Posts by Vehlin 68 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Mar 2010
The big failing I always see in these big ERP projects is the customer's insistence that the ERP change to work with their byzantine processes, rather than change their processes to keep the system as close to stock as possible. You end up spending millions trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole and then realising at the end of it that you just have a broken hole and have to start again.
svn commit: WebKit migrates to GitHub
I would say it would be very difficult for a developer to be self employed under IR35. What I would do in this position is form a small development company with 2-3 other developers and then bid of packages of work. Any client would then be asked for either a shared login or an individual one for each developer. Who does the actual work internally is then of no consequence to the client.
In the event of a client wanting someone in their offices during their working day I would get all 3-4 of us cleared and vetted so that we would actually be in a position to make a substitution.
It does, but not on earnings that have already been taxed to the same level or greater than the US would. This is why, Bojo was on the hook for paying US taxes when he sold his house a few years back. The UK doesn't charge capital gains on primary residence sales, while the US does, therefore it was untaxed as far as they were concerned. At the same time his income is already taxed in the UK so they don't go after that.
If they chose to become part of the class action then they get their share of what the lawyers managed to negotiate (less fees). By joining the class they will have had to have waived their rights to further action in exchange for being represented as a class on a contingency basis.
Those that haven't joined the class are free to take their own action, but as no liability was admitted they will be unable to use this suit as precedent and thus must go up against Office Depot's lawyers on their own..
A bit of column A and a bit of column B.
You look at your processes vs industry best practice (ideally the base ERP will align with these too). You decide what can be changed vs what can't and customise around that. Once you can put a price on "doing it the way we've always done it" you quickly figure out what is important.
> Also, why do millionaires need another credit card? I have one with a pretty decent limit and am not a millionaire. These days, it's not like some places only take one brand of card, particularly if you've got one of the big two.
Because different cards are better for different things. Some cards give you airline bonuses, some give hotel ones, others are better for general purchases, etc.
You're both arguing two different circumstances.
AC is arguing from Barclay's position, where they have made all IR35 type jobs PAYE jobs.
Dwarf is arguing from the position of a contractor who's client deems them to be outside of IR35 but HMRC does not.
You're both right, but you're talking about two different things.
I can't comment on this particular case, but Google have in the past been observed to be intentionally crippling its sites on IE and Edge. I had a Windows phone running 8.1 and if you browsed Gmail or GMaps you got something that looked straight out of the web 2.0 days. It looked nothing like the version that you'd see on Android. However, if you swapped the useragent to that of Chrome the site rendered just fine.
If they were happy to break the functionality of their sites on Windows Mobile then I'd quite readily believe they'll try other dirty tricks.
That's not entirely true.
Google have been steadily stripping core functionality from the open source android and moving it within Google Play Services, try using an open source ROM on your android phone without installing the GApps package and you'll see how much stuff is missing. One big example is that google ported the location services into GApps and then required that apps in the Play Store use Google's Location Services.
These are standards essential patents, as sunch they must be licenced under FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Descriminatory) terms.
Qualcomm got together with other industry tech companies to create a set of standards within (in this case) mobile phone chipsets. Had Qualcomm not wished to be a part of the standard there was no legal requirement for them to do so. By getting their patented technology into the agreed standard they massively increase use of their technology. The cost of this is that they must licence their technology to users of the standard under FRAND principles.
Let's say you design a new safety mechanism for usb chargers that makes them impossible to explode. You could either produce your own chargers and sell them on the open market, licence your invention to a company or two to include in their chargers or you can come to an agreement with the standards body (BS, ISO etc) to make it an integral part of the design for all USB chargers. If you were making your own chargers you'd have a unique selling point that you could possibly tack on £2 onto the price of the charger. If you licenced the product to a company (that had bigger market presence) you might see 50p on every charger sold, however they'd sell way more than 4x the volume of you selling just your own chargers. The final option may only offer you a return of 10p per charger, but if every one sold in the country must contain your technology that adds up fast.
