Finished reading "Hit Refresh" by Satya Nadella. On the one hand, learnt that Hololens had difficulty getting funding for some time, with the dev team renaming it as "Project Baraboo" as a piece of gallows humour. It's a town in Wisconsin, home to a Clown and Circus Museum. OTOH, lack of lifetime learning opportunities, the pervasiveness of zero hours contracts, trade deals up in air and rent seeking serves only to undermine our future as a nation (i'm in the UK FWIW). Politicians of all stripes should read the last two chapters; probably the best articulation of building for the future since Eric Schmidts interview with the Queen of Jordan. Good read.

See: http://www.migrationobservator...

This happened to the old age father of a friend, who gave them a continuous authority on a debit card for "support". Downloaded and came in using TeamViewer, and messed with his PC. Traced the domain name back (set as a private individual, anonymised); got the registrar to de-anonymise their whois record due to being a commercial company. Traced the resulting contact details back to UK Companies House, where the guy was an Indian national who was one of two directors of 12 companies set up in a small business centre in Coventry, UK. Local Bank account received the funds. End result was that local trading standards got their bank account closed. Directors are on LinkedIn, and claim to have 600 telesales operatives in Kolkata, India.

The core problem is taxing on the fiction that are profits. The unsavory bit is Apple maintaining at least one corporate entity that has no country of domicile, and passing cost allocations around between operating subsidiaries to take their effective tax rate to punitive rates in countries where their revenue comes from. There are similar fictional cost allocations in car manufacturing and in FMCG markets (eg: Nestle borrowing money from another subsidiary at well above banking industry interest rates, or coffee outlets paying external entities for brand licensing). There's also strange patterns on how some online vendors allocate R&D costs almost in sync with their gross profits. The overall effective tax income from multinational companies has trended down relentlessly for 40 years in the West. The first core issue is how aggressively companies use fictional instruments and stooge third-rate economies to distort the tax paid away from the economies that provide their revenue. The solution is to impose tax rates based on local revenue, not fictional profits. If they do pay tax equitably, then the second core issue is how they repatriate income to the parent company's home geography. That's something for the US Govt alone.

When I joined DEC as a trainee programmer in 1976, MUMPS-11 was one of the OS choices on the PDP-11. One of the guys still Product Managing high end systems at HP UK was a MUMPs support guy in Software Services at the time. Last saw it in the flesh as VAX DSM (Digital Standard MUMPS) back in the late 1980's. A lot of the revolutionary stuff like NoSQL and JSON type databases are just reincarnated from DEC way back when.

Ironic that about the only place left to buy a Confederate Flag is the Black Market

Friday 16th August on the ZTE store on eBay (USA and UK).

Who had the "Live Free or Die - UNIX" license plate at Spit Brook first; you or Armando Stettner? And do you still have it??

I used to have tons of respect for Nokia. Then one of their employees got VLC knocked off the Apple App Store for incredibly selfish reasons (certainly didn't help VLCs market share). Now becoming a patent bully in the footsteps of their OS provider. Not pretty.

The ORG have suggested an amendment to the bills words to explicitly exclude any "small business" from this law, which was really intended to be targeted at mass market newspaper owners only - ie: those with the financial resources to behave above the law against victims who couldn't afford to bite back. Link is http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/leveson. If folks sign, it sends an email to three key MPs which gives a specific sentence to add as an amendment to the bill as it goes through Parliament. Very nicely done.

It is of course perfectly coincidental that the lawyer firm involved is the same one who previously acted for Microsoft in a case against unlicensed X-Box accessories.

Recommend Podio from Citrix....

In my experience, the only people who complain to the EU are competitors trying to fiddle with Googles business model. I think people who sponsor that sort of activity should attract fines of their own.

Prior art city: hitting an alarm clock. If Americans are so intelligent, why have such an outrageously dumb patent system? It's meandering stories for profit rather than any reward for innovation these days...

Fwiw, I wouldn't characterize this as a 'Serious' issue. I found it apparent only with heavy network loads and retries tended to do their job on the later Linux kernels. Things improve by leaps and bounds as they do with open source software in general.