to put the interface (the licencing terms of which are not visible at present to me) onto other programs running on Open platforms.
"I fail to see how choosing Linux doesn't result into 'lock in'. At least to any extent greater than with Microsoft Windows. Support for Windows can be had from any consulting agency, pretty much."
That is just wrong, as many people using NT4 will be prepared to tell you, if not now then soon.
I'm talking vanilla Debian Woody, and Fedora Core 2 under VMWare. Not brain surgery.
Debian woody. Sigh I appriciate the debian project but could they PLEASE change the name of their versions? "Try Debian". So you go there "Stable, testing, unstable"... hmm which do I want? Stable sounds good.
What they don't tell you is that you get an age-old distro completely unsuited for anything but server use. Granted, the new stable Debian is out this year but it doesn't change the basic problem. Stable = Debian server. Testing = Debian desktop. Unstable = Debian unstable. That'd make everything a lot easier for everyone.
As for FC2 on VMWare. IMO anything on VMWare will run like crap, be it linux or windows. It is not worth it. For all the extra power you need to put into your machine to run VMWare+OS+Apps, you'd get a second box that'd run circles around it anyway.
Personally, I would recommend debian testing (sarge? sid? I forget, not woody at least) and the new installer. Debian is a brilliant distro once you get it up and running (well, in my case that often involves doing a minimal install and apt-get just the apps I need)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Garden variety end users don't administer, troubleshoot and configure their own boxes. They don't install Windows. They don't even know there is a low level.
These days a lot of systems come pre-configured I grant you. But many non-brand names aren't and windows is a damned easy install compared to certain varieties of Linux. I've known many a non-expert to install Windows. I know few that install Linux, and some of those that have tried have regretted it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Such a cost saving!? Did anyone factor-in the cost of being hit by the next NetSky/SoBig/.... ? Thought not.
The original discussion was about Linux as a desktop OS for a large organisation.
You made a sweeping statement about end users not administering their machines. I don't know what you think the millions of home computer users do exactly, but that was the statement you made.
I was making a point that in small organisations sometimes end users have to be involved in trouble shooting.
My experiences were indeed in setting up Linux for a server environment. Specifically a CVS server. However in doing that I had trouble with a desktop component - X-Windows, as well as hardware, while CVS was relatively easy to get up and running.
To me this suggests that the distros I was using certainly aren't ready for the Enterprise. While the choice of distros has widened recently the quality has fallen, and yet people rabbit on about Linux being ready for the desktop. If my experiences are anything to go by, its certainly not.
I was not saying that an expert user could not use Linux as a server and I don't know where you got that idea from.
End of discussion.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"Garden variety end users don't administer, troubleshoot and configure their own boxes."
If they don't, then who does? There isn't normally any professional supporting these Windows machines.
Put that question another way: how many "admins" (i.e. windows users) had turned off LSASS prior to the virus hitting it?
It's interesting to note that the report mentioned in the article has, as you can see by following the link, been removed and replaced with a message basically rubbishing the contents of the report. But there is an archived version available.
Yeah, vote for the Cons "The party of convictions" (most shadow cabinet ministers have been convicted of something!)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Gee - what a coincidence that the report came out right before this contract - I wonder what the the price was before the report came out. I don't care about training costs - it is irresponsible for a govenment to waste the people's tax money on a substandard product. Training costs can be dealt with over time - this is just bad decision making and the taxpayers should be very upset. Nine years is ridiculous - anyone who agrees to nine year contract with anything related to IT is an idiot. The person's who dealt this contract should be fired on the spot no questions asked. I bet they will create web pages that can only be viewed in Internet explorer too.
'cos it's the usual one-eyed bull.
The problems with the NHS are shared with pretty much all civil service operations; massive inefficiencies with too many people focused on serving themselves rather than others. Co-incidentally I work for one of the NHS IT providers so perhaps I shouldn't complain but what they spend on IT and what they get for their money is a joke.
Other simplistic suggestions such as the NHS keeping people healthy and hence more productive/beneficial to the economy are just plain wrong and show a negligible understanding of reality.
I have already wasted too long on this troll so my final comment is to point out that Blair isn't an MS fan boy, he's just easily bought.
...Made me think of the crackpot club, The National "Honor" Society. I guess making a database interface for an EMS department that allows faster access to vital information, and spending hundreds of hours fixing computers does not matter to them... all you really need to be is a joint smoking slacker.
