Posts by Horned-Devil

Re: Viva the Fruity Revolution

"It does not make sense to me to utilize something that can be hacked easily to gain entry to my house. Nah, I'll prefer to be old school and use a physical lock with a physical key. After all, these don't need electrical power to operate, will survive an EMP, and is not so easily hacked/bypassed if you use the right combination of hardware."

And somewhere on a locksmith's forum there will be a thread of 'how do people still use yale lock's, they are so easily picked...what they should be using is lock xxx with 27 pin capabilities etc'. You are aware of the risks you know and oblivious to those that you do not. The reality is that the general public will never know the risks they take with all the convenience features they have, be it in IOT or cars or locks or foods they eat. It SHOULD be mandated on the suppliers of all such products to be the experts and protect the public from themselves (with mandated firmware updates, avoiding ridiculous backdoors etc). How such a utopia could be achieved is sadly well beyond my ability to be able to dream up sadly...

Re: Can someone help me ...

What do you define as sales - as another poster pointed out you could have a lot of sales which are actually to other group companies (and which don't get taken into the global number as they essentially get eliminated within the overall accounts)

Different countries have different rules on accounting - so your 'sales' number that you post in Madeupistan based on their accounting practice could be vastly different to what the tax man deemeth revenue in the UK

It would also require all companies to have completely transparent and consistent accounting globally to allow for this which would involve harmonisation of this from every country, and you can imagine how easy that would be...

I guess in the same way that Google was 'just' another search engine back in the day. Marketing and users can create a critical mass which, regardless of actual quality, means they become the defacto - more people using equates to more drivers and therefore more options/faster response/more 'invention' due to more money and on..just market forces at work (albeit in these cases, ridiculously sized VC investment creating market forces...)

Per share...

Re: back to wetware to wetware direct interfacing

You think? And Visa/Mastercard don't know your buying habits?

Not strictly true - there are a number of channels out there which benefit from location - being next to a popular channel on an EPG can drive a degree of 'footfall'. With lower production costs, there are a number of channels out there that operate on quite small audiences. I used to work for one company which did ok(ish) out of that (albeit parasitic crap TV...) and one of the advantages it had was its EPG listing. Sky then decided to rationalise the EPG listing (eg move Sky's competing channel into a good EPG slot and move ours to a lesser viewed area) which killed a huge amount of the audience number. Amazingly, OFCOM etc weren't bothered about this abuse when it was a small operator who got trashed but when its good old auntie...

The consumer credit act is an odd one - I think (although willing to be corrected) that if you use your debit card 'and you are in your overdraft' that you are also covered...

Re: Something smells

Not quite - if the fair value of the transactions were say, $1m and $5m and both companies 'upped' the price to each other with a similar net of the $4m difference then it is accounting tomfoolery. Not saying that is what has happened in this case but just to make the point that sale value does not always equal real revenue.

Re: "a building that will "range in height" from 7 to 11 storeys tall."

Typical bloody google - can get away with that kind of comment and still get planning permission. My house was about 3cm too tall so had to redesign the whole bloody thing...

Re: Big Pharma has done this for decades

"Audit methods with teeth and assay and inspection rights are needed so that this profit exporting is discovered and denied."

So we end up with an enormous HMRC to be able to manage all of this audit and investigation which swallows up all the effective tax that it brings in? Could well be a zero sum game (or even cost more to manage/administer than would be gained in additional tax revenues)

or maybe, just maybe, some of these issues go beyond the pure technical. Director insists on pushing iPad's (or whatever shiny device is in vogue) to sales team. IT department state this is not cost effective, doesn't help and can be easily dealt with by much cheaper solution. Director realises that said sales team are fickle lot who don't care about the technology but are pretty good sales team despite being flash Harrys and over-rides IT. IT call director and idiot who is wasting money and getting no more productivity (and possibly less). Director understands there are possibly more factors in play and that these pointless shiny objects act as a decent retention tool and the cost is outweighed by the potential recruitment cost that would be caused by additional team churn...

Re: A couple of points:

Actually it may well be - transfer pricing isn't just a made up number (weil not quite) - technically it has to have some basis behind the calculations and justifications for the charges. The money gets routed back to Bermuda because (I'm guessing), Google Bermuda owns a significant portion of the IP and charges France for it. Similarly, management and probably the bulk of the servers are not located in France and so Google France gets charged for those. What the French Gov is probably doing is challenging the 'value' of these charges - certainly for the more intangible side of things around marketing and IP and therefore reducing the costs/increasing the profit and therefore the tax.

