Posts by Andy 73 366 posts • joined 9 Jul 2009
.. well of course not - they're after the 8bn subsidy, not giving a vote of confidence for the political leadership of the EU.
...who are in turn panicking over global supply chains. It looks like the new fabs will all come on line just about the time we go through the bust phase of the chip supply cycle.
What a shameful article.
One of the reasons Bezos has had the success he has had, is that America celebrates and supports success of it's citizens - even the ones who (like Bezos) manipulate the tax system to reduce their outgoings to a bare minimum.
To read an article where there is an apparent need to do anything to 'take the piss' of a hard won achievement is quite frankly unpleasant.
Grow up.
The Cadbury development dramatically improved worker's housing, and is still used as an example of progressive and socially aware architecture.
Given that there is a death spiral of housing costs and worker pay in high-tech communities in America, it seems quite a good idea to take the price of putting a roof over your head out of the equation. Optimistically, we could even see innovation in modern homes and communities.
Ultimately, though the article tries to paint this as an example of Victorian-style oppression, workers have a choice to go there or not. People willingly moved to the new developments like Cadburys (and ultimately formed major cities in the UK) because it was a damn sight better than living in a rural hovel.
Just replying to myself here.
Cadwalladr having to hand over £62,000+ for not being able to produce any evidence whatsoever for the Russian influence claims she made should be a deep embarrassment to those who fawned over her. Withdrawal of the defense of "truth" from her court case with Banks, despite so much support suggests that (to put it politely), she "made up" the stories that got her so much attention.
I'm sure this will add to my collection of thumbs down, but there you go.
You may have to wait for HMRC to release any figures - it's not the done thing to set policy based on actual data. Instead, vague threats and faith based policies are to be pursued.
This should be a real embarrassment for our Government, right at the time where agile support for new businesses, SMEs and greenfield projects are most needed.
If the benefit of some huge investment in IoT 'stuff' is so unclear, or so diffuse throughout a business that no-one can become passionate about it, then no-one is going to champion it.
Proof of concept usually limits itself to "is this technically possible?". The problem is "Is this adding sufficient value?" Until one (or possibly two) stakeholders can say "yes", then we have a Mexican standoff, with everyone waiting for someone else to pull the trigger.
Alternatively, if your IoT thing only becomes valuable once everyone has fully invested in it, then - short of the CEO becoming an evangelist overnight - no company will risk adopting it.
Immediate and localised reward is necessary. "What do I get for investing in this gadget for my department?"
I can't see the point in trying to have a grown up conversation about how to improve innovation, research and business growth in the UK, when the mere mention of Brexit, Cummings or any current political party will bring all of the frothing loons out of the woodwork arguing that we can't/ won't/ shouldn't do whatever the other frothing loons insist we can/ will/ must do.
For what it's worth, if we are to replace initiatives like Horizon2020 and other research and innovation friendly schemes, we should do so with our local knowledge base, workforce and skill set in mind. On the whole I think such schemes are good, if rather heavy on procedure and documentation.
Equally, Cummings is a big fan of the idea of a UK equivalent of DARPA, funding 'moon shot' projects and encouraging emerging technologies. Again, I don't think it's a bad idea.
As a country, for various reasons, we are not very good at risk, early business growth and long term market ownership. However, we've got some very smart guys who drive real innovation and deliver engineering excellence that brings the whole world to our doorstep. That suggests that we should think carefully how we handle funding and finance.
Not going to happen though, because the political infighters will be too busy ripping each others' heads off.
In the rush to demonise him, a small portion of the internet are only serving to bolster cases like his.
Yes, of course his memo was supremely badly judged, sexist and all the rest - but the reaction to it shows all the characteristics of a purity spiral (go look it up). He's gone from being a socially maladjusted geek (hardly rare in this industry) to being a fascist sympathiser in just a handful of comments.
The recent pandemic has been a timely reminder that, even ignoring security, the last couple of decades' rush to globalisation has resulted in chains of production and ownership that are highly dependent on a status quo.
