An opinion piece on things in the news, because no one has ever done that before

So I'm bored now so I'd like to have a little rant about all the stuff I have been reading in the paper recently.

Firstly, right off the bat Windsor and the CSG (Coal Seam Gas) thing! My god get over it! The state owns everything more than 6ft below your land. Whether it is fair or not is beside the point, that's the law move on. I have worked for a company that is very heavily involved in CSG and I can tell you that all the companies that are involved in it are doing everything in their power to ensure there is minimal impact on the land that the farmers occupy. Secondly, if you want to get into the sustainability thing, lets talk about what these companies now have to do with the incredibly purified water that comes out with the Gas. THEY HAVE TO PUT IT BACK IN THE GROUND! Why? because apparently it is to pure for the water systems around the plants and some microscopic organisms were getting weak shells! This water could have solved most of the drought issues of a few years ago but no instead of building a pipeline to pump this pure water around state Governments decide to build enormous, expensive, unsustainable desalination plants. And now, thanks to some bleeding heart, they have to go to the expense of putting it back in the ground, BECAUSE IT IS TOO GOOD! what a joke.

Secondly, our economy relies on this CSG, people are so quick to say we should shut down this mine or that gas plant as there is a potential for impact on history or the environment. One, the key word here is potential, it may not. Two, what about the job creation? what about the potential to get some of regional Australia into high paying jobs? what about the potential for the economy and the money that is generated that can be poured back into said community? Have you seen Roma lately? I was up there at the beginning of the year after not having been there in almost 10 years and I can tell you right now that all the money that is pouring into that town has greatly improved it and I'm sorry but there is no way the agriculture industry could have done it, put simply it didn't before it damn well won't now. Yet Mr Windsor thinks it is fine to stop this potential economic boom in regional Australia, because it might mildly inconvenience a few farmers.

Ok next 

If we are talking recent News we have to talk Qantas, and since I am potentially 10 days away from finishing a degree in HR to not comment on it would be remiss.

Firstly, let me be clear I am by no means a Unionist, I think they are a waste of space and do nothing but stifle our economy.  Secondly, I think Upper level management is beginning to get short sighted and greedy and this is just as bad if not worse. 

The whole Qantas thing is a mess of monumental proportions.

1. Since when did a Union have the right to come in and dictate business strategy? and I'm sorry but this includes the distribution of the workforce.

2. What idiotic board would decide it is ok to provide a $3million pay increase to a CEO that has done NOTHING I repeat NOTHING towards value creation in a company?

Put these two together and all of a sudden no-one has the moral high ground and no-one is thinking about the long term viability of both the company and the people. Here is my reasoning on why everyone in this dispute is being selfish.

THE UNIONS

My god, what high horse are they standing on? There are two fundamental issues with their argument and it is these that make them lose all credibility for me. 

1. They think they are entitled to significant pay increases, even though they are already paid higher than anyone else in the industry, without any productivity concessions. I'm sorry, what? You essentially want Qantas to hand the Engineers, Pilots and Baggage handlers more money because you said so. Now the Unions will jump up and down saying it's only 2.5% to keep in line with inflation, but let me ask you this, your employees are already paid at least 5% more (http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newsbusiness/aap/8368932/virgin-ceo-says-his-staff-paid-well) than other airlines so why should Qantas give you a pay rise? are you performing better than the other airlines?

2. The Unions want job security for their members, fair enough, but the price of labour is directly imported onto the price of a ticket. When Qantas wants to compete internationally it needs to be able to lower costs, this means streamlining and improving operation processes, which inevitably makes some roles redundant, and lowering the cost of labour where possible, this means private contracting and outsourcing to other countries, why? Because the archaic, protectionist labour laws in Australia make our workforce uncompetitive. The Unions want their members jobs to be guaranteed and, put simply, that is impossible. Who can truly say their job is guaranteed in private industry? the whole point of it being private is to lower costs and improve processes so the customer gets the best product for the cheapest price. To do this a company needs flexibility and the ability to run its own business, you want a guarantee go work for the government. 

It's clear the Unions want things done like they were 50 years ago when Australia was a closed market and there was government intervention everywhere, in today's globalised world this is a fast track to poverty. They want to step in and tell Qantas how to run it's business and when Qantas says no they chuck a hissy fit and take industrial action. 

ALAN JOYCE AND THE BOARD

I was on their side through this I really was................ and then he took the completely undeserved pay rise.

