It's still possible to be loyal and yet move on. It may be that the new company would accept you working a longer notice period at your current employer (for example, if you're on 4 weeks ask if they'd wait 6 or even 8 for you)? That should be sufficient to ensure that the company can bring someone else in of a similar skill level to yourself, that the product can be handed over with minimal disruption, and you leave things in a stable situation.

It's your career, after all. Sometimes you do have to be selfish, otherwise you will never leave.

In this case, "support" is likely to be the infrastructure team within the organisation itself who handle the repairs, upgrades, security updates, server maintenance, etc. It's not going to be the telephone helpline that tells you where to plug your mouse into or what your ISPs telephone number is.

The main problem is that, like all the other numbers, the £3,500 figure is unexplained. For all we know, it's "total amount that the IT department spend" divided by "number of users". That would mean it also includes a proportion of the costs of the servers, switches, cabling, telecommunications, etc.

... that this £3,500 doesn't just cover "hardware sitting on a person's desk"; it also includes the software, support, long-term upgrade contracts, etc. This "journalism" sells newspapers (unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail featured it quite prominently) but ignores most of the facts.

I'm not denying that some money is being wasted, but nowhere near as much as this report implies. See this article for more detail.

This was my approach, completely. I graduated with a Bachelors back in '97 with a 3rd (due mainly to a lack of motivation in the later years), and never considered returning. Then, about 5 years ago, I discovered that there was funding on offer that could be used towards a Masters.

So ... I enrolled as a part-time student on a modular degree (each module being a week of teaching and then several months of working every evening), with the teaching time given as paid (i.e. not from my holiday allowance) in lieu of any other training by my employer. The end result is that I now have an MSc with Distinction, having learnt the value of hard work. It hasn't changed much about my current job, but at least my CV will be read sooner when the time comes to hunt for a new job. And, unlike many professional qualifications, it's also mine for life with no need to retake any exams or pay additional fees.

Although people seem amazed about this, it's not the first time that this has happened.

Back in '98, I worked on a network where it was against Government regulations to connect it in any way to the Internet, and an 'air gap' was required between the two. I was one of a very small team that wrote a system (using Zip disks for storage) that pulled data from a mail server on our secure network and pushed it to a mail server on the Internet, and vice versa. It had very high latency - people were assigned to do the mail drop only twice a day - but it worked well.

"Cut the Rope" on iOS uses multitouch within its gameplay. I have also seen applications that allow both zoom and rotation - a scroll button could emulate one or the other, but not both concurrently.

By your own logic, that means that money isn't the reason (something which most other authors will also claim, although probably slightly less honestly). The only other one that comes to mind is to allow him to put the record straight about the relationships between himself, Gates and, to a certain extent, Ballmer. To some people, making sure the truth is known is important.

Of course, the book isn't about Allen and Gates, and I doubt it's even 'about' Microsoft any more than iWoz was 'about' Apple. They're just the elements that will generate the most interest and get people wanting to read more.

... does he use open sauce?

Oddly, I happened to RTFM before it even reached Slashdot; the plugin they've developed is Firefox-only. This doesn't mean it's not headed for the bad-ideas graveyard, though.

(Did you mean 'for a UK gaming company? I got confused with all the negatives.)

I think this is an important question, whichever way it was meant. Nothing in TFA itself convinces me that this is anything more than an attempt to stir up some publicity for the individual who wrote it.

A question that Develop should answer: why are you not naming the company in question? Possiblity of legal action (as you have no evidence), or because they don't actually exist?

Yes - although I didn't explicitly state it, that was my reasoning behind it hitting B2C (specifically, because it lowers the spending power of the consumer) not B2B. That said, when Labour reduced VAT temporarily from 17.5% to 15%, I don't recall the (admittedly potentially biased) media reporting a massive upswing in spending, so I can't see that this increase will cause a massive downswing.

Unfortunately, you appear to have been misinformed. VAT on electricity and gas is charged at 5%. Depending upon the type of food, it may either be zero-rated or full rate. Mains water may be zero-rated, but mineral water has VAT applied at the full rate. It's a bit of a minefield, but HMRC does explain it comprehensively.

There is another alternative, and one that means the tin-foil hat can be left on its hook. Leaving in a tax break for an already profitable part of an economy would have left them open to critisism (and accusations, ironically, of underhand lobbying from the games industry), so what they've done instead is to distribute the breaks around a number of different parts of the small business economy; think of it as spreading the risk.

Thus, we have the lowering of corporation tax; potential (although I think currently undefined) breaks for companies setting up outside London and the South East; and, savings on National Insurance payments for new small businesses. VAT, which admittedly may hit the business-to-consumer games industry more than business-to-business industries, will still only add 85p to a £40 game.

Personally, I don't think the reason was lobbying. It was the realisation that they could actually use the Budget to help the entire small business economy - of which the video games companies are just a part.

Much as I enjoy kicking them now they're down, to be fair the main reason for that was the range of marks an 'A' grade covered. 'B' could, in theory, cover 60 to 69%, whilst 'A' covered 70% all the way up to 100%. 'A*' simply made it possible to differentiate between the increasingly common (for other, more fundamental reasons) 'A'-grades.

The danger is that in the future, people will forget exacrly when A*s were introduced, and judge 'old' A grades as being inferior.