Source: Real Life Experience
Karma: Good, or bust!
1. Hospitals is what the NHS is looking at nowadays, Practices have solutions (actually we lead the world, but being typically British and understated don't make so much fuss about it)
From this end, the need is for ways of sending messages between systems, which IMHO FLOSS people are likely to be better at avoiding combinatorial explosions on a large scale than closed/proprietary ones are.
For hospitals there is VISTA, in which respect the US VA looks like a world-leader (and the three US gov services that use software suites based on the same core seem the closest analogues of the NHS that are readily available, with software.)
This produced a corps of maintainers and supporters www.hardhats.org (the history is well-worth reading) www.openvista.org who are a good bunch, the interesting example of one of the business models for making your crown jewels Open Source (GPL) with Sanchez' GT.M - on Sourceforge but mainly they do big iron stuff for banks.
So, there is an open (public domain, FOIA, with embellishments) hospital and patient management system and medical records system available.
(It has been translated into Finnish, German - Berlin Heart Institute) and Arabic (cancer hospital in Cairo) so there is a sporting chance it can be translated into English - there would be a fair few changes needed to fit into what we use instead of billing and the work the USN MC at San Diego was doing to extend it with Paediatric modules would need to be continued at least, but it is a plausibly promising system with a long pedigree)
VISTA has been ported by WorldVista to run on GT.M which of course runs on Linux. VISTA I am told was designed early on to move platforms, with a bit of alteration to a shim layer, and survived moves across different sorts of M and Unix (and I think VMS before that) so the alteration to run on GT.M and on Linux was not a large task (it looks like a big job to me, but Rick Marshall et al seemed quite happy with it - key points: there is experience, there are people, it was designed for it.)
There is a GUI for VISTA.
Thing about this - a GUI is not a good choice of interface for a proportion of tasks commonly done in healthcare organisations. SO having a GUI that goes alongside a functional plain terminal interface makes excellent sense.
The GUI is behind stuff in use in General Practice in the UK in its development at present, but is generically usable, and does not trail the state of the art in hospitals.
It is in Delphi, so if we use Windows on a desktop that is fine, I do not doubt that it could be ported to Kylix or otherwise moved to GUIs on newer operating systems as they take over.
Tools exist as Open Source and in production, to connect GT.M to SQL and to the Web, so a web interface is a reasonable approach. Jim Self in LA has done a lot of this rather impressively for the Veterinary Hospital he is at.
Others
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There is also the Care2Ex project which has a lot of energy going into it in Europe, and is a cross-border effort (a nice thing to see in the evolving European Confederacy) this is aimed at hospitals, the University Hospital of Geneva has been using its BolinOs system for Radiology and other records and administrative tasks for a while, and there are a stack of Practice systems in early stages. My source code is available, but in VIsual Basic, so possibly best left buried for now; but Horst Herb's GNUMed project based in Australia www.gnumed.org and www.gnumed.net are promising approaches to doing it all in a provably correct fashion - and hence are taking a long time.
The ontologists - a proper medical automation system requires a sound ontology to be based on or else you end up with a local curiosity - are agreed AFAICS that medical ontologies do not work unless they are Open SOurce and Open Licence (Galen which is one based in Manchester University in the middle of England) has a slogan "Making the impossible very difficult" which semes to accurately reflect the level of c
I don't think the NHS are that heavily Windows. They have people typing up documents on it, but I don't think any more.
My experiences as a customer are:
The NHS has a lot of disparate systems, many paper based, that it would be great if they could come together. I've had to retake xrays in different hospitals because they couldn't communicate (emergency chest xray for injury one week, followed by routine cancer xray the next), not good for the patient.
Its a big new project, but I think the current firms that are fulfilling the contracts tend to be Microsoft shops. Its a pity really. At least from all we can see the architect has mandated open formats for exchange, and most medical data is either easily represented in plain text (a blood test result, a radiologist report) or as images (xray/CT), for which open formats exist.
I used to have relatively little problem porting apps betweeing UNIXes, and writing apps that were portable between UNIXes. They have some differences, but also a lot in common.
More and more programming nowadays uses higher level abstractions through toolkits and libraries, that this should be less and less a problem. Its really Windows thats the odd one out in terms of fundamental model, coming from a single user desktop system.
End users NEED to be able to trouble shoot their OS to some level - otherwise you'll never get people running it at home.
