Posts by Ye Gads

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

Re: Some well made points

"The fact that some individuals have enough surplus income to be able to opt out of the state provision and into a private paid for alternative is largely irrelevant"

No - that's hugely dangerous. People who opt out of these services no longer care how well (or badly) they are run. Worse, they then resent having to pay for services that they aren't using.

Take education: my kids go to private school. We do this because the local primary schools aren't particularly good. All the parents at the school are very fussy and push like crazy to keep standards up. Now, imagine what would happen if these parents were let loose in the local state primaries: they'd be on the board of governors, they'd be pushing the school about school meals, the quality of the homework and lessons and bugging the hell out of their local councillors to ensure that the schools standards were maintained.

But, because they're not doing this, the local primary schools aren't pushed as much. If we want to keep services going we need to ensure people are bought into them.

Wacky 'baccy making a hash of FBI infosec recruitment efforts

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned...

But surely arriving at a job-interview when drunk/high is not the best idea.

Arriving to a job interview with law enforcement while drunk/high seems particularly nuts.

Even 'Your computer has a virus' cold-call gits are migrating off XP

I'm a lumberjack...

The last time they called me I said "Oh dear, I'm not very technical. I work as a lumberjack. Let me tell you about my job".

At which point I broke into song. They hung up half-way through the second verse and haven't called back since.

Boffins claim battery BREAKTHROUGH – with rhubarb-like molecule

Re: Optimistic - Given the right components

Which will need to include sugar, custard and (and this might be controversial) a little strawberry jam then I agree they may be on to something here. We would be both more environmentally friendly and yummy...

Windows Phone app developers: These games are made for you

Don't knock desperation

I've already had several hundred pounds worth of Amazon and JL vouchers from DVLUP. MS and Nokia are obviously keen/desperate enough to encourage/bribe developers.

I'll be taking their coin while its offered

Vodafone dodges UK corporation tax bill - AGAIN

Re: Isn't this the same Vodafone...

Yes and no. Substantial shareholding only applies to shares owned by UK companies and these shares are held by Vodafone Holland because of (you guessed it) the low tax Dutch tax regime.

As such they would have been outside the 2002 Finance Act and "substantial shareholding". The reason HMRC is getting squat is because of the following:

1) Previously the UK would have charged a foreign controlled company the difference between the tax it paid in the foreign jurisdiction and in the UK, but this was deemed contrary to EU law.

2) Even after all this we would have still got them on any profits they tried to repatriate to pay off UK shareholders. This would have amounted to about £5 billion (or the cost of higher education for a year in the UK). But the law was changed in 2009 so that it's now perfectly OK to move money to the UK for dividend purposes and pay no tax on it.

So, the story is that where there was once a tax obligation there isn't one. This is all recent. This is money would could have used to improve services/reduce the deficit (choose depending on political persuasion) but it's no longer considered chargeable.

Isn't this the same Vodafone...

Who is getting £84 billion for it stake in Verizon? And is returning £22 billion to shareholders?

What happened, did they lose all this money behind the sofa?

Or do the use inter-company loans and other complex financial products that allow them to move their "official" profits to low/no tax jurisdictions?

Yeah, thought so...

Blighty's biz bods get their paws on Nokia phondleslab

For Business Use?

You must be joking.

As a .Net developer who writes LOB apps there is no way we'd have these. Why?

1)

When you look at their side-loading story, it's all about si

de-loading Windows Store apps. This means Different Xaml, different control sets and all the fun of double coding features for this and the desktop version of the app.

Buying the full fat version of a W8 tablet makes all this go away and costs an additional £300. Given that a developer costs about £500 it's far, far cheaper to buy more expensive kit than to re-building existing apps using new tech.

2)

It has a teeny, tiny screen. All my users have 2 or more screens. This would only be useful to management types who wanted dashboards, and they're all in love with their iPads. They don't want these things because they don't want to buy Fruit Ninja all over again.

I'm sure it's well-built, but the only way business is going to buy these things is as kiosk/POS devices (and even then it would be cheaper, integration-wise to use intel devices). And they ain't gonna buy them from John Lewis...

Paypal makes man 1000x as rich as the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE

I'd settle for

Just a seconds worth of interest on the sum. That wold be fair. I'd still be a trillionaire.

India's centralised snooping system facing big delays

Too many jokes...

Though it just goes to show, you should always develop with a sensible dataset.

I can just see the developers working with a flat-file of 2500 intercepts and saying "yup, the system works just fine..."

