Try aviation GPS, that's a whole new level of comfortable. Instead of correlating the information presented to you by a bunch of different gauges tuned to 60yr old radio beacons you just follow the pink line. Need to land at an airport in thick fog? No problem; switch on approach mode and simply fly through the boxes displayed on the screen, or enable synthetic vision mode and you essentially get a video-game recreation of the terrain, runway, everything.. just not the fog.

Another poster was right, GPS is just a bunch of clocks sending out pulses whose transit times you compare to establish location, but the quality of applications designed around it is simply stunning. One of the best inventions of the 20th century in my opinion.

Not the case for CSC though. They're on pay-per-deployment. When trying to deploy a single-instance system shared between many organisations with minimal tiered config scope creep is bad. Very bad.

It's a shame these big contracts are being allowed to tarnish all the achievements which have been made. Digital x-rays, scans etc enjoy 100% coverage across the UK; consultants can get a second opinion from someone 100 miles away in minutes, instead of sending x-rays in the back of a taxi to another city.

Electronic referrals from GPs (family doctors) for hospital treatment are in the tens of thousands per day and GP2GP record transfers for people changing doctors are becoming widespread. All NHS sites are connected by the N3 network.

The big sticking points are the large hospital trusts and their systems; in London and the south the system of choice was Cerner Millennium (a bastardised billing system from the US market not particularly well suited to the NHS), and in the North it was iSOFT's Lorenzo (a web-based system built specifically for the NHS, but built by coders in India who have no idea how the NHS works). In all fairness, despite its lack of suitability Millennium is up and running at quite a number of big hospitals. Lorenzo has been delayed for many years and is only just becoming usable, although it's hardly what one could describe as feature rich at this point in time.

Aside from software issues, one of the major issues the suppliers had was trying to be too helpful; every hospital will insist they are somehow unique and by pandering to every possible requirement the scope of the software build simply exploded.

Trivialising the scale of the task shows considerable naivety in the working of the NHS, but it definitely could have been done at a fraction of the cost. The national-level architecture (NHS Spine) whilst showing its age a little now, is still valid in its construction; a national interchange which any software complying to the relevant messaging standards can interact with.

As you've probably guessed, I'm involved in this particular industry. The intentions from a patient care and modernisation perspective were honourable, but the huge contracts for specific things from specific suppliers were a mistake.

Congratulations. You have just illustrated every aspect of the problem very well indeed. The other issue is that US media is so insular that folks simply don't have any idea what goes on elsewhere in the world. They hear "socialism" and "communism" and get all upset when its nothing of the kind.

Don't get me wrong, I like plenty of things about America, but the healthcare system sucks. Ours is far from perfect, but care is completely abstracted from the ability to pay which can only ever be described as a good thing.

The fact that America has such an utterly fucked healthcare system is the reason I've turned down 3 jobs which would involve moving there. If you have a medical condition which needs treatment the last thing folks should have to worry about is whether or not they can afford it. I do agree that the US has a serious pill-popping culture, but seeing news stories about people dying prematurely because they can't afford medication can only be described as third world.

In the UK healthcare is free, and there is a fixed charge for prescription items (£7.40) no matter what they're for. But this doesn't preclude you from paying for things if that's what you want... If you don't want to wait a couple of months for your hip replacement to be done on the NHS you can pay to go private and have it done the next day complete with tidy filipino nurses and in-room wine list etc. Chances are you'll get the exact same surgeon, just that he's doing private work on the side for the extra cash

It's truly mind boggling to see Americans on the news screaming in protest against healthcare reforms because they believe without question the outright bullshit spread by those with a financial interest in making you pay as much as possible. I think it inaccurate to describe the US as a developed nation whilst they retain such a discriminatory and unfair healthcare provision.

You ARE joking, right?

You'll get no argument from me in regard to the shortcomings of Novell's business strategy, but eDirectory was light years ahead of AD for over a decade. AD 2008 is pretty good, but it still lacks many of the enterprise class features of eDirectory. Whilst ConsoleOne was a source of constant irritation bulk user management was trivial when using tools like the JRB utilities. I used to manage an eDirectory with over 100,000 users and it barely broke a sweat.

