Posts by Yet Another Commentard

Osborne slashes growth forecast by half in bleak economy statement

Re: John Maynard Keynes

@AC

The Keynsian response is to do something, even if it is to pay people to bury money, because they earn, they spend (UK GOv gets the VAT on spending). They buy materials from someone, who now has money, which they spend. It creates employment, the Government taxes the employment... and gets a nice new bit of infrastructure.

It worked in the '30s. The US is the easiest to think about - road building and the Hoover Dam.

Now it's a bit different. We would buy all the steel (or whatever) from China, so no cash in our economy. We'd get cheap labour from other EU countries to turn up and do the work, who would send the funds back home. No cash in our economy. Then we'd get Capita to run the IT (into the ground) and just pay cash to shareholders, most of whom already have the cash to spend. All of the contractors would be based in Lichtenstein and pay next to no tax.

Spend to grow isn't as simple as it used to be.

SimCity owners get free game, EA will get A NEW CEO

Message and beancounters

"After the offer expires it is likely that an EA/Maxis bean-counter will run the numbers on the games people chose and come up with a number representing either lost or missed revenue."

But that woud be, ahem, wrong. Looking at that list I already own the only title there I want. So I may, to be bloody minded pick another (the most expensive) and download it, and register it.

But what's the value of it? This is a rather odd concept.

I (say) I wanted Battlefield, and was about to go and buy it then its value to me is the current retail price.

If I didn't want any of them then the value to me is roughly the resale value, oh, zero as it can't be resold.

The "cost" to EA is only lost revenue on the former, not the latter. Even then the marginal cost (actual money out of the door) is pretty much nil, just the extra electricity to generate a new unlock code and spin some platters to facilitate a download.

EA will, of course, never know which was which, so any attempt at saying "we lost revenue of $...." is wrong, irrelevant, and downright silly.

Modder hacks SimCity for unlimited offline play

Re: DRM Encourages Piracy @Hulky

Had you considered that subways (for example) may appear later, for a micropayment. Then another piece of DLC for larger cities, another for bike lanes...

Study: Megaupload closure boosted Hollywood sales 10%

So not quite...

The level the MPAA suggested then - http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html

Amazon yanks SimCity download from store

Re: Just tried to play

A mystery to me is why anyone would sell a game you download that immediately has to update itself with another massive download. Why not just keep the most up to date version as the original download?

How can a firm fail to recognise the demand from presales? I mean, most of the players yesterday would have been presales, which, being already sold, means EA knows they will want to play ASAP, so the servers need to be ready for more than the number of presales.

<sigh>

Oh, for the avoidance of doubt

I don't pirate music or software. I just do without it if I don't agree. So, a lost sale not accounted for by piracy.

Actually, I disagree

Home taping didn't kill music, so let's start there.

Now I have a choice. I pay fifty quid (or whatever). I install Origin. Which persistently throws ads at me every boot up (now turned off in startup). The ads cannot be stopped, despite me paying for the bloody thing. I install my game, which won't work because the servers are overcrowded. If like Ubisoft you then DRM it so I can't move it when I rebuild my PC I have to buy it again. Then EA gets bored, turns its servers off and I can't play any more. Not only do I not have a printed manual to read, I also don't have control over the thing I bought. Sorry, leased.

OR

I get a cracked version which skips all of that crap.

Same for DVDs, I paid for the darn thing I don't want to sit through unskippable adverts for other films, endless bloody knock-off Nigel adverts I can't skip to get to thing I bought. Well, hired.

This behaviour ENCOURAGES cracking and pirating, and actively DISCOURAGES purchases. Both Ubi and EA are my "never buy from" list, no matter how good the game looks. It's not piracy that's killing them, it's slow suicide.

Google sends Street View car into Fukushima dead zone

Is there any data

On the actual level of radioactivity there? I mean, is it like some bits of Fallout's Wasteland, or more like Cornwall or that desert in Iran?

Is this something the g-mobile could record?