NSA PRISM-gate: Relax, GCHQ spooks 'keep us safe', says Cameron

So this is a modest encroachment of our privacy

So, what's a significant encroachment?

They only do this because they can. At no point have our governments tried to read all our meatspace post. Now we know why: not because it is a authoritarian and anti-democratic thing to do, but because it was too hard...

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

Actually, the Declaration of Independence had very little to do with French philosophes. It was very much a Lockean document.

First, some history. After the English Civil War a writer called Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan. He basically argued that living outside of state control was so horrible that we would/should accept a ruler with absolute power because any kind of civil society was better than living outside of one.

A little bit later (1690 something) a writer called John Locke write "Two Treaties on Government", in which he argued that the state of nature was not so brutal and that (wait for it) man had some inalienable rights because of his God-given reason and that, finally, man only formed the civil state to pursue "life, liberty and the pursuit of property". He believed that the state was a man-made thing and required our consent in order to be legitimate.

The Americans would not have liked Rousseau on little bit as he argued that the state and society had is bound by its laws and people must submit to them (he calls this the "General Will"). Once these are in place people must conform to them. On the plus side, everyone is treated equally before the law but they are expected to submit to it. Given that the American founders were in the process of rebelling against their lawful rulers, I suspect that Rousseau was not their philosopher of choice.

Locke, on the other hand, fit the bill nicely: "No taxation without representation" is a Lockean argument (I haven't consented to you so you don't get my property), Their argument about "God-given" rights and reason is pure Locke.

Apple unveils hints of Monday's new-product announcements

Whatever they're selling

We can be sure that the NSA (Hi guys!) will have your usage and browsing patterns analysed before Apple does.

IT staff clamouring to pay for their own BYOD kit, says survey

Actually

I work for a large organisation which gives all its staff laptops so ee can hot-desk.

The problem is that, as a developer, having a laptop that can run an email client, chat and excel doesn't cut it. Having your hard disk encrypted, with the 40% reduction of performance that comes with it, doesn't help either. Having a slow 5400 rpm drive sucks too. Oh, and did I mention that we also have anti-virus scanning each read and write?

The developers complained and were told that getting laptops with SSDs and a sensible amount of memory would cost an extra £200 so wasn't practical. I would gladly have written them a cheque right then and there for £200 for a dev box that wasn't the laughable joke my current laptop is.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. The developers here have risen up with torches and pitchforks and have demanded better kit and it does look like they're listening this time.

But, all this said, I can see the attraction of using something I've chosen as fit for purpose for my job instead of the pile of junk I currently have.

Herschel Space Observatory spots galaxies merging

That explains

The tremor in the force I felt earlier...

EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

I have no issue with this

It's all horses for courses...

The iWatch is coming! The iWatch is coming!

Amazing multi-tasking capabilities

It allows the owner to talk into their watch and out of their arse at the same time.

Another breakthrough product by Apple!

Peak Apple: Yet ANOTHER supplier reports drop in demand

Re: On the other hand.

By 17%? Not a chance. Especially as most Asian exchange rates are pegged to the dollar. And commodity prices have been going one way in the past couple of years (and it ain't down). Also, they said revenue from their largest customer had gone down, not profit. These terms, in accounting parlance, are quite different:

Revenue is how much you've made from a customer. E.G: I sold Apple $500 million worth of stuff

Profit is how much you made from your revenue: E.g. After costs, I made $150 million of profit of my sales to Apple.

They're saying revenue is down, not profit. This means that either Apple has reduced the price they're paying by 17% (don't believe that for a second), they've bought 17% less stuff or some combination of the two.

Also, companies making large purchases in foreign currency fill usually go to a bank and sign an agreement to buy x amount of currency y with currency z at a point in the future (this is called a Forward), so currency fluctuations usually don't affect this kind of thing.

So no, it's not price fluctuations, it's almost certainly that they're buying less stuff.

Cameron: Get those saucy websites off Blighty's public Wi-Fi

Don't they have more important things to do?

Y'know. Jobs, the economy, that kind of thing?

No.10 guru: UK tech scene is AN EXPLODING CHEESE

Hold on...

So we're paying for foreign companies to use UK state office space in foreign companies? In the name of supporting the UK tech industry?

iPhone 5S and lower-cost sibling coming this summer?

Yawn...

Another year, another set of incremental improvements palmed off as revolutionary...

Xamarin chucks Apple fruit at Microsoft mobe wobblers

You must be joking

Visual Studio integration costs $999 per year per platform. Easier to learn Java...

New blow for Microsoft Surface: Touch Chromebooks 'on sale in 2013'

Blow?