This is one of the big reasons why I _won't_ run windows - If something breaks in Linux I have all the tools I need to poke around and debug the problem. If I'm presented with a non-functional windows machine I find myself standing there saying "well, it's screwed innit?" and theres usually very little debugging I can do. This is probably why the usual solution for a broken windows machine seems to be a reinstall whereas I have never had to reinstall Linux because some software broke.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
1. The NHS provides medical care, free at the point of delivery, from cradle to grave, with the same quality no matter who you are. Good isn't it? Just like communism! (Just my little joke.)
2. It has a programme to overhaul how it does IT.
3. Previously IT decisions were taken at the hospital or trust level (there are over 300 trusts).
4. England (yes, just England, not Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland - they all have their own NHSs and they are all doing their own thing) is divided into five areas and each area run by a large consultancy. Each of these is termed a cluster and the organisation running it is a Local Service Provider (LSP). They are responsible for integrating the IT systems within their area and providing the interfaces to systems outside their area.
5. There is a sixth function called the Spine. This is basically an XML message bus to enable the LSPs to send messages between each other. It is also where you plug in an application which you want to make available on a national basis.
The key reason for all this is that there is no central information store for patient data in England. The hospital doesn't necessarily know what your GP (doctor) knows, and when you are discharged, your GP may not know what happened in hospital.
There are a lot of people for whom clinical staff more or less need to make guesses. Guesses like: you're not allergic to penicillin, you're not on serious medication etc. This whole project is aimed at getting the LSPs to take responsibility to get the systems within a geographic area sharing data.
It is completely amazing and the statistics are mindblowing. There are 600 million prescriptions issued each year. Average of 10 per person. Now keep all that data and check new prescriptions against it so you can alert if the drugs have an adverse interaction - and do it in real time because clinical staff are busy people. Not easy. If you think that wasn't hard, don't forget that this is a small fraction of the total amount of activities taking place.
The desktop thing could have gone linux, using something like VMware server farms for access to Windows applications. But they would need serious architecture design, support and integration. Not done by Mr Noddy Consulting.
It would have meant that cheap terminals (e.g., SunRays or whatever) could be used within hospitals where their integrated smart cards would support the authentication requirements of the NHS. These devices would also be of limited value to a thief - something worth considering.
There is an impression that the NHS used the threat of Linux on the desktop to get i) a very good discount and ii) the promise of development money. It looks like they got both of those so UK taxpayers can think they probably didn't do too badly. What other taxpayers think is largely irrelevant.
... and the figures quoted seem ludicrously inflated. The Accenture contracts (which are 2 out of the 5 available) cost the NHS less than £1 billion over the next 10 years. BTW your link doesn't work.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
I'm sorry to hear about your troubles installing linux distros. As someone else pointed out in response to you, Mandrake Linux does an excellent job just working "out of the box." I've installed Mandrake (9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 10.0), Red Hat 9.0, and Slackware 9.1 on my home system and each of them installed fine, booting into a graphical KDE environment. Mandrake did the best job between the three detecting my hardware, but the other two distros detected most everything automatically. I've also installed Gentoo (and still use it to this day). Although Gentoo isn't what you'd call "newbie" user friendly (as far as installing goes) if you follow the installation handbook, everything (with the exception of sound in my case) works fine.
In my opinion, Mandrake is the best for a "newbie" installation. The graphical installation is easy to use and everything works fine in my experience. Some users' problems with installing linux distros may lie in unsupported hardware. Before selecting a distro, you should ensure that your hardware is supported. Mandrake does support a lot of hardware. Note: Windows doesn't support all hardware either. I'd say not only is Linux ready for the desktop, it has been ready for some time now.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
ve also installed Gentoo (and still use it to this day). Although Gentoo isn't what you'd call "newbie" user friendly (as far as installing goes) if you follow the installation handbook, everything (with the exception of sound in my case) works fine.
I'd say not only is Linux ready for the desktop, it has been ready for some time now.
This RTFM attitude is exactly why Linux needs to change or die on the desktop. I'll repeat again. Not everyone has the time or interest to RTFM or go out and check every little bit of their hardware to see that its supported. I've seen Linux users suggest that if an end user doesn't like something they can learn to code and change it any damn way they want. Well in the real world not everyone has the inclination, time, resources or aptitude to do that. So if Windows or MacOS works for them they'll stick to it and leave Linux to the "propellerheads".
