Agreed - he's asking the wrong question.
For the best examples of the usage of pde's etc, he should look at any aero eng book.
anderson is good (that was my first year) but it's been a while since that now.
suggest strolling over to the aero eng dept and asking a professor (or even a fellow phd) for some good books on compressible fluid flow.
1) NAT'd and cheap with a 5gb/week limit 2) Public IP and pricey with no limits.
The students have a public ip so are directly responsible for their actions. Should be easy enough to do once you have the IPs, just allocate them to the mac addresses of the interface cards and you're set. oh yes, and check periodically for open access points...
BT are generally regarded as being crap, but i think the truth of the matter is rather more complicated.
BT is not just BT, it consists of a number of 'arms' that just don't talk to each other. That is fundamentally the problem and that is what was forced on them by regulators.
Their ISDN services are, for example, excellent. I had to order an ISDN30 line in feb and the location had cable and wireless already providing the isdn30 line so i called them up. They assigned me an account manager and said they would get back to me. I stressed i needed it asap (ideally in 30 days) and they said no prob. no mention of prices or anything, my account manager would manage that. I waited a few days, and finally called BT for the same thing. BT were able to give me a price and a target install date immediately over the phone so i went with them. They arrived 3 days ahead of the install date and the isdn worked first time. I was installing asterisk and had a couple of config problems so I phoned them up and spoke for half an hour on an 0800 no with an engineer who (although he had never even heard of asterisk) was able to guide me through all the correct settings and we got it running first time. We also had to have adsl put in and had only one analogue line in the building but (believe it or not) we couldn't find the socket for it. (there were 3 comms rooms and overlapping numbering for sockets) so i phoned up BT. That same day, an engineer came round and took me for a tour. He said he had worked in the area for 20 years and even remembered the layout of the building from when he had been there last. He took me to the frame relay room (of the neighbouring building) and we 'toned' out the socket till we eventually found it terminating in a mess of (disused) cables downstairs. He knocked up a quick patch cable and within minutes we were up and running. The charge for this hour of investigation? £50.
I think the thing is that BT consists of a lot of very good people who are encumbered by a real communications issue through management. They provide excellent support and good SLA's. What's more, their new pure IP backbone will make them a world leader in comms.
Hate to say it though i do, if BT had not been broken up, all the problems we are having now would not be an issue...
For what it's worth, my account manager at Cable and Wireless phoned me back last week about getting a new line in...3 months after the BT install had gone though.
We've coded an entire medical practice management suite in php5 with pgsql. the whole is is completely oo'd and could not be back ported to php4. Why do this? mainly because we now have a complete classes based development environment which is used to enable us to add new features extremely quickly. when that is combined with nice pgsql features like triggers which allow us to store a lot of our queries in the database and makes the code so much cleaner (ie when new appointment row created, add this to event log, and that to charge), we have a truly amazing development environment. the next stage for us is to incorporate the ajax cool stuff and really make our baby fly...
the best thing about all of this is that our clients are amazed at how quickly we can churn out custom mods - page layouts are just css, add a new reporting tool is just another row in the database...
stable, secure, platform independent...it is truly the way of the future...
At the risk of grossly oversimplifying a very complicated concept:
From a purely theoretical pov, is there any reason not to be able to do this kind of thing relatively easily anyway? if you're just getting information from streaming data, then surely the analogy would be putting rocks in a river - each rock would represent a set of if/then conditions and the time the water spent passing by the rock would be the time for the system to discretise the data, perform the if loop, then let it pass... the then diverted river represents your outputs from the algorithms..
i guess the trick would come in the discretisation...but then they do describe their processing in 'transactions per second' so is 'real-time data analysis' not just a function of being able to parse the data at sufficient speed...?
(i know very little about databases, but to my lay-eyes this does just sound like a wrong application of the word 'base when it could in fact be closer to an interface to a selection of looped algorithms which you can dynamically alter in a nice pretty way -)
but then trying to remember back to my complex systems courses, you do have to be careful in discretising chaotic functions as they don't play nicely in time...so how do you analyse the data in discrete packets when a key input in their evolution in time may have passed and not been stored...if you have the data to begin with, you have the luxury of being able to choose your approximations and discretisation techniques in advance, but if the data is flowing towards you, how do the rocks in the river know how the river is to be moved if it can't everything going on around it....which somehow brings us on to supersonic shock waves and the end of my rambling...
if anyone has any idea what i'm trying to go on about, feel free to point my wafflings in the right direction...
