wildjim

I have often wondered whether UK Immigration Officers have a quota to meet...

It's easily as useful a comparison between any smartphone and a mainframe.

I have regularly wondered how all these Hedge Funds (let alone the Banks) are doing so well without some kind-of inside information and/or some means to "generate interest or concerns" in the direction they would find the most beneficial.

There is a continuing misunderstanding between "suits" and dev's, where most dev's _do_ learn the business through experience, but the suits continually choose not to, and instead of working as the "teacher" and filter between both areas, just push the demands down to the dev. And "yes": teacher is always part of the job.

In the UK and NZ, the vaccine is only given to those at-risk from Chickenpox. Children don't receive it as a matter of policy, and I don't believe adults who've never caught the disease are normally offered it, either.

One of the reasons/theories I've heard for this, is that if you've had Chickenpox, you are at-risk for Shingles -- which is often extremely painful and difficult to overcome. However, if you are regularly exposed to Chickenpox, your immune-system gets "reawakened" to the virus, therefore can more-quickly recognise and fight-off a recurrance, before it becomes Shingles.

One of the easiest ways to aid this exposure is to keep the virus active, but under-control, in the community. This has a useful side-effect of the community also being aware and more-knowledgeable about the disease, too.

Another argument I've heard against the vaccine is that it's simply not possible to get rid of Chickenpox totally -- it's _highly_ infectious, and the infectious stage is before symptoms appear, etc -- but the vaccine gives a false sense of security of protection, perhaps in the same way as everyone thinks they're safe from Smallpox, Hepatitis, Ebola, etc because we worked so hard to get rid of or control it.

Strictly speaking, it's not the same as Chickenpox, especially in symptoms and effect.

I agree. It's a little like a Java programmer knowing JVM bytecode: definitely not _needed_ but you'll be much better at understanding why (for example) some code structs are more efficient than others.

Years ago, before ActiveRecord, I started writing my own ORM for Ruby. I got a reasonable way into it, too. I gave it up, because I realised that it was much, much simpler to write many small PL/SQL views and write-triggers and use temporary local objects and/or lazy writes (etc). The DB could do much better query-optimisation this way, for one thing. But anyway, that was a long time ago.

TBH: If you want all your relational logic in your app, NoSQL systems make an awful lot more sense these days -- esp. if you've got a decent API/wrapper-layer that can automatically manage the freshness of locally cached data for you.

Was it really "giving" or did they just get an arrangement to be able to use them "defensively" against other patent suits?

Not quite: businesses (or corp's) are effectively made of groups of people. These particular groups seem to want to act more psychopathically / self-interested than an individual might -- think mobs or riots.

Isn't this part of the reason for references, but more importantly: probation period ?

I would say a Senior iPhone Dev in London would be £60k+ but since the number of com's who need ObjC is pretty small (even though London has a lot of Mobile dev's) then I wouldn't be surprised if it topped-out at £50k. In London, a £75k job is very well paid, even in finance, therefore a £100k job (I assume you meant $160k) is getting into higher-management or Contractor territory, not Senior Dev.

I remember payments in NZ being <1 min -- possibly seconds -- 10-15 years ago, as there was a single clearing-house for all EFT, nationally.

Apple seems to have a policy of regularly testing the water for further lock-down/lock-out/lock-in.

Almost as if they think because an awful lot of people have accepted it on iTunes, a similar number accepted it from Microsoft for such a long time (and still do) that it's simply a matter of waiting until the public are too jaded to care any longer.

Don't wait.

The usual effect of such misdirected management behaviour is most of the good/talented/valuable people leave earlier than later, as they smell blood in the water.