If people are expected to buy new hardware to run Linux they'll never bother to trash their Windows. When I finally got the opportunity to install Linux at work, I didn't get to pick the specs for the machine. I got the box that could be spared. From a manager's simplistic point of view Windows will happily run on it, so if Linux won't its garbage. (Now a good manager would know that the hardware was bought to spec to support Windows in the first place but not all managers are good managers).
I honestly think this whole situation is a real pity because I'd like it to get to the stage where I could recommend Linux to friends and relatives. Instead of actually addressing it it seems the Linux user community would rather stick their heads in the sand and abuse anyone who points out the problems.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Can you kick a few UI designers at SAP? They seem to have totally failed at UI design.
If you don't use SAP daily, or don't have a step by step procedure in front of you, you are lost. I'd find it easier to type a manual SQL query than navigate through this miserable system.
Fortunately, (or unfortunately) I only have to use it every few weeks.
The end user who doesn't know a hundred obscure commands, and another hundred obscure config files is just as screwed in Linux as they are with Windows.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That's why I suggested Mandrake. I was not suggesting to tell a newbie user to RTFM. My very first linux installation was Mandrake 9.0. At that time, I knew absolutely nothing about Linux or Unix or anything. I just popped the CD in, hit next a few times, made up a password, and that was pretty much it. Everything on the system worked fine, sound, video, mouse, network, Internet (dialup), KDE... it all worked on its own. I didn't have to pick up a single manual. I haven't installed any distro on modern hardware, but I have used liveCDs (Knoppix) and they "just work" as well.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
LibDems probably need a chance at government (can't do any worse than the other two have done) with the added bonus we get properly united with Europe and away from the possibility of becoming the 51st state of the USA.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Just out of curiousity, why do you even need X-Windows in a server environment? Especially if it is just a CVS server. I'd think the server would run more efficiently without the overhead of a graphical environment. Having the graphical environment running means more processes, with potentially more vulnerabilities, and more ways for someone to break into your server.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
That article doesn't indicate that people are leaving to go to the Private Sector, althought I won't argue with the fact that they are leaving. Most I know of are just getting out of the NHS period.
As for your friend, she sounds incredibly lucky for a middle manager. My wife can't even get her Trust to recompensate her for the petrol she has to use to drive to the other Trusts Hospital location [ which is through mad traffic 10 miles away ] on a regular basis.
As for the choice of running Windows, thats what people are familiar with ! Why rip it out and put in Linux etc ? The money you would save would quickly be swallowed by horrendous training and maintenance costs. Also, remember that until the people are training up in the new apps, their productivity will nosedive, so their is a cost element also.
Believe me, I'm not happy that any of the money goes to Microsoft either, but its the only realistic choice.
p.s. As for your comment about hospital cleanliness, my wife read the new 'Matrons Charter'. It waffles on about hospital cleanliness but it means zip. Cleaning contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, normally a massive company. They supply the minimum of staff to the job and don't supervise the results. You can complain about cleaning standards, but you have no weapon; financial or personal, to effect change. The BEST thing to do would be to take cleaning in-house [no outsourcing] and provide proper staffing to do the job properly - the cleaners matter as much as any nurse/doctor/consultant etc - an important point which seems to have been lost by the new layers of management in the NHS.
viable alternative != best choice
And where's your proof of research into making this statement? Microsoft's "Get The Facts"??? C'mon, this issue's been argued many times on Slashdot and the worst possible case is that's there's not much difference in maintenance costs between Linux and Windows.
As for all your other points, I agree with you 100%.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'd bet my life that Microsoft has paid some people well to make that decision. Hopefully this time will be enough evidence to proof it. At least Linux is gaining ground on the desktop market at an amazing pace. At least all of my friends have switched to Linux lately.
I worked in a large telecom company before that had a history of winning signed contracts, only to have the customer later pay some nominal cancellation fee and go with a cheaper competitor, because the cost situation had substantially changed over the past year or two.
I wonder if the contract is written to avoid a "lock in" situation, that lets the customer decline or opt out if they decide to use non-MS solutions.
I think the 9 year thing is to ensure they have support for a newly purchased system that will be in maintainance mode five years from now.
On the other hand, having lived with the Canadian sponsorship scandal, you never know what kind of dirty backroom sweetheart deals go on behind the closed doors of government offices.
My rights don't need management.
