What has the EU ever done for us? Mostly, a lot of harm.
Consistently favoured corporate interests over public interests
The EU is far more insulated from public pressure than national governments but even more prone to listening to corporate lobbyists. It is not transparent enough about lobbying for us to even know what the real expenditure is, but we know it a lot.
The greatest single case of this is in the supposedly free trade, but really corporate welfare, TTIP treaty which the EU is pushing hard, despite widespread public opposition. Who wants the treaty? Corporate lobbyists. It also binds countries permanently to particular policies, undermining democracy.
As Taylor Swift seems to have difficult saying what she means, so I thought I would provide a plain English translation of what she has to say about Apple Music.
This is partly a reaction to people who talk as if Node.js is unique, and partly to test my code against something that has seen production use. There are all sorts of problems with doing this sort of comparison, and while I would have liked to compare more servers, used a better environment, performance tuned everything, done more measurements etc. but I think what I have done is enough to prove my point.
I have never liked the user interfaces of either Eclipse or Pycharm, so it is hard to be impartial. Liclipse, for those unfamiliar with it, is an Eclispe based IDE, that is a successor to Pydev. Both are proprietary, but prices are reasonable. After trying them again I still do not like Eclipse or Liclipse, but I do see the appeal of Pycharm.
Continuing looking at Python IDEs, I have been trying Eric and Wing IDE. Both primarily Python IDEs (although Eric also supports Ruby), both are very powerful, but one is free and open source, while the other is proprietary and expensive.
Continuing my review of a number of Python IDE s, I am starting with two IDEs I already know I like: Komodo and Ninja. As I said in the first post before I have used both Komodo Edit (Komodo IDE is Komodo Edit with extra features).
I have been using Geany for a while, because it is lightweight and has a nice UI, and it will be my baseline for this comparison, but it lacks some features I would like to have. The most important is good auto-completion, but refactoring support would be nice and real time linting even nicer. So, I made myself a list of IDEs (and extensible editors) that met my criteria.
I can understand Ankie Renique’s frustration about people who think that living is the tropics and working as a remote freelance is idyllic, but her reaction is to pick on a number of minor issues, or those that say more about her than the country, rather than picking very real problems.
Insurance company Hiscox has posted a misleading article on “the advantages and risks of open source software” in its “small business knowledge centre”. It is not clear who the article is aimed at, the explanations of legal issues are unclear, and the discussion of security issues irrelevant. They could have saved themselves from looking foolish if they had asked some with some technical knowledge and familiarity with the licences to review the article.
I have used Fossil for version control for a few years, and I like it, but this recent comment on the fossil-users mailing list made me think about its limits:
we must agree Fossil [..] much easier and friendlier to use.
It is, and it is not. I do recommend it, and it does provide a a lot of functionality and it is easy to learn and use.
The appeal of Wordpress is obvious: cheap and easy, and lots of “developers” know it. The biggest problem with Wordpress is that something originally designed as a blog platform, has evolved general CMS features, and is widely used a development platform. The problems are that it has security issues, and is neither flexible nor productive when used a a development platform and cheap developers are not good developers.
This post was sparked off by a comment a teacher made about the British government’s education policy, but the point I want to make is that this is the result of a globally accepted change in values. There is a link between education policy, how prisoners are treated, arts policy and more.
Tablet computers (and smart phones) are bad. They are bad for consumers and kill innovation. They move power from the owner of the device to its manufacturer, and denying the use of a cheap base for research and development, the very base that made the tablets possible in the first place, and, if PCs follow suit, innovation will become much harder. They deny consumers choice, are sometimes impossible to update (a security nightmare) and are inflexible.
Having taken a number of Smarterer tests I find it scary that people use it as a recruitment tool. The tests are unreliable and meaningless. First, I will explain what is wrong about my scores — and I am complaining more about scores being to high than too low, so there is no personal grudge here. Then a few quick thoughts on the reasons.
When I say that homoeopathy is magic I do not mean it as a metaphor or analogy, I mean that its principles are a variation of those of sympathetic magic. The term sympathetic magic was first, as far as I know, coined by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough. He wrote:
My idea, intended for the UK, but possibly applicable elsewhere, will generate a huge amount of government revenue, complete change immigration, and stimulate economic growth. The idea is a very simple: auction residence visas.
The Takeover Panel (which regulated mergers and takeovers inn the UK) has sent me an email telling me that reproducing the list of takeover offers (i.e. a list of company names and dates) would be a breach of copyright, and that they would be unlikely to allow commercial reproduction except though “official news channels”.
This is a company I have not looked at for a very long time. My interest was raised by a post on Expecting Value. The price to book value of 0.5 and reasonable PE (5× pre-exceptional earnings) it looks like a bargain, and sales of assets paying off its debt, but with some worries about low returns and constant downward revaluations of fixed assets.