Posts by JetSetJim
574 posts • joined Saturday 4th July 2009 07:51 GMT
Re: What about being a sole trader?
Personal liability, as I understand it. Imagine making a coding error that costs the company that hires you £200,000. They can claim that off you personally if you are a sole trader, or off your company if you are in a Ltd Co.
I'm sure there are insurances to be had in either circumstances.
Also, it may expose the hiring company to IR35 investigations, too. When I did a stint in contracting, it seemed the norm for a couple of tiers of separation between my Ltd company and the hiring company.
Indeed, most UMTS networks are not built for use at high speeds (HS2 is alleged to be due to rumble along at a clippy 250mph). You might just be able to hang on to a 144kbps connection if you're lucky, but there are going to need to be some funky long-lobed directional antenna deployments to minimise the handover rates.
Re: Want One
I was at a Thrust SSC presentation a while back, with Noble & Green, and they were asked a "what it something goes wrong?" type question.
The answer was rather simple - lift the tail up an inch or two (or whatever) and then wet your pants while the car slows down. What lifting the tail does is basically keep it on the ground. They basically reckon that if the car goes airborne, then Mr Green becomes strawberry jam when it comes back down. So they lift the tail while he tries to keep it going in a straight line. I imagine parachutes would be deployed to try and slow down a bit quicker, too, as the brakes aren't that useful at 700mph.
It was a fascinating presentation, though.
> Taxation does NOT create jobs Mr. Politician
Indeed it doesn't, but every govmt wants to tax what people spend every which way, so when those nasty multi-nationals use loopholes to funnel cash out of a country without paying tax, it denies them that segment of tax revenue that could have been collected if the company providing that service wholly operated within the UK. This diminishes the Treasury's revenue, and makes the defence, NHS and welfare bills add up to more than the govmts receipts if this isn't fixed.
The question is, how should govmt be funded? And what should be funded? I'm sure we can all find little (and large) projects that are white elephants, plus examples of wasteful expenditure - but that's not the issue. How does the govmt fund what it is supposed to be doing? The answer is taxation - both on income for the proletariat, and profits for corporations. It's hard for the proletariat to hide their income, but large corporations can easily funnel stuff elsewhere - therefore reducing the "take" for the govmt, and requiring either increased general taxation for those that can't avoid (or "plan") it, or reducing services (or a mix of both). Or they could borrow squillions of quid to let our children fix it.
In short, the system is broken and needs sorting. Yes, the internet is a great inter-country leveller, making it easy for a business to set up shop in a low tax area while selling into a high tax area, so they either need to unify tax systems to level out the global tax demands, or make the transfer of cash between countries for business purposes a taxable thing (somehow, which I appreciate will tread on toes all over the place).
Possibly over-simplistic, and IANAEconomist, so feel free to blow raspberries at my naivety.
Uni of Surrey
Note that their "private sponsorship" includes names such as Huawei, Telefonica, Fujitsu and ...... Samsung
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2012/90791_the_university_of_surrey_secures_35m_for_new_5g_research_centre.htm
Re: Well
Maybe it's a poker site that is plagued by bots scamming the fleshies with their accurate statistical calculations. Angry rant => fleshie => ok to play
Re: cling film
Either
a) don't put the poo in the document feeder - it will jam
b) on a flat-bed scanner, don't close the lid too rapidly (and also use cling film on top of the poo)
Re: If my math is correct
Don't the match officials get anything? :)
Cheer up, have a beer. I, too, am always astounded by the amount folks are willing to pay to watch a group of chaps kick a ball about. Yes, they may be talented ball-kickers, but many thousand-pounds-a-week good? I suppose they've got to offset for 20-30 years of scrabbling around trying to get a job when they're past it - there's only so many top-tier managerial/coaching jobs, after all, but I have a sneaky suspicion that a bunch of them will employ good "financial advisers" in that regard...