XML based HL7.2 is what we are meant to use to interface in the NHS (Yes I work in IT in a NHS hospital). Moving legacy systems to do this is going to be fun...
Oooh 'eck DM!
Does this £500m include support and services or is it just for the software licenses. I see there is a £40m R&D expense, but I am wondering just how expensive these things are???
But what you have to remember is that the NHS only installed X.400 as standard 4 years after it was obvious that X.400 was the failed standard and SMTP was the successful one.
...
Now, what is it that we are doing? Oh yes. Installing Windows for everything, over the next 4 years
I think they are going to be spending more time curing virus infected computers than curing virus infected patients :)
The private sector health care in the UK is just a leach on the NHS.
If something goes wrong in an operation in the local BUPA hospital where does the patient end up in Intencive care? in the Local NHS hospital.
How many Nurses and Doctors did the private sector train? None.
Gits
Oooh 'eck DM!
"And why? Healthcare is almost certainly one of the most challenging problem domains for IT projects in existence. Not only does it require the reliability and robustness of the banking industry, the informational complexity of the subject matter exceeds most other problem domains in human usage. Even the everyday things like the prescription and administration of drugs are horrendously complex ; the computerisation of a full medical record is something that I would describe as more challenging than a dozen Manhattan Projects."
Smalltalk. A language already used in the banking industry, amoungst others. Perfect for big, complicated, and evolving tasks. The only other is Ada, but that's less known.
If the folk over at NHS, if they're doing their jobs properly, picked the best tool for the job. And for this job, Microsoft won.
Hate to break it to you, but sometimes linux isn't always the best tool, especially if you have a lot of not-tech users (read doctors and nurses).
I design .NET and java web services for a living. The beauty of web services is that the client can either be browser based, like you say, or a thick client. You can either use Swing or WebForms as a thick client or you might even use open source alternatives.
Cheers,
Adolfo
I don't know why you expect CVS to be ported to windows--what is wrong with CVSNT?
Good ol slashdot editors, can't be bothered to look up what any acronym stands for and actually, you know, edit. Must be such hard work clicking on "approve" and "reject" all day.
£500m / 60m people =~ £8 per person (lets round it up for population growth) =~ £1 per year per person. (not taking into consideration people who go private etc). Obviously software doesnt have any cost per person attached to it but Bill didn't get filthy rich with fair prices. I think what we're paying for here is 'peace of mind' (did i just say that??) since Microsoft is a big well-known company they know they better damn well not screw up. For that price I expect nothing less then 99.999% uptime, and zero patients records stolen. If I was running the country, under-the-table deals would work two ways: Fuck with me, and I will ban your business from the country and start a mass scale piracy operation of your products.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Good question. The simple answer is I would like to have X-Windows set up so that certain graphical applications and web admin interfaces can be set up. I'm the only person from my company at the client site where I work that knows Unix/Linux at all well, and I would prefer not to be the only one who can admin our CVS repository, since that's a recipe for being called up to fix things while on holiday, or on the weekends.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Similarly, most posts that are fairly off topic and is a rant about a single user's individual experiences should be modded down. If you had written a tirade against your personal experiences with window, I'd expect you to be modded down too
You have serious issues if you think my post is off topic. It dealt with suitability of Linux as a desktop OS and the parent was all about Linux being passed over as a desktop in a large corporation.
You haven't dealt with end users much.
Thank you for telling me what I have and haven't done you arrogant fool. If you deal with end users the way you deal with me, good luck staying employed.
Absolutely not. If Walmart can sell PCs with Linux installed...
If you hadn't noticed a lot of vendors who tried offering Linux as an OS choice on their pre-built machines have pulled back and stopped doing that.
I realize CVSNT is an application. I've used it. You sais Windows had caught up. I don't see that. Linux has been improving more rapidly (and, on the desktop, it had (perhaps you would argue "has") to). My remark on CVSNT was sarcastic--how did you opinion of Linux worsen & your opinion of Windows improve?
Are you sure you've used CVS? What with? (See below)
Well when I started playing with Linux, Windows was still 16 bit, and crashed a lot. You still could only really play games on DOS and multimedia and internet access were basically add ons not built in.
Now stability in Windows has improved, multimedia etc. are all built in, a lot more hardware is supported, the interfaces are more intuitive etc.
Windows has definitely improved VERY rapidly with each generation of the OS adding capability.