'Mainframe blowout' knackered millions of RBS, NatWest accounts

In theory...

Of course, in theory reality and theory are identical. In reality, they are not.

Samsung grabs Sharp shard, brings pain to Apple supply chain

From Bloomberg:

"“Sharp was the first supplier that was cut out when iPhone demand started to slow,” said Amir Anvarzadeh, Singapore-based manager for Asia equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. (BGCP) “Chances for Sharp to revive as a standalone company are zero unless becoming part of a big group like Samsung or Foxconn.”"

So, that would seem to have happened.

Samsung may be trying to get a foot in the door to access something else of interest in Sharp should a fire-sale or "white knight" of some form be required.

BRITAIN MUST DECLARE WAR on Cervinaean menace

Re: Earning their keep

Our dog cornered and killed a rat in the stables last November. I was surprised, he's a King Charles Cavalier, a breed not exactly known for their ferocious attacks. Perhaps the rat thought the same. He still managed to get bitten on the lip, which required another expensive visit to the vet.

True story.

As a complete aside, can we also declare war on moles. There's not much meat on them I know, but I think given enough you could make some clothes out of the skins. I've taken a staggering 21 out of our lawn so far this year, and they keep on coming. It's an invasion. It looks like the battle of the Somme out there.

Sorry, I'll calm down now.

Re: Control emissions?

"while the Baltic was the source for hemp." Yep, but that all went to pot. Badoom tish.

Ash is best for burning. There could be quite a glut of it soon.

BT to slap overalls on 1,000 new bods in fibre broadband boost

Engineer

Engineering has a problem, that of identity.

When the photocopier breaks it has a sign put on it saying "engineer will be here soon". No, no (s)he won't. A bunch of highly brainy and talented people designed the machine and all of its workings. They were engineers. Then a bunch of equally clever people worked out how to make it. They were engineers. Some bloke with a screwdriver is not an engineer, as AC notes he's a technician.

Engineering is a profession - that's why there are institutes for its different branches. You pass exams and all sorts to be admitted. THEN you can call yourself an engineer. It's a badge that must be earned. Sadly the engineering professions have let that slip, so world+dog uses the term.

You don't call the nurse a doctor because (s)he isn't a doctor - (s)he has done lots of training, but not that training. You don't call a Vet a Doctor, despite the massive commonality of the two professions.

I have just built a watercooled PC and installed an OS on it. That does not make me an electrical engineer or a software engineer. I'm just a bloke with a screwdriver, too much time on his hands and a few cuts from hidden sharp bits in the case.

Engineers - be proud. Stand tall. You are the future, just as you were the future in the past. Make these people earn the bloody badge, not just be able to use it.

All this from an accountant.

SimCity 3000

Dons cynical hat

Another Sim City reprisal. It's almost as if something has prompted it, such as a new version due out any day now.

Virgin Mobile coughs to choking its customers

Re: Contract change

"Mobile data is never sold on speed, only on the monthly data usage."

An interesting point - but quite often these things are marketed on speed, albeit not sold on such.

'Brit Bill Gates' was powerless to stop HP's Autonomy acquisition

@ACs

A bit of pedantry.

Enron wasn't just the fault of the auditor, more the fault of the US Accounting rules. It used to hide (legally) losses in Special Purpose Companies that were not consolidated. When it messed up its sums on some, they should have been consolidated, Arthur Andersen insisted they were, and the ensuing mess caused the downfall of both AA and Enron. A weak auditor would have let them pass, and not consolidated them. (that's really too brief to be accurate, but gives the gist).

That's not to say that auditors can get too close to their clients, or that auditors shouldn't miss things, it just that Enron isn't quite as black and white as is made out.

The purpose of an auditor is a "watchdog" and not a "bloodhound" (thanks to Lord Justice Lopes).

Due diligence is different from an audit, albeit as another describes, usually being done by "the usual suspects". if the due diligence wasn't all that diligent, then go ahead and sue the accountant who messed it up.

