Posts by Bart Janssen
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Personally, I can't for the life of me understand what the interest is in the likes of Survivor or The Apprentice -- they seem dull and nasty -- but I accept that decent people can actually enjoy them.
Loathe survivor and apprentice. The amazing race just didn't grab me (although some friends love it). Dancing with the stars makes me want to gouge body parts, not necessarily my own.
BUT
Really hooked on NZ's next top model (not interested in any of the other versions), like project runway. And occasionally watch a random cooking one.
I even think I have a slightly greater appreciation of modeling as a job than I used to, eek.
I think the point is there is such a variety of them, the almost everyone will be interested by one of them for a while.
Of course Iron chef isn't reality TV it's a genuine sporting event and so doesn't count :).
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You don't have to kill lots of people to be a terrorist.
The act was designed and intended to create fear based on ideology.
That is terrorism.
Susan Boyle didn't do it for me but it doesn't take away from the fact that many people found her achievements moving. As a devout cynic I still think, no matter how manipulated, it was a moving success story.
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Especially the kind you think I might be better at answering than Keith. Honest, that's what he wants.
We'll CC them to you.
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I'm not sure how convincing my 'nineteen year old' costume would be.
Fair call, sometimes the past is better left alone. I still think geeks in full regalia is a good idea though
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Will the Geeks be in full costume?
Yeah I admit I just want to see the Green Onion Slave Girl :P
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Kyle
because it would be my biggest nightmare from hell.
Sorry for the generalisation. I know there are some very good folks out there trying. But the above comment is one problem I hit, the aim surely is to make the professor more efficient even if it costs you time. It's his effort that earns the money that pays your salary, so any time you can make him more productive, even if it cost you time, is worth investigating. It may not balance out but because it costs you effort is not the reason to not try it. If it costs your professor efficiency to switch then keep her on MS by all means.
But the real problem I have is not that IT won't impose OO or similar on everyone to save money but that they prevent anyone using such systems. I don't mind MS what I mind is not being able to use anything else.
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Sorry Stephen - I overreacted
like giving your ballerinas standard issue steelcap boots.
Oh that's great Stephen I will steal that and pretend it's mine.
Sorry about the reaction, it is just an area of frustration about the way we view workplaces in general, - standardisation is good, all staff have the same needs, all work has the same safety requirements, all computers users do the same thing, average bandwidth is enough etc etc
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Stephen
On the third point, much government work is not "knowledge work" per se but more data entry or process orientated. A more restricted computing environment is safer, cheaper, easier to administer and eminently feasible to build (and clone and rebuild and update) on a free software stack.
?!?!
As an employee of a govt owned institute I can testify that the above logic is in fact used and repeated numerous times to justify our IT decisions. Of course that means that the research institute I work in still does not have a software package that can draw proper graphs, "if you can't do it with an excel pie chart it can't be worth doing". We also have internet access that is slower than my home connection, even when the neighbours are downloading their weekly pron.
In short - bollocks. There are numerous govt dept that use the internet and computing to its fullest.
Accepted there are people in our own institute who barely use word and probably could should have a hamstrung OS like MS will provide.
really bitter today - should go have coffee now
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Quite why we persist in sending so much bloody money into the coffers of a foreign company when there are cheaper, viable alternatives is rather beyond me.
Because the people making the decisions, usually suit wearing middle managers, are too lazy to use their brains. Or simply don't actually have functioning brains. Or are keen to stamp their mark on an organisation by changing previous decisions.
And seriously why not shift most of the desktops over to Macs. Any half decent network can hang PCs and Macs and 7 different flavours of linux off it.
Oh and yeah, of course support people for a open systems cost more - but it's also considerably smarter people providing that service and smart companies like to have smart people around. Government department management generally don't like smart people that much because they can be embarrassing. Couldn't possibly have someone point out that management were wrong that would be bad for morale and disrupt the chain of authority.
Bitter, moi?
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Do they own the country?
No not quite - they own the agency that tells the people who do own the country whether it's time to sell the country off to the lowest er highest bidder.
Essentially the guys who have lent NZ billions of dollars own most of the country in the same way most people own a little bit of their home and the bank owns the rest.
If you decide to give up your job and spend your time surfing the web instead of paying your mortgage the bank will ask you to get a job or move out of their house. The same is true of international lenders except they use S&P to let them know if a country has gone batshit crazy.
So frankly S&P acting as the proxy for the international lenders and telling JK that he can't give his cronies a tax break is really kind of a good thing. Especially because you know damn well the only people gonna benefit from JK version of tax cut/growth incentive are gonna be his neighbours in Parnell.