Chromebook sales so far make the Surface look downright successful.

iOS 6.1 KNACKERED our mobile phone networks, claim Vodafone, Three

Crashing the mobile network

There's an app for that...

We're not making this up: Apple trademarks the SHOP

Re: So they've not patented...

They tried that with their "Look and Feel" lawsuit against Microsoft in the 90s...

Microsoft promises big shiny tool to cheer glum Windows resellers

That's a terrible thing...

To call Steve Ballmer

Nokia chief Elop: 'Android? Hey, anything's possible!'

Re: Hmmmm

I'm not so sure. Nokia didn't just get an OS for Microsoft. they got quite a bit more:

1. About 1 billion dollars

2. Protection from being sued by Apple. You can bet Apple would have targeted Nokia if they'd gone with Android. MS would have probably targeted them as well. Nokia doesn't have the deep pockets that Samsung does so this could really have been a problem for them.

3. A lot of say over how the OS was going to be developed and the hardware that could be used with it. Given that they've been the only one championing the OS for the past 18 months this gives them a lot of leverage.

4. A new market. Nokia map data is now the WP platform standard, a new revenue stream for Nokia. I think you'll see them doing this with other services, giving them new revenue sources.

They could, of course, still go belly up. I just don't think their move was as dumb as people say. Their choice came with a large number of advantages.

Vodafone will rent you an iPhone 5 for 69p* a day

Lets do some maths

So if I'm currently forking out £47 a month I can change to £26 a month + 69p a day.

That means £251.85 a year for the handset (or 20.99 a month). That means a very generous saving of 1p a month.

So the "deal" has nothing to do with saving any money. It's a case of being tied to a shorter contract in return for giving up control of the hardware to the operator.

I'd be interested in knowing what "rights" I had on the phone? When can Vodafone claim the phone back, and for what reasons? If I annoy them can they cancel my contract and leave me phoneless with no warning/comback?

So you want an office of Apple Macs - here's a survival guide

Lets list the ways in which this is a bad idea

1) Cost of hardware. Macs cost significantly more than a PC

Ican buy a Dell for £300. It's nothing special but it will do everything %90 of office workers need to do. Macs cost significantly more. And lets not even talk about support.

2) Cost of support. Supporting multiple OSs, PC types, etc is more expensive

How many people out there have experience running Macs against a windows domain? Go on, raise your hands. Thought so. Finding people who can do this in a credible way that doesn't expose the network to security issues is going to be expensive. Windows support people are plentiful and cheap.

3) Cost of IT time to make business software run on Macs

I've read lots of "ways to get windows software to run" on a mac. All of these require effort, setup and support. There's a massive added cost here in getting people to a position where they can do their job - as well as wasting ITs time helping people getting software to work on incompatible platforms.

4) Security

Apple has a long history of leaving security holes to linger in their OS before patching them. Their recent issues with the Java runtime was a case in point.

Companies are there to make money. IT is there to help them do this. Giving people equipment that doesn't allow them to do their job and costs significantly more to run and support is idiotic. I completely accept that there are places for Macs in certain roles: graphics design, some creative functions, etc, but if someone says they want to use a Mac to use Word, surf and run the accounting app then they need to be shown the door (as do the idiots pandering to them).

Apple engineers 'pay no attention to anyone's patents', court told

Re: Quelle surprise...

Yes, because most developers read the documentation first before they do anything. Developers love reading and writing documentation, it's far more fun than coding and

<BANG>

Oops, there goes the reality distortion field...

Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review

Tablet Math

iPad Mini 16GB : £269

Google Nexus 7 32GB: £199

Kindle Fire HD 16GB: £159

Playbook 64GB: £129

I use a Playbook and a cheap Android tablet for long car journeys as it's loaded up with movies for the kids, can do web surfing and email, etc. I need my devices to be small, cheap and replaceable.

I'm just not sure that it's worth an extra £60-140 unless I've already committed to Apple products.

Hmm, I think I'll order an iPad Mini on Amazon ... Oh no I won't

Three words

"Tee hee hee".

Mine's an extra large tub of popcorn...

Pre-ordered a Microsoft Surface? So SORRY it's late, have a voucher

I guess this is Microsoft's attempt

to stop us "holding it wrong".

We can pay for it but we're not going to be allowed to sully it with our presence....

iPad Mini: Why is Apple SO SCARED of the Kindle?

Re: Education? More like car aftermarket...

Yes, because we'd all prefer to pay £300 for a device that plays movies and might get mauled by the kids when there is a £129 alternative that does the same thing.

