Posts by Paul Campbell
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Word 6.0 sucked - I stopped using it at 5.something
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Apple's intense, secretive development process ....
I used to be a serious Apple developer when I lived in the US - back in the good old days before the iEverything .... I've seen the Apple development process up close and personal .... basically it's highly political, chaotic, thrives on leaks (as one internal group try to get their thing adopted)
I distinctly remember one of the (what's now called) firewire team coming to me to try and get a quote he could take out of context hyping his about to be (but in the end not actually) canceled project
It always seemed a terribly toxic environment - I resisted the pull to go work for them - they paid well but I like to make stuff people actually use - too many people gave years of their lives designing really cool stuff to have it canceled at the last minute - like the guys who built the Apple CPU just before they went PPC
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As others have pointed out the govt hasn't collected enough money to come vaguely close to covering this.
It's worth comparing the temporary scheme with what was the norm in the US - the FDIC only insures money from banks that meet certain requirements to do with their practices they collect insurance fees in good years and bad (used to)have a limit on the size of accounts covered, require a percentage of the bank's assets to be on deposit etc etc
They'd never cover the equivalent of a NZ finance company. And when the crunch came even the FDIC needed bailing out - partly due to the recent deregulation
I think that having a FDIC style scheme here would be a good thing but we need to have it in good times and bad like any other insurance
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In the US after the '29 crash and the great depression Roosevelt passed a bunch of laws limiting what banks and other financial could do, at the same time providing limited deposit insurance - ever since Reagan, and on through the various Bushes (and even Clinton) US financial institutions have chipped away at those laws - the result is the currently world economic instability
We should do what Roosevelt did - create a safe, stable corner of the financial marketplace to build our economy on - require companies that want to step outside that space to be overly public about their intentions and the risks involved but not ban them (because having people take those risks and getting the associated returns is valuable).
What we shouldn't do is deregulate our financial system to be more competitive on world markets if the companies we're trying to compete with are those same ones that keep going belly up - great for people make short term investments but not good for the sorts of long term investments that help grow economies
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In my biz few people have windows machines, no one uses word - we only have to deal with it when marketing get involved - I haven't even owned a copy since word 6.0 came out and it stopped being easy and useful and started to become work
what's all this 'camera ready' stuff when I finished my thesis I printed it out and took it down to the University binders - they were used to typed sheets rather than stuff with sprocket homes but a few minutes with a heavy duty paper slicer and all was good (rereading it is like dragging fingernails across a blackboard - it was the first piece of writing I'd done since 6th form english)
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I have the dubious distinction of having submitting the first ever thesis that had not been hand typed at Otago Uni (25 years ago now) - took a lot of hassle to get them to accept it in a different format .....
Even more of a hassle was helping someone else debug their page layout language at the same time ....
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umm ... David .... rule34 ....
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I think the thing with Act is that it's really 3 or 4 parties who vaguely tolerate each other - there's libertarians-lite, law'n'order, Roger Douglas, .... and a sort of Rodney-aren't-I-great-Hyde-and-don't-I-look-cute-(bald,in-this-yellow-coat,dancing) self-cult - they each sort feel that they as a group fit together and but that their particular issue is the important one - is anyone surprised what's going down?
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I'm not sure about 'soviet' - seems a bit more like 'nobody expect the spanish inquisition' - but with lawyers rather than comfy chairs
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Kyle, can you just look over into that corner in your memory, and then answer me this question: are there any chicks?
that corner existed for a long time - it was where the poets and artists and CP hung out - or glared at each other as various factionalisations occurred - there were women - but not a lot - sadly most were temporary hangers on rather than storming another male bastion of (hoped for) power - I do remember my 18 yr old flat mate hiding under the pool table once when the cops came in to roust the joint I've no idea how she ever got away with that - the cops were showing off their shiny new batons prior to the '81 tour - the whole bar seemed to devolve into snide comments about Freud which seemed to largely go over the cops' heads.
I do own a suit - it gets worn to trade shows and funerals - sadly I've had to wear it more often these days - I did exactly once rent tails (for a grand lesbian wedding - I was there in my family position as 'donor').