Posts by BenWilson
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Much though I wanted to throw myself into Melbourne Cup Day when I lived in Melbourne, inherently the whole idea of it, and what they chose to do on that day, just gave me the shits. I don't worship horse racing, or gambling, or dressing up to the nines and then getting rotten drunk and carrying on in public. "You gotta get into it mate! Woooo hoooo!" got old by the 20th time I'd heard it.
At least I got a day off. Would have been nicer if I'd had it on my annual leave instead. Would have been an extra day I could have seen my family back here in NZ each year.
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@steve
I'm pretty confused by M$'s plans at the moment too. Not that I especially care what happens to them - their only products that I use are Windows (which I'd just as soon stopped being developed, and just stabilized), and Visual Studio. Oh and Hotmail. Even if they start giving Office away for free it won't switch me back from OpenOffice.
Ben, of course web standards mean we're all one big happy data-swapping family now but that doesn't eliminate the possibility of someone coming along and dominating a new(ish) platform they've (more or less) invented and for which they control the primary channel for content and software.
Yes, Apple will dominate the iPad, most likely. That's a no-brainer. Will they dominate devices of that size that people use for doing the stuff iPads can do? I very much doubt it. There will still be a huge range of more powerful devices (like the far, far more mature laptop market), and similar devices at lesser prices, and lesser devices, like phones, PDAs, etc. They can get a good piece, sure. But total market domination isn't something I see happening again. Like I said on this topic last time it came up, the fragmentation of the marketplace continues apace, and I think it's a good thing, really. Everyone gets the configuration they like, all the devices interoperate, and everyone's happy except monopolists, who can get stuffed.
The whirring sound I hear now is coming from the ashes of my Stalinist Mum spinning in the urn on my mantelpiece.
Yes, she'd be furious you weren't fully into Linux, if she'd been the least bit tech-savvy. Rooting for Apple is as bad as being a running dog for American Imperialism.
@russell
A Singapore-based company has helpfully come out with the JooJoo tablet, which is just like the iPad except it really sucks. The Wired review shows that getting a device like this to really sing isn't trivial.
For sure it isn't. Making a Ferrari is a pretty expensive process too, hence the price. But a lot of people are perfectly satisfied with lesser cars.
@simon
I guess I'm a dickhead for not wanting to
More of a dickhead than me, who never, ever shuts his workstation down voluntarily, because I can't bear waiting 5 minutes for it to come up?
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recordari, I think you might be onto something. Apple talks up the M$ rivalry. It's a way of making out they're in the same league, that there's some ongoing war. But the truth is that the world is moving away from platform allegiance - it's becoming less and less relevant, and each device is weighed up on it's own merits, rather than as another stage of this battle.
In reality, they all mesh with one another, and choosing to stick to only one becomes increasingly limiting. Buying an iPad doesn't mean that I have to sell off the 3 Windows boxes, the Linux box, the Netware box, my PDA, my phone, and change the house network. It's just another device, with an interface I might find a little bit annoying initially, having been accustomed to file system access since about 1985. Maybe it would be a deal breaker, if another comparable device without such a DRM-oriented limitation was available. Or I might just dig it for what it does do, rather than what it doesn't.
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I was arguing against the idea that we should all have an individual stack of public holiday tokens that we could invoke at will. I believe there is a value in having public holidays (secular ones if you will) that we can all share.
And how does having tokens make it impossible to share holidays? On the contrary, it means people can share the holidays that mean something to them.
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If your boss is saying "Jim's willing to work Easter and he's got more kids than you and, hey, there's a recession on..." how likely are you to insist that your family time is more important than this "voluntary" work day?
This kind of pressure comes on people all the time anyway. Which is why you have the right to a holiday. My question is: Why does it have to be on a public holiday? Or a weekend, for that matter?
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Danielle
but it seems a peculiarly privileged way of looking at things to assume that everyone doing shiftwork or beavering away on a public holiday has the same sorts of "choices" as you or I do.
I don't assume that. And I don't accept that my choice of timetable has forced anyone else to do anything. Like I said above, I'm in favor people being able to take the holidays they want, not ones that are timed around ancient and for many people irrelevant rituals. The people who end up working on public holidays ARE these people with no choices, and they do it for the money. Which means they don't get to be part of the celebration (even if it was meaningful to them).
