Much of this (as admitted in the tweet thread) is due to the VAT changes, I don't think it is wise to blame this on Brexit and move on as it ignores the growing problem. The only connection Brexit has to this is timing, these VAT changes are EU wide and will rolled out to EU member states this year. Foreign companies will need to charge VAT at the member states rate (some have multiple) and register for VAT in the EU.
After the EU other countries will follow suit wanting their slice of the pie, if you don't believe me have a look at global sales tax handling for digital sales ([0] quick example). Trying to stay above board here is difficult, there is investment to be made in charging the correct taxes in the first place but the main problem is the massive amount of potential paperwork in filing all the taxes. As will be the case for many retailers we simply don't sell to any country which requires us to charge tax and has no sales threshold.
This is a big problem for small business, in an age where anyone can start a niche business and scrape a customer base together from the entire world they will be killed by paperwork...
We recently launched https://www.db-fiddle.com/ which you may find useful, you could save your scheme/data sql and your students can fork it for their own version :)
This isn't how you should drop support, it might be a good choice but can we at least have some discussion, maybe even an RFC, not just declare it be so within the space of 3 hours and lock the issue...
Napkin math incoming... Say you only used a-z in your token, at 1 character long you have 26^1 combinations, at 6 you have 26^6 or 308,915,776 combinations, which could easily be scanned. Increase the length to 26^ or 95,428,956,661,682,180, a big ass number, if we reserve 1,000,000,000,000 for actual items and create them over this range then the odds of guessing a correct token is 0.000000010479, then ban all the hosts which trip more than the average number of 404s.
Bankers created the sub-prime market by offering mortgages to people they knew couldn't afford the repayments, they then packaged these bad debts with a few good quality debts on top and passed the resulting package off as good. They then sold these packages off to other banks or investment groups to make a profit and export their exposure.
Banks which gained exposure to the bad debt employed bankers who were either negligent in investigating the contents of the debt they were acquiring and invested their depositors money without due care and attention, or knew the risks of what they were doing and continued to gamble with their depositors money while skimming large amount off as their own. These banks had then lost their depositors money and demanded that the public bail them out, while still taking large salaries and bonuses.
There will of course be other factors in something like a global financial "collapse" but this is my understanding of the sub-prime situation and why you should be angry. Somewhere along the line the actions of some of the bankers should be criminal.
If you don't mind commercial, we are about to release [0], its our internal CMS we've been using for ~4 years, we're just working on some better documentation before release. There's a beta signup on that page which we'll be running for a couple of months.
1. Use a static site generator to build the site, ensuring I have indexes available, piggyback s3's SSL as a custom endpoint through to cloudfront and use SNI for my custom domain.
2. Use Heroku (or similar provider to remove most of the maintenance burden), piggyback their SSL to cloudfront+SNI+csutom domain.
This is the choice I made (UK based) and 5 years later I can say I'm doing fine and have no regrets. But what does concern me is the way college[1] staff reacted to this decision, from warnings in one to one chats down to outright scaremongering that I was throwing my life away even though I had explained that I could not find a course that I felt would be of value or advance my knowledge in what I WANTED to do. This is the same situation my younger sister is currently facing, she would much rather pursue the apprenticeship route to gain practical experience (she is wanting to pursue events management) but her college keeps pushing her back to the university route offering little to no support for her choice and the provided tools for finding apprenticeships or opportunities are next to useless.
Thankfully my family has a history of self-employment so for us convincing family that it is the right path is not difficult, but with colleges acting as very persistent recruiters for universities this will be a very hard decision to make for a lot of people as the advisors parents listen to are saying it is not a viable option.
[1] For those unfamiliar with the UK system college is attended separately before university.
One of my college teachers actually tried this, it did not end well... A teacher should be a source of qualified help, not just a glorified marking machine. She also wasn't happy that I made space invaders instead of pong...
League of legends - Been playing for years now, recommended.
Assassins creed black flag - Great game, think asscreed may be my favourite series.
Tomb raider - This was so much better than I was expecting, bought it in a sale while it was cheap. The story is good and its pretty intense in general, though the rope winch pulling down walls is pretty hilarious (also half price on steam)
I got a proposal to review one yesterday, was already a little concerned that a vagrant config on github made me ideal for reviewing a cloudera handbook. If the review isn't taken seriously I'll pass, thanks for the heads up :)
Am I missing something here? All I can find is a bunch of middleware and grunt. I'm starting to get sick of open source projects leading with a shiny marketing site...
Interesting product, how well is selling through envato working for you? I've looked at it before but the rates seemed a little too much for new members.
After the EU other countries will follow suit wanting their slice of the pie, if you don't believe me have a look at global sales tax handling for digital sales ([0] quick example). Trying to stay above board here is difficult, there is investment to be made in charging the correct taxes in the first place but the main problem is the massive amount of potential paperwork in filing all the taxes. As will be the case for many retailers we simply don't sell to any country which requires us to charge tax and has no sales threshold.
This is a big problem for small business, in an age where anyone can start a niche business and scrape a customer base together from the entire world they will be killed by paperwork...
[0] https://quaderno.io/blog/digital-taxes-around-world-know-new...