Anyway, I’ve often thought that the secrecy around how much people get paid (which is the (significant) objective component of your ‘compensation’) is self-defeating. How can people know they’re getting a decent deal if they don’t know what others doing similar jobs are getting?

As far as I can see, the world knowing I’m paid £14,250pa doesn’t hurt me. I know I’m paid a pittance, so does my boss. Any future employer (ha!) would probably ask me outright, so worst case is it makes it harder for me to lie about it (but what’s to stop them asking my boss for it in the reference?). But there would be obvious benefits for others knowing, and for me knowing what others in this company/industry get paid.

Of course, from the ‘compensation’ point of view never having to leave the house, or really do much work, are advantages. But you have to weigh them against never leaving the house or talking to anyone, which probably isn’t healthy. Every silver lining…

increasing your compensation will give you a quick fix to the problem at hand, but after a while you realise you are still unhappy no matter what the compensation is…

so stop thinking about compensation to make up for the unhappy feeling, start making yourself happy again even it means getting less compensation, trust me it will work!

Just to make you feel happier about things, you may be interested to hear that the Sandra Gidley and the Liberal Democrats have a very nice little policy designed to make the pensions of all higher-rate taxpayers a lot worse.

They plan to start levying 20% income tax on the pension contributions of higher-rate taxpayers. Go work out what THAT will do to your pension pot. As a hint of how big a deal this is, I have a “Tax Plans” paper from the Liberal Democrats that shows a sum of £4,590 million per annum to be raised through the levying of this tax on pension contributions. Nothing trivial then. And guess who’s paying?

Yours, Mike.

And if you want a tiny computer you can get a more powerful machine, with a keyboard, that supports all the software you already use, and is roughly the same size, for less than half the money. And humans can already use it, ‘cos it’ll use whatever interface they already know. And you won’t get fingerprints on the screen.

Nope, don’t get it at all.

As to OS X, I think it is far too complex and I quite agree that things like Dashboard and Hot Corners are unusable widgets. I don’t think the iPad will have those problems.

The value proposition of the iPad to me is: £550 or so for a thing that’s better than my current laptop (or any I could buy) for doing the things I usually use it for. Given the amount of time I spend using my laptop (vs how much I used my pre-iPhone phone), this is a much easier purchase to justify.

It will be a success, if it is a success, because (a)Steve Jobs tells everyone it should be (b) it will look pretty, (c) it will have adverts with cool dancing young people. I can’t see it personally, because I think they’ve got an uphill struggle to persuade many people they need a completely new toy that doesn’t do anything their current toys don’t – with the phone, they just had to convince people to spend £100 a year more than they currently did on their contracts, but this sounds like a tougher proposition.

It’s probably quicker to install Karmic and add the IBM layers from scratch than downloading a pre-canned image of that size: the packages are quite well compressed, and you would only download the latest ones, whereas if you got a pre-canned image you would probably spend all the time you saved and more downloading updates.