Swinx43

This and the AWS in Plain English are both awesome. Is there an equivalent for Google Cloud Platform?

Did you land the opportunity yourself or how did it come about? I see one of the biggest issues being that people always hire contractors for their area of expertise. It is thus difficult to convince people that you can do a new technology without having done it before for a client.

The language point you touch on cannot be stressed enough. I have first hand experience with this as I travel to Germany on a regular basis and find Germans much more accommodating language wise than the French.

I also have had first hand experience of staff at establishments in Paris simply refusing to speak English. All in all if I had to choose as a Londoner I would prefer to move to Frankfurt or Amsterdam over Paris any day of the week.

I learned Pascal in school many years ago. I honestly did not know that Delphi was still kicking around. Very interesting to see this :)

From what I could dig up online the CPU is a i7 Dual Core CPU, which makes this one VERY expensive dual core laptop at the i7 + 1TB SSD range (http://pureinfotech.com/surface-book-laptop-technical-specif...)

Granted there is not much information but if the above is correct then you are better off getting a Dell XPS, at least they run about £1800 for the i7 quad core with 512SSD.

Totally agree. If Microsoft wants to made proper comparisons then they need to state what CPU it actually is.

The amount of times I have heard people say that a particular notebook is "Way" cheaper than a MacBook Pro only to point out to them they are comparing a dual core i7 to a quad core i7 is just ridiculous. When they then look at quad core i7 notebooks the prices become much closer if not end up being the same.

I could not agree more. I make my living using Microsoft tech in the analytics space and I absolutely HATE powershell.

This is a really good talk that will give some valuable insight into how Greece has been bullied. (YANIS VAROUFAKIS | NOAM CHOMSKY, NYPL, 26 April) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szIGZVrSAyc

More than 90% of the bailout money went to banks, not to Greece. Bank recapitalization via the back door while blaming Greece.

I am sorry but Yammer has been the single most atrocious thing that has been unleashed in organisations.

It is normally touted as some form of magic where everyone needs to get involved and keep everyone up to date. It is simply a waste of productive time as it tries to recreate a twitter/facebook style social media mess of which its value is over inflated.

Use Slack or a wiki or any other sort of collaboration tool that allows for better communication without the hyped hipster propaganda of corporate twitter. I have never worked in an organisation where Yammer added any real value to those who had to deliver. It seemed a great way though for those with too much time and too little output to look busy and impress their often clueless managers come annual review time.

Given the way the "enterprise" works I would guess that their clients caught on to the high level of BS and low level of value of previous "technologies". In true enterprise fashion they have now found a new shiny marketing opportunity and only recently put the finishing touches on the sales presentations ;)

According to the Reddit the payload was on the rocket. https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/50n5cl/rspacex_cape...

This is very intriguing, I cannot help but wonder how this operation would have performed on something like Google Big Query. I know that it is highly unlikely that Facebook would ever load their data to the Google Cloud Platform, but it would be an interesting comparison.

This is something that looks very interesting. I wonder if this would ever come to the UK. I know France is just across the channel but there surely is massive demand for this in the UK as well.

I am interested to find out what volumes of data each of these solutions, Cubes and Bubbles, have been tested against?

I work with enterprise tools to create ETL and OLAP solutions daily and really like what I see here but I am concerned with the performance since it is all done using Python and performance is not Python's strength.

Do you have any more information regarding this?

I work in the BI space and Cubes is exactly ROLAP.

I find this short piece released by a South West London estate agent rather appalling.

Most disgusting is how the situation of not being able to afford anything in London is being framed as a shift in the attitude of consumers and you buyers.

The problem is that not even middle class residents can afford to buy a basic property. It is definitely not that these people have chosen to rent instead of buy.

Fantastic stuff! I cannot wait to read this. This has single handily become my Thursday obsession for the last few weeks.

I am wondering that exact same thing. I did see that it is available through Google Books as well so not sure myself at the moment.

Yes that definitely sounds about right. :)

I completely agree, this type of snake oil entrepreneurship is really getting on my nerves. It seems that peddling pseudo science is a very lucrative business opportunity and as such there is no small amount of people willing to jump on it.

Another thing that truly gets me annoyed is the listing out of all these "things" that an author has been, none of them the reader would know if they have actually been any good at it. I could list a myriad of things "I have been" and make me look like a renaissance man except half of them I have been not even average at.

This has been a fantastic series of articles! I absolutely love this. Evan Ratliff is simply a superb writer in long form journalism.

That is REALLY interesting! Quite a useful and nice way to work with tax. What does the percentage increase to in the following year?

It is a shame that the UK does not have anything like this. The best you can hope for is to contract and that give an average tax of around 26% to 30% depending on how creative your bookkeeper is.

Germany as my alternative example is quite a different story, there being freelance is very difficult due to the cost of healthcare that you HAVE to pay and their tax law is extremely complicated, you pay loads more tax than the UK for example. I know some friends who too permanent employment in Germany as it was more beneficial than being freelance.

> The hard part for me was the visa. But that is also a solvable problem.

That is something I did not even want to mention due to the challenges it brings. It is not insurmountable but does sometimes come at a high cost of both money, time and stress.

Thanks for the reply and the info provided. My personal opinion regarding the ability to move from a bad economy is that this is not always as easy as it looks. Even if you are european with an EU passport you are very likely to come up against some high language barriers etc. Although that could be a challenge some people might jump at.

For example I know that the UK (and mostly London) is extremely tolerant of non native English speakers. However from experience I know this will count against you when people are looking to hire (I was on the hiring side at one point so know how my managers perceived this.)

Germany is again another example where unless you speak really good German you will have some pretty tough challenges. I had a friend who grew up speaking German as a second language, who completed his masters in Germany, be told by his boss to go for German writing classes if he wants to get anywhere in their company.

Europe might be one big open job market but Language honestly makes it far more difficult than it seems at first. This also goes for settling into your new country even if you are working for US or UK companies as your day job.

Thank you very much for the reply. Yes if you move to (or live) in an area in europe that is cheaper than say London, Paris or the other big cities (and most places in Scandinavian :) ) then this is an option.

At the moment really good developers in London can hit £80k+ per year in full-time salary but living costs locally are insane. If you are contracting in London you can make good money but you are still hindered by the high living costs. One big drawback is that I have seen very little remote work opportunities for London companies to anyone not living locally. This gets more pronounced the closer you move to the Data Science / Business Intelligence space, but even for Web Dev etc it looks to be not that common. So as you say it might have to be the big cities in the US as it seems the US are much further in accepting remote work than where I currently am.

Mind me asking where most of their clients are located as well as themselves?

That is true however it is a very far cry from adequate unbiased reporting. We get lengthy pieces on the "usual suspects" but a mere token gesture for the elite of other countries.

I really hope that this does happen. I would like to see unbiased reporting about all of the information instead of selective reporting.

Yes I saw that however you cannot have the mention of his father be seen as adequate reporting on the misdeeds of the elite.

Am I the only one to find the reporting on this to be rather one sided? Sure we all know Putin is a shady character to say the least, but none in the US or the UK being directly reported on? Germany? France? Instead we get a token gesture in the way of Iceland's PM being implicated.

The Guardian is losing a hell of a lot of credibility in my opinion for having this biased view being published.

I say make all the documents available to the entire world. That is the only way it will be less media propaganda and more a true leak.