Spies in the sky: The leaps and bounds from balloons to spook sats

GAMBIT and HEXAGON

Were briefly on display at Dulles Airport.

If you want a look at a bunch of amateur photos of people prodding the guts of them - look here

http://www.space.com/12996-secret-spy-satellites-declassified-nro.html

(NB Ghostery blocks about 50 different things on the page).

Google+ goes single sign-in, exec roasts Zuck's 'frictionless sharing'

Re: Fixed it for you

I'd rather go with LastPass than Facebook/Google to store my 400x24 digit passwords. Heck, I'd rather write them down next to my PC than go with those two!

Bees use 'electrical sixth sense' to nail nectar-stuffed flowers

Re: Ironic

I assume you troll, but I will still bite.

At no point does Evolutionary Theory point suggest that it's an accident, that is nothing more than a claim made by its detractors. I would call it a straw man, but it's not even that sophisticated.

It would seem that as well as basic biological senses our schools are deficient in teaching the single most complete theory (more so than even gravity, but you never complain about that in the physics articles) in the history of the human race. As another notes, go and read "The Blind Watchmaker" or an easier read is "The Greatest Show on Earth". Or if you feel up to the somewhat dusty Victorian style, go for Darwin's original.

4G in the UK? Why the smart money still says 'Meh'

Killer App suggestion

"Once you've got 4G, there's something a little miraculous seeing web pages rolling into your mobile faster than they do at home over Wi-Fi."

Speaking as a non technical chap, is it possible that 4G could be used to get high speed Internet to dwellings, using mains-powered routers (kills the battery problem) etc. Could such routers be used as repeaters to propagate the signal?

I can only assume that if the coverage is as crap as you make out, the infrastructure cost would make it even more prohibitively expensive.

My line of thinking was that if viable, it actually gives a bit of competition to the BT/Openreach pseudo-monopoly on getting fiber out to places ("we'll do it when we want to and charge you what we like..." and "oh, sorry that's 10 feet too far from the cabinet. Clear off").

My point is - maybe it's not a mobile technology at all, but a wireless fixed one.

I'm sure it's a lot more complicated/expensive/not viable than I would think

Oklahoma cops rake ashes of 'spontaneous combustion' victim

Re: I thought this kind of thing had been explained as a 'wick effect'?

I don't know if it was QED, but yes there was a programme about it where they used a pig to substitute a human. I think the very same photo the rest of the commentators above recall was shown on-screen. I recall the photo, but never read "Unexplained". It may have featueed in Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World too...

Bring back Horizon, QED, and Equinox in all their technical 1970s/80s glory.

I'm off to start a petition.

Jerry Yang hired as fly on the wall at Lenovo

Re: Two.

...and that pistol being an automatic...

Apple CEO Cook: 'Bizarre' shareholder lawsuit a 'silly sideshow'

Re: Hmm...

Bazza is right. The shareholders own the business, Cook is just the custodian he needs to act in the shareholders' interests, not his (yes, I know he is a shareholder too).

The other issue is that having a gargantuan cash pile you are not doing anything much with it. You stick it in the bank and get, maybe 3% return (you could drive a bargain with that much). If that's the best you can achieve with it, why not give it back to the business owners who could try and put it somewhere where it would earn them more? Such as another company's shares, or a new startup etc. etc.

Companies need cash, but they don't need Scrroge McDuck-esque piles of it.

BT copper-cable choppers cop 16 months in the cooler

What's it worth?

Having never tried to fence 450m of copper cable I have no idea what it's worth. I'm genuinely curious. How much would they have made from that hoist? Is it really worth the crim's time to do it? How do you fence it? Do they have to remelt it first?

Public told to go to hell, name Pluto's two new moons

Re: Related to the underworld and Roman or Greek?

I had thought about "Dis" (term for Pluto, also Satan), but the other moon would end obviously up as "Dat".

Shocked jocks' O2 calls crossed with Brummies, now everyone's cross

Happened to me

..and Mrs YAC.