Linux has also improved in terms of hardware support and applications but the pace of change has definitely been slower. This is unsurprising as a lot of Linux development is done by people working on a volunteer basis in their spare time. I'm not putting down people's efforts there. But there was no need for Linux not to stay further ahead than it has. Most of the changes in Linux have been behind the scenes from the point of view of an end user. They couldn't care less about whether they're running ext2 or 3.
I don't know why you expect CVS to be ported to windows--what is wrong with CVSNT?
Here you show your ignorance. CVSNT does not exactly match the behaviour of CVS. People running Eclipse have had only limited success with getting it to work. When you can't synchronize with the repository very early on in the project for whatever reason you can't trust your code to the repository server. I tried different verisons of CVSNT and it was too flakey to use. The Eclipse project doesn't support the use of CVSNT, and CVSNT doesn't try to support Eclipse.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This would at least give your other cvs admins a graphical interface into CVS.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
hopefully the PC doesn't reboot when they're about to jumpstart someone's heart
The end user who doesn't know a hundred obscure commands, and another hundred obscure config files is just as screwed in Linux as they are with Windows.
That is exactly my point - if you don't know what you're doing, you're screwed either way, but if you have some clue you're better off with linux... so where's the advantage for anyone in running Windows? It's no better for any of the users, and for some it's worse.
You said that home users need to be able to trouble shoot stuff themselves, but you just admitted that most of them can't nomatter what OS they're running, and the ones who can would be far better off with an OS that actually has the resources for them to trouble shoot it.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
That is exactly my point - if you don't know what you're doing, you're screwed either way, but if you have some clue you're better off with linux... so where's the advantage for anyone in running Windows? It's no better for any of the users, and for some it's worse.
You rarely need more than the graphical software found in the control panel and start menu to do basic stuff. You certainly don't need to edit config files by hand to get your mouse working if something stuffs up in the install on Windows. (I've never had a mouse go unrecognised on WinXP, and I've never seen the graphics card repaint things funnily because I didn't tell the OS exactly how much video RAM or what graphics card I was using). This is the sort of shit an end user HAS to deal with under Linux, and it doesn't need to be that way!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
When you talk about governments and countries, TCO/costs should be looked at differently.
Even if OSS costs more than MS to run it should not be the main consideration. A country should also see how much money LEAVES the country.
This is why some smart countries/govs are still picking certain OSS even IF the TCO is higher. Even if you pay a bit more for services and support, the money goes to YOUR citizens and it comes back to you via taxes. D'oh...
Don't ever forget it is PUBLIC money you're spending.
If the UK Gov rarely cares about these things then the UK is pretty much screwed.
Whenever fraud etc is discovered in a foreign government (or the EU and so on), British Politicians ridicule the foreign government saying how corrupt it is, and how much superior the British Government is.
But everyone on the ground sees through their false words. Was there any meaningful quotation process for this work? Unlikely, even if it went to quotation, the requirements were probably highly stacked in favour of the chosen system.
Public job adverts are seen as a way of avoiding a legal challenge over employing the cousin/friend who they really want to get the job.
This just continues and continues unchallenged. The media are just as rotten.
Someone needs to give Britain a good sorting out about all this, and it would be good for the country, because it is, with inefficiency piled on inefficiency, performance is lousy. Without unprincipled UK arms sales, UK GDP would be non-existent.
I worked on a government funded heap of crap .. er I mean "cutting edge system" for a while.
It was very very bad, luckily I was just a drone, but it was obvious how lousy it was (apart from to the people at the top).
It wasn't a total waste, I made a reasonable wage at the time, and spent a lot of money on food and drink, and having fun, after all that's what the world is about.
Being a buddhist helps by the way.
So then why in US dollars?
I'm sorry I offended you, but at least I didn't call you names.
That makes it alright then doesn't it. Calling you a fool is so much worse than you presuming to know what I do or don't do for a living and how competent I am at it, based on a single post. Even your apology implies an "I'm better than you" attitude...and you wonder why I called you an arrogant fool.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So am I a troll, or a stupid fool who should be ignored because I don't know this. I assumed the best to run would be the stable version. It neither lived up to the tag nor was any good for me. THIS is the sort of BS that's EASILY fixed that would get Linux up to scratch for the desktop. Why don't the Linux zealots fix it instead of fobbing off anyone who complains?
There's a lot of this attitude in the community. Its the RTFM attitude that needs to go. That's what's holding Linux back not anything technical.
