Posts by jelaft

Inateck BP2001 Bluetooth speaker: The metalhead sysadmin's choice? Not exactly

"My music tastes run more towards jazz, classic rock, and neoclassical music"

Taste? It doesn't mean what you think it means :-)

Oxfam, you're full of FAIL. Leave economics to sensible bods

Yes and the top 1% in the UK pays 27.7% of the tax.

http://ukhousebubble.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/who-pays-income-tax.html

So while people do what they can to avoid tax *at all ends of the scale* - "discount for cash mate, cough cough", I think that's a pretty generous contribution/

Hey, IT department! Sick of vendor shaftings? Why not DO IT, yourself

Re: I cant but applaud this article.

That certainly used to be the case (effective small skunk works) where I work (a bank), but no longer. It was There are unavoidable scalability and audit issues that just didn't exist even 5 years ago. Also once that team of 6 people slowly moves on, it's very difficult to maintain that constant delivery and, perhaps more importantly, support and cohesively extend the system without introducing huge amounts of technical debt. The audit and regulatory aspects are just soul destroying. As a result actual per-person productivity drops off a cliff as the team size grows to take on the load. There's not an obvious answer; agile (small 'a') just doesn't scale well and older software development practices have been shown to be very poor in the face of rapidly changing requirements.

It's sad as those teams a great places to work, but I haven't found another industry yet that does them well. I suspect they only really survive in quite niche industries that aren't under pressure to scale or be regulated.

Why the banks aren't scared of the Robin Hood Tax

Mr...

A 50% tax on bonuses > £100,000 effectively exists with the new 50% income tax on earnings > £150,000 as most people on that kind of bonus will have a base > £50,000 anyway... So, by the time the banks paid the 50% corporate bonus tax levied this year, the goverment walks away with about 75% of it anyway. Not much left to tax really.