Posts by gratou

average income = meaningless

The median income is a lot more useful to estimate what a population earns, or who really is "average".

The average is too skewed by high earners.

Average *is* interesting however when used together with the median: the gap between the 2 shows the inequality (The gini coefficient is a slightly better measure).

Median annual houselhold income is $50k in the US, average is $70k, which is a rather large gap (+40%).

A few ginis:

Slovakia 25

OZ 35

USA 45

Brazil 57

control

Controlling the hardware is one way to increase stability. Not nearly enough though. The underlying architecture must also be sound, which windows definitely isn't, being the broken spaghetti mess that is. And mostly the attitude must be right. Apple aims at small high-margin volume, but wants perfect experience, and is anally retentive about it. MS goes for volume rather than quality and doesn't give a s**t as the xbox (100% controlled by MS, never fixed) reliability fiasco shows.

Only govts can create monopolies?

You look like the clueless one now, Tom.

For example, last time I looked, the power lines and the phone lines here belong to a private monopoly that will never be challenged because the cash outlay to do so is too great.

Same for my city's airport, etc. You can't have two sets of wires running down a street, the return on the 2nd set will never cover the huge cost.

As for private companies doing a better job just because "the market knows best" look at the british railways and weep.

crock of shite

Trade Me is has many flaws for sure (like crap search), but is head and shoulder above ebay. Better GUI, better fees (no listing fee for general items for a start), better customer service (yeah I know, that doesn't say much, but nonetheless it is). I dread the day ebay buys them.

And Fairfax's ROI is almost 7% and steadily growing. I doubt they kick themselves.

Sheesh.

@AC: ancient, etc.

The same non-sense was uttered by Vista proponents.

W7 is hardly better than XP, and struggles to justify the expense of buying the licence, deploying it, upgrading HW, training users, etc.

MS will still sell it because most IT depts are afraid to leave MS and can' t use an unsupported OS, but XP would still do fine without the politics.

Indeed

Human rights come *after* corporate rights don't you know?

Even worse in the US in some respect [not the one mentionned in the article] where corporations, despite not being natural persons, are recognised by law to have rights and responsibilities like natural persons ("people"), and can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state.

Sick world indeed.

are you sure?

> we have an accent which is generally human comprehensible

as in " the trine's lite mite" ?

Also a dash is missing in this composite adjective.

Up to you

I moved from Europe 10 years ago with my IT skills.

Yes NZ has got some good sides (hence why I moved, even though english is not my native language, and despite the crippling distance to family & friends).

Note that it is a lot easier to ski and scuba dive on the same day in Vancouver (which I love, but it's probably a good thing we didn't go there seeing BC's economy atm) than in NZ. It would be just as feasible in Nice or Ljubljana.

These good NZ sides are no reason not to be aware of the shortcomings, like very limited tech choice, ridiculously slow and capped and expensive so-called broadband, or totally crappy housing building quality.

Trevor, if one manages to find a US retailer willing to ship to NZ (good luck), one wiIl probably get charged USD30 or USD50 to ship something like a teeny weeny CPU. That's the kind of rorts we have to live with here. Again, no hard feelings, we made the choice, but grass is always greener etc.

You are right of course; ideally, the whole world would have the incredible choice and low prices the USians enjoy. But hey, better living here than living in the states imho. You lose some, you win some as they say. We made a choice, and alleviate the down sides as we can.

patches for free?

Really, w7 is a sp for vista. What worthwhile features does w7 have that vista doesn't? (well, I am shooting my own rethorical question in the foot, but he same could be asked for w7 vs XP, depending on what worthwhile is deemed to mean).

I'd hate to be a vista customer having paid for sh!t and having to pay again to get it fixed with w7.

ZFS

Why ZFS is not mentionned when there is a discussion about raid is beyond me.

ZFS and RAIDZ beat any raid config for data safety, ease of maintenance, ease of moving the array to a different box.

RAIDx is dead afaiac.

bad driver?

Why no criticism? Since when an OS doing its most basic job should BSOD because of a driver? I suspect most windows fanbois have never used a proper corporate OS like Solaris or HP-UX or AIX or old VMS (let alone a mainframe).

These OSes wil never ever let a driver or an app get in the way of the OS. Ever. By design.

Windows falls over all the time, sometimes freezes for a sec or two when you insert a USB key or a CD, lets apps install crap in its system folders, etc. Wtf? Windows is not a good OS. At all. It is flawed. By design. As long as people accept mediocrity and say such things as "the box crashed because of the driver, not the OS", MS will get away with inferior OSes.

Less of a problem indeed

I'd much prefer a guy stole $1000 from my account (and many others') than he assaults or burglars me (or them), thank you very much. Violent crime is the most traumatic, and should be the most punished, there is not doubt.

@PDawe

I am missing something?

You want greater govt intervention, and at the same time condone survivalists, who would like as little govt intervention as possible?