What Qualcomm are doing is the equivalent of you agreeing for your technology to become part of the standard, then once the standard is agreed demanding 50p per charger for the tech.
The non-discriminatory part of FRAND also comes into play. Suppose your arch rival in one of your other businesses (selling kettles for example) decides to get into the USB charger market. To do so they need to get the licence off you to allow them to include your design (which is required by the standard). You think "Ha! I don't like you very much. You can't have a licence" or "I'll charge you £2 per unit for the licence". Neither of these options is allowable under FRAND.
In the UK at least we have two different forms of taxi. We have the Hackney Carriage which holds is own operator's licence and is allowed to take bookings on the street. These are very strongly regulated, must be wheelchair accessible and are able to charge fares based on distance and time.
On the other side you have the private hire sector, these are generally a lot less regulated than the Hackneys, the operator's licence is held by the taxi company and bookings can only be made with the operator, so the cars can't pick up off the road. Importantly they can only charge by distance.
Both of the above have regulated fares. Hackney fares are set by the Local Authority and private hire have to submit their fare sheets for approval too.
Uber attempts to circumvent this in a number of ways. There is nothing stopping Uber setting up as a private hire company in the UK, however their pricing models are not compatible with the way taxi licencing is done in a lot of the UK. Private hire companies can't just put a surcharge on because their busy (Surge pricing is one of Uber's defining characteristics), they also can only charge by the mile, whereas Uber's app charges you for both time and distance travelled.
Uber are trying to straddle the line between being a black cab and being a private hire, while adding some extras in that aren't strictly legal either.
Normal users tend not to bother ripping and reuploading, that is almost certainly going to be done by a much smaller group of prolific uploaders.
The reason why people do it is that Facebook hosted videos will play easily within the Facebook phone app, which is where a lot of Facebook's traffic comes from. Youtube links kick you out to the YouTube app so people just don't bother. Thus videos posted to Facebook rather than shared will receive far more views and elicit more comments.
Yes.
Not long ago all I needed was a Sky Sports sub to watch Premiership Rugby, then I needed a Sky Sports sub and an ESPN sub. Now I need a Sky Sports sub and BT Sport sub to watch it. So in the name of competition I end up paying more
You can't compare a water main with a cell tower. If you've got a pipe going across your land it restricts where you can build as the utility will have an easement over the land, but you don't have to look at it every day either. Also you can build a road over a water main, you can't exactly drive through a cell tower.
The closest comparison would be telephone pole, but these tend to be kept out of the way and the only time they come onto your property is when the cable overflies it. You do get them on farmland in rural areas but again they tend to be more out of the way. The other side is that telephone line maintenance is much less frequent than that of the mobile towers, so the landowner doesn't have to move his livestock as often.
There should be no problem in the UK. Uber sets up as a private hire company and gets a licence. Only uses drivers with a private hire badge who are driving a car with a private hire plate that's been tested by the licencing authority.
Sadly Uber doesn't want to have to do that, as most of the badged drivers already work for a company who would have th win radio off them if they found them working for Uber.
Well written Apps are better than websites. Sadly the likes of Facebook suck at writing Apps.
No matter how great your website is, when it comes to speed there's no beating the amount of local storage you can use to cache all of the site's graphics. The smaller you can make each request for data the faster it's going to appear, especially in areas of flakey network connectivity.
This isn't the case on a PC where you get access to a decent amount of local storage in the temporary internet files type of location, but for mobiles where the web browsers local cache is more closely guarded it's a no brainer.
Vendors != Products.
Office is mainly sold by resellers if you have a big enough order you can get the reseller to cut you a deal, if they don't you go to another reseller who will. If I decide to buy a certain model of car I can still shop around for a better deal, changing vendor but not product.
They could even cut a deal directly with MS to cut out the middleman, MS makes the money either way and the Aus Government gets to to as if it were a reseller itself.