A hundred Brit IT bods' jobs under threat at Direct Line

They never learn...

Direct Line and Churchill are the insurance arm of RBS Group. Given RBS' past successes with outsourcing I'm sure they'll hire experienced and competent people and it'll all be for the best.

Oh, wait a minute...

Never mind.

Scottish brainiacs erect wee super-antenna

Too Late...

Apple has already patented "rectangular device that sends and receives mobile signals".

they're doomed

Win8 tablets may cost MORE than iPads – AND LAPTOPS

In fairness

Microsoft isn't marketing this pathetically overpriced crap, Asus is. They're going to have to do significantly better with an iPad costing $400-$500 and a Kindle Fire costing $200.

Sadly, MS get tarred by association. Lets hope the Surface is (significantly) cheaper.

New Nokia Lumia mobes fail to inspire investors

Re: Nokia need to put out Android phones

They do make great hardware, but putting Android on them would be a mistake. Here's why:

Nokia's business is under attack from a number of angles. Their "cheap as chips" phones are facing stiff competition from Chinese handsets and are losing market share there.

Android, while popular, is causing legal headaches for the companies that use it. If they're not being mugged quietly by Microsoft and being made to pay them a royalty for each handset sold they're being mugged loudly by Apple, who takes them to court.

Imagine the following: Nokia had chosen Android rather than WP7. They get hit by MS for $10 for each mobe they sell and then get sued by apple in multiple jurisdictions, stopping their product from even reaching market. They've got nobody to bail them out (MS gave them $1 billion and other unspecified payments) and no big, powerful friends to help.

So they've taken a risk. Symbian was dead (had a Symbian phone, hated it) and they needed to find something else. But was Android the answer? No.

Behold: China's robot noodle army!

Now...

That's using your noodle

Apple's Mountain Lion to offer automatic security updates

To paraphrase Prince....

We're going to update like it's 1999...

Wasn't Microsoft doing this in Windows 98?

RBS IT cockup: This sort of thing can destroy a bank, normally

Re: Hmm...

Nope.

RBS started offshoring its investment bank in 2006.

RBS closed its final salary pension to all new employees in 2007.

What the new lot have done is followed the same policies, only more so. Moving some stuff offshore is probably not a bad idea (Helpdesk, legacy internal business apps, etc) - shipping off core bank functionality is not so good.

Natwest, RBS: When will bank glitch be fixed? Probably not today

On the plus-side, all RBS Group employees are forced to have an RBS/Natwest account into which their salary will be paid. This happens around the 24th of each month.

Yep, you guessed it: RBS and Natwest probably won't be able to pay their staff until they fix the problem so they will be feeling their customers pain.

Larry Ellison buys island 1000x bigger than Branson's

In other news

Larry Ellison has also bought himself a white cat and several sharks (for performance review purposes).

Python wraps its coils around the enterprise

Innumerate

Right, so Python has exploded 600% while Java/.Net have grown by 25% over the same 4 year period. As "any fule no" it's easy to generate large growth rates from small numbers. if I go from 10 to 60 that is 600% growth, and 600% growth sounds much better than 50...

Lets look at some real numbers, taken from www.ITJobsWatch.co.uk

In the last 3 months:

.Net 23381 (.Net Developer 8184)

Java 18322 (6110 Java Developer)

3295 Python (273 Python Developer)

Looking at this, I'd suggest that business are mentioning Python in their job adverts a lot more but are

still not really looking for people with Python as a primary skill in large numbers (notice the difference between Python and Python Developer).

Oracle staffer accused of sex-for-favours in Singapore

Oracle

A company that gives a f**k about getting your business...

Or is that gives one to get your business? I can't decide

Tube bosses: 'Wireless tickets too slow, we think'

Um...

Here's the issue. The gates are all about getting people through as fast as they can. Making them ticket machines as well will slow down the process considerably. People should have a ticket when they reach the gate.

Just imagine trying to get to work via London Bridge (i've seen crowds by the Jubilee line entrance 10 deep on semi-regular intervals) when 4 of the terminals are taken up with tourists buying tickets for their family...

So how is this going to make the tube better?

We've already got paper tickets and Oyster cards. I'd prefer if they put the money into trying to stop the Jubilee line breaking down twice a week.

Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead

Re: The initial reaction

Except that you've probably got a lot of people writing WinPho apps using Express. People who will find they need to upgrade to VS 2011 to port their app to the new WinRT interface.

And they won't be able to do this unless they fork out the thick end of £500