Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Um Labour Party members?
Oh, well, like they matter. Pffft.
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to HORansome,
Now, I don't know what the user experience on Android tablets is in this regard, but I was impressed (moreso) with how easily it just worked on the iPad. Does anyone know about how such things with respect to other portable devices?
I haven't tried any accessibility tools yet, though it is in the plan this year.
Android on a tablet is still very much an infant. Basically, it's a phone with a bigger screen. And no phone capability.
I got a Zenithink out of China last year. It's heavier than an iPad (just) but pretty good for Angry Birds (fuck, that is a timewaster!) and reading documents, which was the main reason I got it. Also excellent for playing games. Does WiFi, doesn't do bluetooth, does have a full sized USB port on the side, has crap speakers, gets warm if used while charging (O_o), pretty good with browsers. A few downloads won't go on it, but plenty won't go on my phone either (Voda845). Both still running Android 2.1 which is sufficient for me at the moment. These were nice cheap ways to get into the game - I never expected either to be magic, but it's surprising how much I do enjoy using them. (I got my wife a Hai Pad ;-) she loves it. Watches TV on the train into Welly)
To be fair, the iPad is an overgrown phone as well, as iOS was built for the iPhone, but it's undergoing its adolescence a bit more gracefully. Look for iOS to become much more important for Apple - not for technical reasons but because they have more of a lock on it.
OSX is essentially a Unix variant which is cool when I want to be adventurous and compile some source code to see if it will work (often, yes, but crashes at some point because of the Mysteries of Cupertino, also known as Quartz graphics). It also means it's relatively open for development. A lot of the base code can be found in the Darwin Project (and vice versa) and so Apple don't get to control it quite as tightly as they can iOS. Whenever they feel it slipping away, they release a new cat (I mean, Lion? Come on, Steve, I've still got an eMac in the corner running Tiger quite happily) and do stupid things like buggering up Java locations so that OpenOffice breaks again.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Apple fan (though not a fanboi) - my main machine is a 24" Intel iMac and I have the eMac for voice recording in a different room and an old PPC Mini as well that is destined to be a media server when I get my shit together- but their stuff works as well as it does because they have less variation in hardware to have to deal with.
I didn't get an iPhone because I refuse to pay that much for a phone, which I know is going to be at risk in my pocket, and I didn't get an iPad for the same reason. I think the tablet has legs, but I'm wary about any walled garden approach.
I also have 2 Win7 laptops, 2 XP laptops, an EEEPC running Xandros (makes a surprisingly good webserver for the house intranet) and at least one variant of Ubuntu running on whichever tower is working at the moment - we're a broad church, and I use whatever is the right tool for the moment in time and the task at hand. I just wrote a script for a play on the Win7 lappy, using Celtx, because it was warmer upstairs this week than downstairs, but I have the same software on the Macs downstairs and, where possible, I tend to open source apps that are cross-platform precisely so I can be as agnostic as possible about hardware and OS. Platforms really aren't important - it's the apps that define what you do, and your needs at any given time.
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Hard News: Media7: Doing it for the Kids, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Let’s see:
Perception that National Minister has been criticised.Check.
First, Tolley isn’t responsible for the headlines in newspapers not exactly know for pushing the hyperbole button, hard.
Strawman that no-one had even suggested, check.
Meanwhile, here’s a direct quote from Tolley in the last story you linked to.
Cherry-picked quote, check.
Sure, but let’s sheet the responsibility for that where it deserves to be. I don’t know if I’d go as far as “moral panic”, but I’ve sure felt like getting my liberal whinge (tm – Michael Laws) on about the exploitative and deeply unhelpful posturing of the alleged grown-ups.
Abrupt change of focus when strawman burnt to ground, check.
not everyone comes with a default setting that the Education Minister is Satan’s handmaiden.
Over-wrought attempt to divert discussion from subject of post (e.g. media) to political wrangling, check.
Yes folks, this is indeed an all-too-common example of classic Ranapiasm, as executed by the Craig-bot. Please note these standard features for identification in your own threads.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to linger,
I'm not sure he is but, be fair, Key and English don't give him a lot of good material to work with.
What I got out of Craig's post is that it was alright for the National Government to do what they did, because Labour would have done the same, which - no.
In a way, Craig has just complimented the Labour strategy (if it was competent for National, then it was competent for Labour) and confirmed that National don't actually have a distinguishable economic policy or strategy of their own.
As Sacha said, "foot, meet gun".
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Sacha,
I’d take anything that particular ‘writer’ says with a sack of salt
Ah yes, Rachel "Glaucoma" - the willfully blind leading the dimwitted "majority"
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Katita,
+1 across the board.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Sacha,
Partly superseded by Tizard deciding today not to re-enter the fray.
First plus for Labour in a while.
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Hard News: It Began ... in Chicago, in reply to Rich Lock,
What? No horse's head?
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Hard News: It Began ... in Chicago, in reply to Rich Lock,
God damn! I didn't think to type "jockey cap"
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to BenWilson,
State Sector Act 1988 — made the civil service more business-like with Chief Executives instead of Permanent Secretaries
I’m not so sure I’d exclude that one from the stench of free market ideology.
Correct. Pure free market ideology, based around the flawed thinking that business operate more efficiently than government, so let’s make government more like business. I’ve worked both sides of the fence and businesses are at least as inefficient as government and often more so, but they don’t have the media camped on their doorstep reporting their every mis-step with shock and horror.
What that act did was fragment the sector so badly that all this duplication arose that English now says he is trying to get rid of. It had to – instead of a shared infrastructure, each agency had to build its own. Agencies had to compete for funding to do the work they’d always done. People who were unprepared and untrained in commercial corporate methodology were overnight expected to cope with a very different environment, and they weren’t allowed to make mistakes. Where we had had a cohesive (and largely cooperative) government sector, we now had lots of silos with their own performance measures, none of which included cooperation.
Did the state sector need to be reformed? Yes, there were issues, especially in secretiveness and responsiveness. Yes, there was a definite need for management to modernise, to look at better ways to do things. Change was required. But the State Sector Act was driven more by perceptions of Gliding On than by actual good public management practices. It has created far more problems than it solved.
Also, I have my own suspicions that Douglas wanted to turn agencies into businesses to make it easier to flog them off, but that’s another rant ;-)