Posts by Eek

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

I love the fact that we seem to have gone back to the old Wyse terminals secretaries used to be given back in the 1980s..

Given the price a new Mac mini at $599 is a bargain...

IPSE: More than a third of freelancers have quit contracting since IR35 reforms

Re: It's made my life simpler.

Oh HMRC are very clear in who should pay the bill when it goes wrong.

I've called HMRC's IR35 helpline as the "feepayer" to ask that exact question and the answer was pass the bill to the worker.

Now that's utterly wrong but it's going to require a court case or 5 to get a proper answer.

Re: Just an observation

Nope the primary group of people who lobby against umbrellas are contractors who are usually forced to pay for an umbrella that isn’t their first choice and then watch holiday pay be stolen from them.

I could name names but given this is someone else’s site I won’t

Re: Forgot NI? @elsergiovolador

Nope the use of limited companies has nothing to do with HMRC - It goes back to the 1977 Agencies Act that banned agencies from employing workers on a self-employed basis.

Very quickly afterwards limited companies started to be used to provide the 3rd party required between the agency and the worker

Re: It's made my life simpler.

Equally that’s slightly wrong.

An SDS determination can be changed from outside to inside but that can only occur prior to the end client making the first payment.

How do I know the exact rules, because I triple checked with HMRC until they actually documented the above.

Finance Bill amendments to curb umbrella company malpractice fail to get traction in UK Parliament

Re: Employment Agency Act 1973

Under what act?

The issue is that umbrella firms are not currently regulated

The kids aren't all right: Fall in GCSE compsci students is bad news for employers and Britain's future growth plans

this one is an easy answer

The old course was an easy pass for students as it was mainly coursework.

The new one has some coursework but the vast majority of it is an exam at the end.

And for those who took it in the early years - a lot of students where were expected to do well did badly because of the exams.

Hence schools now steer students in a different direction.

Microsoft finally spills the beans on everything you need to know about its low-code platform, Dataflex for Teams

Nope, MS are currently being sued for their use of the name.

Microsoft pulls dust covers off Dataverse*: Low-code data access from Teams

I really don't think you will see special rates for students - the authentication fees MS introduced on portals last year will show you the way that's heading...

But you could add a team for each quick fix and assign all students to it.

One for each team - upto 2gb in size.

As for students I'm not sure they would be a market I would be focussed on, the license costs are fine for employees but definitely not for consumers..

I can answer that to.

Dataflex is an empty Power Apps database with a limited security model and support Power Automate and Virtual Agents - the data is only visible within Teams.,

Dataflex pro is Power Apps as it already exists (so it includes the CDS data tables, plugins, a security model....)..

Re: Anyone told Data Access Corp?

The name choice came as a surprise to Data Access Corp who are not happy about it see https://support.dataaccess.com/Forums/showthread.php?66168-Microsoft-Dataflex&p=357081#post357081

Having spoken to the product team Dataflex is free for Teams users which requires a basic (Base) Office 365 or Microsoft 365 license.

Dataflex Pro will require a Power Apps license as it an be accessed outside MS Teams.

And I'm not blaming the register for the poor reporting it take 39 minutes with the Power Apps product team to get this information out of them.

AMD pushes 64-core 4.2GHz Ryzen Threadripper Pro workstation processors

I believe it uses a different socket and motherboard to the none Pro chips - which given the limited market size means none OEM motherboards would be very expensive.

Four years after swallowing Arm Holdings, SoftBank said to be mulling Brit chip biz sale

$775.5bn is a hell of a return - I think you mean million

Salesforce shells out $15.7bn for data viz biz Tableau

Re: for $15.7bn

I wonder how much of the sales pitch will be "we can get those Tableau customers to also buy SalesForce"

Fancy a .dev domain? They were $12,500 a pop from Google. Now, $1,000. Soon, $17.50. And you may want one

I'm confused as https://domains.google/tld/dev/ says I have to wait until 4pm on the 28th to get my domain for just the annual fee..

One Project to rule them all: Microsoft plots end to Project Online while nervous Server looks on

Re: Hey MS...

What version of it are you using? USD has improved a lot of the past year....

