NHS Awards Contract to Microsoft 445
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."
Candy (Score:5, Interesting)
MS probably knows it can still compete in customised applications with its almost unlimited resources.
--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer [iclod.com] [iclod.com] and win Half-Life 2
Re:Candy (Score:5, Insightful)
UIs in Opensource are a really big problem - not because they aren't good, but because they're not _tested_ - UI testing costs money and is not as easy as most people would think.
Most end users are not CLI geeks, and for them usability plays a _VERY_ important role. Which is why, I strongly support the development of an Opensource usability team.
If there are usability geeks around here, maybe we could all pitch in and do something. What do you folks say?
Re:Candy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Candy (Score:5, Informative)
Usability design is not merely throwing together a bunch of buttons, fields and text. It's a whole lot more than that and involves some quite well thought and established principles, both quantitative and qualitative.
The best designs are those that you do not notice and are really intuitive - there is a reason why usability experts get paid so much.
What I suggested was start something of an Opensource UI consulting group, where a bunch of usability experts could pitch in and help out the development of UIs and do some serious usability testing of interfaces.
If you _ever_ worked in any half-decent usability project, you'd realize that the time and effort that goes into the precise positioning of a button involves a whole lot more than meets the eye.
Re:Candy (Score:2, Interesting)
I haven't actually read any of them, but I like the idea.
There are some pretty clear points you can make about user interfaces that I never did a specific course on, and therefore never learned.
For instance, people nowadays know to look for "OK" and "Cancel", so you don't go changing that to "Proceed" and "Retreat". Tab order is really important. Borders and colours to break up the screen are really useful. This is the kind of thing all UI p
Re:Candy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Candy (Score:3, Interesting)
You know how you see an ellipsis (...) after some menu options?
That's meant to mean the menu item will open a dialog. It's been an Apple Interface Guideline for years I think, and it seems to be fairly consistent now across platforms. I wonder how many people notice it?
Re:Candy (Score:2)
Re:Candy (Score:4, Informative)
Right, it's not a 'dialog'....it is what's known as a 'modal' window, meaning it floats over the action, as an interrupter/error/alert, not offering an alternate path according to the program's normal flow.
If it were designed to act and react the same as a 'dialog window' (representing a flow with choices to proceed), it would then present a similar impression to the user, and thus not serve the purpose intended, which is to act as an alert, to which you say 'OK', I got it, let's go back to work. (and then try something else...something else that is not tied to the halt brought about by the alert).
Re:Candy (Score:3, Insightful)
Computers should always offer a way out as an option, and not just present a deadend, which is one difference between Windows and Mac OS... I use Mac OS because the concept of alerts (among many other things) reflects respect for the user, and the logic is carefully applied. Window
Re:Candy (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually think it's quite sensible. After all, once I've read the message and maybe written it down on a convenient piece of scrap paper, there's not much else I can do apart from get rid of the requester. If I was wearing a tinfoil hat and looking out for black helicopters, though, I'd say labelling the button as "OK" was a way of getting users tacitly to approve of error messages such as "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" and accept them as a fact of life.
Re:Candy (Score:3, Interesting)
Error messages are rarely meaningful, but often if you search for the error message on the web you find some useful info or advice.
Instead you have to copy it down on a piece of paper (and pen and paper should never be necessary for using a computer).
Re:Candy (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Candy (Score:3, Interesting)
Any time I hear anybody complain about a UI it's always the same complaint "this does not work the same as the program I am familiar with". It seems to have nothing to with whether the system is easier to use, arrainged more logically, layed out better on the screen, has better graphics or anything.
To me UI guys are simply people who police the windows WIMP paradigm. If MS changes their UI then voila now you guys enforce the new MS look.
If you ask me there
Re:Candy (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been asked a few questions about voice-recognition too.
People have latched onto the whole 9-key typing of SMSs pretty well. But you're right, people only want to learn things once.
If you have the choice between a normal bike or one that will take a little while to get used to, which one you gonna choose?
On the other hand, if the other one has a motor, people will see the benefit and make the effort to switch.
There's a sort of friction thing going on. Once you overcome static friction the resistive force isn't so much...
Re:Candy (Score:3, Informative)
I believe it was Alias PortfolioWall [alias.com]. I've seen it used primarily with gestures, which never seemed to work well. People would drag right for the next slide, but get so lost that an assistant at the keyboard had to help. The guy on TV stuck to simple button pushing and map zooming, which was effective.
