Posts by Pete

Rubbish UK management crushing creativity

Best manager I ever worked for worked his way up

Fairly rapidly admittedly seeing as "daddy" owned the company, but he was made to do every job in the shop before he was allowed control. it was a steel fab shop so he had done everything from sweeping the floor to welding to writing computer systems to run the office.

He sat his desk right in the middle of the drawing office, open to all, and genuinely seemed to know pretty much everything that was going on.

Every other job I've had, managers have been either too ignorant of the actual job, or promoted because they were good programmers/techies etc. but suddenly, in power they discovered they had no man management skills.

Six in ten UK punters fear what gov will do with private data

Self selecting survey surely

How many people really concerned with their data being used by anyone would respond to a phone call wanting to ask them question?

so I would say more than 6/10 would be more realistic, I talk to no-one who rings me on my home or personal mobile number unless I am 100% of who they are, banks etc. I ring back on a number I know (on the back of the card etc.) rather than risking it being a scam call.

Linux desktops grow and grow and grow

I moved to Linux

a few years back, after dabbling with it for a while, I'm not particularly a geek, but I am a computer programmer, working with PHP and MySQL

It suffices, I do miss some of the toys with windows, like Paint Shop Pro for example.

I switched mainly as I was sick of paying for Microsofts insecure OS, since switching I've had no problems worrying about viruses or malware, which is worth the inconvience of some things not working correctly, such as the BBC media player

I know if I could be bothered I could read up on, and sort out, many minor irritaions such as WINE suddenly deciding to crash KDE but really, what matters to me is my computer works, and keeps on working, never crashes (except if I run WINE) and does the job it's supposed to do.

What helped me switch I think, was that I was already using alternate browsers (Opera) Open Office and such, so there was little pain involved in switching over as all the tools I needed remained the same.

The cheapest calling plan of all: Friends and Family on the company phone

Would this be

The same UK.biz that manages to get people to work massive amounts of UNPAID overtime every week?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4583236.stm

penny pinching b'stards