Posts by Old Cynic 26 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2011
HMRC say they can add £xB to the coffers by fixing tax 'avoidance', no minister is going so say no to that.
Big companies stop engaging contractors, bring in more people from offshore to fill the gap.
Some time later, none of the promised income appears, more local people are out of work and money goes to offshore companies.
Obviously it will be claimed to be a massive success.
Electrically heated water storage tanks (immersion heating) is also very common in the UK - and currently not benefitting from off-peak tariffs or fancy meters.
Gas is common as well, as you say, and you might heat water by burning oil, wood, dung, wet dogs - it doesn't change the fact that a lot of people use leccy and aint getting a benefit from fancy meters.
They already are properly flexible and can be hit with a hammer - check out Samsung Youm, some 5 years old I believe. OLEDs are flexible but on phones/tablets have a glass front that solidifies them. Without the glass, I suspect the surface would be prone to scratching badly.
I can see these displays being used on things like car dashboards where the dash itself is the display rather than a rectangular thing stuck into a plastic dash - the possibilities are profound.
It's obvious - they want more money without the hassle of chasing big players who can defend by throwing money and lawyers at it.
And, the people who told them to do it want less competition for their mates running Indian body shops and the likes of Capita. The result - more bodies brought in from offshore and the ability to charge a grand a day for recent graduates without pesky local contractors getting in the way.
How many companies have you worked at that are full of work visas, where local talent can't get a look in? It will just get worse, now BAs, PMs, Architects flown in will become the norm.
Looks more like governments continuing to extract money for tax avoidance to me, no doubt this will be just the first as skint European goverments look forward to getting their hands on many billions without bothering with sorting out the complicated tax mess.
I'm still amazed that people expect the likes of Facebook to respect privacy - you give them all of your information, use their services, pay no fee and expect them to do that for free? Facebook may have started as an idea to let friends keep in touch but once it grew to a certain size, it had to be monetised and had to keep growing and take over the world.
Can you really expect a massive, global free service to treat you with respect in any way? If Ford gave away free cars, could you believe they were doing it to provide a service for your benefit?
Now that inflated speeds are a no-go area for most ISP, the next best way to sell their poxy service is by promising the best wifi. Most customers use wifi and know all about patchy coverage in the home so likely a good way to churn customers onto their service - until they realise it's just as shite as the service they came from.
Unfortunately most users aren't aware enough to know that the only way to improve things is throw away the shitty router and install something like a Nighthawk. Or to make a real difference, add an additional WAP to extend coverage properly. My house has thick stone walls and 5 WAPs to ensure decent coverage - I can't see TalkTalk supplying that kind of service for 30 quid a month.
Labour were happy enough encouraging globalisation, offshoring, manufacturing in the cheapest place, bringing workers in from around the globe and paying them peanuts.
Now some companies are globalising their tax payments they don't like it. Why not use the cheapest option - they were encouraged throughout Labour's reign....
Interesting that this story hasn't led to howls of tax evasion by the people who scream at Amazon/Google/Microsoft et al...
If you think about it, the UK's large spend on games, music, software, movies could (likely already is) handled through tax-efficient arrangements and no physical goods change hands so even easier than the Amazon setup. It would be interesting to quantify the impact on the treasury as soon there'll be no workers in shops selling these things, so no income tax, NI, shop rents etc...
I'm sick and tired of re-doing my programme list across 4 tellys every other day. Can they just re-do the bastard thing so that any dedicated shopping/smut/religion/music or subscription channel is at the top end and normal stuff is at the bottom end. That way I can use the normal channels without ploughing through endless lists of crud (or re-programming on a daily basis)
thinner? 7.1mm vs iToy5 7.6mm?
And, wasn't it released quite some time ago? And didn't it have memory card expansion? And a kevlar casing to make it robust ?
I'm sorry but the new shiny shiny has produced nothing new, all of the innovation is courtesy of the manufacturers e.g. Samsung, LG, Hitachi etc... who actually make the components.
NFC? No way until Apple get a slice of every transaction. Wireless charging? No, apparently that is too complicated.
I see they are being vague on the CPU - why not just say it's a fast dual core? Oh that's why, because quad-core is now standard on flagship phones except for Apple's.
The new screen res is interesting, now it's a 16:9 ratio, oh like most other smartphones have been for years. The aspect means most apps will have black borders until the developers sort it out - sounds like fragmentation to me.
and I doubt if all that equipment would work so well in a smallish room - no doubt amazing in a large room.
My ~£6k setup has most of the features mentioned apart from a disc ripper (mine is a 3TB NAS that holds a few HD movies dowloaded, ahem ripped by myself).
I'm not an audio/video-phile but I honestly can't tell any difference between being at home and being in the cinema. Even now the cinemas have gone 4k, you're such a distance from the screen, I don't see how anyone will appreciate it.
The sound is probably the only area where there's much of a difference but I think that's got a lot to do with the size of the room. However, in my dedicated room at home, there are no interruptions from arseholes coughing, rustling, talking, or lighting up there bastard phones. And I've got a (silent) beer fridge at hand ;)
Well,
Rectangular phone with rounded corners.....check
Black bezel.....check
full screen touch......check
Icons......check
Purchased months before the iphone was launched.....oh yes.
I'm not saying it's better than the jesus device, but sure looks close.....
...and they've added value by putting a pad and a battery in it.
I use a Vega - £250 very well spent and can now be had for less. Hooked up to an old wiresless mini-keyboard & pad that I had lying around no problem. Cursor is on-screen and I can get around Android 2.2 quite nicely, I suspect Honeycomb will be built with this nav method in mind.
Unlike the transformer though, I can use my wireless keyboard to drive the Vega when it's hooked up to the bedroom telly playing vides or games (and it's damn good cos it can handle full HD).
Looking at the Android scene, ther are so many tabs coming out with different forms, resolutions, attachments and capabilities from prices starting at rock-bottom that I think we're seeing the end of the i-pad. Unless Apple can get properly creative....
I just donwloaded the wank-o-meter app this morning, fantastically funny. Is it out on the iThingies yet cos I know some people who really need to get a copy!
...technically.
Bearing in mind non of the actors saw anything other than a green screen, it should be easy to stereoscope them. The rest of the film was rendered by computer so simply doubling up there can't be difficult.
Still a back of shite, just shite in 3d.
I'd prefer them to put the effort and money into remaking the film properly, from scratch, with minimal cg, decent script, and actors who are allowed to actually act.
That means no input from the bearded one.
Dvillish Bill Gates cos there isn't an icon for Lucas.
While everyone drools over these new tabs, i picked up an Advent Vega for 250 notes. 10" screen, multi-touch, android 2.2, decent screen res, decent battery, hdmi at 1080, micro sd and usb for good measure.
Dual core tegra at 1GHZ is good enough for anything and angry birds looks amazing, there's some kind of display hardware smoothing going on.
Don't know why all the fuss about these new pads....
...for the minions. Most big companies give the plebs really quite cheap phones. You need voice and email, - that'll be a few thousand blackberries at tuppence each, locked down for security reasons of course.
No point having your staff running around with iPhone playing angry birds all day "being creative". Only the boss "needs" an iPhone.....
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