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The problem is that multinational corporations can devise complicated ways to avoid paying taxes in the countries where they do business by exploiting tax havens, as Apple did in Ireland.

Amazon has a huge business in the UK with offices, staff, stock and warehouses, but Amazon UK doesn't sell stuff. You are actually buying UK goods from UK warehouses with UK delivery etc but the money goes straight to Amazon EU Sarl in Luxembourg, where it has a sweetheart tax deal.

So Amazon exploits the whole UK social system of education, health services, roads, police etc etc without paying the UK government for the benefits. This is really bad for the UK and other countries except Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, Amazon EU Sarl reduces its taxes by paying Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS - a "non-resident" company -- hundreds of millions of euros for "intellectual property" rights that are basically untaxed (Amazon is paying itself), and the money gets spirited back to the USA.

The cost of "intellectual property" is really just a made-up number. What is Amazon charging itself vast amounts of money for when its UK website and business processes are basically the same as its American and other websites?

The whole thing may be legal but it's basically a fraud, and the EU ordered EU ordered Amazon to repay €250m in “illegal tax advantages”. Which is still chickenfeed for a company of Amazon's size and wealth.

It's highly likely that European countries will introduce a "digital tax" on turnover to stop this kind of cheating. I expect Americans will get angry if or when that happens, but in the long run, we don't have an alternative. Infrastructure is expensive, and the money should come from the people who are benefiting from it.

In the US, of course, Amazon gets tax breaks from people who want Amazon investment. New Jersey offered $7bn of tax incentives in its bid for Amazon's "second headquarters".

If companies like Amazon actually paid the taxes required by law that would be nice. Instead they have armies of people finding wholly artificial ways to legally avoid paying those taxes.

You can be infected without having a fever. That's one of the problems with coronavirus.

Knowing you have the virus won't save you, of course, but you will be able to react accordingly. That will include trying not to infect anyone else....

Agreed, but unless you can self-isolate, it's not going to last very long.

If you got tested weekly, the costs would soon mount up.....

One of the nice things was that you could run Windows NT on a DUAL PROCESSOR PC with two Alpha chips. This was such an attractive idea I thought of buying one. However, when I did a very quick trial, it didn't make any noticeable difference to my very simple workloads (mostly Microsoft Office).

DEC sold its StrongARM (ARM-based) business to Intel in 1997, before DEC was taken over by Compaq in 1998. It resulted in Intel's XScale business, which it later sold to Marvell.

Compaq abandoned DEC's Alpha for the HP/Intel Itanic, so Intel didn't get an Alpha business. However, Compaq sold the Alpha IP to Intel in 2001, before the HP takeover in 2002.

I'd be interested to know what happened to the Alpha architects, Richard L. Sites and Richard T. Witek. A quick search doesn't find anything interesting.

I remember there was a breakaway of DEC engineers founding a small chip design company, but can't remember what it was called.

Belated reply (Christmas!)

> the failure was not necessarily technical

Well, that was exactly my point ;-)

If you only look at the technical issues, ur doin it rong.

I use Everything all day every day and it's brilliant at what it does. However, it's not Google Desktop Search, which I sorely miss...

(1) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of employing the people who use it.

(2) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of retraining staff and changing business workflows and processes to cope with different software.

(3) Changing to new software is relatively simple compared with the problems of making all your staff, your contractors and your suppliers change to new software.

(4) Even if changing to new software was relatively simple and cheap, there would be massive risks in doing it. If you are designing nuclear power stations, nuclear submarines, skyscrapers, bridges or whatever, the cost of mistakes can run into the billions, or be fatal for a significant number of people.

(5) Bonus point: making this kind of switch could take a decade and could end up not saving you any money (cf Munich trying to switch to open source). Not many CEOs will attempt it because they are more focused on the next quarter's results. Anyway, in many if not most companies, the benefits -- if any -- would accrue to whoever the-next-CEO-after-the-next-CEO happens to be. And who really cares about that?

It's hard enough to get most people to change their email client or their text editor or whatever when the alternatives are free and the real-world risks are negligible. Getting them to change the software on which their whole business survival is based is another matter.

Moral: changing business software is not as simple as it seems if you only look at the software and don't look at the whole business plus the whole industry infrastructure of related businesses. It's never as simple as people think.

> They both got ones with 128GB drives which has turned into massive frustration. But we will ignore that for now.

Please can you un-ignore that in one sentence? ;-)