Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Doing everything in-house is all well and good, but it's wasteful to train staff with skills that they won't need in the long term."
Doing everything in house also brings in a choice of two other penalties: miss out on some things from time to time by not having enough staff or increase cost by being over-staffed most of the time so as to be able to catch the peaks.
"ALL permies are somehow lacking in skills, lazy and take sick days all the time?"
It's not so much that as some of the wingers* lack self-awareness.
As a permie I was aware that although it rewarded risk taking freelance wouldn't work for me at that particular time of life and that I probably lacked the experience. It wasn't a matter of complaining of being unfairly treated (I had enough experience of that in other ways earlier on), just of understanding the situation. In due course I was able to take advantage of changes of personal circumstances and experience.
The real issue with some of the posts here is that the posters stop at "rewarded". Obviously they intuitively realise it's not for them, otherwise they'd go ahead and freelance themselves. But they don't grasp that it's a risk/reward situation; that they've come down on one side and need to accept the disadvantages in terms of reward are tied to what they see as advantages; that both modes are equally justifiable; that from the employer/client side** the two are complementary; and that the effect of IR35 is to unbalance the risk/reward structure to nobody's overall advantage.
* Some are just trolling.
** I've been on the client management side so I know that there are occasions when extra help has to be brought in on a short-term basis and that that isn't going to happen by bringing in short termers on the payroll. In fact, if short term becomes a feature of the payroll the next step is that there aren't any long term roles and where does that leave the wingers?
Any such employees could have joined what you obviously see as a nice safe gravy train. So could you.
Why didn't you? Altruism? Or something else holding you back? It's odd that those who are posed that question never seem to answer. Perhaps when they stop to think what the answer might be they realise the difference.
The concept of what an OS is has been rather fluid ever since virtualisation raised its head on mainframes. If you run Windows as a virtual OS on BSD or Linux on Windows - or these days just running WSL as part of Windows - what's the OS as far as the application is concerned. We're dealing with layers and all the application can do is take whatever provides its API is the OS. For an application running in a browser that's the browser. If you want to look as far as the hardware* then the OS is the entire stack up to and including the browser but all the application sees is the browser.
* Given that the processor's instruction set is apt to be an artefact provided by microcode what actually is the hardware as afar as the OS is concerned?
"Of course the best approach would be for the site to check for required browser features and only pop up a warning message if a feature used by the site is reported as not supported by the user's browser."
A better approach still would be a plain vanilla test browser approved by someone such as the W3C. Devs could use it for their own testing but if it passes W3C or whoever could also hand out an approved badge based on independent testing. Banks and other financial institutions would be required to have it.
Lack of the badge would become an indication of cowboys and smartarses at work.
"how it was impossible to convince a court of innocence when that was truly the case, why it's only now recognised that they were malicious prosecutions."
Somebody has posted explanations above. Basically experts - but in effect PO/Fujitsu representatives - giving evidence and the accused not having their hands on sufficient documentation. An expert will be called by one side or the other but should still make an independent investigation. A strong desire to seek out the truth is the best qualification for an expert witness.
"AWS, Facebook and Google wouldn't exists - or at least wouldn't be so profitable, without being able to use and run a lot of code for free, and on a lot of systems."
AWS & Facebook, maybe. But I just looked at the 2017 kernel report. Google is 10th in company contributions for 4.8to 4.13, seventh if you strip out "none", "unknown" and "consultants". Only 4 changes less than SUSE and 3x the number by Canonical.
"The trio promised that any investments would be repaid in full if the product failed to sell, with five per cent interest for good measure, with Bershan guaranteeing the funds."
That should have been a warning. If the prospects were that good and they had the money to reimburse with interest why would they need to bring in external investors? If it's too good to be true ....
We had a 1/2" reel HP drive. Periodically its loading mechanism would get into a state where it failed to work - much blowing of tape into the slot and re-winding. The solution was to reset it by shorting two pads on a circuit board. The spacing was just right for a bent paper-clip.
That is bwas paid for with pre-tax income of the company from the higher rates that they choose to charge are able to negotiate with the contracting company to cover this.
FTFY
And note that the "higher" income is obviously more advantageous to the client than the costs of engaging a permanent employee. That's because the "lower rate" of the permanent employee doesn't include that until you take into account the employee benefits.
It would be very unwise of a judge in one case to make a straight accusation of what could be another case. It would be up to the CPS to make such a decision. The question is will they decide to try and keep a lid on it and hope it all goes away or will they prosecute some of their witnesses to show their own hands were clean?
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