Exactly! (Score:3, Informative)
HCI consultancy not the issue (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Candy (Score:5, Insightful)
When Microsoft introduced "task oriented" design (such as with folders and control panel applets), they didn't forget about the old users, leaving the option to revert to "classic" views. For the most part, my Windows XP desktop at work looks like Windows 95, and I like it like that.
Gnome, on the other hand, strived so much for usable software that they alienated their userbase, and thus we have GoneME [goneme.org]--indeed, their Project Goals [goneme.org] are admirable.
So much is focused on making opensource pass the Mom test, but I'm afraid of it failing the experienced users test in the process.
--sean
Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people forget the overhead costs of switching to an entirely new system.
However, it's worth noting that this is more of a short-term decision than a long-term one. If they did switch to Opensource solutions now, it would cost them money in the immediate future, and loss of productivity.
However, 5 years from now, once the people are quite used to the new system - it would be a breeze. However, 5 years down the line, the same argument would be used to once again not switch to Opensource.
It's a vicious circle, and you would have to break out of it at some point of time or the other.
Re:Costs (Score:2)
Nine years is a time to be trapped with one vendor. One would hope that Linux will be
Re:Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
See, you would need to expose people to the new system, and unless you do, you will never make it popular.
People are used to Windows because it's popular. Why do they want Windows? Because they are used to it.
Unless other alternatives slowly start creeping in, it's going to be next to impossible.
Yes, you'd have to break the user-base at some point of time or the other, but it needs to start _somewhere_.
Not unless we all want to be using Microsoft products 10 years down the line, too.
Re:Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, I agree with you, and I think that this behaviour is lame. As more work is done by corporations like Red Hat and SuSe on the desktop, as SCO dies and burns in hell, as organizations that are less "risk averse" start switching to Linux on the desktop, things will get better because the stodgy organizations won't feel like they're sticking their necks out so far.
Now, if IBM were to switch their desktops internally to Linux, and publish their results...
Re:Costs (Score:5, Interesting)
You're forgetting one more point - all the software they use runs on Windows. Sure, most of it may well have an equivalent alternative for Linux, but in my case that's certainly not all.
Sure, that's not true of the average office worker, who really only needs email, web access, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, but that's the thing about averages; they don't apply to everyone...
Re:Costs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Costs (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux on the desktop will happen, but it will start with call centres, budget airlines, etc, i. e. in situations where the set of software that people are using is small and standardised and there is a lot of pressure to reduce costs, where people need small amounts of training on the software, and where staff turnover is high (you are loosing the knowledge that people have of existing software anyway when they leave).
Once it starts getting used extensively in these kind of environments, it might gain sufficient critical mass to overcome the "we use Windows because it is popular" trap.
Re:Costs (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say its because they think they are used to it. Windows has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 10 years in terms of user interface.
I have personal experience of migrating desktops to Linux. There is often a perceived need for retraining that in practice is often way in excess of the real need. There may be some end-user irritation at the changes in interface, but I rarely find that the
Re:Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Costs (Score:2)
The worst I've seen along this line is users who insist on attempting the MS Office "open file" dialogue box for all file management.
Re:Costs (Score:2, Insightful)
I know if I got a job as a carpenter I wouldn't go around saying "Oh, I don't care about circular saws". Sure, you don't need to know how to build one or fix one, but you should know how to use it.
Re:Costs (Score:2)
Yeah, I can see that. In the enterprise software deployments I've done I've seen so much complaining about stupid things, baseless complaints, complaints that buttons are in a different place, complaints that things are different (duh, it's a different fricking product), etc. that I totally agree. Most of the users
Re:Costs (Score:3, Informative)
These arguments really aren't as compelling as they seem. If you split it up in to three levels...
Servers
I'm talking about everything from nationwide databases down to local hospital medical records, from DNS to authentication and filestore. These have always been a mixture of Netware and Unix servers at the higher end, with perhaps Windows boxes more recently for lower end stuff at smaller institutions. Retraining? Not really - the guys administrating these have a Netware and Unix background and ha
Re:Costs (Score:2)
Similary they forget that the "Microsoft route" actually involves switching every few years anyway...
Re:Costs (Score:2)
And with Microsoft's release schedules slipping, it looks like the support timelines for things like Windows XP will be as long as the support from Red Hat for Enterprise Linux (5 years). Oops! Fortunately, Red Hat will have two new OS releases before Microsoft gets one new one out.
