Posts by Shagbag 832 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
That's my goal - to have a number of houses in different tax jurisdictions and spend my retirement in each of them - experiencing the 'eternal summer' and not being TAX resident in any one. I've been a net contributor to the tax pot all my life so far, so I will try and be a net drain on it in retirement. Fuck 'em.
Apple restricts supply and then says "hey, we've sold out".
Microsoft announces "100m Win8 licenses sold" when the real figure is closer to 60% of that.
Now Samsung says they've "sold 10m units in a month".
It's all a load of bollocks.
Samsung fail. Apple fail. And, of course, ....
MICROSOFT FAIL!
The legislature makes the laws but the judiciary interpret them.
"Three of Apple's subsidiaries, he added, 'sure seem to fit that description'." LMAO. "seem to" != "do" and, besides, it's up to the judiciary to determine if any laws have been broken, not the legislature.
EXACTLY.
I've posted about this before and been down-voted by gutless AC type faggots.
HTC only need around 3 phones (all Android) and they should focus their efforts on those three. One of those three should be a high-spec re-introduction of the HTC Wildfire which was, unquestionably, their best phone ever and would sell like 'wildfire' if they re-introduced it (but with high specs).
The HTC One is really nice and the HTC One Mini is looking very promising. With a line up of all 3 (incl. NO WinPho), there is no question HTC will return to profitability. Big time.
There you go. Comments from the 'Super CEO'.
As a Chartered Accountant, I must say "WTF does that mean?". It's management-speak gone wrong.
"to realise" means to convert into cash, eg. to realise the value of your home by selling it.
"capitalised" means any debt due to yourself (ie. you're owed money from someone else) is reflected in the balance sheet as an asset and "capitalised loans" means any form of receivables that are currently listed in the balance sheet as assets.
So, "to realise capitalised loans" means calling in a debt or selling it on to some debt-collector.
How raising equity can result in 'realising' capital loans is fucking bizarre.
Maybe it's just me, but this type of comment really gives me the shits. How dare he say that any taxpayer is not allowed to structure his/her/their affairs so as to limit the incidence of tax. Imposing taxes is not a God-given right and it shits me when politicians behave as though it is.
They make the rules. Taxpayers follow them. Some do it stupidly, others are more responsible with THEIR money (not the Government's).
I'm not sure MSFT had a choice. If you remember at the time, Nokia's Symbian phone sales were being eroded by the (then rising) Android phones and MSFT was still peddling the morobund Windows Mobile. It was not so much the Belle finding the Beau, it was more two fuglies getting it on out of desperation.
Agreed. Telco price gouging sent customers away in droves. But the Telcos will never admit it. They'll come out with some 'spin' crap on how consumers don't want quality this-or-that. Just like what we're hearing about Silicon Roundabout and a 'shortage of developers', when what they really mean is a 'shortage of developers willing to take a hefty pay cut just to work in Silicon Roundabout when they can get better paid elsewhere eg. The City'.
It's another FAIL.
It's easy to grow the fastest when you come from a very low base.
WinPho with a 27% growth rate = increase of 1.4m quarter-on-quarter.
Android with a 9% growth rate = increase of 13.7m quarter-on-quarter.
Look at the Q12013 numbers Android was shipped on 163.5m phones, while WinPho was shipped on 6.5m phone. So for every person that bought a WinPho, 25 others bought an Android. Like I said, no-one is really that interested in WinPho and it's been that case for some time now.
Elop will be out by the end of the year and his MSFT exclusivity agreement will be thrown out with him.
This is getting ridiculous. Nokia either just don't get it or their design team need some sort of cathartic release. Yet again we see another sexy piece of hardware from Nokia that is handicapped with an OS that no one really wants.
Elop will be out on his ass by the end of the year. Taking his MSGR exclusivity agreement with him.
"Shock! Horror! UK companies who do international business aim to minimise their costs"
Big bloody deal. Tax avoidance is a feature of any tax system. It has been going on for centuries and it will continue to go on. The capitalist system is not perfect. It never has been. It never will be. But it's a damn site better than the alternatives. If you don't like it, go and live in France or Sweden or any other Western European country that 'enjoys' taxing the crap out of their citizens.
TBH, I can't see McDonalds or Burger King being interested in this while the cost of farm-raised eyelid, gonad, sphincter and colon are considerably cheaper. There's also the question of whether the new product qualifies as "100% Beef". For although the former 4 do, it's questionable whether in-vitro produced product could be said to have come from the beast.
"Microsoft paid $8.5bn for Skype in 2011, $1.5bn over the price sought by the venture capitalist and investor consortium that owned the loss-making web telco. Microsoft had been the only bidder in a non-existent fray to snatch Skype"
They paid $1.5bn above the asking price with no-one else bidding? That's one hell of a 'mastermind'.
"Microsoft’s 'licences sold' numbers include copies of Windows sold to PC makers, so they tell us what the channel has been willing to buy or what volume customers have swallowed rather than what’s actually being deployed on new machines."
I'd argue 90%+ of 'licenses sold' are sales from MSFT to PC makers with 10% accounting for direct sales to consumers.
The 90%+ doesn't give any indication as to
(a) how many of those PCs are actually sold to an end user,
(b) how many that are 'sold' to an end user are returned,
(c) how MSFT prices its Win7 licenses to PC makers vs. Win8 licenses.
I'd expect:
(a) not many - given the slowdown in PC growth and the poor profit results of the big PC makers,
(b) a lot of Win8 machines being returned,
(c) Win7 license cost >>>>> Win 8 license cost so that PC makers are compelled to buy Win8 or face no profit margin on a Win7 machine.
It's all academic, really, because this whole Win8 episode has been a failure for MSFT of epic proportions. All that shareholders' money wasted on software (ie. Metro) that no-one really wants.
Win8 = EPIC FAIL.
As soon as I saw he was in it, I said "I bet you he's the bad guy...because he's British".
It is becoming boring that Hollywood is always casting the bad guy with a British accent.
To think that an American can't play the baddie is ridiculous. You just have to look at the last 10 years to see how many Americans have blown up fellow Americans and then compare that with the number of Brits who have done it (zero).
“respond to the customer feedback that we’ve been closely listening to since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT"... but people were complaining WAY before the launch.
“building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs.” Fuck me, do they actually believe the crap they write?
The only 'listening' MSFT does is to the sound of the cash register. If they can't here it, they decide to do something. Really, this is a sad, old, tired monopolist whose grown too fat and can no longer respond in any way that could be considered timely.
MSFT doesn't listen to end consumers, MSFT doesn't listen to its hardware partners. MSFT is dying. Windows 8 is a FAIL. Windows 'BLUE' is a desperate attempt to breathe life into the corpse of the PC market.
It is bizarre that MSFT still continues to develop desktop OSes at a regular pace when the world has said "we want mobile". MSFT still doesn't get it and it's heading for an EPIC FAIL!
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