CalDAV and CardDAV are all well and good for Calendars and Contacts, these can be added in the future.
The main issue from my perspective is the loss of push email. I've always used the Gmail Exchange sync option on iOS, Android and now WP8 as it allowed me to get my email into a unified inbox by push rather than having to wait for it to be polled via IMAP.
Google dropping ActiveSync means no push mail on any platform unless you use the GMail app (which IIRC just polls the server repeatedly).
Why should the HTC deal have any bearing whatsoever? We're not talking FRAND patents here. If the patents are valid, not saying they are, then Apple should have the right to licence them to whoever they wish. I think the long and short of it is that Apple don't want to licence them to Samsung for any amount of money.
Whether this is fair or ethical is largely irrelevant, you couldn't force Dyson to licence its tech to Hoover if it decided to do a deal with Panasonic.
The games retailers have only themselves to blame for this one. The one community that has easiest (and cheapest) access to games on demand is the PC market; coincidentally this is the same market that every retailer has marginalised over the past 10 years.
If I go into GAME I'll see 20 panels devoting to all kinds of console gaming and 2 panels available for the PC; of which half is taken up by WoW and Sims and the rest is either pre-orders or Truck Simulator types or Hidden Object games. My local HMV doesn't even stock PC games.
It's not even limited to the UK either, while in the US earlier this year I popped into a GameStop to see if I could pick up Mass Effect 3, granted it was a smallish store on a stripmall but their PC section amounted to a 5 x 4 end aisle where every game on it was really a box with a key in it to download from the GameStop website.
I despair for the current situation; I used to visit my local GAME shop at least every payday to pick up a new shiny, but every time I went there was less and less to chose from. How can you expect to keep me as a customer if you don't have anything to sell me?
The shops have shown that they've got no clue whatsoever how to deal with competition from the likes of Steam and just jump out of the market, how are they going to cope when the next-gen consoles put games on demand at the heart of the ecosystem?
Sadly there are plenty of films like that, it's all big power blows that you can see coming a mile off. Generally you'd attack the closest part of the opponent to you could cause damage to, this would invariably be his sword hand or wrist; you can't hold a sword with fingers missing and there are some lovely blood vessels in your wrist.
Sadly most people don't really appreciate competitive fencing as there's a lot to get your head around with regards to priority etc. Which is one of the reasons why one touch epee is quite popular to watch.
Whichever side of the argument you stand on with regards to what should/shouldn't be patentable or trademarkable the fact remains that Samsung DID copy the iPhone/iPad looks from the box it ships in to the design of the icons on the screen. There's plenty of comparisons on the internet showing the Galaxy and Galaxy Tab next to both the Apple products and the previous gen Samsung ones. You can tell an HTC phone at a glance, the same with the Galaxy Nexus but this isn't the case with these two.
The reasoning is simple, Samsung wanted to attract previous iPhone owners to their product by providing something with a familiar look and feel. They wanted them to be able to pick up a Galaxy and immediately know how to use it. I don't think there was ever a desire to confuse customers about what they were using, but there's certainly a desire there for it to feel the same as using one.
Whether Samsung broke the law or not is not something I'm trying to get into. That really depends on whether you believe that Apple should have been allowed to protect those elements in the first place, however I don't think anyone can objectively compare the two devices and not feel that one was based on the design of the other.
Game have only got themselves to blame for this. For years I always bought my PC games from Game as I was able to walk down to the shop, buy the game and be home faster than if I were to download it. Gradually however they have reduced the PC section from 6-8 panels down to one.
Now if I go into Game there is almost no chance of them having the title I want in stock unless it's in the Top 10, frankly Tesco have a better selection these days. So taking away the convenience of being able to walk into a shop and buy it, why would I want to buy from them?
Game abandoned the PC games industry in favour of the cash cow that is the console market, so frankly they've got little reason to complain about PC gamers abandoning them.
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