Re: The real problem
Your statement that we are citizens by virtue of being born here needs a bit of qualification:
"Even if you were born in the United Kingdom, you will not be a British citizen if neither of your parents was a British citizen or legally settled here at the time of your birth. This means you are not a British citizen if, at the time of your birth, your parents were in the country temporarily, had stayed on without permission, or had entered the country illegally and had not been given permission to stay here indefinitely."
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/othernationality/Britishcitizenship/borninukorqualifyingterritory/
India
It may not be a manufacturer of telco kit, but there are a lot of folks writing code for telco kit working there.
Prior art
There was recently a Moto phone that had a trackpad on the back, so the "sticking it out of the way on the back of the phone" aspect of the patent is instantly obvious. I wonder if Moto patented that....?
I'm sure there's other prior art, along these lines, too...
Re: Good
I'm not saying they didn't do it at all, I'm saying they made an offer which was consistent with previous opening offers in FRAND negotiations with other companies. Apple declined to negotiate, preferring to litigate the rate. Motorola would seem to have been able to reach FRAND agreements in a similar way for at least the last one or two dozen years with a wide variety of other phone manufacturers without anyone raising a gripe like this.
Similarly Apple have tried to get the courts to set a FRAND rate while withholding the right to disagree with it if it is over $1/device (or whatever low rate they stated).
That's the whole problem with the FRAND stuff is that there is no fixed rate per SEP, and different companies will have a different opinion as to what meets the criteria of FRAND. Perhaps up until now the whole FRAND negotiation has only been tested between companies holding their own piles of SEPs, and Apple, with their small holding of SEPs from the Nortel IPR purchase and limited recent activities, doesn't fit that mould. But is it "reasonable", or even "fair" for someone who has not contributed to the standards process (either in the working groups that do research, or in the standards setting procedure) to get the whole standard for a minimal price?
Put another way, is it fair for the incumbent 3GPP manufacturers to have to subsidise Apple's margin (with their many years of research) so that Apple can "compete"? I would argue not. Apple *should* have to pay for it, as that is only fair and reasonable.
Re: Good
Did I? All I've seen is statements like "Motorola made their standard opening offer of 2.5% of device price", expecting a negotiation, not litigation. Moto did not present them with an invoice. There may also have been reference to a cross-licensing deal for Apple's non-SEP patents. Just because Apple have a different business model which has resulted in their operating margin being up in the 30% range, rather than the <10% (being generous) that MMI enjoys, doesn't mean that the opening offer is any less valid.
I'm not aware of anyone coming forth with what is a "fair and reasonable" SEP rate, primarily because the deals that are entered into are usually enormously complicated due to both parties having differing lists of SEPs in their back pockets, plus other non-SEP, but standards relevant patents, plus other "regular" patents, plus other "software"/"design" patents that might be useful.
If you buy a car (used or not), do you pay sticker price? Or do you sue the dealership?
Re: Good
as I understand it (feel free to correct me), the situation is as follows:
a) Apple start selling their phone, neglecting to license all relevant 3GPP SEPs
b) Moto notices, asks for royalty
c) Apple sues
d) Moto counter-sue, asking for injunctive relief as Apple still haven't paid a penny to them
e) Apple starts moaning about anti-trust
I'm not saying the situation isn't daft, merely that Moto isn't as bas as you might think.
Re: Ten years?
Unfortunately I suspect we couldn't extradite as he's quite likely to die as a consequence (either by death penalty or by mob justice).
Re: They have a right to their opinion ...
So they're saying it's unfair for someone to scrape public information and publish a "league table" of "good corporate citizens" listing:
a) Company name
b) Company profit (global)
c) Declared company profit (local)
d) Company taxes paid (local)
Might make for an interesting website, particularly if it could also be made global with a "local country selector" drop-down.
Re: Beer for $0.50c
I assume you homebrew, then? Much cheaper and can produce excellent results
Re: Solar sail? Ion drive?
