Posts by CoffeeFueled

I'm fairly sure there's a standing theory that large parts of Stonehenge are missing because someone said 'we should reuse those big standing stones as it's cheaper than digging up or dragging over fresh rocks'.

Re: Apple Innovates Again; first it was corners, now sticks!

Done. Find me a patent to infringe.

Although honestly I'd prefer to go with rapiers.

Re: Loan based crowdfunding sites?

There are other, similar sites to Kickstarter which actually loan funds to businesses or individuals rather than simply giving them the money and hoping for the best with no guarantees. These crowdfunding sites then divide interest paid on the loan between those who invested.

In other words it's almost exactly what the banks do, but instead of keeping you blind to what they're doing with your money they allow you to choose on a case-by-case basis where you will loan it. Obviously the banks don't consider their customers to be wise enough to make these choices for themselves.

Re: Are these certifications actually valuable?

At a guess, you've been hiring in contractors to do this.

As a holder of various certs (though not the master-level ones), and having only been a full-time employee I've regularly recommended open-source or alternative solutions where appropriate. There's also some time required before any proposal to look at what the business actually needs (in one case I had to talk an employer out of deploying SharePoint and instead putting in Wordpress, as all they actually wanted was a corporate blogging system).

Contractors don't have the same perspective of a business, nor the same appreciation for how a business has developed in the past and should continue to develop taking account of what's currently in place. Getting someone who'll still be there after a system is deployed (if for no other reason than that they can be yelled at until they fix it if it's wrong) is vital. Contractors are suitable for short, completely standalone depoyments but for anything integrated you need a person who is actively involved in your business.

Re: Price competition?

If I had, say, my own online store then I'd've been forced to use the same price as Amazon - even though selling direct may involve less costs to me (such as Amazon's cut). So it meant that ALL of my prices would have to account for that commission, when I might be able to undercut them on other platforms or my own store.

Re: Unix

Not sure if it counts, but there are a few of us beardy Windows lads as well.

Re: Programmer

Paypal actually do the keyword voice recognition thing. It was rather frustrating, right up until I discovered that just repeating "Operator" got me a human within about thirty seconds.

Re: Evil pirates of the high seas!

If you've got no intention of buying in the first place, why are you watching it?

Not quite

Since the license doesn't actually apply to all tvs (just all tvs which are actively used to receive transmissions - those which are not used in that way are exempt) I doubt they'll manage to push the internet one through.

Even if they do we'll have a little warning before-hand, since they'll have to get the license to apply to televisions which aren't used for transmissions first. Then I'm sure someone'll be setting up an ISP which specifically doesn't provide the iPlayer.

Not that I wouldn't like to see them wiped out of course.