From a core file/print perspective Netware simply kicked ass; the technology behind filesystems like NSS makes NTFS look positively prehistoric. AD and NTFS don't even have a proper inherited rights implementation, I mean come on?! Layer stuff like Identity Manager, Zen and Storage Manager on top of it and you've got complete workflow management, policy driven desktop config and app delivery, and intelligent dynamic storage management. The clustering support was also excellent.

Of the 2 local universities 1 runs OES (netware services on Linux, basically) and the other moved to Windows. The support costs at the latter went through the roof.

Personally I don't care either way any more; I'm well out of the hands-on NOS management space. What I see these days when recruiting is that those with pure Windows experience can support Windows. Those with Netware experience can support anything.

Ok, having RTFA again I see he was actually in the USA when he was arrested. In that case, good luck fella; you'll need it.

If he lives in the Philippines he may not have broken any laws whatsoever. The way America thinks they can apply their laws to anyone on earth, regardless of location or citizenship is simply preposterous.

I thought it was impossible to actually delete a Facebook account? Sure, you can deactivate it, but not delete as far as I can remember.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

The R2 scream. A proper, and possibly the most impressive R2 noise, IMHO. I have it as my SMS alert. It royally pisses off my work colleagues.

There's plenty of flexibility on TimeMachine backups. I've been using TimeWarp to backup to my Amazon S3 account for ages, and before that I used some cheap HD hung off a DSL router, mounted as a NAS. A quick and simple shell command is all that's required to allow TM backups to "unsupported" targets.

No, I'm not mistaken. We're not talking about holding it on the clutch; that's a whole different discussion. We're talking about being stationary, with clutch in and footbrake applied.

Most modern diesels have sufficient torque suddenly letting the clutch out with no gas will not cause it to stall, it'll just drive off at engine idle speed.

Most countries with mainly manual transmission cars teach to put it in neutral when stopped. Reason being that if someone hits you from behind and your foot comes off the clutch the car is a hazard as it's in gear and could injure others when it drives off with you unconscious at the wheel. Someone hits you in neutral you've only got the energy from the smash to play with.

Noone's suggesting putting it in neutral whilst driving, but say you're in slow moving traffic, going down a hill at walking pace, car stays in neutral, engine stays stopped. As soon as the car hits 5mph the engine restarts without any input from the driver.

It behaves perfectly well in cold weather. I have a 2.0L/200bhp diesel BMW in the UK where it's been sub-zero (that's on the rest-of-the-world temperature scale) for the last month. A number of pre-requisites have to be met for the car to commence the start-stop behaviour, such as the engine having warmed up sufficiently, battery charged etc.. There's also a button on the dash to disable it as it can get a little annoying during rush hour due to frequent stopping in heavy traffic. It took a couple of weeks to get used to, but it now feels strange to sit at the lights with the engine running. It's very fast aswell; kills the engine below 5mph when the car is in neutral and clutch is out, then the moment you hit the clutch to pop her back in gear she fires up again, so quickly that it's almost impossible to get your foot on the gas before she's running.

Not sure how they plan to implement it for cars which run in "stupid mode" (automatic transmission); presume it'll crank it when you take your foot off the brake to drive off.

BMW specifically recommend NOT warming the car up for long periods before driving off; it's no longer necessary due to today's technology, nicosil-plated cylinders etc...

Well let's see... the only copyright issues with jailbreaking are the teens using pirated apps; you know... the teens who wouldn't buy them because whilst they've blagged an iPhone out of daddy, they don't actually have any money.

The possibility of damaging the device is practically zero. You could do it with the 1st iPhone if you tried really hard, but it's practically impossible with 3G and later.

Potentially harmful physical effects?! WTF does that mean? You might stain your pants because jailbreaking gives you the choice of installing that strip poker app which got barred from the app store?

FUD, FUD and more FUD.