How about linking this to recipesource and the database telling you what recipes you can make givemn the ingredients you have?
Of course, more practically, this would be one hell of a way to run a professional kitchen - in a restaurant say....just-in-time assembly/manufacture applied to the kitchen. v cool. (IMHO)
Jenson Buttons neck size when he started f1 was a 15.5/16. Now it is 18/18.5. For small guy that is a lot of neck.
Besides which, speaking as an aero engineer, anyone with any sense knows that nomatter how good your aero package is, if you don't have the traction (ie mechanicals and most importantly tyres), the whole lot is wasted as the aero package does so little for you in the slow corners where most of the overtaking is done and where the driver gets the real confidence in his car.
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.
My company has just spent the last 6 months developing one with the help of a number of doctors in the uk. it runs off php5.0 with css to make it very pretty and mysql with innodb (move to pgsql possible for fanatics) over apache and ssl.
It has complete multi-site, multi-user support, billing, direct insurance company integration with bupa, ppp, nu etc (no more 60 day turnaround from bupa to get your cash, we send each claim direct to them (click of button) and they settle in days), online booking and payment solutions, a very powerful appointment search engine designed not to clutter the diary, a queuing system, full audit trail and more...
We have been asked to turn it into an emr system by a large provider and that work will be complete by march with full triage as well as SNOMED and Multilex integration.
It was originally made as a bespoke system for one of my medical clients but we've spun it off and formed a company around it to cope with the demand generated. Interestingly enough our first client has been a very large private physiotherapy provider in london, not the medical client. - they don't need medical records, just a damn good billing and appointments system.
The earlier points about UI are interesting - the lengths we have gone to in order to make this thing pretty are quite strange. Obviously with no right click (yes we could trap it but we don't), button placement is key. Sometimes even having a 'Create appointment' button on the right hand side of a diary was too much of a leap for the users, so we moved it to the left! It doesn't help that doctors are some of the most stubborn people in the world!. In the end, we actually developed 4 independent interfaces for doctors, admin staff (2 levels) and patients - each tailored to their specific needs. That solution has worked out best and it has the added benefit that doctors can be restricted in their meddling on their interface, and they have to think twice about meddling with the admin interface as they are not familiar with it.
I would dearly love to post a link to it here but we are currently moving all our nice servers to a new datacentre and our backup would die. horribly.
At the risk of turning this into an advert (I think i can be excused that as I didn't even post a link to the website), you can email me at this address robbiehughesatgmaildotcom if anyone wants more information. my work address is on the domain that would get swamped.
hmmm...slashcode doesn't seem to support "advert" tags....oh well...sorry...
as part of my aeronautics control systems course we covered this exact thing: control systems designs which had integrated many different panels into one touchscreen - particulrly in the a320. the pilot had to switch modes before performing an action, which he wasn't used to. he'd push 500ft for a slight altitute change and in fact the autopilot would be in 'rate' mode and the aircraft would start falling...quickly....
I heard that story too -- in my version though the student went to the top and dropped the barometer off the top and timed the time took to hit the ground...
agreed, but the distinction is only necessary if that is going to be the case - such as with mobiles... i will be interested to see what happens - will each provider be allocated a batch of numbers?
if i am 12345@sip.provider.com will that translate to 05612345 - clearly not....there would have to be universal (worldwide) application support for this standard for it to be successful so i can call 056123457891 (where 056 is voip, 123 my provider and then 457891 my uid?) from my vonage phone and it to know to call a uk sip no over the net, and not to try and route it through pots....
I'm not convinced assigning a new prefix is a good measure anyway...as time passes the two will surely converge and then you'll be left with a mess of numbers that mean nothing....?
Besides which, the clean running of diesel engines is often overestimated. State of CA did a study (not the 2000 study) in 1997 (IIRC) showing the effects of Small particulate matter on the lungs. The new 'clean' diesel engines are actually making matters worse because they burn the fuel so completely that the particulates being emitted are so small they are no longer filterable - by anything - and they get embedded deep in the lung. At least in the past with older engines, the 'soot' was made up of larger particles you could filter out - be it in the exhaust or in your own bodys natural filtration system.