Only we ended up being unable to hear each other, and the other call could not hear us either. Rather oddly I could hear one side of the other call, and my wife the other call's counterpart. Together we could piece it together. Or at least the 30 seconds I heard while I was yelling "HELLO!" rather loudly. Other people's conversations are actually quite dull.

I am surprised the paper hacking chaps don't leap on this and say "it was a crossed line! I just happened to have a crossed line with <Z list celeb> and <other z list celeb>. Five times. And their voicemail. Twice.

Dead Steve Jobs 'made Tim Cook sue Samsung' from beyond the grave

Re: The problem Apple has now.....

Hmm, something unphonelike. Maybe if they had a triumvirate design team of MC Escher, Salvador Dali and Dr Seuss. Of course all of them being dead kinda stops that.

Kirk to beam up chat with ISS astronaut on Thursday

@AC 08:05

Shouldn't that be

"SHATNER'S ALIVE?"

In style of Brian Blessed?

News buried in there...

Twitter has a benefit?

Kids as young as FIVE need lessons in online safety - NSPCC

Re: 70 per cent more boys had called in about seeing porn online

Also I recall reading a survey about kids taking drugs, where something like 80% of them said they had taken drugs. Including one that was completely made up.

Kids boast, especially about things they should not be doing.

Kids as young as five...

Can they actually read or type well enough to go and seek out pr0n? Surely if they are clicking on pictures on some child friendly website it's unlikely they'd stumble across something unsanitary.

Or maybe we should praise the pr0n and the Internet for significantly increasing our children's literacy levels (albeit in one fairly specialised area).

Jammy b*stards: Admen flog chocolate bars with 'Wi-Fi-free' zones

Re: Even a Portable Faraday Cage? @AC

OFCOM is the regulator, you need to read the Act. s55 is all about this:

55 Enforcement: use of apparatus

[OFCOM can do nasty things to you if, inter-alia]:

(a) the use of the apparatus is likely to cause undue interference with wireless telegraphy other than wireless telegraphy falling within subsection (2) [essentially police, fire, coastguard etc];

(b) the use of the apparatus in fact has caused, or is causing, such interference; and

(c)the case is one where OFCOM consider that all reasonable steps to minimise interference have been taken in relation to the wireless telegraphy station or wireless telegraphy apparatus receiving the telegraphy interfered with."

So, is it causing "undue interference" is the bit you need to consider, coupled to have reasonable steps been made to minimise its interference.

Also, whilst not explicit (there is no definition of apparatus I can see, but IANAL, I just looked at the Act) the Act is written with the idea of broadcasting/receiving in mind. I have no idea if it would treat a Faraday cage as "receiving" a signal, and therefore be subject to it in the first place. I doubt it, or every building in London would fall under its remit.

Report: Over 1.5 million UK drivers will have hydrogen cars by 2030

Re: What a load of crap

Part of the problem is that "the future" only extends as far as the next election if you are a Government, so spending now on something that will benefit a following administration (whilst diverting cash from something now that will benefit yours) is generally not the done thing.

"Democracy is the worst form of government. Except for all the others that we've tried." and all that.

Apple to stop European shipments of Mac Pro on March 1?

Re: Makes perfect sense @Dana

Not exactly, it's all about where the business is and what it does. Things change. MSFT is a software company, which doesn't mean to say that millions of x-boxes and some mice, keyboards etc don't exist. I doubt that will change any time soon.

IBM was a typewriter company, but now clearly isn't. I doubt Apple will drop its OSX based things, it's just that they are a relatively minor part of the business.

Re: Makes perfect sense

If you look at Apple's financials, it's actually a 'phone maker now (if you count the big phones that won't make phone calls as phones), and has been for some time, not a PC/OS maker.

WORLD temporarily FREED from BURDEN of TWITTER!

News

How will the BBC compile its news without Twitter to quote mindlessly?

One assumes it will return to asking cab drivers for uninformed opinions.

I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square

Amiga word processors

I used Protext. That was the business, did everything you needed etc.

