Bumper Banker’s Bonuses Are Back

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 072009
 

… goes the headline, but did they ever really go away ?

All that really happened was that last year the bankers did not get much of a bonus because their banks were losing money, and now that things are looking better the bonuses are back. This should not surprise anyone; plenty of people get bonuses. What is really happening here is that people are questioning the size of the bonuses.

In fact when you look around, you will realise that there are plenty of people who get ridiculously large amounts of money for doing their jobs. When someone questions whether someone is earning too much, the first thing that occurs to everyone is “Is this jealousy?”.

Well perhaps a bit. I would not mind earning a bit more money, but I am reasonably comfortably off. And to earn more money at my current type of work, I would have to resort to working to make rich people even richer. Which I would much rather not do.

I have no great solutions to solve the problem of income inequality, but it is something that is worth trying for. And screw those who whinge about how taking money away from people with high incomes will drive talent overseas.

The most obvious thing to start with is to start making tax avoidance an activity that brings contempt from the public so that someone at a social gathering who admits it is likely to be shunned. There is a tendency to believe that money that one has earned is solely one’s own, and that tax is somehow “theft”. Whilst the anarchist within me would agree that governments taking money off individuals by force is theft, those who usually complain about this theft are merely being selfish.

No man is an island, and the cleverest banker who earns millions in bonuses, would not be able to do that in any sensible way without public services – police to protect their property, firefighters to try and save their property (and life), and health service workers to try and fix them up when their health fails. The more tax you pay the more proud you should be.

Perhaps we should encourage people to pay more tax than they are required to.

Whatever we do, we should remember that a society that pays some arsehole more money in a week than a nurse earns in a year just for kicking a pig’s bladder around a field has something wrong with it.

A Quick Look At The Olympus EP-1

 Photography  No Responses »
Jul 282009
 

There are many other places you can find technical information on the Olympus EP-1 – this is merely the first impressions from someone who has only just unboxed one, and taken it out for a quick spin.

It’s small. It is not a point and shoot, and so it is quite a bit bigger, but it sure beats my Canon 1DS for size, and even my Epson RD-1. Providing you are not wearing tight jeans, you can certainly slip it into a roomy pocket with the 17mm pancake lens. The 14-42mm zoom lens increases the size enough that you would need a jacket pocket to be comfortable.

The included camera strap is far too short. Admittedly I’m tall and I like my cameras to hang low, but this really is titchy. The camera itself feels good and solid – whilst it is no tank, it should survive a few knocks and bumps.

After charging the battery (why do the suppliers not charge these up themselves?), the first thing most of us will do is to dive into the menus to see what things can be fiddled with. Well the answer is a lot. In fact at first it is a little scary how many options there are to fiddle with even before you turn on the “customize” menu item. But after you get used to the idea that the menus are complex because there is a great deal to customise before you go out, then it becomes a little less scary. After all any camera that allows you to move the focus button from a half-press of the shutter (which I really hate) to an alternate is going to have lots of options. And I’ll put up with a lot of complexity if I am allowed to move the focus button!

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Out and about, the camera is reasonably comfortable in the hand. The lack of a “proper” viewfinder is a little distracting at first, but the key thing to remember is that this is a view camera which do not have small viewfinders. Sure holding the camera out to look at the LCD preview screen is somewhat problematic in terms of steadiness, but in practice it is perfectly possible to get used to it.

In fact I do happen to have the optical viewfinder for the EP-1 (for the 17mm pancake lens), but I have not used it in anger.

This is not a camera to replace a “proper” DSLR, but is a good choice for someone who finds the current crop of P&S cameras to be a little too small and limiting. I will probably find myself lugging a big DSLR just as much as I have done in the past, but I will also have a decent camera with me for those times when I would not normally carry a “proper” camera.

Most Ridiculous Product Ever: Camera Armour for a Canon 1Ds

 Humour, Photography  No Responses »
Jul 272009
 

Sometime you look at a product when trying to find something on Amazon (or elsewhere), and think what were they thinking of ? And a set of “camera armour” for a Canon 1DS (probably mkI and mkII) certainly fits the bill. It smacks of corporate stupidity – we make camera armour for Canon cameras, so we’ll make armour for all Canon cameras whether they need it or not.

If you have never encountered a 1Ds, you make well be wondering what I am on about, and that camera armour in certain situations is a good idea. Well, the Canon 1Ds is a tank. If you need to drive nails, and there is no hammer handy, the 1DS will do quite nicely. If you drop it, the pavement will break before it does (the lens attached might suffer though).

Seeing as so many people are reading this, I’d better point out that it is intended as humorous!

Solaris Zone Descriptions In Zone Configuration

 Computing  No Responses »
Jul 272009
 

I am a big fan of ‘self-documenting’ systems where the system has enough ‘comments’ to describe how it is configured and what things are doing. Unfortunately Solaris zones (or containers if you are so inclined to use the marketing name) lack one feature that would assist this :-

# zoneadm list -d
global
black                  Stealth Secondary DNS
grey                   Webserver for project X
white                  Mailbox server for project Y
blue                   Oracle DBMS for project X
puce                   MySQL DBMS for project X

It would seem that project Y hasn’t gotten beyond the talking stage 🙂

Yes, you’ve guessed it. Solaris zones could do with a “description” attribute to assist in documentation.

Last Of The Veterans Dies

 General  No Responses »
Jul 252009
 

This morning, Harry Patch died. At 111, he was the last of the “Great War”‘s veterans to have fought in the Western trenches and experience the senseless slaughter of trench warfare. One of the “lions led by donkeys”, Harry was an ordinary man who went through extraordinary experiences like countless others. He was lucky enough to survive the war relatively intact physically and mentally.

And he was fortunate enough to live to a great age, outliving all the other veterans of the great war. After he began talking about the war, he became a media celebrity not because he was any more special than any of the other veterans, but because he was still alive and prepared to talk about his experiences.

One thing that may be missed in the media was that he was a dedicated pacifist saying that war was the “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings” and that “war isn’t worth one life”. And another time: “It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it…the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it”.

We all owe him a debt of gratitude for fighting in WWI, for talking about it afterwards, and perhaps most of all we owe him a debt of gratitude for making it plain that war is not something to celebrate.

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