I can't find the link now, but I know the article well as I worked on a patent for a diesel filtration device in 98/99. Unfortunately we decided it was a wasted endeavour as diesel engine manufacturers were producing more and more engines which produce these fine particles that are just unfilterable (and invisible).
This link (and site) has some interesting facts, but it's not the complete study. http://www.ems.org/diesel/diesel_particula te.html
I've just spent the last 10 minutes trying to get through and this is the first time i've succeeded. It's been going on for about a fortnight now at least. I'm getting maybe a 50% success rate on average....
That EEtimes article missed out one set of people who will never get sucked into the black hole:
Battery makers. - an absolute prerequesite for anything to do with portable electronics, particularly where RF is concerned...
Build a better battery - you do that and you will never need to worry about anything ever again...
I have to say that the BBC coverage of sporting events this year has been absolutely outstanding.
Being able to pick what court you want to watch at Wimbledoon via Digital, then the same tech at the Golf...it's amazing what these guys are doing. Now they're all being sold off to Siemens as 'Technology is not part of our core offering' - what a load of rubbish...anyway..compare that to ITVs low budget offerings and it really puts into perspective why the License Fee can be a good thing...
of course it's a shame they then have to put on shows like that new Spy reality tv thing...
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - he's asking the wrong question. For the best examples of the usage of pde's etc, he should look at any aero eng book. anderson is good (that was my first year) but it's been a while since that now. suggest strolling over to the aero eng dept and asking a professor (or even a fellow phd) for some good books on compressible fluid flow.
Have a two tier service:
1) NAT'd and cheap with a 5gb/week limit
2) Public IP and pricey with no limits.
The students have a public ip so are directly responsible for their actions.
Should be easy enough to do once you have the IPs, just allocate them to the mac addresses of the interface cards and you're set.
oh yes, and check periodically for open access points...
Or a record company wanting a piece of iPod revenue because they are using 'their music' on it...oh wait...
Or get the first year elec eng students to design/build them...nice end of year project and then they keep them for the next 3 years....
after 4 years, recycle and then the 1st years have them too, before building their own...rinse,recycle,repeat...
BT are generally regarded as being crap, but i think the truth of the matter is rather more complicated.
BT is not just BT, it consists of a number of 'arms' that just don't talk to each other. That is fundamentally the problem and that is what was forced on them by regulators.
Their ISDN services are, for example, excellent.
I had to order an ISDN30 line in feb and the location had cable and wireless already providing the isdn30 line so i called them up. They assigned me an account manager and said they would get back to me. I stressed i needed it asap (ideally in 30 days) and they said no prob. no mention of prices or anything, my account manager would manage that.
I waited a few days, and finally called BT for the same thing. BT were able to give me a price and a target install date immediately over the phone so i went with them. They arrived 3 days ahead of the install date and the isdn worked first time. I was installing asterisk and had a couple of config problems so I phoned them up and spoke for half an hour on an 0800 no with an engineer who (although he had never even heard of asterisk) was able to guide me through all the correct settings and we got it running first time.
We also had to have adsl put in and had only one analogue line in the building but (believe it or not) we couldn't find the socket for it. (there were 3 comms rooms and overlapping numbering for sockets) so i phoned up BT. That same day, an engineer came round and took me for a tour. He said he had worked in the area for 20 years and even remembered the layout of the building from when he had been there last. He took me to the frame relay room (of the neighbouring building) and we 'toned' out the socket till we eventually found it terminating in a mess of (disused) cables downstairs. He knocked up a quick patch cable and within minutes we were up and running. The charge for this hour of investigation? £50.
I think the thing is that BT consists of a lot of very good people who are encumbered by a real communications issue through management. They provide excellent support and good SLA's.
What's more, their new pure IP backbone will make them a world leader in comms.
Hate to say it though i do, if BT had not been broken up, all the problems we are having now would not be an issue...