There was a wysiwyg one called Final Writer (and a Final Calc) too, but even my mighty A4000 (EC30, natch) couldn't deal with it properly. So I went back to Protext.

Help us out here: What's the POINT of Microsoft Office 2013?

Re: Worth the money? Depends

I'd agree with the above, and add one more. I'm not saying this is worth the money (and I have no idea if OO/LO does this) but if you send an e-mail with text in it such as "I attach the..." and don't attach anything Outlook will check you meant to send it without an attachment. Which is surprisingly useful, and should cut down on e-mails called "this time with attachment".

...BUT...

Replying to e-mails embedded in the reading pane is an experiment too far, however,

Oh, also saying after a spell check "you're good to go" really grates.

WHY DOES IT SHOUT?

The cursor animation in e-mails (in the preview, not used the final release) also lags behind the letter being typed, which is really off-putting if you look at the screen and not the keys when typing.

Excel has an odd habit of perpetually rendering cell contents. So, you type =SUM(yada yada) it stays there, or appears in another cell while the cell you'd worked on shows the answer. When you scroll the spreadsheet it stays where it is. It even survives minimising the thing, only solution is to close the sheet and reopen. After saving when there are a lot of tabs it will freeze and show just the top left 10x10 grid until you click outside that grid.

And finally, why does it keep insisting on using US English? Windows must tell it my keyboard type, and my timezone, preferred language and location. But, no, first time I type "analyse" it is changed to "analyze" (which can't even be a word, given its etymology) so I have to go and find how to change the default dictionary.

...and reporting them as bugs is a pain, because it wants to send a screenshot. Yep, I'll do that, a lovely screenshot of that confidential spreadsheet I was working on...

Amazon: We have great cash flow - it flows straight out of our hands

@Charlie Clark

A really interesting article in that link, which backs up what "feels right". The paper is quite involved, but has this lovely conclusion "We did not start out trying to forecast gloom and doom. We started out by looking at the optimists' assertion that today's low payout ratios are a strong positive signal for future growth. Unfortunately, this view is emphatically inconsistent with the historical evidence."

There was also a paper (Stanley Paulo, Chris Gale, (2012),"The Miller-Modigliani 1961 Ponzi scheme, alias "dividend irrelevance"", International Journal of Law and Management, Vol. 54 Iss: 3 pp. 234 - 241) about the M-M formula actually equating a Ponzi scheme which is quite entertaining. At least as entertaining as highly technical accounting papers get. Which isn't very.

Re: Profits = tax bills?

I'm not too sure on your question, but in general...

A company is taxed upon its profits in the country where those profits are recognised.

If you make £100 in a country with a corporation tax rate of 80%, then you hand over £80 to that government. You may notice that the next door country only charges 5%. So you open another company in that country, and send a bill for "licensing" or "management fees" to the first company of £99.99. Now the first company makes a profit of 1p, which is taxed at 80%. Good luck collecting that. The other company (assuming it has no other costs) has a profit of £99.99, and pays tax at 5% (so about £5). Total tax bill - about a fiver. Would you rather pay £80 in tax or £5?

That's sort of what Amazon, Starbucks et al stand accused of in the UK, and that's probably why you describe them as efficient. They use low taxation regimes to pool profit, reducing the overall tax bill. Sort-of. it's far more complicated than that, but you should get the gist of it.

Amazon made a loss last year. Losses are not taxed, in that you don't get tax back if you make a loss, but you (in many jurisdictions) carry the loss forward to net off against your future profits, reducing your future tax bill.

Does that make any sense?

Otherwise "efficiency" could mean sales per $ of capital (it's called an efficiency ratio).

Re: No dividends, ever, and no plans to start one

Apparently, according to Messrs Miller & Modigliani, dividend versus capital growth is irrelevant to an investor.

See the seminal paper - Miller, M.H. and Modigliani, F. (1961), “Dividend policy, growth, and the valuation of shares”,

Journal of Business, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 411-33

A paper debated now for about 51 years.

