Daily Grind Of Still Water

This helps explain why the UK was able to weather the collapse of share prices from 2000 to 2003 without damage to demand, because houses went on increasing in value.But naturally, were house prices to soften, the impact on wealth would be correspondingly large in the other direction.. It takes more than a pink tie to make a prime minister. Gordon Brown’s pre-prime ministerial posturing this week stuck in the gullet. If the Chancellor is going to be “on approval” for the next 12 months, I suppose at least we can flesh out the main elements in his credo – such as health policy. Six years ago, almost to the day, a bizarre struggle broke out between the two most senior ministers of Her Majesty’s Government. As part of this conflict, the Prime Minister appeared on breakfast TV and sought to bolster his “real Labour” credentials by suddenly promising a 2 per cent shift in GDP in favour of health.
No 11’s initial response was hostile. But the Chancellor, realising that he was potentially being outmanoeuvred, then did a complete U-turn Suddenly, 2 per cent was barely enough.

In the ensuing bidding war for the heart of the Labour Party, the UK ended up with one of the most dramatic peacetime government initiatives in history.We spent £44.6bn on the NHS in 2000; we are set to spend closer to £90bn in 2008. In the past few years it has absorbed nearly 40 per cent of the Government’s discretionary budget, and if we carry on spending at this rate, by 2008 all increases in government spending will be absorbed by this one priority.Where has all this money – your money – gone? Yes, in some ways there are visible signs of improvement, such as shorter waiting lists (though some doubt the validity of the statistics).But overall, it is rather difficult to see the dramatic flourishing of the NHS that this doubling of expenditure would imply. The sad, indeed tragic, truth is that by the Government’s own admission 73 per cent of this shower of bounty has gone into so-called “cost pressures”.Chief among these has been the wage inflation among healthcare professionals. A couple of weeks ago at a march in Berlin, German doctors carried placards that read: “England, we are on our way”. Who can blame them? Our doctors are now the best paid in Europe, having had a 30 per cent pay rise in the past three years alone.

The average GP now earns 45 per cent more than his German counterpart (and nearly nine times his equivalent in Poland).At least having the best-paid doctors (and nurses) in Europe might give us hope for a high-quality service, but why hand out largesse to drugs companies? A recently leaked government study found that the UK pays nearly 20 per cent more for branded drugs than nearly every other country in Europe.This is why, despite the cash raining down from the Treasury (and this is where the bizarre becomes ridiculous), nearly a quarter of NHS trusts are on the verge of deficit, and overall the service is in the red by some £620m a year.Where on Earth do we go from here? In the first place, quite simply, we need to put the brakes on all this spending, and fast. “When it comes to the approach to business here, the French may have invented the word entrepreneur but they do not always recognise it.” After a pause he adds: “But we are getting better. I have to be positive about my country.”His promise to blue-chip clients such as Boeing, BMW, Toyota, Porsche and Nokia is compelling: “faster, better, cheaper” processes and products, as their far-flung teams of designers and engineers collaborate cohesively in real time courtesy of Dassault 3D simulated images on their screens.Charl?insists there is no need for expensive physical prototypes as the final, virtual prototypes can be verified digitally, so costs and lead times to market are slashed and factory production capacity can be optimised.Dassault software does not come cheap and businesses must also be willing to make radical changes to the way they operate, to embrace digital management of the life cycle of their products.But evidently Charl? messianic zeal and the power of IBM’s sales and consulting machine, to which Dassault has hooked its wagon, has convinced many. He led the company’s thrust into design software and became its chief executive in 2002.With his lithe figure, contagious optimism and explosive energy, he is a dead ringer for the American genius of dance, Gene Kelly.

When it is suggested he might resemble the star of An American in Paris, he laughs: “Some days, yes.”If only, he continues, his fellow countrymen could be so nimble on their feet. He had graduated with honours as a mechanical engineer from one of France’s most intellectually rigorous universities, the Ecole Normale Sup?eure in Cachan. “Why build a product that may not work, when in the virtual world you can verify if it will work or not?”Charl?was 26 years old when he joined Dassault in 1983 to lead teams developing new technologies. On the banks of the Seine, in the bourgeois Parisian suburb of Suresnes, on the seventh floor of an undistinguished building, Bernard Charl?is pacing about his functional little office. The irrepressible chief executive of France’s Dassault Syst?s is explaining how he sees the world in digital 3D, saying: “All physical products, no matter what, should be designed and made, end to end, with our simulated 3D software.”

Dassault is a €5.3bn (£3.6bn) group whose innovative computer-aided design (CAD) software has revolutionised the construction of planes, cars, boats, factories, watches, mobile phones – even a dam in Canada, and architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao.
“Only when manufacturers have looked at every aspect of the design and construction of their products, and verified that they will perform via virtual 3D software, should they be authorised to use the energy, resources and material to build them,” Charl?argues.

Ordinary models are available for between £500 and £600, and may well have more features than the P8.But if portability is the main criterion, the P8 is the model to opt for.RATING: 4 out of 5PROS: ultra-lightweight and compactPROS: no digital input; portability comes at a priceCOST: around £1,200 plus VATCONTACT: www.toshiba.co.uk. A digital (DVI) connector would give a sharper image, although an analogue-only input might be an acceptable compromise in return for the P8’s portability.The P8 is also significantly more expensive, at around £1,200, than a standard projector. This is fine if the person giving the presentation is standing ahead of the screen, but less useful if someone is driving the projector from the back of the room, as they might be if they are playing audio-visual material, such as DVDs.The other issue is that the P8 only has an analogue video interface. The picture is XGA standard and compatible with high-definition DVD or TV standards, and the image is crisp and bright. In our test, the P8 handled basic video from a DVD without a glitch, and computer-generated images, such as PowerPoint, with ease.There are plenty of adjustment options for the image, which can be accessed via the remote control or from the buttons on top of the projector. One of the more useful is “automatic keystone”, which straightens the edges of the image if the projector is at an angle. This is a problem that is most acute with small projectors, as they tend to be used nearer to the screen.The P8 does have a couple of minor drawbacks.