All posts tagged: packet

Labour’s ‘back-of-a-fag packet’ plan to slap VAT on independent schools could cost £1.6bn | Politics | News

Labour’s ‘back-of-a-fag packet’ plan to slap VAT on independent schools could cost £1.6bn | Politics | News

Published by skeptic

Labour plans to slap VAT on independent school fees could actually cost £1.6billion, rather than deliver a tax dividend, a damning new analysis has indicated. A new report published by the Adam Smith Institute suggests that applying the levy risks raising no money at all – and could even backfire in spectacular fashion. The report also finds that the policy risked harming other children by creating a mass exodus to the already overwhelmed state system, intensifying competition for the country’s best state and grammar schools. It also highlighted the risk of reduced bursary and scholarship opportunities for talented youngsters. The analysis, by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), scrutinises the findings of a separate report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies which suggests applying VAT to independent school fees would raise £1.3-£1.5billion – evidence for which the think tank itself has acknowledged is “thin” and “sparse”. Under the IFS’ optimistic scenario, only a limited number of parents will no longer be able to afford fees, and will move their children to the state sector. However, the …

How the internet pushed China’s New Year red packet tradition to the extreme

How the internet pushed China’s New Year red packet tradition to the extreme

Published by skeptic

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you ask any child in China what’s the most exciting thing about welcoming another year, they are likely to answer: the red packets. It’s a festive tradition: During the holidays, people give out red envelopes full of cold hard cash to young members of the family. You can reliably get cash gifts every year until you graduate from school and start working full-time. So this week is a great opportunity to talk about how the tradition of giving red packets, which has been around for hundreds of years, has evolved in the digital age. Even though I’m not in China now, I still managed to send two red packets to my nephew and niece, through mobile payments on WeChat. In fact, red packets have not merely turned from a physical activity to a digital one. They’ve become a way for Chinese tech companies to make a stack of money each year …

Clockwork’s Cloud Deluxe platform eliminates packet drops, improves cloud network performance

Clockwork’s Cloud Deluxe platform eliminates packet drops, improves cloud network performance

Published by skeptic

Clockwork today announced a new service that uses its clock synchronization service to eliminate packet drops to help businesses improve their network performance. A year ago, the company created a splash when it announced its clock synchronization service that helps businesses keep their server fleets in sync. Keeping clocks in sync with up to 5-nanosecond accuracy (for hardware-based timestamps) is quite an achievement, but the idea here was always to go up the stack and build tools on top of this fundamental technology. The first tool, Latency Sensei, provides users with fine-grained data about latency in their networks. Now, Clockwork is bundling this tool with other features and a new ‘sense-and-control’ dashboard for managing them all, aiming to help businesses reduce network latency, jitter, and virtually eliminate packet drops between their machines, regardless of location or computing environments. Traditionally, to reduce packet drops (and those drops and their retransmissions are fundamental feature of TCP that make the internet work), network switches use buffers. But as Clockwork co-founder and Stanford computer science professor Balaji Prabhakar noted …