pointyhats

That is because the 140 EUR grant is of significantly less value, which is absolutely wonderful motivation to do things properly.

I applaud what they do in Finland.

Firstly it's not a fantasy unless you make it one. As someone brought up on a shoestring budget in one of the worst bits of London, I can assure you that in the real world, class is entirely irrelevant and ethics and morals are. There are people earning a quarter of what I do and three times what I do living either side of me and we're all on the same page, have the same ideals, hopes and goals.

There are no classes other than in the media.

Secondly, health is more important than purchasing branded and luxury goods. That is universally accepted as to shortcut ones health is to cause harm and the "golden rule" backs that up. To observe both signs of wealth and signs of poverty at the same time has certain obvious implications.

It's all logic.

See my reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5818507

I try to live a life which is entirely ethical and I treat people with respect where earned. I will not be an apologist though and if I find something morally reprehensible I will exercise my right to mention it as you are exercising your right to criticise (which I accept).

Your comment by nature is to demote the "right wing" which means you are playing to typical partisan political ideologies.

I care not for either.

And by making the distinction of working class are you not contributing to that bias? I treat all people as classless.

The people described by myself are not bound by class, but by attitude and morals. There is no class distinction involved.

The problem is not specific to one traditional "class".

The whole "tabloid smearing lies" drivel is another form of enforced division by promoting classes of reading.

This sort of stuff annoys me.

(for reference I have never purchased a newspaper and rarely even bother to look at the news unless it's technology related)

I agree entirely.

I did not state it was citable or sound, but an observation.

The observation/hypothesis is valuable as it's the starting point for a discussion.

Presenting the extreme is disingenuous.

The answer to the correctness of my argument is neither yes or no - it is simply mu.

Yes indeed.

Philosophical note:

1. I think things that are desirable are easy to offer citations for because there is a motivation to promote the desirable.

2. Conversely, things that are not desirably are not researched by people who do not desire the result.

So the citation is moot if either way it is biased. If you ever read any medical papers, they are a fine example. Look at the efficacy of Seroxat/Paroxetine for a fine example. GSK papers = utterly wonder drug. Independent researchers = suicide pills.

Which is where we stand on everything more complicated than basic scientific issues.

Applying that to my point, there is nothing citable as the result is probably not politically desirable.

It's all "in my humble opinion".

Yes it is unsupported. I admit that. But it's clearly observable. I'm sure many people here observe it regularly.

You specify the problem the wrong way around.

The women got pregnant because the maternity grant was offered as is a cosy council house and a career of being pregnant. That's how it works here.

When you have three children like myself you spend a lot of time around parents and maternity units and the general consensus of the particular social stereotype is that a baby is a meal ticket and the £500 would go nicely on some Uggs and enough Silk Cut to get you through the first 9 months after it's born.

You can see the results of the maternity grant spending at ASDA which is basically the decked out in designer brand children being pushed around in their expensive buggy but the mother is buying £50 worth of cigarettes and her other three children are consigned to economy grade processed meat wrapped in breadcrumbs and some reconstituted potato product and some panda pops as their entire diet.

It's not down to poverty: just selfish idiocy, apathy and a complete lack of morals and ethics.

I know the differences, probably more than you realise.

I presented a hypothesis, which you can turn into a theory by sitting outside ASDA for a bit with a clipboard and a copy of SPSS. My suggestion was that you should try it.

Not everything needs citation in the form of a survey or scientific paper. I doubt the results of it would be honest as the people who they would be surveying have an interest in lying about the things they have purchased with it.

Some things are blatantly obvious if you peel your eyes occasionally and observe humanity.

Stand outside ASDA in Feltham or Hounslow and observe.

There are very few tech products without something Foxconn in them.

Even my old Lenovo T61 had most of the parts stamped Foxconn.

This is because their JS implementation is a wrapper around WinRT rather than anything close to what anyone else is doing. It also isn't very JavaScripty. WinRT is a particularly odd creation.