I once tried to ask RMS about his view on this. He simply fobbed me off and said he doesn't see a problem. The man's a technical genius, but that's not always going to excuse eccentric behaviour. (He was dressed as the patron saint of Linux complete with halo at the time. I was the only one dressed in a suit at a programming society meeting. I was automatically perceived as the enemy. I had just come from work and wasn't trying to rub the man the wrong way).
Friendly does not mean saying:
* RTFM stupid.
* Go do your research first otherwise don't expect anything to work.
* Installers that tell you what you need to know when its too late.
* Distributions with badly named directories and broken desktops but no warning about this.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"everything (with the exception of sound in
my case) works fine"
Uh huh, there's always an exception. Another reason users aren't flocking to Linux is because it takes away choices with respect to what hardware they can use. I remember when USB didn't work for a couple years in Linux, while it worked fine in Windows. You want users to go for this, make it work with *all* the hardware they use. Even if it means making everything work smoothly with closed source drivers. Usability before religion. Users before developers.
OK, while I sort of agree with some of the things you've been pointing out, I wasn't sure whether you were trolling or not...
But this post pretty much proved conclusively to me that you are. I don't know why other people are continuing to feed you.
looks like the trend these days is to get better discounts from m$ by publicly talking about how "viable" linux is... pretty sad.
Get your torrents...
Posting as AC to make it look like someone else agrees that I'm a troll is lame and sad. Why don't you grow up a little, or at least learn to word things a little differently when you're posting as AC, so its not blatently obvious its you.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I like your idea for those of us who are concerned about the User-Interface issues to get together to work for the good of OpenSource community.
...
Although I have no formal UI training, I think many people like me, who have used lots of different programs, may have something to contribute to your idea.
Patiently awaiting your reply
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Elections are over, and it is payback time.
You rarely need more than the graphical software found in the control panel and start menu to do basic stuff.
Ok, here's an example: A while ago I was setting up a Windows system. The network wasn't working, something somewhere was blocking the traffic. On a Linux box I would've got out tcpdump and looked to see what traffic was actually going where, but on Windows, about all I could do was check the IP settings were correct and then sit there wondering what to do now. Yes, I know I could've used a different machine to download Ethereal or something, but that's not the point.
(I've never had a mouse go unrecognised on WinXP, and I've never seen the graphics card repaint things funnily because I didn't tell the OS exactly how much video RAM or what graphics card I was using). This is the sort of shit an end user HAS to deal with under Linux, and it doesn't need to be that way!
You're right - it doesn't need to be that way... infact it hasn't been that way for years. I certainly haven't had any problems like those for years... probably not since XFree86 4 became mainstream.
On the other hand, I have seen Windows systems do some truely insane things and have had to spend hours or days trying to work out WTF they were doing.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Actually I believe there's a version of tcpdump for windows. It installs drivers and you'd have had to reboot, but its doable and besides now you're talking way beyond basic troubleshooting. It sounds to me like you're just less familiar with windows diagnostics because you're pretty much forced to deal with Linux diagnostics to get anything working in my experience.
I don't accept that it hasn't been a case of having mouse, keyboard and drawing issues for years. I've only just experienced these very things with current distros.
Yes Windows does insane things and I don't love it in the least. I'd really like to see Linux take off. It ain't gonna happen the way things are just now unforunately. Windows for now is just much easier.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I can't even apologize now?
Fine--I'm an arrogant fool and you're an ignorant, flamebating asshole.
have always been mostly Microsoft whores anyway.
They haven't gone that extra length of having the House of Parliament being sponsored by "Microsoft"
But let that fetid Gordon Brown and that pathetic grinner Tony Blair stay more time in power - and it will just be a matter of time - before we see "Parliament Time : Sponsored by Microsoft".
Let's not forget the greatest old whore of all - that idiot who knighted Bill Gates.
The NHS is a former shadow of itself as a healer of the public. Yes it is spending more and more money and employing lots of people. But the ratio of medical vs administrators is going down. In the wrong direction and the care is decreasing. I worked in england for a british company long enoug to know that the NHS is great at spending money and hiring people. It is getting people threathed by doctors and nurses that they seem to find hard to do. Funny thing is that both the conservatives (think democrats for the americans) and labour (think pinko commies) have screwed it up. Maybe it is just a cycle. One generation gives free medical care for everyone. The other destroys it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.