Posts by mootpoint

Re: "Apple and Google have substantial and entrenched market power in mobile operating systems"

It's astonishing to me how much people in tech have bought into the "tech titans are monopolies because they are good at what they do". No. They obtained first mover advantage and now they are exploiting their market power to maximise profits and destroy the competition. It is classic monopolistic behaviour. Market dynamism is down - there are way fewer startups than there were 20 years ago because entrepreneurs know they haven't a hope in hell of breaking their stranglehold on the market. Product innovation is down - without any meaningful competition, they don't need to innovate to keep market share. When did you last see any innovation from Google? From Facebook? The CMA are absolutely on the right track here. When the AT&T monopoly was broken up in the eighties, it resulted in a huge growth in the market, massive product innovation in the telco space and, ironically enough, the widespread adoption of the internet. Bring it on.

I think the problem with this approach would be identifying that the process is running encryption. I'd imagine these would be custom written rather than using any identifiable system processes.

Re: US broadband is still better than the UK ersatz

Sounds like you need to change supplier - Hyperoptic does 1Gbps symmetrical fibre in London for £45 a month.

Re: Anonymous Contractor

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the way contractors get paid. My clients pay my limited company, which pays corporation tax at 19%, NI, expenses etc before paying me. Then I still have to pay personal taxes like any other employee. The fact that I can receive some of my pay in dividends results in a small tax advantage but it's nowhere near what permanent employees seem to think, and hardly covers the lack of sick / holiday pay.

WooCommerce?

You make very good points about "standing on the shoulders of a crowd of giants" when using an established open-source CMS. I will back WordPress against a bespoke e-commerce site any day of the week, simply because it has been stress-tested to f**k in the wild.

I cannot see anyone run a shop on WP, that's simply not what it was designed for (it's OK for a little "public only" website)

WooCommerce extends WordPress to do just that. It does it pretty well, and is now used by 40% of the world's online stores. In other words, WordPress is the most popular e-commerce platform in the world.

Re: ....and they don't stop coming

After a mere 240 shots? Lightweight!

Re: What's the advantage to the consumer?

Your calculations seem quite off to me. I recently replaced all the bulbs in my 5 bed house with LEDs. They were previously a mixture of filament, CF and halogen GU10. The monthly leccy bill went from around £80 to under £50. The bulbs cost £90 delivered. They paid for themselves in 3 months!

The biggest hurdle was persuading the missus to try LED. She really liked the warm glow of tungsten filament, to the extent of hunting down the bulbs from dodgy corner shops. She hated CF, and I agree, the light is awful, with a cold purple-green cast. But LED has come a long way recently - you can get warm 3400K bulbs with the same colour temperature as tungsten. You can even get clear bulbs with LED "filaments" that are almost indistinguishable from tungsten. And they're dimmable too. For around £5-6 a bulb.

Re: Hands up who's shocked?

I have to disagree, based on my experience with IceSave in 2008. I had £300K in that and got a cheque for the full amount from the FSCS within 2 weeks. I had written it off...

Re: I have never understood how peadophillia can exist.

I think a lot of paedophiles were abused themselves as children, and are caught up into perpetuating what was visited on them. - "man hands on misery to man". They must also be some of the loneliest people on earth, which I suppose is part of the motivation for "sharing". The sad thing is that there is so much hysteria and revulsion over this topic that there is almost no sensible discussion of treatment, any treatment centres get shut down because no-one wants them in their neighbourhood and the whole thing gets driven underground.