Posts by Matthew Poole
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and all the schools in our area are decile one schools.
umm, surely you mean decile ten? Devonport != t3h slums
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13 weeks stand down for unemployment
Bloody hell! Is there a source for that?
If you resign, or get fired for misconduct, s60H of the Social Security Act 1964 mandates a 13-week stand-down period before payment of a benefit may commence. It's mandatory in the case of resignation, but discretionary in the case of termination.
So it's possible that it'd apply in the case of employees terminated out of a trial period. I'm sure the lawyers will have fun arguing it.
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Some people did a dial-up speed test of all the major local news sites a couple of weeks ago. From memory, they were all ~1MB
"Everyone else is doing it" doesn't make it any more acceptable, though. They should all be hunting for designers who actually understand the demographics of the NZ internet. It's not primarily people on stinking fast fibre or DSL, it's mostly people on connections of, at their very notional best, 8Mbps, or less, or on dialup. ADSL2+ is not the predominate connection. And that 8Mbps sure as hell ain't happening at this hour on a week day!
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The TVNZ site is perfectly usable from home. Obviously anything that's Flash-reliant doesn't work, but the site can be used to get news and programming information just fine. It's slow, as expected, but definitely functional.
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Nasty. You can be sacked at any time during the 90 days, but you have no right to just walk out. Unbalanced much?
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The home page is 1.2MB in size. which is about a 10 seconds download on 1 Meg DSL.
This shows a complete, arrogant disregard for the huge number of folks in this country who're on dialup. When you've got 800-ish-thousand dialup connections in a population of 4.2 million, you don't just ignore them!
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I think people assumed that there were laws in place that protected them from simply having their money stolen from them by their financial agents.
I'd support that law being passed. Under urgency, or otherwise.
I don't know if it passed under urgency, but fraud and theft by a trustee are already covered by the Crimes Act. So, voila, your wish is granted.
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not even a block of cheese
Yeah, but what size block are we discussing here? I can get a 500gm block of house-brand Edam at Countdown for under $10.
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So, online open Government is available only to IE users on Windows.
Well, it looks OK in FF and Safari on this Mac. But it's possible there's stuff buried further into the site that doesn't work other than in IE. Which in 2008 is completely inexcusable. It was only barely excusable in 2001, and now that IE is the subject of a rapidly-shrinking share of the browser market it's just thoroughly ridiculous.
My favourite anti-portability application is the Java (yes, that cross-platform Java) app that IBM ship for administering their blade servers. It'll only work in some versions of Windows (XP and 2K3, nothing earlier) under IE. One's left wondering why they didn't just build an ActiveX control and make the lack of portability blatantly obvious.
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I should point out that the likes of Hannover are now subject to statutory oversight. Too late for the current round of failures, but hopefully it'll do a bit to prevent something of the like happening in future. The law is Labour's work, so they weren't totally impotent.
One thing I found more than a little disturbing was learning this year that it took until 2002 before the Takeovers Panel was created, despite it being founded in the Takeovers Act 1993. National just didn't want to do anything to interfere with their mates getting to fuck shareholders for every last cent, even though they passed the Takeovers Act to give us the framework for it. Funnily enough, the Minister behind (not) driving such measures was Doug Graham. Thankfully he's not back this time around, but we do have a Rodney and a Roger instead so we may yet be gouged again.