Of course, why and in what you would choose to invest is up to you and your personal circumstances.

Re: Cashflow != ignore

Just a quick point - you can make a loss many times (IBM, MSFT last quarter etc.) but you can only run out of cash once. At that point you are bust. Dead. Game over.

Ignore cashflow at your absolute peril.

The maxim for accountants is "Cash is king. Sales are vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality".

I assume you'll be paid in profits this month rather than cash then?

Is your Surface Pro a bit full? Slot in an SD card, it's not from Apple

Re: Limited capacity

"And use of WiFi..... I'd rather have it disabled.....which is damn near impossible on the iPad"

I believe the latest iOS update may resolve that for you...

Sorry, Apple-haters, but Cupertinian doom not on the horizon

Re: Fruity Bookkeeping

Some places eschew calendar months and have 13 sets of 4 week periods. IIRC Rolls Royce does that. It makes the accounting a bit easier, but if your salary arrives on a 4 week schedule it can make home budgeting a pain in the neck.

The spurious use of "Q1 2013" is a result of Apple having a 30 September year-end. So it classes Oct, Nov, Dec 2012 as being in 2013. I could say "Q1 of the 2012/13 financial (or fiscal as our US friends tend to say) year".

Office 2013 now available for some home users

Re: Is there anyone left..

"Won't be long now before the shrink wrapped product is largely dead."

Be careful for what you wish.

That's what MSFT wants. The pricing on shrinkwrap vs subscription (Office 365 or whatever it's called these days) is so far weighted to subscription that the latter is the most viable option for all but the most die-hard must have a disc types. A subscription is an income stream that's a bit more predictable. Subscriptions bring along SkyDrive (or Lync) so more lock-in.

Microsoft to end Windows 8 discounts on January 31

@Dana

I get your joke, but there's a serious point in it.

It's not selling well, and to help old Stevie B out it needs more sales. Put the price up at a defined point may tip those who were thinking "oh I'll maybe do it sometime" or "I always wait for service pack 1" over the edge, so there could (MSFT hope) be a sudden sales frenzy to get a license code and an iso before the price goes up, and tumbleweed follows other than new PCs from OEM.

The key is - lots of licenses shifted for the next earnings call. Long term we can put off for a bit. This is not a smart way to run a company.

UK climate expert warns of 3-5 degree warmer world by 2100

Re: Issue with these models is...

The problem is amplified by the media, and the fight for funding.

Only catastrophic projections make headlines, which makes the "visible" climate change science biased toward catastrophe NEXT WEEK OMG!!!!111!! Of course the impending catastrophe does not happen, so the whole field is called into question.

Headlines attract funding (well, it's more that headline makers attract funding) so the circle continues.

There has been a lot of Bad Science on climate change, and a lot of very underhand and suspicious activity (witness University of East Anglia, for instance). That does not help with any serious science being given the page space to be read and understood.

I sort of see the point of the £70 each to help the third world, becuase if we in the UK shut up shop and stopped producing any pollutants then we'd make absolutely no difference to the CO2 at all, so encouraging others to clean up their act is a sound move. The bigger problem is, we can't afford it (hell we can barely afford anything) and I have no idea as to the viability of the potentially sponsored projects.

Surely £2bn towards, say, nuclear fusion research may have been better spent? As I understand it the physics is well understood, the majority of the difficulties lie with engineering. Oh, and the word "nuclear".

Dogs would say: size is important, shape - not so much

Re: My dog's very clever

"... has yet to dispatch anything avian."

I thought you may have heard that "bird" is the word.

Smear campaign

Re: Mashing the screen makes me want to kill...

What a computer really needs is some form of pointer device (like an on screen arrow) that could be used by the observer to accurately indicate what they were talking about. It could be moved around by some form of physical control, maybe kept near the keyboard.

Boffins prescribe SNAKE VENOM as future pain killer

Re: News

Nah, the parrots-eat-em-all.