For what it's worth, my account manager at Cable and Wireless phoned me back last week about getting a new line in...3 months after the BT install had gone though.
you should use skyscanner.net
it trawls all the cheap airlines for you and gives you plots of prices over time so you can see when to fly in the month and even in the day
Not sure where they get their data from...
my postcode is wrong as is my nearest tube...
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=angel,+n1&hl=en
although it does have the link in the right place...just not the picture...v odd
I know a couple of barristers in the uk who still do their letters and briefs in LaTex. They just look so much better....
It is so nice to concentrate on content rather than layout...
We've coded an entire medical practice management suite in php5 with pgsql. the whole is is completely oo'd and could not be back ported to php4.
Why do this? mainly because we now have a complete classes based development environment which is used to enable us to add new features extremely quickly. when that is combined with nice pgsql features like triggers which allow us to store a lot of our queries in the database and makes the code so much cleaner (ie when new appointment row created, add this to event log, and that to charge), we have a truly amazing development environment.
the next stage for us is to incorporate the ajax cool stuff and really make our baby fly...
the best thing about all of this is that our clients are amazed at how quickly we can churn out custom mods - page layouts are just css, add a new reporting tool is just another row in the database...
stable, secure, platform independent...it is truly the way of the future...
The easiest, best stats program i've used.
http://www.webalizer.net/
Whack it in webmin and you're laughing.
you will have heard of the concept II. I've yet to go to a uk boathouse that isn't full of them...they're the standard erg you will find everywhere...
At the risk of grossly oversimplifying a very complicated concept:
From a purely theoretical pov, is there any reason not to be able to do this kind of thing relatively easily anyway?
if you're just getting information from streaming data, then surely the analogy would be putting rocks in a river - each rock would represent a set of if/then conditions and the time the water spent passing by the rock would be the time for the system to discretise the data, perform the if loop, then let it pass...
the then diverted river represents your outputs from the algorithms..
i guess the trick would come in the discretisation...but then they do describe their processing in 'transactions per second' so is 'real-time data analysis' not just a function of being able to parse the data at sufficient speed...?
(i know very little about databases, but to my lay-eyes this does just sound like a wrong application of the word 'base when it could in fact be closer to an interface to a selection of looped algorithms which you can dynamically alter in a nice pretty way -)
but then trying to remember back to my complex systems courses, you do have to be careful in discretising chaotic functions as they don't play nicely in time...so how do you analyse the data in discrete packets when a key input in their evolution in time may have passed and not been stored...if you have the data to begin with, you have the luxury of being able to choose your approximations and discretisation techniques in advance, but if the data is flowing towards you, how do the rocks in the river know how the river is to be moved if it can't everything going on around it....which somehow brings us on to supersonic shock waves and the end of my rambling...
if anyone has any idea what i'm trying to go on about, feel free to point my wafflings in the right direction...
How about linking this to recipesource and the database telling you what recipes you can make givemn the ingredients you have?
Of course, more practically, this would be one hell of a way to run a professional kitchen - in a restaurant say....just-in-time assembly/manufacture applied to the kitchen. v cool. (IMHO)
Jenson Buttons neck size when he started f1 was a 15.5/16. Now it is 18/18.5.
For small guy that is a lot of neck.
Besides which, speaking as an aero engineer, anyone with any sense knows that nomatter how good your aero package is, if you don't have the traction (ie mechanicals and most importantly tyres), the whole lot is wasted as the aero package does so little for you in the slow corners where most of the overtaking is done and where the driver gets the real confidence in his car.
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.
A client of mine has an exercise ECG machine that runs win2k.
It keeps changing into french and they have to keep calling out support....
fun.
Mostly, but not entirely true...
My company has just spent the last 6 months developing one with the help of a number of doctors in the uk.
it runs off php5.0 with css to make it very pretty and mysql with innodb (move to pgsql possible for fanatics) over apache and ssl.
It has complete multi-site, multi-user support, billing, direct insurance company integration with bupa, ppp, nu etc (no more 60 day turnaround from bupa to get your cash, we send each claim direct to them (click of button) and they settle in days), online booking and payment solutions, a very powerful appointment search engine designed not to clutter the diary, a queuing system, full audit trail and more...
We have been asked to turn it into an emr system by a large provider and that work will be complete by march with full triage as well as SNOMED and Multilex integration.