1st warning: 29th March
2nd, more critical warning: 30th March
Burn date: 3rd April, 12:00
Original estimated collision date/time: 3rd April, 13:00 (? the article doesn't explicitly mention, but the text leads me to this conclusion)
The delta-vee available from a solar sail or ion drive is tiny - the wiki guesses as <1N (for what I assume is an absolutely mahoosive sail). Fermi has a mass of around 4,300kg, so a mono-Newton force isn't going to achieve much in the timescales we're talking about - particularly with the uncertainties of working out which direction to apply the thrust.
Solar sail obviously has the problem of mostly only being able to apply force in one direction only, and you need to have a solar sail ready to deploy.
Ion drives are similarly limited in thrust - up til now they've been measuring thrust in mN, although there's some experimental jobbies with 80+N of thrust using a pulsed engine and a whacking great big power supply.
...or
use OsmAnd. Free, same data (OSM), online or offline, including navigation
Re: Streaming does suit my needs....
Thankee for the prod - rang them up and moaned about it, saved >£5 by removing the cap. Weird. If British Gas can manage to tell you if you're on their best tariff every 6 months, why can't BT?
silly
Indeed - it would be much more cost-effective to let the USPTO invalidate at least most of Apple's patents that they're using before resorting to an overall retrial (which will happen when Sammy appeal everything). This is just a waste of everyone's time so that Apple can trumpet a press release saying they won.
Re: WTF?
I don't dispute the "wtf" element to your post, but doesn't the iDonut HQ building have a big underground car park? GPS won't work there, so it is logical to have such a system in place for dopey iWorkers.
I completely agree that the patent is in the "bleedin' obvious" category, and should be denied with all due speed.
Re: Share buy-back
> Any student of investment analysis knows that a buy-back has positive effect on a company's share price because it means having the cash sitting around in a bank earning sub-cost of capital returns won't be dragging down the company's value anymore.
IANAEconomist, so this may be a dumb question - AAPL are "investing" $100Bn in a share buy-back. Current market cap is $380Bn (give or take), so they are effectively buying back ~25% of the company. I'm guessing this will have a positive effect on the share price as it will restrict the amount of stock available to trade, thus making the "shiney-shiney" stock harder to obtain, thus inflating its value. Isn't that the main reason for share price going up in these circumstances? On the upside, it gives AAPL more clout in the AGM as it is unlikely to be outvoted due to its shareholding (I assume these are the same sorts of shares?). So, all this does is prop up the plunging share price.
As a side note, Motorola had a 12% market share in the smartphone market in q2 2011 (when Goog announced the acquisition). That market equalled 107m units, so Moto sold just shy of 13m units and was bought for $12.5bn. In contrast, Apple sold 19m units in that quarter and was even then trading around the $350-380 range - i.e. a market cap slightly lower than it is today. Was Apple worth 28x Moto at the time? Yes, Moto had issues and Apple was a rising star, but still, 28x? IMHO, Apple is still overvalued and all Cook is doing is stemming the share-price slide with this buy-back. It merely delays the inevitable.
Another spin is that perhaps they are instead preparing for a new round of stock option deployments to senior directors...? :)
Streaming does suit my needs....
But my capped copper connection to BT doesn't....
Re: Nice, but..
Nothing "in my head", merely the personally identifiable information (namely pics of Plumpy) being distributed to all and sundry. That's why you can get in trouble (in theory) if you have a security cam that points off your property and takes pics of neighbours as they go about their business on their property.
Re: Nice, but..
It is invasion of privacy, and possibly a breach of the Data Protection Act - considering he's taking pics of other peoples activities in their own home and posting them on t'internet. Shitty, I know, but the cookie has crumbled that way.
Nice, but..
I imagine he'll soon be arrested for breaching Plumpy's privacy, causing him stress, etc...
I'm surprised the local rozzers aren't keen on just wandering round to the (I assume provided) GPS coordinates and knocking on the door to get it back, although in the last week I assume they were all told to prioritise guarding a coffin over actual criminal acts.