We saw this sudden awareness of structural risk emerge from the 2008 financial crisis - but didn't extend that awareness to physical production and intellectual property. We should be clear that the financial benefit of handing production and ownership offshore can result in structural risk and a long term weakening of our ability to compete, produce and innovate.
...they just need to convince USPTO to accept machine generated patent applications, write some dumb-ass software to mash together every word and phrase in the USPTO database, and hey presto, everything that could every be invented will be patented in one fell swoop.
"And pray that we find intelligent life in space/because there's bugger all down here on earth"
"Perhaps it's a lack of imagination on your part if you can't envision a scenario where complex long-running operations on petabytes of data might be tricky to move."
Been there, done that - nine petabytes of data moved. Sure, it wasn't a standard deployment cycle, but it was a thing we were prepared and able to do.
But note that the article specifically said "Customers do not need to move their data".
I can (and do) imagine far worse problems!
It won't happen, but just imagine we take a dispassionate look at the amount of 'damage' done by making these books available, compared to the number of authors actually significantly affected by the decision.
It's timely that Tom Scott has done an excellent piece on copyright on YouTube, arguing for shorter terms for copyright so that society as a whole might benefit without materially affecting more than a handful of creators (the very, very rare exceptions who still benefit materially from their work over fifty years after they publish).
Unfortunately, a balanced call for moderation in these matters is drowned out by corporates who benefit from endless extension, and freeloaders who want to pretend that any copyright at all is unfair on consumers. Still, it's a nice experiment...
Rather misunderstanding the longevity and consistency of Java, there.
This is a language and VM that has been around for nearly twenty four years, with remarkably little breakage. Libraries and the core VM have been compatible for the majority of that time, with breaking changes only occurring when the current 'state of the art' has advanced so much that the old way of doing it can no longer be supported.
It speaks volumes that they were willing to upgrade everything - if breakage was a serious concern, it would have been easy to keeps parts of the system wrapped in containers running older VMs.
Comrade, you're not allowed to criticise the EU. This is the comments section for people who want to savour the schadenfreude of Brexit not being a time of unicorns and cake.
Please report to the centre for reconditioning, and in the mean time remember to state that the UK is incapable of delivering anything, or achieving anything without help from people bigger and smarter than us.
Not only would FAA regulation require your car to stop driving if you got too close to Buckingham Palace, Heathrow or any other sensitive site (including the hundreds of grass airstrips throughout the countryside) in the UK, but it would also be a legal requirement that any existing car must be retrofitted with the tech, or removed from the roads.
In addition, you wouldn't be able to race your cars (not permitted) or drive them off roads, or build go-karts.
And, before you drove anywhere, you'd have to file a request to drive with the DVLA.
And, all of your journeys would be publicly available for people to examine.
Don't worry about the punishment beatings, they're going to be gentle for the first year.
Yes, that's apparently a reassuring phrase that should settle the matter. Back in your hole, contractor scum!
I hope the government learns it can't just take instruction from the large firms when it comes to economic policy.
Very true, but then you get efforts like Flutter and slowly the libs get replaced as well. Again, if Spring provide top level support, then the reasons to stick with Java are eroded.
It's hard to overstate the value of the Java libs - you can get Java to do just about anything thanks to the vast, well supported and consistent APIs they provide. But... nothing is forever and there is always an incentive to build a 'free(er)' version if there is someone attempting to gate-keep.
Of course, money from an existing resource is 'free', so it doesn't matter if that resource is decimated in the process. No incentive for Oracle not to squeeze the pips for juice.
In the mean time, we start with languages that compile to JVM, but aren't Java. Then we get a VM that isn't Java and the whole world moves away from Oracle. Kotlin, Dart and all the others are the bridge away from Java, and if something like Spring suddenly starts to support those other languages, devs will be happy to move.
What a surprise. This sort of comment crops up whenever IR35 or contractor rates are mentioned.
If, as a permanent employee you are earning half that of the contractor next to you, you should ask why that is the case. No-one is forcing your company to engage that person, and no-one is forcing you to stay as a permanent employee.