It was originally made as a bespoke system for one of my medical clients but we've spun it off and formed a company around it to cope with the demand generated.
Interestingly enough our first client has been a very large private physiotherapy provider in london, not the medical client. - they don't need medical records, just a damn good billing and appointments system.
The earlier points about UI are interesting - the lengths we have gone to in order to make this thing pretty are quite strange. Obviously with no right click (yes we could trap it but we don't), button placement is key. Sometimes even having a 'Create appointment' button on the right hand side of a diary was too much of a leap for the users, so we moved it to the left! It doesn't help that doctors are some of the most stubborn people in the world!. In the end, we actually developed 4 independent interfaces for doctors, admin staff (2 levels) and patients - each tailored to their specific needs. That solution has worked out best and it has the added benefit that doctors can be restricted in their meddling on their interface, and they have to think twice about meddling with the admin interface as they are not familiar with it.
I would dearly love to post a link to it here but we are currently moving all our nice servers to a new datacentre and our backup would die. horribly.
At the risk of turning this into an advert (I think i can be excused that as I didn't even post a link to the website), you can email me at this address robbiehughesatgmaildotcom if anyone wants more information. my work address is on the domain that would get swamped.
hmmm...slashcode doesn't seem to support "advert" tags....oh well...sorry...
as part of my aeronautics control systems course we covered this exact thing:
control systems designs which had integrated many different panels into one touchscreen - particulrly in the a320. the pilot had to switch modes before performing an action, which he wasn't used to. he'd push 500ft for a slight altitute change and in fact the autopilot would be in 'rate' mode and the aircraft would start falling...quickly....
I heard that story too -- in my version though the student went to the top and dropped the barometer off the top and timed the time took to hit the ground...
i quite liked that...
agreed, but the distinction is only necessary if that is going to be the case - such as with mobiles...
i will be interested to see what happens - will each provider be allocated a batch of numbers?
if i am 12345@sip.provider.com will that translate to 05612345 - clearly not....there would have to be universal (worldwide) application support for this standard for it to be successful so i can call 056123457891 (where 056 is voip, 123 my provider and then 457891 my uid?) from my vonage phone and it to know to call a uk sip no over the net, and not to try and route it through pots....
my 2 pence...
Yes, although you can do that already
voip.org.uk - for suppliers.
I'm not convinced assigning a new prefix is a good measure anyway...as time passes the two will surely converge and then you'll be left with a mess of numbers that mean nothing....?
Besides which, the clean running of diesel engines is often overestimated. State of CA did a study (not the 2000 study) in 1997 (IIRC) showing the effects of Small particulate matter on the lungs.
a te.html
The new 'clean' diesel engines are actually making matters worse because they burn the fuel so completely that the particulates being emitted are so small they are no longer filterable - by anything - and they get embedded deep in the lung.
At least in the past with older engines, the 'soot' was made up of larger particles you could filter out - be it in the exhaust or in your own bodys natural filtration system.
I can't find the link now, but I know the article well as I worked on a patent for a diesel filtration device in 98/99. Unfortunately we decided it was a wasted endeavour as diesel engine manufacturers were producing more and more engines which produce these fine particles that are just unfilterable (and invisible).
This link (and site) has some interesting facts, but it's not the complete study.
http://www.ems.org/diesel/diesel_particul
I've just spent the last 10 minutes trying to get through and this is the first time i've succeeded. It's been going on for about a fortnight now at least. I'm getting maybe a 50% success rate on average....
That EEtimes article missed out one set of people who will never get sucked into the black hole: Battery makers. - an absolute prerequesite for anything to do with portable electronics, particularly where RF is concerned... Build a better battery - you do that and you will never need to worry about anything ever again...
I have to say that the BBC coverage of sporting events this year has been absolutely outstanding.
Being able to pick what court you want to watch at Wimbledoon via Digital, then the same tech at the Golf...it's amazing what these guys are doing. Now they're all being sold off to Siemens as 'Technology is not part of our core offering' - what a load of rubbish...anyway..compare that to ITVs low budget offerings and it really puts into perspective why the License Fee can be a good thing...
of course it's a shame they then have to put on shows like that new Spy reality tv thing...