The problem here is that some of these will be judgmental and will need the French to be able to disprove Google's allocations - which will be subject, no doubt, to court ruling in both France and ultimately the EU. As this will hit the EU a 'victory' for France will be a 'loss' for Ireland/Netherlands in this example and so will be driven more by politics than the realities of the case. I predict a lot of posturing from both sides followed by some under the table settlement that both parties can claim means they 'win'

Re: He's dead wrong...

RE: Wibble

Docking stations? The bulk of heavy duty work is likely to be conducted at a desk so you could dock the tablet to a large screen/better keyboard/mouse etc but it still becomes very portable for use on trains or on the move etc. Also, can simply remove from the dock to do some of the lighter work (eg emails, consume content etc) on the sofa. From a business point of view this allows a massive peripherals market to spring up around the device (which if is using USB rather than specific proprietary connection ports would allow many players into this market) as well as native windows products to be used on it (excel, word etc) which are still used by most businesses. Obviously CPU vs battery life vs heat will be an issue and will not suit the more intensive 'power users' but what % of the market does that really make? Apple have proved there is a market for tablet devices so if M$ can make them more of an enterprise product (eg what the Blackberry Playbook should have been without failing monumentally) then there exists a market for it - potentially even beside leisure tablets (eg Ipad...)

Re: Confusion of numbers

2/3 of the global population don't have two legs? As the average is two (maybe with a fractional rounding difference) does that mean there are whole populations of three (or more) legged men wandering around (if wandering is what you would call that motion with those additional legs...)

Re: One tactic

In fairness - it looks a lot from dealing with HSBC commercially that they have essentially just rebranded it and probably not touched a lot of the bank end. The IBAN still refers to Midland and if you try and deal with them globally you quickly see that the different countries HSBC banks don't talk with each either systematically (or commercially) so I think they could well be untouched from an IT systems perspective

Re: I <3 Apple devices

You have interest on your deposits? Not the biggest Apple fan but really, does it really look like the current lot have actually done what you have just suggested? As much as Apple are selfish, greedy bastards - it's hardly any different from most of the current lot - at least they have some attempt to address the user experience - when was the last time a bank did that?

maybe having blue eyes...

...allows you to see the purple reply to button?

Obviously never worked in an industry where you are presented with these choices.

Merchant accounts pay out based on your arrangement with them. I've had monthly, weekly and daily settlements in my past - all depends on their view of your businesses (and the transactions) risk.

Cash is quite an expensive way of handling a business - you have additional insurance costs for cash on the premises, banking isn't free (and any mug out there who thinks it is better wake up!), there is a risk of cash disappearing from the till, an additional cost of maintaining the tills as well as keeping an adequate float. Additional reconciliation headaches (although you have that with CC it can at least have a degree of automation) plus deemed time per transaction (possibly not an issue but again, depends on the business).

Whilst CC is hardly risk free (increasing CC fraud etc) it is a convenient way to get to the cash into the business if done right - the charges you quote are probably not a million miles off but it does depend on the volume of your business and its deemed risk to the merchant (for example, Tesco will not be charged 3% by VISA)

It ain't that difficult - in fact, it's a fairly simple logic - if condition x is y then charge z. European retailers and online businesses have been doing it for years (you see the requirements for the EC reverse charge and it can be more complicated). I'm pretty sure that the level of analysis they do on customer purchases etc is a lot more complex and difficult than assigning a tax rate...quite a lot of the rest of the world can deal with these complex tax issues fairly well (and different currencies as well!). I'm sure our American friends will be able to handle it...

Optional

Maybe this was because he was fed up of the continual downtime he was having from locally hosted and supported servers...sometimes the move to put things in the cloud is driven by frustration with poorly run internal IT teams and not just because 'it seemed a cool thing to do'

Ah, memories...

The Princess Bride - what a great film...

VAT headaches

Think its more complicated - something about selling over the internet (which I assume is technically true for app store-esque purchases) within the EU/EC - you get to register in one country and charge IT'S rate of VAT for sales to consumers within the EC. This is why they are located in Luxembourg for its low rate of VAT (and why its European HQ is located in Ireland with a cross charge to get the low rate of corporation tax). I think Luxembourg also has some silly exemption which makes it lower than 15% for these kind of sales. Whole thing changes in 2015 (at which point expect ITunes to get straight out of Luxembourg....)

Yes but if you can't connect

What good is a browser based travel guide of VietNam? If I'm there and using it, chances are I'm probably going to struggle to get internet access - yet, if I had downloaded a searchable version onto my pad then I can access it as long as I can get power...