Why spend money when you don't have to? Go direct to the relevant UK authority at http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/, read the guidance notes carefully and incorporate away. Pay special attention to your articles of association as they're akin to a constitution for your business. Also, you'll need a registered office in the UK that documents can be delivered to.
Experience: UK resident who set his own Limited company up
Did you not RTFA? The article is about a PHP hosting company that is getting merc'd because of the security flaws inherent in PHP that lead to their design decision to use Amazon EC2.
Whats up with the attitude? Seriously. The arrogance and self righteousness on HN is ridiculous sometimes and really kills the conversation.
To your point though no i didnt read the article because there was so much noise between it and the flamewar going on here that it was difficult to figure out what was even going on. However, to quote you, "The article is about a PHP hosting company that is getting merc'd because of the security flaws inherent in PHP that lead to their design decision to use Amazon EC2."
Ya wasnt that the question i just asked? Seriously maybe you should read the question before just downvoting it and replying with no reply. My question was actually a serious question. I want to know if there are security flaws in php as i am looking at it for a few projects and would like to know if there are issues with it before i start them.
PHP is just as secure as any other language. It's the programmer's best practices (or lack of) and implementation that can make the code secure or insecure. The language is mature, actively maintained, and has a nice standard lib (debatable). Whether or not YOUR program will be secure depends on you the PROGRAMMER not the language.
While there are some features of PHP which are inherently a bad idea (register globals for example) these are, for the most part, deprecated and removed in the most up-to-date version.
I agree with other views that it is the programmer's code that is insecure, not the language itself.
So does that mean ec2 is insecure? Or is the flamewar about how the article is really about the writer blaming their problems on something thats really not at fault. Meaning php or ec2?
The exploit was not anything to do with PHP. A section of their site was allowing to users to execute commands under a user which they should not have been allowed to. This could have happened under any programming language.
Whilst I couldn't find a way to automatically include header files, once they're added NetBeans automagically switches on autocomplete and finds documentation where available. I've used it for my own C++ projects (using headers and libraries from others as well as my own) and had no problem. I'm by no means an expert (used C++ for only a few months, coming from a PHP background) but I managed to get a few CGI applications working using Xerces-c
Whilst I don't think a profitable business like Groupon will 'burst', I think it will slowly deflate. Why? Does anyone remember the company from over a decade ago, backed by Paul Allen, who were going to revolutionise ecommerce by offering group discounts? It was Mercata and they went under in 2001.
The article at http://www.seattlepi.com/business/vc122.shtml sums up why long-term, Groupon will face challenges (and it's also the exact reason why I decline to use Groupons' services):
"Those who wanted a baby jogger or DVD player, for example, sometimes had to wait seven days for Mercata's so-called PowerBuy to kick in. By that time, shoppers had moved on to another store or online shopping site. Instead of creating a faster, cheaper way to buy products, Mercata actually slowed the buying process."
Que Groupon offering group-buying service with no time-limits, only a quantity-limit?
"...if you have to raise thirty million to start your business, its probably not a good business (at least for me)."
I've lost count of the number of articles I've read saying "Startup XYZ Inc just raised $X million!" and a dearth of the "Startup ABC Inc made $X million profit on revenues of $Y million" kind.
It's refreshing to see an article on HN that points out the obvious: if you have such a good business, why doesn't it make any money?
Articles do not get written unless the company pushes for it. They need the publicity when they raise the money, not when they are making money. Its quite simple, really.
Thats totally it. "raising money" is a marketing event for many companies. And then the list of investors put you on a status hierarchy so that you become first in line when Google goes shopping. Or so the CEOs think. I'm almost embarassed when any company I invest in announces their funding. Thats not the real world. The real world is buying something low and sell high. I learned this many times over, some times the hard way.
"The growing use of Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework, in recent years has created developer shortages everywhere, said Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson...Many developers who were trained in Java or PHP simply need to be retrained, he said."
=== "Hmm, PHP and Java are out, so what does someone with vested interests in Rails think I should learn? Hang on, Rails isn't mentioned as out of date by its creator so I'll retrain in that!"
I can't remember the exact articles from HN but there were two recently: one was about a sysadmin that went for an interview at Facebook or Google and was surprised that they wanted knowledge on low-level, performance critical features rather than advanced bash programming; another was an example of why it's often more cost effective to get twice the performance out of one server (by investing more development time i.e. C/C++ over PHP) rather than buying another server.
YMMV but I switched from PHP to C++ for my personal web projects and haven't noticed it taking me exponentially more time to develop.
What about the effect of bad students? Isn't education a two-way process involving a supplier and a consumer?
I got my highest grades in subjects I enjoyed (Business and Mathematics) and my lowest grades in those I didn't (English). Was my English teacher not as good because I got a D yet the Business and Maths teachers got an A or B out of me? Does the fact that other students got A in English and a D or E in Business or Maths show that actually the English teacher is 'better'? Or was it just an anomaly?
Sure, there are no doubt a tiny minority of teachers who (in the UK at least) have paid thousands for a degree, gone through some form of postgraduate training and accreditation (years in total) only to land a job and then throw it all away. However, my own opinion is that 'bad teachers' are an excuse for bad students and (anecdotally and just in my experience) poor parental/primary caregiver role models. I saw the same 'my son/daughter is performing poorly because of bad teachers' come from parents whose children were more adept at petty crime and drug dealing.
As other comments have drawn attention to, it's a shame that the first things to go in any government austerity drive are sciences and things too complicated for the average, TV-educated Joe to care about. Imagine how different the world would be if in the 1940s the UK decided computers had no use outside of war and cut their funding. Or if in the 1960's the US government decided that DARPA should be focusing on cutting costs, not trying to connect these computer machines together over this network they'd been working on...
"From a two year research initiative published in 2000 by AAUW, young girls in focus groups reported that "lack of interest" was not the reason for steering away from a computing career, but rather, their male peers were treating computers as toys"
Is it safe to assume girls + I.T. + toys != good times?
Speaking as a male peer, do you mean to tell me that computers aren't toys? Code is my game, and the line between "tool" and "toy" is extremely narrow based on how much enjoyment I get out of a good hard problem.
The problem is the 'rich guys' are using the average Joes money, often lent to/invested with them by banks and pensions funds to try and secure the largest return possible.
Even if they're using their own money, the cynic inside me predicts that if/when the house of cards comes crashing down, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer will be asked to 'stabilise' the industry in the interests of national economic security.
Experience: UK resident who set his own Limited company up