Plus Windows 8 RT isn't selling.

They should do this in the UK. From observing the locals, the maternity grant (until yanked by the government) was used to buy designer gear for the mother, cigarettes and some expensive fashionable buggy for the baby (usually topped up by the baby's grandparents).

Unfortunately essential stuff was forgotten.

This solves those problems.

Very true.

It took me 9 months and 45 calls to support to get a relatively simple regression in IE9/ClickOnce fixed and all we got was a fucking registry fix that we now have to ship to 2000 clients.

Basically they broke ClickOnce in IE9 for launching via scripts due to the new download prompting stuff.

Neither the framework team or IE team wanted to take responsibility leaving my poor support rep to reverse engineer both products.

Good plan! Never thought of that!

I've got an 8 core 3.0 Xeon with 32Gb RAM and Samsung 840. It's still slow.

It's more latency than long waits but it's enough to stop me using it.

To be honest I dragged a 1.5MLOC .Net 1.1 Web Forms and SQL 2000 application up to 4.0 and SQL 2008 R2 last year.

It wasn't that much of a problem. It took about 3 days and most of that was fixing deprecation warnings and porting the in house test framework to NUnit.

The real problem in the process was getting the build tooling and all the associated crap surrounding the solution up and running. This was also only because the muppets who wrote it originally put it together with sticky tape and string.

Try R# with VS in a solution with 54 projects and ~ 1.5MLOC...

It stinks!

The Windows kernel is C++. From what I've seen (shared source), it's mainly C-style C++ though. I didn't see a single template or a class in my travels.

Did we really expect any other endgame?

Isn't this just a "job agent term" for generalist?

C is easy to get right. Its also easy to get wrong.

To be honest, most holes I've seen over the years are above the level of the language and are down to the implementation or design being flawed. For example SQL injection, silly business processes, elevation flaws, bad maths etc.

It is right not wrong. Being decoupled from the machine by several layers of abstraction means you're just rearranging the furniture rather than whittling it out of wood.

I hate rearranging the furniture; it gives no satisfaction.

Satisfaction is a big part of quality in your life.

There are loads of companies already doing this, at least in the UK. They find the holes and you fix them.

I've done contract work in London and had several permanent positions over the last 15 years. That's a BIG chunk of it unfortunately. The rest is "big names", "trendy startups" and high finance. There is literally nothing else.

The best opportunity would be a small established business but they get eaten in London instantly.

Yes.

Myself, my wife, 3 children, a car in a 2 bedroom maisonette with two gardens in zone 5.

No problems. Apart from the incurred debt from having to live on a much lower salary for several years beforehand. That is the biggest problem for me.

This times a million.

When I was doing contract from 2004-2007, a shit Nokia and an O2 PAYG phone was a good investment. Many times did I just chuck the thing in the bin.

Recruiters will suck up to you even if you've ignored them for months. Commission vampires - that's all they are. You're just a line in a spreadsheet to them.

You need a big stock of cash, a hard skin and a good accountant.

The uncertainty is a problem, particularly when you end up getting booted early (it does happen), but occasionally you get to sit on your arse for the last 3 months of a say a 6 month fixed term contract being paid to play solitaire because they can't get rid of you early.

The agents are all asshats and will screw you for a penny if you're not careful.

The hiring companies treat you like a disposable tool. Don't expect to make any friends at the companies - the permanent staff know you're making more than they are.

The cost of living is absolutely awful in London.

You'll be fine doing a flat share etc in some of the nicer metropolitan bits, but if you have 3 children like myself, things get expensive awfully quickly.

You have to fish out £1500/month for a 3 bedroom house in a suburban area (zone 5/6) which you won't get stabbed in.

If you want something really nice, say Richmond/Strawberry Hill, try £2250 for the same.

It's not as bad as you think. The number of applicants is lower per position outside London and the ratio of muppets to positions is higher.

If you're not a muppet, it's quite easy to land 50k+ in any major city.