Re:Costs (Score:2)
Re:Costs (Score:3, Informative)
A quick hint, the NHS employs somthing in excess of 1.3 million people.
Re:Costs (Score:2)
For the non-british (e.g. me) (Score:5, Informative)
OGC - Office of Government Commerce
£500 million - $924 million
Re:For the non-british (e.g. me) (Score:2)
DoH = Department of Health
and I'm not sure what ISV means - anybody know?
Re:For the non-british (e.g. me) (Score:3, Informative)
Basically any company you can purchase a software "solution" from. May be a single app, or a collection of applications bundled into a single set of services.
Re:For the non-british (e.g. me) (Score:2, Troll)
£500 million - US$924 million
LOTS of countries use $ as their currency symbol.
a week? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sales cycle takes time, effort, contact (Score:5, Insightful)
.
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?
Re:Sales cycle takes time, effort, contact (Score:2)
There's also plenty more too it (Score:3, Interesting)
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 diff
Re:There's also plenty more too it (Score:3, Informative)
actually, judging from the numerous "warning to users of [x] - [y] doesnt compile under new kernel" posts everytime news of a new kernel gets posted to /., it seems to me that ms
Longevity (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [joelonsoftware.com] 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 mot
Re:There's also plenty more too it (Score:4, Interesting)
new kernel gets posted to /., it seems to me that ms's backwards compatibility record is alot better than linux's
As someone who remembers downloading SLS Linux one floppy at a time from a BBS over a mighty 2400 baud modem, I recall that once I got the base installed, I used Minicom, gzip, tar, and bash in my efforts.
To my knowledge, there is no SLS Linux anymore, BBSes are either gone, or moved to the Internet, 2400 baud modems are considered intolerably slow (and are only supported as a fallback protocol that is almost never used). I still use all of those apps. I used fvwm as my window manager once I had X up. Fvwm is still available today should I choose to use it. I can use it with gtk even though gtk wasn't even thought of when fvwm was the default window manager. I recently switched from XFree86 to Xorg. Nothing else had to be changed.
When the Internet started to be available to non-university students, I got a shell account. I used Slirp to make it act like a slip account. It's still available [sourceforge.net].
I still have a few disks with DOS/Windows software from the same era, but it's useless because it won't run on a recent Windows OS.
Perhaps you don't hear much about it when a new Windows breaks old apps because it's not news. It's just par for the course. Or it may be that you don't hear about it because there's nothing to discuss. Nobody has the source, so nobody needs to know what to change to fix it. Nobody is deciding if it's worth the effort to update it because nobody has a way TO update it. It's just gone.
Great deal for the department (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2)
A Linux system would be based on open file formats. Also, Microsoft are after the embedded market so they would make sure that your life support machine running (some of the time) on Windows CE works very well, and very exclusively, with the desktop/server environment of the hospital.
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to disregard the assumption about the proportion of costs eaten up by independent consultants vs. sales & support through contracts (which can essentially be part of that sales figure). Instead, I'd say that this shouldn't always be the case.
In the long-long term, Linux support costs should decrease. Simple supply-vs-demand. T
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2)
> doesn't result into 'lock in'
OK, here's one way.
Current Windows platform of choice, as put forward by MS, is C#,
At some point in your design/development, you decide to move to Linux, so you do the following:
- build a Linux server running Mono
- take your
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2)
Sorry to ask so harsh, but are so dumb not to realize how much 500 Million GBP (= almost 1 billion USD) is?
With that kind of money you can hire hundreds of technicians, programmers and support staff.
I think finally Microsoft has succeeded in their mant
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:3, Informative)
Half a billion pounds - close to a billion dollars - that's a lot of money. That buys a lot of custom code. And you're sure about this, are you?
Of course you've got the numbers at hand to back it up, or you wouldn't have stated it so positively, would you.
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:3, Insightful)
He who has his data in an obscure format gets fucked in the ass with a big stick at migration time.
The wise man, with his data in XML files you can read in a text editor, goes merrily on his way shouting 'fuck you and the £500m bill you just sent me' to his vendor.
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot about the public. The NHS pissed away $800 million of public money that could have been spent on making people well, instead of lining the pockets of Microsoft and whoever had to be paid off to land the deal.
What a stupid comment. Obviously the NHS should be able to run their IT infrastructure for free. This is because it will be powered by hopes, and dreams, and maintained by leprachauns.