GNOMEs beat Microsoft: Git Virtual File System to get a new name

I'll do it first VFSy mcVFSface?

But to be honest I expect SAVFS or (Super Awesome Virtual File System) to win out.

Uber 'does not exist any more' says Turkish president

Re: It's hard to know who to sympathise with...

Nope, I won't drive in Istabul (nor did Jenson Button for that matter) it's more the trying to overcharge and unnecessarily complex and long diversions that I dislike.

Re: It's hard to know who to sympathise with...

No-one who has ever used a taxi in Istanbul will have any sympathy with an Istanbul taxi driver.

Gone in 60.121 seconds: Your guide to the pricey new gear Nvidia teased at its annual GPU fest

Re: I don't know for a fact or even if its happening..

Which clearly isn't the case as Nvidia are selling GPUs when in stock at 66% of their resellers prices when they have stock (which has been twice this week).

Salesforce courts the great un-CRMed with 'Essentials'

Re: I'm about to test another platform

What you will find is the amount of money you save in purchasing a solution will instead by spent trying to get it to work and supporting it.

While I don't like Salesforce (and have a bias towards Dynamics 365) you do often get what you pay for.

Attention adults working in the real world: Do not upgrade to iOS 11 if you use Outlook, Exchange

I'm equally Confused

I've been using iOS 11 since the first public beta and all my outlook email from both my exchange and Office 365 accounts has worked without a problem

IT MELTDOWN ruins Cyber Monday for RBS, Natwest customers

Re: It does make you wonder what sort of hardware our banking network is running on.

Suggests..... That was just careful phrasing.

I think just about the only bank I would trust nowadays is HSBC.... I've heard enough scare stories about the others that I wouldn't go there. That is not to say HSBC are any better it may be that they are competent or it could be that they don't employ people who frequent the same network of contacts I have...

How STEVE JOBS saved Apple's bacon with an outstretched ARM

The Archimedes was popular in schools?

I remember the BBC Model b being popular in schools but I don't think the Archimedes (which the ARM Chip was designed for) was ever that popular.

It was the lack of popularity of the Archimedes as IBM PCs took off that meant ARM become its own company and Acorn is no more.....

BT boss barks at TalkTalk for being 'copper Luddites'

Re: Agreed

Are you sure about that. Around here we've got Virgin Media but aren't due to get BT fibre until 2015.

Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review

Re: GPS? Maps?

no wifi only ipad has ever had a gps chip built in. GPS has only been included in the 3g / LTE versions.

Apple shifts 3 million iPads in 3 days: But how many were Minis?

Personally I saw the iPad mini this afternoon and bought the last one in that apple store. At half the weight of the iPad there will be an awful lot of people who will see one, pick it up and instantly buy one as I did to replace the new iPad I have been using.

Heck you can even type on it reasonably well as this post shows (somewhat badly).

Virgin Media nukes downloads after SuperHub 'upgrade'

Re: reluctantly

So you work for a CDN know all about network latency but can't identify the symptoms of a hidden transparent proxy being used to cache requested pages.

Ho hum

Virident flasher claims Oracle database streak record

Not quite

Oracle licencing states that the Series E7-88XX has a Core Processor

Licensing Factor of 0.5 so the oracle licence would be for 40 processors.

Mind you that probably only shifts the licence costs from totally utterly insane to totally insane.

Facebook: 'We don't track logged-out users'

Its a shame he didn't ask the right question

If he did he would find at that Facebook don't use cookies to track visits to +1 pages. They use ip addresses and browser strings. Statistically the accuracy is enough that cookies are irrelevant to the data quality.

Flipboard

feedly is probably the nearest competitor.

Its my preferred choice because it uses google reader as its main data source and keeps that up to date so you can use it across you phone, ipad and multiple computers and it keeps a record of all the articles you've already read.

Dell XPS 15z 15.6in Core i5 notebook

Um

Dell are one of the very few people who still offer 1920 by 1200 screens albeit as an £100 option.

The article says that for £999 you can have it with a high resolution screen and I commented above that you can have the high resolution screen for £1229 with a i7 processor and 8gb of ram.

