It’s UK Budget Day and George Osborne has been strutting his stuff, playing to his party and to the world stage. Amongst the usual increases to Duty on cigarettes, beer etc. one of the small, but possibly important points is the removal of maintenance grants for students from September 2016 onwards. These were available to […]
David Cameron: Tax and Legislation
In the news today, apparently David Cameron has pledged to pass a new law guaranteeing there will be no rise in income tax, VAT or National Insurance during the lifetime of the next parliament if he is elected. Whilst this might sound like a good thing, here at The Internet Sheep, we disagree. So, in […]
Audi and Amazon: Car Boot Delivery
I came across an article on the BBC News site yesterday with a headline of “Audi and Amazon to try car boot delivery service“. In summary it seems that Audi, Amazon and DHL are proposing a system where you can get your parcel delivered to the boot of your car, using a one-time access code. […]
Second Annual Open Doors Weekend
The second annual Open Doors Weekend will be celebrated by construction firms opening 80 sites across the UK to welcome public entry, according to Construction News. Over the weekend of 27th-28th September, school groups, the public and twenty Members of Parliament including most notably, Vince Cable, the Business Secretary will visit. Amongst those opening sites […]
Online Recruitment Still Most Popular
A global survey by FindEmployment has determined that online recruitment is still the most popular method for job searching, with 27% of respondents favouring it. Interestingly, despite the efforts of FaceBook, LinkedIn etc. social media is the least popular method, with only 6% of those responding to the survey stating they would actively use it. Out […]
McLaren/IO Partner on Data Centre Energy Efficiency
On the 6th of June, McLaren Applied Technologies (MAT) and IO announced a technology partnership focussing on energy efficiency in the next generation of data centres. At current estimates, data centres consume two percent of the worldwide electricity supply – a figure that is equivalent to the output of roughly 30 nuclear power stations. With […]
Data Backup – It’s Like Insurance
Most of us are aware of the need to backup our data, whether it’s our office computer, home computer, web site or one of the many gadgets that now occupy our homes, however just knowing we should be doing it does not always translate into actually doing it – and even if you are backing […]
Thinking Outside The Box
I owe the inspiration to this one to the BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) – you can read the current episode here – worth going through the archives if you haven’t come across this before. Anyway, if you bother to read the comments, the wondrous phrase “Thinking outside the box” comes up, largely with respect […]
Bob Diamond – A Question?
Now that Barclays (ex) Chief Executive Bob Diamond has gone, there seems to be an unanswered (or even, unasked) question left hanging about what he did or did not know. From the open letter written on the 28th June 2012 to Andrew Tyrie, Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee and published on the Barclays website […]
N+1 Redundancy – How Not To Do It
This morning, as I got up, I noticed that our server monitoring system (Nagios – if you don’t know it, give it a look) was erroring for a set of customers servers. They’d been rebooted a couple of times over the last few weeks, so I decided a visit to the DC was in order […]