Then we would all join hands and sing about rainbows.
Meanwhile, back here in the real world.....
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2)
How do you know the deal was deeply discounted? From what? What did the previous 9 years cost? Are you going to believe the Microsoft-approved press release about the so-called discount?
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2)
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:2)
Dear anonymous coward,
Software costs essentially nothing to produce. A 35% percent discount on a huge volume deal is not sharp negotiating, it is getting taken to the cleaners.
Re:Great deal for the department (Score:3, Interesting)
The price of hardware has been falling for years, there is competition in the hardware market, hardware is getting better and cheaper at an astonishing rate..
The price of software has just been going up, because there is little or no competition, and there are underhanded ways to eliminate competition than making a better product..
It still costs real money to produce a piece of hardware, it costs absoloutely nothing to produce a "windows license", hardware is a physical item
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
From personal experience, government contracts like that can often take years to design and bid.
Okay (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Okay (Score:2)
BTW any CEO/CIO what agrees to a nine year contract for anything with any vendor ought to be fired on the spot. What kind of a moron does that?
Re:Okay (Score:3, Insightful)
I think security really does in effect boil down to the user / sysadmin. A good knowledgable user/sysadmin is far less likely to be compromised that a person who doesnt hold the qualifications. It doesnt matter whether the underlying system is Linux or Windows.
I THINK the Granparent poster is tryign to say that out of the most, a RECENT copy of Apache installed in its default settings MAY be more secure than a RECENT copy of IIS, also installed with the default s
Linux as a viable OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux is great for certain things but practice management would be a disaster without custom software.
Re:Linux as a viable OS? (Score:2)
500 million pounds should be more than sufficient to fix that problem (sounds like a 50,000 pound problem to me).
Re:Linux as a viable OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
You say that as if it's a bad thing! I don't understand why; from the beginning UNIX was designed to use multiple programs together to complete a task. That's what pipes and shell scripts are for, after all.
Now, I realize that at the moment graphical Linux apps might not work together all that well, so you do have a point. However, that doesn't mean that the situation won't improve in the future. D-BUS [freedesktop.org] in particular looks promising.
Re:Linux as a viable OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an application called "DentalPro" that my father, a dentist, used for years on his 80286 PC running Dos 5.0. It was based on Foxpro. It does EVERYTHING - dunning messages, insurance claims, dispute claims, the works. It came on a 1.2 MB 5.25" floppy set. The only limitation is that it's a single-user system, for smaller practices.
It works like a charm under Freedos on a Linux system, in a termminal window over SSH! The only thing tha
something uplifting please (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Re:something uplifting please (Score:2)
No, they'll still be great leaps. Just, backwards.
Here's how MS does it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Knighthood (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Knighthood (Score:3, Funny)
Windows didn't win contracts its first 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Linux should do the same. Can't expect to be birthed ready to run a marathon.
Re:Windows didn't win contracts its first 10 years (Score:3, Informative)
The workgrouping was done by Novell servers, by and large, well before MS was anywhere in that league.
That was tried and true tech, so, by your argument, it should have held that market.
MS advertised to the management structure (not the tech staff) that anyone could administer an NT server. So, many companies took this challenge, and stripped out the Novell servers to put in NT, and got rid of the old Novell admins, to try and save money having basic s
Not the right time or situation (Score:4, Insightful)
BSOD (Score:3, Funny)
Re:BSOD (Score:2)
It's just a recommendation (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
£30 billion (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
Beep, Beep, Beep, Booooooop (Score:3, Funny)
Doesn't suprise me a bit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
NHS IT is too fragmented. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Doesn't suprise me a bit (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow I don't think that was what the IRA had in mind when they fought for a united Ireland.
So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
This seems like a pretty sweet deal... (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source if not quite ready for prime time, is already showing its power in competetive situations..
Thank fsck for that (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux is making inroads (Score:5, Informative)
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
Background (Score:5, Informative)
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
NHS Massive changes (Score:5, Informative)
Linuxs Issues for Admistrators/Corproate users. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
really? (Score:2, Informative)
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 ci
yeah but (Score:2)
Oops, sorry, wrong OS troll....
Re:Stop saying Linux is ready (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stop saying Linux is ready (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Acronymity (Score:3, Funny)
Well, after hearing the election results, Microsoft figured the dollar was going to tank soon....
Re:Tell That To The Underpaid Doctors & Nurses (Score:4, Insightful)
>>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.