Don't underestimate the 'disguised cost' you place on your company - all those benefits, employee rights and cost of an inflexible workforce add up.
Given HMRC's antagonism towards contractors over the last few years, I've taken the path to permanent employment. I'm paid less, pay less tax and offer much less flexibility to my employer - but I don't have to jump through hoops to prove I have a right to exist and I have more stability in my life. No need to complain about the guy sitting next to me - if they earn more than me, perhaps it's because they're worth it to the boss.
Yes it's "difficult to harness the drone community for free/open-source work" - because the drone community is sick to death of idiots giving them a bad name.
"Will you help me crash and steal drones" is not going to get you a good response, not even if you are doing it for free/open-source.
The political bias in this piece is hardly justified by the story that prompted it. The ad was not sufficiently informative - that's rather different from 'telling lies'.
As for the 'hostile environment' comment - about as current as referring to Thatcher as 'the milk snatcher'.
As a contractor, I can pretty much guarantee I have paid more tax than any permanently employed person of similar grade that I have sat next to at any time in the last twenty years. I offer utility to companies that need (a) workers at short notice or to bridge a change in work load, (b) workers to bring in knowledge about external systems and practises that the company itself does not have, (c) workers that can be let go with little or no notice if a project has to be stopped (d) workers that self-train where there is a company culture of expensive external accreditation and so on and so forth.
And as a consequence, I pay more tax than the permanent employees who take full advantage of sick days and holidays, training and wellbeing days, maternity/paternity leave, company pensions, health plans, car pools, car parking, mentorship and counselling, fitness clubs, company retreats and the financial stability that long term permanent employment offers.
On the whole, this is a fair deal, and I try to deliver the value the client needs, to integrate with their team and help implement change and improvement in practices. Only very occasionally do I meet sanctimonious, angry, self harming idiots who think that companies are special social clubs run for their sole benefit, and who get mightily offended that someone might be seen as more valuable to the company than they personally deem reasonable.
You can pretty much guarantee that one of those moral guardians will crop up on each of these news items, clearly misunderstanding how taxation and employment work.
I very rarely feel it's appropriate to discuss past achievements, but... I led the team that wrote one of the first online banking services in the UK, developed services for an online global retailer that handle a million unique users each and every day and devised databases for tracking terrabyte datasets for a medical research organisation.
The price quoted is (excuse the technical term) a complete piss-take. Nothing more to add.
This was demonstrated by Lotus ten years ago (using a Prius) - a dynamic accoustic system that both warned pedestrians and gave drivers better feedback about what the car was actually doing.
The Harman system they developed could choose engine sounds - either something Star Trekky, or a more traditional sports car sound - so your Nissan Leaf could sound like it had a V12 engine.
@DavCrav "This doesn't exist anywhere else on the planet. No such systems have been shown to work. Even in theory it would be impossible to stop mass smuggling, never mind in practice."
You do understand that there is already a border between RoI and NI, that they run different taxation regimes and that 'mass smuggling' is prevented on a daily basis across that border? You just don't see it because most of the police and customs operations are run away from the border itself.
Frankly, the understanding of these issues is laughable. But of course, everyone has political skin in the game and the basic facts get lost to the whichever view the reader thinks most fits their beliefs. It's lovely that 'IT experts' think that their desktop skills give them special insight into how an international border works.
@DavCrav And in your subsequent paragraph you demonstrate the same.
The WTO do not require a hard border, they require that customs are maintained across a border. That does not have to be through a physical stop at the point of crossing. Both the EU and the UK have said that they would be OK with checks occurring away from the border and through technological means, and the WTO is understood to accept such arrangements.
No, I just pointed out that the two places where innovation is occurring are not the EU or the UK, and that 'we' are doing everything we can to ensure that remains the case.
Note there is a subtle difference between security of data and the crusade some are going on in the EU to make handling of people's data as onerous as possible.
..as the fact that some seem to think that adding a byzantine layer of legal requirements to providing online services (all in the name of stopping the big boys, who are now officially the enemy) adds yet more friction to small companies trying to deliver innovative new products.
China (and America) must be laughing like drains.
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