I'm not sure about your conclusion. If you want a proper full HD screen Apple simply don't offer that option on the 15" model and its the one thing that has always held me back from buying a mac.

It will be interesting to see what the cost of the 15" macbook pro with the 2.7ghz processor is when its released later this month. Its going to a lot nearer £2,000 compared to the £1229 Dell wants for the same specification machine.

iPad 2 3G price-plans compared

the old one is probably a better deal.

All the offers still seems over expensive compared to buying the ipad outright and then buying a monthly sim only deal.

I'm glad I picked up the last ipad 1 32gb at three last week. £129 upfront + £20 a month for 24 months so a total of £609 all in.

Granted its last years technology but it does exactly what I want, doesn't force a camera on me which could be awkward at some clients and saves me £270 over the cost of the new one.

UK probes ebook pricing

Its the usual problem of customers not knowing where the cost is

Charles Stross wrote a serious of Blog entries last year ( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/common-misconceptions-about-pu.html ) that explain how the industry works and the cost of ink and paper is not a significant factor in the price of a book.

The pricing of a book is the same as any other item with a limited shelf life (expensive to begin with, getting cheaper of time). The only thing unique about the book industry is that the format changes as the book gets cheaper.

Facebook: Why our 'next-gen' comms ditched MySQL

Probably because most messages average 1k in size

and it ain't worth it if you want to quickly write and retrieve it.

With these sort of systems normalising data ain't worth the effort. Hard disk space is cheaper than cpu time.

Google aims Nexus S smartphone at US, UK

Rip of Britain by the looks of it

And a hate saying so but $529 in the us is not £549 in any exchange rate I've seen recently. Yes I know VAT (at 20%) has to be added but $529 is £335 so a fair price including VAT is £400 not £550.

Microsoft's .NET at ten: big hits, strange misses

Rotor died because of Mono

after all why pay for developers when people do the same work for free.

Is your office World Cup sweepstake legal?

@harry

You forget all the win a house lotteries of the past few years. They all got large amounts of publicity, are totally against the spirit of the law let alone the law itself and yet non were prosecuted.

This just seems a article written for public relations. Not that I mind that but I better starting point would be the law is a mess because you can't do .... while everyone knows people do.

Confirmed: no iPad iBooks for Blighty

well ebooks will always be 17.5% more expensive in the Uk

As books are 0% rated for VAT in the UK but ebooks aren't

Nissan to build e-car batteries in Blighty

@Martin

That £200m is not the government investment but Nissan's.

The government have been working on a £380m loan from the EU for nissan which would appear to be why sunderland got the work.

Dismissed deputy head launches legal fight

ho hum

If the best people can come up with is to complain about grammar its no wonder crap laws like this are appearing. If people are concerned about a little piece of incorrect grammar on a website comment they really should find something better to do with their time.

To answer the only point worth replying to on here, it is in recruitment where issues will occur. If we are already employing someone you ask for the case to be examined (by the local authority, the police or a.n.other) and based on the outcome decide (in reality get told by local government personnel) what to do. You have a paper trail you can follow and someone else to blame or offload your guilt on.

Recruitment of new staff is a different matter. Here you don't have the paper trail but a piece of paper containing rumours, previously investigate and dismissed allegations, innuendo and possible even comments generated from people who dislike you for minor irrelevent reasons. Then based on this waste of paper, fear and gut instinct we need to decide whether to employ that person.

Sued if their right, sued if their wrong

As a school Governor this is going to make recruitment entertaining to say the least.

If we receive soft information and ignore it we will be (rightly?) attacked for employing someone unsuitable if something eventually occurred.

If we receive soft information and using it decide not to employ the most suitably qualified person we can be sued under various discrimination acts. Worse, because the information is confidential we don't yet know whether we could use the soft information in court to justify our decision and it will only be when someone takes this to the House of Lords in x years time that we will know definitely.

So we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. Possibly appearance in the Sun or immediate legal case with expensive costs. Not a decision many Governors or headteachers will wish to take.

T-Mobile doubles 0870 call costs

Not quite right

The question I'm asking is since they've changed the terms and conditions why are they being so awkward when I ask them for my contract to be terminated.