I have just gone on and on about how the Unions can not expect something for nothing with regards to pay, and that was his argument as well and it made sense, until he gave himself a very public pay rise. FOOL! I understand that the job market for CEO's is very competitive and to attract the best we have to pay for it, but seriously what exactly has he done? The share price is sinking, he can't control his workforce without running to Fair Work and the reputation of the company has been diving since long before this happened and yet he still gets a pay rise!? what you couldn't live off 2Mill pa for another 12 months and wait for the media storm to finish? You had the moral high ground about wages and productivity and strategy and then completely blew it all away by high jacking the AGM and ensuring a pay rise. You have no clout, no class and are being just plain greedy. You could have easily one the argument until you did that and now the whole of Australia thinks you're nothing but a money grubbing bastard and their right, well done, you might win in the courts and with Fair Work but the damage to yours and Qantas' brand has been done and the blame for that rests squarely on you and your idiotic undeserved pay rise.

The lock out was justified in my opinion, it is really the only type of industrial action available to a company and it was used to perfection. It brought the whole thing to a head and stopped the unjustified hissy fits by the unions. The politicking that has happened after, about who knew what when, is irrelevant and will rightly be ignored by the general public.

Simply put everyone who has been involved in this is in the wrong. They all want to blame each other, they all think that money grows on trees and, at the end of the day, the real loser from this is Qantas as a company and the Customer. Everyone is wanting something for nothing from this company and they just assume that the company can compensate. The unions want pay increases that are unnecessary and unjustified and Alan Joyce gave himself 3mill pa extra for doing squat. So the moral high ground for both parties there is gone. The only thing that is left is the Unions want a say in the strategy of the business and how it deploys its workforce, it CAN NOT have this power, Bluescope Steel anyone? Everyone needs to get over this go back to work and get on with the business of restoring the company, Alan Joyce needs give back his undeserved pay rise ( I know I'm dreaming) and the Unions need to stop harrasing the company about outsourcing and wait until the rest of the airline industry has caught up to Qantas in pay levels. 

Yes, Australian jobs will go, but this to is the a problem of the Unions making, they simply want to much money, it is through their incredible ineptitude at realising how the wage directly impacts the cost of living that things are so expensive in this country. How about, instead of focusing on wages the Unions focus on workplace conditions and intangible benefits so that Australia can start to compete internationally in the labour market? Just a thought. You can't have your cake and eat it to, you want high wages, fine except some offshore outsourcing of labour, you want jobs in Australia fine stop increasing the wage without increasing productivity, its that simple, sort of (lol).

any ways just my thoughts on a couple things doing the rounds in the news, I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me but hey that's the fun of the internet. Please remember that this is all opinion and if there are any grievous factual errors I am more than willing to listen and change the post if it changes my mind.

cheers for listening to my rant.

My network

Well.... it seems I got a few readers personally I can't believe it but anyways........

as promised a run down of my current network setup

I managed to procure an old Gateway Desktop from 1997 from my dad for free and decided I would give linux a go on it........ since I didn't understand the notion of Distro for computer at that point I stupidly decided to put Fedora 13 on it..... If I had my time again I would probably go for Puppy or one of its derivates as an old Pentium3 computer with 512 RAM and running and old Voodoo 2 is probably not the best thing to be running fedora on lol. But with a bit of help from a friend of mine who works for Red Hat, we managed to get something going, This computer has since become the backbone of everything I do on my network. It is the main repository for all my media and I rely on it for backups. It runs as a ssh server, nfs server, DaaP server, Torrent box and it does it all with surprising stability considering its rough begginings and age. to keep the pay load on it low I have turned of all graphical interfaces and run it as a headless box.

I also managed to procure a slightly younger computer (2004 model) which I run Linux mint on. If my Server is the backbone this computer is the is the workhorse. I got it because the windows install on it had massively corrupted and Dad didn't need it any more so he said if I could get it running it was mine. Well, needless to say all I did was throw in a Linux mint CD wiped the windows of it completely and now it runs like a dream. It's a dual core Pentium 4 with 2gb RAM and an old Geforce  fx5500 in it so again nothing to really right home about but with an essentially out of the box mint on it I have managed to get a dual screen system that runs most of my music into the stereo and is not particularly taxed. It caters to all my browsing needs, and with the help of Libre office has written all of my assignment this semester and converted them to pdf with no problems. So once again Linux has breathed new life into this machine and made it into something I can use efficiently on a daily basis. My only issue has been the corruption of cups, it can probably be easily fixed I just can't be bothered as the mint upgrade comes out soon and that will more than likely do it for me.

