Posts by Roland6 10749 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
>Which means what, in real terms?
Zen/Ofcom can give BT/Openreach a £serious kicking - but you do have to order a business line...
The longest I've waited with Zen for a missed Openreach delivery date has been 5 days.
Mind you, I've been impressed by EE's post-BT takeover response, as it also seems to be able to get Openreach to deliver on consumer/residential lines.
The government is using the "Super Deduction" tax incentive to encourage businesses to spend on enhancing their business at a time when they might be strongly tempted to tighten their belts. The effect the government is hoping for is this expenditure will directly help the current UK economy and help UK businesses be in a better shape for the future, both of which should result in increased tax revenues...
>BT gets a vast reduction in taxes
But only if it spends the moolah...
So yes we can expect it to report good before tax results, but because of the investment expect it to not declare substantive profits and dividends for a few years.
Remember because BT is a UK HQ'd company, and does most of its business in the UK, it can't indulge in the tax dodging tricks Amazon, Google, Starbucks etc. get up to, so those surplus revenues really have to go on capital expenditure...
>They want to get back to the old days when they could force you to buy a licence you don't want.
Going to be interesting, given it seems W11 is the door opener to consumer subscription Windows (already a reality for volume licence users).
>Electric cars powered by fossil fuel power stations are still more efficient than directly fossil fueled cars.
Looks like many have been taken in by the greenwash of the clean exhaust...
> Even if the transmission rates once infected are the same
From what I remember reading, being vaccinated primes your immune system, so you are infectious for a much shorter period than if you haven't been vaccinated. Which all things being equal, should result in someone taking no precautions infecting fewer people.
What COViD19 has demonstrated is that we are woefully unprepared for a pathogen that has a natural R value of 4~7 and a mortality rate of 30% ie. another smallpox.
This is an interesting article on Smallpox that does comparisons with CoViD
>How does forcing a Cisco employee, who works remotely, take a leaky vaccine make sense to the risk assessment?
Read the Executive Order.
The Risk Assessment Cisco would have performed, would have considered the risks of non-compliance with the Executive Order, which would include consideration of various lawyer interpretations of the text of the Executive Order.
Cisco's interpretation leaves little room for doubt - all " workplace locations " including working from home workplaces have been covered. Although, if you are working from home, you are required to ensure your workplace complies with all guidance on workplace locations published by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, which may mean you need to ensure your household are also vaccinated...
Forgetting something, if you live in America you accept that the President and Congress then you've already accepted that they can unilaterally change the law, and in the case of the President they can simply sign Presidential decrees and Executive Orders...
I think you will find your employment contract will contain a clause allowing government to change the law and that such changes will take precedence over any contradictory clauses...
That was also part of the doctrine of the Nixon era, getting China to use US technology rather than home grown or Russian technology. Trump has given China a big incentive to not be dependent upon US technology. The concern here is that in a few years China will be exporting products that contain that technology to the USA etc.
My thoughts of the Zuckverse - on watching the video, is it is ideal for those in denial about climate change, extinction, etc.
In the metaverse, the weather is always sunny (and even when it raiins you don't get wet or cold), the vegetation is is always lush and the grass green.
So a nice piece of escapism from the realities of the real-world. Obviously, we've just got to find a use of all those humans and then we can go full on Matrix.
Just a query: what is the speed of light in the Zuckverse?
>But Meta isn't "going off the deep end", it's just Facebook realising they've made a bunch of acquisitions ...
It is MZ going off the deep end, about his metaverse; instead of simply announcing the creation of a parent company etc. which doesn't really need an attention grabbing admedia friendly name. Because following the logic, if MZ calls the holding company Meta then the subsidiary developing the metaverse can't also be called Meta.
> that has 16GB RAM, and a 6 core, 12 thread Ryzen CPU. And that's the min spec option.
That seems about right for W10 running Office, Teams and Zoom concurrently and users not complaining about audio-visual quality (although why vendors aren't fitting 1080 HD webcams as standard now...).
Although my min. spec. includes HD screen and the option to add a second 16GB module.
