Posts by sege122

Reg man confesses: I took my wife out to choose a laptop for Xmas. NOOOO

HP Stream maybe

The HP Stream 11 or 13 looks pretty much like a Windows 'Chromebook'. Better than a Netbook and a free year of Office 2013 by subscription.

Maybe it hasn't got the 'cool' of Google but the colours are Ok.

BT Infinity ‘working to fix problem’ after three days of outages

DNS

BT DNS is a well-known pile of xxxx the homehub can't be changed to use anything else which is it's major failing.

I have setup opendns on my main PC. I am acutally thinking about changing my router!

Doctor Who trashing the TARDIS, Clara alone, useless UNIT – Death in Heaven

Watching Doctor Who I found it all a bit disturbing. Not frightening in the 'horror' sense but disturbing.

Was this my natural reaction to death being a subject we dont talk about in the round? Was it this idea of almost resurrection being brought into the script?

Perhaps the most disturbing thing was it felt like the Who spin-off Torchwood. The was dark, morbid, and somewhat depressing. The scheduling was quite inappropriate too. Directly after this use of the dead walking was the festival of remembrance honouring the dead of wars past. I am not even sure if the story worked either as I didn't understand why the Master would assume the Doctor would take on the role as messianic leader of the cybermen.

Can we some science fiction led by plot and story rather than shock value please?

Looking for a job in Europe? Experienced IT staff needed in UK, Italy and Germany

Pay seems to be going down

My observation of the IT jobs market is a reduction in salary. I regularly check adverts and some of the salaries are just a joke. I recently saw a network/server support role in Linux Admin for £18,000 to £22,000. I am not a Linux specialist but I was left wondering what an employer expected at that salary level.

My estimate on looking at server support roles with Exchange or AD skills is that salary offers have reduced steadily and are probably 20% lower than 2 years ago. Many jobs are now been offered as contracts and want 'immediate start'.

I dont actually think there is a shortage of IT Pros. There is a shortage of IT Pros willing to take a pay cut or not seeing salaries that represent the experience and skills demanded.

Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

So Much Assumption

There is so much assumption here. The public sector and the private sector are not two walled gardens but changes in both make such comparisons very dubious. Low paid public sector jobs have been extensively privatised in the last 20 years meaning that people cleaning hospital floors, doing home care or many other things are now private sector workers. This transfer of low pay into the private sector has been substantial.

If you look at pensions the collapse of private sector schemes and saving in general means that public sector schemes are bound to be "better". Should we be celebrating a race to reduce wages, pensions and provision.

However for the purposes of an argument lets assume it's all true and the big conspirators of the crash are public sector workers. People being made redundant by the score to save bust banks - banks who were theoretically private sector!

The analysis seems to be that if you were in the public sector with strong trade unions, rights at work, a strong culture of negotiating collectively on wages and conditions you have done well. If you work in the private sector with little or no trade union representation you do badly. So the message to all workers is surely to join trade unions and negotiate collectively with your employer.