Finally, we come to my laptop, this is the machine that comes with me everywhere and has the hard drive I do most of my work on (more on that later). This is a Macbook pro 13 inch running Mac OSX and whilst Mac OS is wonderfully stable and does what I need it to, most times (not all) out of the box, I still find it inherently boring and there have always been little things that gripe me (don't get me started on the media keys and itunes, which I don't use)

Of course the house also has two phones, my Android (Galaxy S) which has been a dream to use for the most part and my girlfriends Iphone 4 (which has not had any issues) and my girlfriend has a laptop but that is used for her purposes and doesn't really use the network.

Ok so firstly, I should point out that a whole new world has been opened up to me through ssh, my laptop harddrive is actually the only hard drive I regularly use (of course it is backed up onto the server and the cloud but that is not regular use in my eyes) even if I am on my desktop i am essentially using it as a seperate processor to do things on my laptop.

Secondly, and I don't think I can talk about this enough, synergy has to be one of, if not the, most useful and productive apps I have ever found. If you don't what it is it allows you to share the mouse and keyboard of one computer with another in other words I can use one keyboard and mouse to control all the computers at my workstation. It also has some limited copy paste ability which is also incredibly handy (pdfs on two screens and libreoffice on another being able to copy text from all computers instantaneously has been a god send). All in all whilst my work station contains three computers (server, desktop, laptop) thanks to ssh, nfs and synergy they all interact together as one. the Server and Laptop hold my files (media and work respectively) and are shared via ssh and nfs. and synergy allows me to only require one keyboard and mouse.

Of course there is also a whole bunch of port forwarding going on so I can access ssh and torrents from outside the network but that is another story.

I do hope to upgrade my desktop and laptop soon and with that will come a complete redesign of my home network. but I will wait to report on that after its done ( if anyone cares lol).

So there you have it.

I like to think I have done rather well for something that has been hacked together from old parts that were set for the junk heap. and I can tell you right now I can't wait to get my next computer which I have decided will be running mint and will be the first time in my life I am not using a propriety OS at all and I can't wait lol.

anyways..... there may be another, non tech related post this afternoon or evening IF and I stress IF I can be bothered but for right now I think this will do.

Hope you enjoyed reading about my set up and as always, suggestions, comments and criticism are more than welcome.

Talk Soon!!!

Linux and the real world

ok

I don't think I'm really qualified to be a tech blogger but I thought it would be good to post something about why I have chosen GNU/Linux (hereafter when I refer to Linux that is what I am refering to excuse my laziness) as one of my primary operating systems and why, on my next tech upgrade, I have decided to move over completely to Linux.

This post is mainly because there has been so much talk lately about the importance market share in the desktop market (which in reality doesn't really exist but more on that later) and its relation to the to the UEFI implementation.

I have not been an avid user of Linux for a long time, only about 6 months or so, and I am by no means a guru, however I know enough to make it useable and to theme, which is the reason for my switch. Before then I was on Mac's and before that Windows, but with both of these I was never really satisfied, there was always something I wanted to do but could never quite manage with both operating systems. (Admittedly the last time I was on a permanent windows was about 5 years ago and since then windows 7 has come out so I don't think my comments on windows may necessarily be true anymore but I refuse to use an operating system that continually get bloated and required a reinstall once a year to keep it speedy, that should be unnecessary in today's day and age). Basically I always found Windows Bloated and it didn't implement the best use of user space and relied much to heavily on the mouse (again this was before 7 and this was before I learnt about key mapping and the such so). Mac had NO themeing you went with want Apple wanted and nothing else. I deplore that attitude as once I have handed over my money it is MY machine and I should be able to do what I want with the software and hardware.

So enter Linux. I originally had it on my main laptop (macbook pro 13 inch 5,5) however it was simply to much of a distraction so I had to replace it with MacOSX which as an operating system is heads and shoulders above Windows as it has a proper implementation of user space on a small screen and does not get bloated. It also has a sane (partially) folder structure that actually makes sense. So I went back to MacOSX on my laptop because it was boring and there was nothing I could do with it.