As I see it, the way our days are organized and structured are much more oppressive to people with fewer choices than a more flexible timetable would be. The idea that society dictates when you must sleep, when you get to have your rest, etc, seems actually pretty slack to me.
Jackie, there's nothing dinosaur about valuing leisure time and relaxation. That's part of what I see is good about a flexible timetable, it lets you choose the most appropriate times TO YOU to enjoy that leisure. I remember one old guy I worked with who found he simply needed to sleep in the middle of the day every day. He would take a couple of hours for a siesta. He got away with it because he was the boss, but he worked like a beaver the rest of the time. He was pretty keen for it to be a company standard, but unfortunately the General Manager was one of those timetable fascists who loved to turn up at work at 5am, and gave huge kudos to everyone else who turned up early. He never seemed to notice that his productivity was toast by about 3pm, or that me and other owls would often work through until midnight if the task required it, or there was some disaster to cope with.
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I'm totally an owl. I used to think it was an unhealthy habit, but now I realize that's just something people who have to get up early in the morning want you to think, that somehow their choice of time to rise is deeply better. But I doubt that there haven't been night owls amongst the population since prehistoric times - someone had to keep an eye out for predators and other enemies. Some kinds of hunting is best done at night, same goes for fishing - the tide doesn't keep officially sanctioned hours. Someone has to comfort sleepless children. My owlishness was never criticized during the first six months of either of my children's lives because it didn't bother me in the least to get up at 3am to give a bottle, so long as I was allowed to sleep in.
I like mornings, but I like to rise after the sun, at my own pace, and prepare slowly.
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I don't think we need to become that place.
I wouldn't object. You never know when you need to buy stuff. I certainly don't know when other people need to, when they're up and about, doing their thing. The world is full of shift workers, people working late, emergencies, insomniacs, people driving long distances, businesses that run 24/7, services that we expect to be fixed immediately no matter when they break, etc. The idea that everyone follows this lovely daylight oriented, 5 on 2 off existence is a quaint throwback to times when we didn't have electric light, and we actually believed in the book of Genesis. I frequently have to work all night long because people on the other side of the planet don't keep NZ hours. It wouldn't hurt anyone else if I could get fried chicken then.
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The silly thing about stat holidays is that it's just so arbitrary where they are placed. It would make a lot more sense to me if workers were simply guaranteed to be able to take holidays of their own choice, and if they opted to work on those days they receive penal rates. That way all the workers who really do actually give a fig about when the Church thinks it's a good time to celebrate the crucifixion (always been a WTF moment for me), then they can go hang with their clique and feel sad and eat chocolate. If they happen to be Chinese, they'd probably pick Chinese New Year instead. Or Ramadan for the Muslims, and so on and forth. Maori might pick Waitangi Day or something else that matters to them. I would (if I were a worker rather than self-employed) most likely put all the holidays together and have one or two big breaks every year.
Even weekends are pretty arbitrary. What's 2 days out of 7 to anyone, really? Why 7? Why 2? I only organize my time that way because other people are stuck with it, and even then, only when I am actually going to see them. I'll work weekends if it makes sense, and take any breaks I like during the week to keep the R&R quotient up. My kids see me every day, during the day, we play for hours when it's convenient, when the sun is out, when the tides are right, when the traffic is light.
There's actually only a small subset of the jobs people do where parceling them in that way so that everyone's there at the same time is the most efficient. The way I see it, the work patterns built into our society are a major cost, they put huge strain on infrastructure because everything's done in these huge floods of humanity pouring in one direction or another. Sometimes that's good, but a lot of the time it isn't. Our town planning is hugely influenced by this built in inflexibility that traces back to arbitrary choices made centuries or even millenia ago.
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Damien, I confess that beer stocks run low far more frequently. Not being much of a beer drinker, perhaps I don't notice that. I tend to have an emergency reserve of at least 6 Heinekens, but that might not be the beer that is wanted on a particular occasion, nor enough to last for a whole weekend.
But if I was a beer drinker, I'm sure I'd take more care to keep a buffered reserve, if only to take advantage of discounts as they come up.
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