Re: same with BT
I'm with BT on their 40GB/mo and bittorrent does indeed drop like a stone during the day. Yet, peculiarly, I can download patches/watch streaming high def/etc at much better rates,
Perhaps this will trigger a wider investigation by the ASA - although I have to wonder if folks that complain about bittorrent being throttled might get stuck on a "to be investigated" list...
Re: Combine the two?
Durn, beat me to it. I'm guessing this mode is a calorie counter rather than SatNav, and measure the heart rate, while also possibly attempting to use the pace detector to check distance (which would be redundant unless they're doing some conversion to "road-miles" cos treadmills don't quite replicate the full outdoors experience), though. Although I can quite well imagine it calling out "continue straight" endlessly...
Re: @JetSetJim Alternative
So a utility meter at one house is sending 10,000 readings per day? So faster than once per ten seconds? Seems excessive to report a household to this level of accuracy. Perhaps with a bit of extra work the meter could record such a profile over time and transmit that back to base but it seems overkill to get the meter to initiate a transaction to send that info back to base so often.
Personally, I was speaking from the UK perspective of receiving quarterly bills - the utility companies ideally need a reading to produce each bill, they don't need to know my power draw at 2:05.30am on a Sunday morning and I'd question the usefulness of that data.
Alternative
Stick a dongle with a SIM in it in the meter - I'm sure the leccy meter could probably trickle off a teeny bit of power to transmit an SMS, the gas meter one might need a small battery, though. I'm sure the utility companies can come up with a reasonable deal with an operator to send 4 readings per utility meter per year (10m household * (%gas + leccy)?). What they really want, though, is the ability to limit consumption now that all the old power plants need decommissioning cos they're too old, rather than invest in new plants.
If I want to install something that will allow remote management of my leccy, I'll own it myself, thank you very much, and it will not be accessible by the power companies.
Re: I was wondering what had happened
It's still up on the Daily Wail, un-blurred and not mentioning the bit with Dom being extremely generous after being contacted by them.
Re: @JetSetJim - I remember streetmap...
Searching on Bing UK for the term "Map" comes up with the following order of results:
a) Google maps (UK)
b) Google maps (US)
c) Streetmap UK
d) Some images of maps
e) Bing maps
Google's results are (when I'm logged out - they are different when logged in):
a) Google maps (UK)
b) Bing maps
c) Google maps (US)
d) Streetmap UK
Went I bought my computer, it didn't come with "Google" installed, it came with IE installed and no browser choice window. Funnily enough, IE didn't default to Google search, or even have the Google search option when searching from the address bar. I chose to install them - perhaps less technically aware folks won't bother but if that was the case then Google wouldn't be getting the views it gets. People are choosing to shop at Google because their products work well for their needs and they have massive brand awareness.
If you came up with a new "best" service, you first have to convince the market that it's the best - get yourself a marketing plan and some funding to do it with - don't expect competitors to have to do it for you.
In contrast, search for "social network" and at the bottom, in the list of most popular references, you'll see a list of social networking sites. There's no mention of Google+.
Re: Streetmap.eu Ltd. v Google Inc
Yes, their company name is that:
http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05471060
Not their URL.
They don't seem to be worth a right lot of money, either. Perhaps this is the last gasp thing to do with the £95K cash they have...
Re: I remember streetmap...
Streetmap provide pukka OS versions of the maps, whereas Google don't - it's just their interface is a bit pants in comparison with Google's - so they lost market share.
Plus Google investing in the maps to make them a better user experience by stuffing the Streetview pics in gives them the extra edge. Perhaps Streetmap could learn from that....
As many have pointed out, candlemakers aren't going to be very successful suing lightbulb makers for loss of earnings.
Not sure when Google last prevented me from viewing Streetmap, though, which kinda undercuts their argument for abuse of market position.