When I recently received an old desktop I decided it was time to implement Linux Mint on it to speed it up and see what I could use it for. This machine which is over 5 years old now currently runs a dual screen setup and quite a speedy pace and is simply the easiest machine to use because every time I think if something new I want to do I jump on the mint forums find some one else who has done it and implement it. EVERY TIME it works and at this point the only crash I have had has been when a ram stick fell out (can't blame Linux for that lol). I don't think If I had reinstalled WinXP (which had crashed so hard it had irreparably corrupted the hard disk, still don't quite know how it did that), that the current setup would be possible at least now without significant lag.

I'm not even going to bother talking about the File server, DAAP server and torrent box I set up with Fedora on a box that is almost 13 years old, It runs like a dream and has almost run for 6 months straight with no issues.

Here is my problem with the UEFI, with every new computer we buy breathing new life into them once their old machines like this (which, if you are looking for the latest and greatest updates on old computers means Linux) would be impossible. If we do not implement it in the way proposed in the white paper by Red Hat and Canonical, we will inevitable increase tech waste and have to spend WAY more money, this is just wrong. Also, if we do not implement UEFI in this way my choice to run Linux on my main machines will disappear. Why is it that when I buy a piece of hardware it needs to have a certain operating system? I can understand why Apple do it, and they have the right to as they are the manufacturer as well as the software supplier. Microsoft on the other hand does not have this right, THEY ARE NOT THE MANUFACTURER, and as such any manufacturer who implements this without the choice to change to linux made easy (either through the ability to turn off secure boot or providing the end user with certs) opens themselves up to a massive anti trust case.

There has been a lot of anger at Microsoft over this, but they have been very clever, you can't blame Microsoft, even with their supplier power, for this, and it will rightly be thrown out of court if we try. The blame and pressure needs to be shifted to the manufacturers. Linux Australia needs to stop this action as it will lose, they need to go after a manufacturer, and a big one. My thought is DELL. This would be the easiest way to send a message. It needs to be made clear that it is the manufacturer that has the power here and it is them who will be locking out other operating systems, not Microsoft.

Now I am not on the Microsoft side here, far from it, and they are playing a very underhanded game, but to go after them is the wrong way to go about it and could make things worse. the 'desktop market' argument is the biggest misnomer but seems to be the biggest argument against stopping the UEFI problem, it goes something like "only 1% of people use linux so why bother?". put simply, this doesn't matter. The software we use is not a market, windows/Linux whatever operates the computer and is not a market. The market is laptops not desktop environments and this is the fundamental problem with argument. The choice of software I choose to use on MY hardware should not be a problem. It is MY hardware and I should be able to run it however I want. Granted a lot of people don't care, but why should those that do be disadvantaged? This is what people need to get over, it is the HARDWARE you are buying not the software (except for the rip off Windows license) and if you choose to not use the software that comes with it there should be no difference. This is where the manufacturer can get into anti trust problems and this is the argument that should be used. it's not about security or anything else it is about being able to use the hardware in any way I choose. To not have this right is anti competitive and a misuse of the power that the MANUFACTURER has.

Anyways, just my thoughts on the UEFI thing and why I think the anger about it is misdirected.

Tomorrow I think I might do a piece on my current and future home network plans maybe see what people think (cause I'm obviously not the only one that reads this lol.)

Talk soon!

              

alright so here it goes......


two weeks that's right two weeks until the end of exams that's nice isn't it? but I suppose the real reason I am here is to tell you what I think people should be doing to ensure that the end of Uni is not the end of your life plans to this point.


First, Uni is not the be all and end all, if you have not been actively searching for a job since February of your final year your chances are pretty well screwed. Not entirely but almost. Most private enterprise is starting in February finished by march, a lot of federal government as well. State government however may not open till later in the year hoping to catch those who didn't know or those who were lazy and suddenly realised they needed to do something. It also catches those who missed out on the private enterprise round, which coincidently is the category I fall into. 


My feeling are that the best way to find out about these jobs are to join up with a graduate job site, in Australia I recommend, www.gradconnection.com.au and www.unigrad.com.au. The other way is to determine which organisations you want to work for and sign up to their mailing lists and periodically check their job boards checking for grad positions.


Just a few quick notes on ensuring you finish your time at uni with plans for your future career and don't stop and think, what now?


hopefully this will be the first of many posts. although more than likely they will only be viewed by me


talk to you all soon