thus proving taxation systems are broken

every time a new loophole is found, it's patched over. our legal and tax systems are like a badly written hacked-together overly complex computer program. no wonder it's possible for clever accounting practises to run rings round it. The winners are the corporates and the accountancy consultants!

we need simpler tax, simpler corporate law.

managers hear what they want to hear

Some years ago I was working with two others on a monitoring system for an ISP. It was a fairly major endeavour intended to

One of my colleages developed the subsystems which collected netflow data, crunched it down and put into a database for analysis and graphing for well over a year, and he went off sick and it looked like he wasn't coming back.

Our manager asked me how long it would take to pick up his work and I said I didn't know, I had specific APIs and data dictionaries but no knowledge of his code at all, so we agreed that I would look into his code and report back in a week's time how long it would take. The next week's meeting didn't take place, so a fortnight later we sat down to review it.

The Manager asked how well I'd picked up my colleague's work, and I said I hadn't, that I'd only agreed to work out how long it would take to get up to speed with his work. Manager tried to rewrite history but I stood firm! I was finally asked how long before I could start on the bug fixes and new features, and when I said about two months, he was aghast! I had to remind him that this was a complex system written by people who'd never worked on this kind of thing having spent months prototyping and experimenting.

Fortunately by the time I was expected to do something useful with my colleague's code he came back to work. I knew his code was a terrible mess so was very relieved.

Nearly six months later there was a big purge and we were "let go" despite being the only people who really understood how it all hung together. I heard that the people redeployed onto our project quickly turned it into a bug-ridden unstable mess in trying to add all the version 2 features and never got it to work properly.

were 99 at comet.

These are excellent android devices.

I bought a pair of these for 99 quid each for my kids when Comet had a special offer. I wish I'd bought three so one extra for me!

With FM radio, GPS, compass, stereo speakers, twin cameras, microphone, big display etc they make a fine toy, and cheaper for games than Nintendo DS's.

I've upgraded them to gingerbread and they run v well.

Anyone who tells me I should have bought SGS2 or Note is invited to give me the 400 quid each for the difference.

held it wrong!

He wasn't able to read the writing on his gong because he was holding it wrong, luckily Her Maj had a rubber ring to put round it so he could hold it better.

designer not engineer..

..because an engineer wouldn't have fscked up the antenna

pricing of music vs movies, and globalisation

how many person-years does it take to make an album? perhaps 20 (the composer, the band, the editors, the graphics designers and the upfront manufacturing tehnicians).

how many person-years does it take to make a movie? perhaps 400 (writers, screen writers, actors, musicians, crew, editors, CGI, etc).

so how come a newly released CD of music doesn't cost about £1 compared to a new DVD release at £20?

what irks me is how the manufacture of DVDs and CDs has moved overseas to take advantage of lower manufacturing prices (as has many goods), but when grey importes attempt to buy them at the market prices in the country of manufacture, they get stamped on. See the case of CDWOW who got slamed for importing legitimate media. Or SuperDrug and various expensive perfumes.

So we as consumers who've lost our jobs to cheap overseas labour don't get the benefit of the cheaper manufacturing costs, only the greedy businesses.

cheaper alternatives

quite expensive compared to tikitag, er, touchatag

http://www.touchatag.com/e-store

a revival of the Sharp willcom d4?

http://www.pocketables.net/2008/08/review-willcom.html

another way to discriminate on sex

the insurance companies use a set of metrics to determine risk and therefore the price;it's not about age, sex, race or any other thing that might offend the PC brigade, just a way to put a driver into a pigeon-hole of likely risk categories.

if they can't use the sex of the driver, they can use the first name instead; there's some overlap of men's and womens names, but it'd be a lot better than nothing.

they could also ask for information about the hair-style and also use that. or shoe-style. it doesn't mean they have prejudice about, say, blondes, if they do.

neglecting legacy customers

shame on panasonic for neglecting legacy customers

at least there are people willing to experiment with vieracast:

http://customvieracast.blogspot.com/

the problem is the people who buy the newspapers

demand feeds supply. if the demand is sufficient, and the price willing to be paid high enough, someone will fulfil it, whether it be drugs, sex, dubious entertainment etc.

the race to the bottom has been very successful for newspapers.

people read these junk news "comics", and so create a market. if the people demanded and only paid for quality journalism, these "hack rags" would die a well deserved death.

unfortunately, educating people to stop caring and paying celebutard news sources is not trivial and may be impossible.

why these models and no others?

what's so special about the designated phones? is it the video chips? specific android release (gingerbread)?

thanks

ideal for an iPad

at last, a useful input device for an iPad; all users should carry one of these around

:-D

protecting trademarks can force this

much as I despise apple and pity iDrones, unfortunately the way trademark law works - use it or lose it + enforce it or lose it, it does mean that companies develop twitchy trigger fingers when it comes to setting the dogs of law onto potential infringers.

tin-foil hats for bees!

it's clearly about time we set up a factory to make tin-foil hats for bees!

ineffective charities commission

I seem to recall BBC R4's Moneybox interviewing the Charities Commission, and it basically showed that the CC were hopelessly overloaded and unable to look at anything but the larger fraud and irregularity cases.