Re: JetSetJim
*I* am not wishing to limit the distribution, merely pointing out that the publishers *may* want to and this gives them an easy mechanism for it
Re: It really should be simple enough
Perhaps I should have said "limited number of licenses" - anyhow, the upshot of implementing that is if copies are unavailable then punters *may* be more likely to instead go out and buy the actual (e)book rather than having to wait for a free read via the library. I fully appreciate that a digital version could get "checked out" unlimited numbers of times, which would drive *some* revenue to the publisher. But it would get more revenue from purchases, so I would fully expect them to want to push folk towards this transaction type by restricting supply in the libraries.
It's a trade off - I don't know the weightings of each revenue stream given particular values of limits to library check-outs, but I'm sure a publisher would be interested to know.
Taking the "library-app" to the extreme, it makes available all literary works in a "pay-per-view" model (except the payment comes from the whole population in the form of taxes to fund the library system).
Re: It really should be simple enough
Exactly - a "UK library" app (hopefully not one app per library!) that allows you to "check out" ebooks owned by the library you are a member of. Limited number of copies allowed by each library, with the option to request a temporary license for inter-library loans. You have the ebook in your app until the library app expires it.
Personally, I think it's a good scheme. I'm sure libraries can also possibly add some partner functions - e.g. a "buy this with Amazon" (or other providers) link.
Re: It's all in the materials
> So, er, where's the rest of the money going?
Good analysis, but you forgot the WiFi/mobile network kit required to connect all these FaceTime sessions. I'm sure it could be frigged with cables between each pair, but that's not the style of elegant solution that St Steve would have wanted, and would result in some fairly exotic antenna systems to provide dedicated bandwidth to each session. This has the added bonus of the possibility for some controlling software somewhere that can change the orientation of the external view - picture it as a sort of carousel of views that someone in the building could move around if they wanted to re-orient their office.
It's all in the materials
For the windows, they're all back-to-back pairs of iPads linked via Facetime to show a picture of the outside world to the occupants.
Re: @Gwaptiva
> moutuus est? But he was in the garden only a moment ago!
> Damn it, poor guy.
Well, he did have a garden on the slopes of Vesuvius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Caecilius_Iucundus#Fictional
Re: Not sure I agree with this.....
That's the whole point of a femto - they don't cost much. AT&T get an additional 40K sites for $140M (assuming that's the price, which I doubt). My point is that femtos aren't useless and they fill a valuable niche in providing coverage/capacity in hugely densely populated areas where macro would struggle. Plus, they can provide a cheap solution to rolling out extra coverage where it's needed. Note that in these types of solutions it is the operator that installs and pays for the backhaul and anyone on the right network can use them, rather than in the residential scenario where the backhaul piggy-backs on the home-owners DSL and they can only be used by the homeowner and a few other pre-specified phones.
Re: Not sure I agree with this.....
Never mind the 40,000 that AT&T are buying in the next year alone.
http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2012/11/08/att-spend-14bn-networks.htm
or the 10m femto's already deployed. Sure is a tiny market, femto's offer lots of useful features & benefits that macro cannot compete with in some environments
Re: @Gwaptiva
Caecilius mortuus est. That's about all I remember
Corrections
Ubi makes reference designs and get other people to shoulder the manufacturing side when they license the designs, and it is merely a radio access node. Also required is an aggregating node for which they rely on a 3rd party (NSN, I believe, but they can interwork with others).
Re: iPhone 6 and iPhone6s
perhaps an extra column, instead....
And yet there is no YouTube footage of some willing volounteer's scan. Poor show.
Top marks to the bods for releasing the code, though. Excellent work.
Re: There sure as hell is a need for press regulation
Intriguingly that article is no longer visible on the Daily Wail website - I can't find it either searching on "Lucy Meadows", or "Nathan Upton" or even clicking on "see all of Littlejohn's articles".
Can't think why it might have disappeared...
