Arrogant government, Crash dumbness, Smart Phones, Java on Windows and Linux

There are so many things I could write about.

Arrogant government

I'm not surpised that the new National-lead government is behaving about as undemocratically as any New Zealand government ever has. Check out No Right Turn and The Standard for the sad, sorry list on that subject. Rich is the irony in that party having accused the previous government of arrogance.

Crash Dumbness

Businesses all over the western world appear to rushing to the aid of......China, India and other sources of cheap labour, based on the numbers of jobs being hurriedly exported there. Yesterday, Australia's pacific Brands, makers of the Rio, Berlei and Holeproof labels, among others, announced it was shutting down all manufacturing in New Zealand and moving it to China. They announced the same thing just over a week ago in Australia.

Generally, I'm wondering why those who managed their money badly, even disastrously, have had their debts discounted and the really BIG screwups and failures have received billions of taxpayer dollars, while people who responsibly assesed risk and controlled their debt are being penalised by having their interest incomes on savings cut in half - or worse.

Smart phones

On the tech front, I want something like a iPhone that has a video camera, and doesn't need to have an iTunes choker on it. Not sure the anroid-based phones will be any better. Private businesses have a poor track record of offering open platforms that put the customer first. They tend to want to lock you in and rape your wallet.

Java on Win Vista and Linux

I'm also amazed anyone bothers using Windows. Ubuntu Linux has been so much better this year. Just this evening, my daughter and I installed the Java SDK on both Linux and Windows Vista.

Linux was "apt-get install "....maybe 3 minutes in all, including download......and then just use it. First (simple) prgram written in 10 more minutes.

Vista was easy to install Java, though it seemed to take quite a while. Then we had to manually add the path to the Java install to the Vista system PATH environment variable, logout and back in. Far from smooth.

I suspect she will be using the Linux environment most. For one thing, it only take Ubuntu about 2 minutes to boot, while Vista easily takes 7 minutes, or more, (on the same system) before it gets to the point where it will make a WiFi network connection.