I would like to see a system of efficiency ratings, just like for domestic appliances, whereby the cost of the charity could be measured against the actual work it does. This is quite tricky since it can be quite hard to differentiate between costs, investments and whether someone is a "front line worker" or overhead.

At the end of the day we have to hope that our charitable giving has a worthwhile effect and doesn't just fund the lifestyles of the directors.

early adopter's price

this is clearly an early adopter's price

as for the value of the stylus, you can buy stylii for capacitive screens off ebay for a pound or two...even Maplin's have them.

the "transformer" tablet seems to be to be the best one if you want to spend lots.

bad antenna design...

... meant that the iBomb didn't receive the signal to go off

and in other news

the golgafrincham fleet departs earth taking all the iTards with it, leaving planet earth free of jobsian-fondle-slab-toting goatee-bearded rollneck-sweatered apple lovers.

shouting the loudest

the real problem is that most people's method of solving congestion and interference is simply to crank up the power and fit high gain antennas in order to "shout the loudest".

the correct solution is for everyone to run the appropriate power sufficient to cover their property and no further. however, that requires everyone to do it, if 95% of people do it but the rest don't, the ones who crank up their power will adversely affect the others.

meego?

if ubuntu like QT so much, just adopt meego.

and I agree that unity is terrible - fails badly without accelerated drivers. the old netbookremix was fine.

gullible hifi buyers

I studied elec/electrical eng at university (graduating about 20 years ago) and even back then I was amazed by the marketing efforts selling products claiming dubious levels of performance. I even considered whether I could concoct devices which would be functional but expensive which could offer genuine performance improvements specifically targeted at the rich, but I didn't think I'd be able to make a living at it. Boy, was I wrong :-(

great product, only new in so far as the execution

there have been lots of phone and UMPC docks which make this sort of thing possible, for example you could "dock" the nokia n900 using a USB cable and the video out (why did nokia never do an update with miniDVI or something?), but this is the first device + accessories which really seem to bring the whole package together.

the only downside? motorola's slow or absent updates coupled with tendency to lock/encrypt boot loaders meaning that you either get updates to android very late or never, and the community being unable to fill the gap: this this forum post at motorola:

https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/39344?start=30&tstart=0

bad luck if you bought the xt720!

madingley is a good candidate

we on the madingley exchange had a big campaign to raise awareness with people doing leaflet drops, a stall at the school christmas fayre, and posted round the village.

sure, there may be only 2000 premises, but the ONLY service is 8M adsl over BT, virtually none of the local villages are unbundled, there's no virgin/nthell and never will be, so BT know they have a captive audience.

a lot of people work from home in this area, to save fighting the traffic every day into Cambridge

population density within the villages is medium, and I imagine running cable won't be too hard for BT.

if I'd ever won the lottery, not that I could as I consider it a tax on the mathematically deficient, then I would have paid some ISP to unbundle/upgrade the exchange to adsl2+!

double-dipping

I pay my ADSL provider to carry my internet traffic. I pay my 3G provider for data services. Both use that money to pay for backhaul to their core, and thence to peering points and pay for membership of internet exchanges.

Google pay for their network to deliver traffic to peering points. They pay for membership of the same internet exchanges.

Noone seems to be providing a free service, none of these parties is a charity.

Or, could it be that competition has forced the internet providers and cellular operators to cut margins to the bone so that their execs can't afford more white power to snort???

boris causing need for safety checks?

maybe it's because the bikes need safety checks after Boris' recent activities?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iQ0KTYdDhk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekjIUR3n1C0

good find, also try barbelo

thanks for posting this app, it's a good find.

I also use barbelo - http://www.darkircop.org/barbelo/

which works ok; I think I have to set my clock back a couple of years as the signature on the app expired, but it works fine.

galaxy s pro - keyboard model?

I am wondering what has happened to the Galaxy S Pro, the one with keyboard, which was first "discovered" back in May or even earlier?

I am qt interested in the HTC Desire Z but the GSPro might be better?