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Comment Re:Wow, I'm speechless (Score 1) 229

Second, "seniority" and "experience" are part of the forumula? Experience in years?

Apparently not, from TFA 'experience' is calculated like this:

  • Master: 1.3X
  • Advanced: 1.2X
  • Intermediate: 1.1X
  • Junior: 1X

I have no idea what the criteria is to meet a particular rank, but all but one of their people are apparently 'Advanced' (including the CEO). I did want to post this question on their page but couldn't bring myself to sign up with disqus.

Comment Re:Free Market (Score 1) 229

eh? GP did not say everyone should be paid the same or that everyone is worth the same amount

The point was simply that not all of the things that are crucial to effective free market operation (perfect information being a pretty central one), are present in the current labor market.

It's a very good point, in fact.

Comment Re:It's more like a stunt to me (Score 1) 229

You reminded me of an economic thought experiment I read about a while back, I can't remember the name or anything but it goes something like this...

You take an upper middle class family, who generally have more stuff than most of their friends and family. They're pretty happy. But then the parents have a chance to earn a MILLION times more money somewhere else - the only catch is that everyone else who lives there earns at least ten times what they do. The supposition is that the family will stay where they are.

Human beings, within reason, don't particularly care how much they earn. What they care about is what they earn compared to others. It reflects my experience with other people at least, and is why I think this transparency is really important

Comment Re:It's more like a stunt to me (Score 1) 229

You manage boxes and machines, but you lead people

Absolutely agree, but if everyone in my team is getting say $65k and quite happy, then my dickhead predecessor decides to pay this other guy $100k because he knows how to use excel and shit, everyone finds out, then everyone's unhappy. - this is a big problem for me as a leader. If the wages were transparent, this would never have happened and this problem would have never occurred.

In this particular case, I can lead them all they want, but it is a gross injustice I'm powerless to do anything about.

Comment Re:Not Culture (Score 1) 314

Placing this debate in the geo-political context is important - the internal pressure in most EU countries to assert their 'national identity' (real or imagined) is becoming stronger. The perception of French culture outside of France is determined mostly by watching movies I imagine - 'hey, look at all those quaint cobble stone streets, the laid-back cafes etc - we have to go there on holiday next year!!'.

The same kind of thing has been happening here in NZ - although there is no 'culture' to speak of here, the revenue from attracting tourists is ginormous and important to local economy. The govt here recently increased a taxpayer rebate for movie makers with a 'good chance of commercial success' from 15% to 25%. Yes, from taxpayer money. Apparently this is reason James Cameron decided finally to locate the new Avatar movies here.

Nobody here is complaining about where their tax dollars are going - either because they support this move, or they just don't care. Either way, if the situation was changed to taxing youtube video consumption I'm sure there'd be a riot.

Comment Re:hey, GCHQ employees (Score 1) 335

You make an excellent point, that is often overlooked in these kinds of debates: there is no faceless spying organisation who we can consider like the Borg, it is always made up of individuals, who for some reason make a conscious decision to engage in this shitty and destructive behaviour.

I've often toyed with the idea of 'outing' people who 'innocently' contribute to the efficiency and organisation of horrible organisations like the NSA. You know - here's John, he's a nice guy, he plays softball and likes Miller Lite, his favourite movie is Deliverance, and during they day at work he spies on your email and helps innocent arab-looking people get fingered in US airports.

I'm being melodramatic but you get the point - we should hold the worker bees of these organisations to account, rather than just say 'the NSA sucks'. These people are all around us and this system could not work without them. They deserve our hatred.

Comment Re:OpenWRT on good commodity home ap (Score 1) 193

+1 to this, except I'm using the gargoyle build on my tp-link.

the features on it are amazing - I have a lodger who wants to use my whole data allowance in a single day. I set gargoyle to cap his usage at x GB per month, and once it's hit he gets 32kbps. I could have set it to kick him off the lan completely but I'm a nice guy.

Not quite as nerdy as OP requested but cost $50 and damn it just works

Comment Re:practicalities (Score 1) 183

hey thanks a lot, that's really helpful.

this whole issue came up again recently when our regional health boards decided to budget for a windows 7 upgrade. The amount of money involved is truly mind-boggling, and a vocal minority of senior docs asked about using this as an opportunity for migration to a linux environment instead. It was rejected without any investigation! There are some nuances in our set up which makes the staffing issue much harder, but still... in a 'competitive' environment where we have to do a full options analysis for spending even $10k, it's incredible that somehow the business case for windows 7 apparently just 'wrote itself'.

Comment practicalities (Score 2) 183

I'd really like to know some detail on how a migration like this works.

I work for a large healthcare organisation and - being a linux fan myself - often wondered about how it could work. Even if there were support from senior managers, there are some really practical issues to overcome...

  • What about windows-based third party software? We have heaps of proprietary software for different clinical applications that will only run on windows...
  • What about IT staff? We have a huge team of people with windows admin skills. Moving to linux - do they get retrained, or sacked and then we have to hire a possibly smaller team of linux admins. Do any/enough even exist in a small south pacific island nation like NZ to make this feasible??

I'd love to see some real gritty detail about exaclty how a project like this is done, and the challenges that were overcome. I know the article talks about a staged approach which makes sense, but I don't see any mention of what happened to their helpdesk teams. Grateful for any pointers.

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