Dell were selling these for £660 +VAT earlier this year, which placed them among poorer spec'ed Intel systems, making the purchasing decision a no brainer.
>when did we start thinking about 4GB not being enough memory to run apps?
When we switched from 32-bit to 64-bit OS's.
But even before that if you regularly used more than one application at a time, XP became a bit of a dog due to the page swapping (might not have been so noticeable with DDR4 and SSD).
5% is a lot of PC's, given the constraints and absence of the W11 version of GWX (none of my eligible W10 laptops are showing any indication that W11 could run on them if I only clicked 'yes', I suspect the figure is highly suspect. Even more so given the silence of Redmond..
A wry joke, like many teenagers, he really just needs some guidance. Personally, someone really needs to sit down and do a debrief converting a simple "you've done wrong" to these are the learning points and the lessons learnt.
If you are the owner of one of the small businesses that GoDaddy uses in its TV adverts, this teenager has the skills you need to build an effective web business.
Doing this would help the teen to move on and positively re-orient their thinking. Obviously, if it happens again...
>I once had to explain to somebody how easy it was to set up a website and make it look like a legitimate one.
This last week received emails from "HMRC", all look good but niggling doubts (they had attachments) caused me to look deeper and compare them to emails I knew to be genuine. The emails had been sent from a different non-UK gateway and the .xls and .doc attachments contained 'interesting' code.
If I remember rightly, the charge is to cover food costs, everything else comes out of the school's budget.
Interestingly, I found this level of subsidy being used in many company canteens. So not an unreasonable charge, if you are to have a charge, however, I believe the benefits that can accrue from universal provision would out-weigh the perceived costs.
I up voted. However, your solution was far to sensible as it was taking a step back and addressing the real question.
>I assume there is some reason why we don't do this
Politics and stupidity.
Spending (taxpayers) money on food means there is less to spend on education etc. (ie. the government won't increase the total education budget). However evidence is that children will only get the best out of the monies spent on education if they have nutritious breakfast and lunch. Hence why we now provide free school meals to all Key Stage 1 pupils; but Westminster politics has prevented it from being extended to all primary schools etc. ...
There are some who think that only "the poor" should get free school meals - the state shouldn't be subsidising the better off. However, evidence again shows that children from "rich" homes can be as badly fed and it does them no harm to also get free meals, in fact it helps to "level up" by removing a line of segregation between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.
> Can't be charging a child the same for a full hot meal, cake and fruity drink as a child who just wants a sandwich.
The school my kids went to charged a flat rate, it meant the child's meal decision was driven by their need and fancy rather than saving a penny or two. It didn't take long for the school to work out a decent menu so that most days kids took the hot meal option.
It is notable that the LibDems - probably the main political party campaigning for free school meals for all have not uttered a word about how all this could be avoided by simply providing free school meals to all...
@codejunky
Don't disagree
>There seems to be no desire to end this just as there was no desire to end the war on terror.
The worrying ramification is there seems to be no desire to actually stand up and say there will be no end to the 'war' and thus start the debate about how are we going to live, what powers are actually necessary and who gets to use them.
> So if we aint getting rid of covid (not a shock) then when do we get to live our lives again?
We don't, I thought that was obvious; welcome to the post-CoViD19 world.
The big unknown going forward is just how long immunity (in any form) lasts and thus whether boosters become part of the normal preventative landscape.
However, I would hope some serious scientific research is quietly going on so that we can better understand the transmission vectors and what mitigations best disrupt them. The problem is, I can see the government turning off the sequencing machines - to save money to spend on projects like HS2 and Trident refurbishment., and demanding the construction of energy-efficient buildings with Sars-Cov-2 friendly distribution systems...
>In general that is not legal and if a worker is dismissed for these reasons it would be an unfair dismissal
In general if a worker were to be dismissed for these reasons it would be because the management have failed to engage with HR (and legal) and so not put in place and then adhered to a CoViD ways of working transformation programme.
>it has not been assessed
Which is also why in the first instance pregnant women were advised not to get vaccinated, however, now there is sufficient data to show that it is definitely in the mothers interest to get vaccinated and a growing body of evidence that vaccination doesn't negatively affect unborn babes.
>Pfizer wanes/decays to that level in about 4mths. Previously-infected people apparently also have their protection wane, reaching 50% around 16mths after first infection.
Been watching too many second rate anti-vax YouTube videos.
https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/feature/everything-you-need-to-know-about-covid-19-vaccines
>Bring you own sandwich in and stop moaning.
Well, with all those Working from/at Home there are going to be some spare desks - plenty of room (and power) for an "under-the-desk" hydroponic cultivation system...
Icon: I understand, (from my student days), that broom cupboards often have an atmosphere conducive to beer brewing...
Who would have thought workers left to their own devices could find exciting new uses for all the HQ office space... :)
That is a problem with many safety measures. Many drove like idiots before seatbelts became compulsory in part because they didn't know or care about the risks. Others in now having a safer driving experience create new risks by driving in ways they either expect others to void them or in which the safety devices will work without fail....
>You mean like this?
One step at a time...
Yes, in general having natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity. However, there are two big problems. Firstly the gaining of natural immunity, which as the article you link to shows is not without considerable risk to the individual, and secondly the duration of any such immunity.
From what I have read, an individual's level of natural immunity is directly related to the degree to which they have CoViD - get a bad dose and you could be looking at 6 months of natural immunity, get a mild dose and that could be 4 weeks. At least with the vaccinated immunity, there seems to be some consistency and a much slower decline in immunity.
>As an aside, why are booster still using the original strain and not Delta as a basis?
That's because Pfizer and Moderna have been shown to be highly effective at blocking the Delta variant and currently they are the ones that have been approved, that show such a high efficacy.
There is another vaccine currently under going trials and approval that is 'reprogrammable'. This is seen as a gamechanger as only the 'reprogrammed' payload will need to go through a much shorter approvals process resulting in the more responsive production of vaccines better targeted at mutations currently in the wild.
>It's actually down to whether the client wants the work to be done by you personally or your company (and by that it means by anyone your company would provide). If the service provided is personal then in HMRC mind it is in scope...
Interestingly, from my experience over several decades, that still largely applies to contracts with the big integrators, the only advantage the big boys have is a warm feeling that they have the reserves to resolve any delivery problems that may arise...
> I should have given examples of the Statements of Work I am seeing which is things like "Consultant required for desktop refresh project".
Understand what you mean. I've found it useful to cultivate a relationship with HR who (as permanent staff) should better placed to assist departments on an on-going basis with the scoping and drafting of outside IR35 SoW's (although I can offer the services of my HR associates ...). Given the example, the first piece of Consultancy I would quote for would be the drawing up of a SoW for the desktop refresh project, mandating the involvement of HR experts with IR35 awareness in the process.
But even then, I can see some being so in fear of HMRC, they will still deem a piece of IT-related work to be inside IR35, even though they have no problems engaging cleaners outside of IR35.
Well all of those tasks could be performed by an employee, just like all tasks being performed by contractors; the issue is about how the task is packaged up and contracted for and whether HMRC (after the event) agrees with the arrangements...
Personally, I don't do simple T&M, I always do defined workpackage-based work, which may be on a T&M basis but will have agreed deliverables and milestones.
The art is learning how to respond to clients who will treat you like an employee eg. while you are here can you look at this...
>and info on traffic jams, but we have Waze and its peers to provide some of that info now.
Well, if the local radio stream was in DAB, perhaps Waze et al. would be able to listen in to the traffic reports... On a regular run between the East Midlands and South West, Waze on its own leaves a lot to be desired - thanks to local radio I was able to totally avoid a major road closure (not notified to Google/Waze etc.); I got home and parked on my drive, yet Waze still wanted me to turn around and retrace my route for several tens of miles, because it was quicker than some other route back to my drive...
Trouble is increasingly company's don't permit you to access their products if you select any options that go against their commercial interests...
As we are seeing with Windows 11, no MS account and thus opt-in for US standard data collection, you won't be able to use W11.
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