Cognitive function is not all that counts in being successful in life. Emotional intelligence ('maturity'), judgement and experience ('wisdom') might increase with age and might be fair trade for a slight decline in raw processing power. Life can get easier post-50 with these skills.
Before, I had no interest in these. Now, with Apple spitting the dummy over this triviality, these dolls turn into collector's items overnight. What a dumb PR move by Apple and what a waste of resources to bother with this. As if any doll could sacrilegious to the memory of St Steve of Cupertino.
Poster did not specify the host species of the vagina he likes to penetrate. There is no reason to expect a/.'er living in a basement to prefer primate vaginas over, say, the more readily accessible canine vaginas, or - if you live in New Zealand or Wales - the vaginas of fluffy even-toed ungulates.
197 out of 200 bonobo owners and their family members surveyed couldn't answer, as they were being penetrated in all their orifices by bonobos. The other three were busy spitting out bonobo semen.
Some people in Jersey pay well for this service. Snooki, is that you?
^^^THIS. Forget about age, get over it. Be young minded. They're all still into retro music/tech/fashion anyway. I was into retro *thirty* years ago when retro came in the first time, so to me it's all just the same. Culture has just looped in circles because the late boomers were the last generation with the numbers and economic clout to actually redefine culture (eg rock, punk, funk, techno, retro fashion and the entire edifice of "indie" were all *boomer* inventions).
Gen Y like to hang out with dad and mum anyway. I'm just like dad. The under 35s do not have a problem with 50yo+ people (esp. men), we just *think* they do because when we were their age there was still something called a 'generation gap'. That gap has evaporated if you're only slightly hip and have a sense of humor. Oh and if you can play the guitar quite well they will love you. Gen Y doesn't know how to play guitars it seems, they think guitar is a sample.
get your certification as a Project Management Professional from pmi.org and start pimping yourself out at $150/hr+.
Last time I looked at that pmi stuff it was all bullshit. I could crap that out my own arse without even finding a bull. People will pay $150/hr for that certification? You're spamming or joking, right? Right?
... leading a charge in combat, let alone Sir Elton John doing so.
I am galvanized by the image of a horde of effeminate young men in paste-emblazoned oversized glasses mincing their way into battle to the tune of "Benny and the Jets".
With that experience he could get a basic familiarity with *Nix systems and teach himself C to a working level in a few months max without trying very hard. And if you know C, then Java will be easy. Shell and Javascript will be easy. Object-oriented may be harder though - I know this because I learned structural programming (Fortran and the like) as a student and I find OoP a bit alien - but I haven't tried at all - if he is motivated surely he can learn that.
He could look for companies/jobs that maintain old systems - and his military background will be a plus. I knew a guy at Sun or somewhere who was the only one who could maintain some old product they had to service. Your dada could maybe enter somewhere as a manager or in a related field (QA, custumer support etc) and do some coding parenthetically. And FORTRAN never went away btw. It's still the preferred language for heavy number-crunching mathematical modeling afaik. PASCAL never went away either - it has been reborn in different forms and is popular in those forms in the gaming industry. Nothing is knew under the sun.
So you say you were an early bloomer if not a prodigy. Good for you. Be warned that many prodigies fail to achieve the predicted heights in their art and still others fail in the ancillary skills needed for success (eg Mozart was a pauper). And peaking very early in any field presents high risks, politically as well as in terms of setting the benchmark so high for oneself that it can never be bettered. It's a pernicious and ageist myth that middle aged and older people cannot learn new skills and cannot blossom in new endeavors.
This is rather awful, negative counsel. Pessimism gets no-one anywhere except to loserville. These days everyone should be prepared to change careers at least three times over the course of their working lives, including in middle age. There is no success without risking failure.
This. Orwell knew that the only reason governments did not monitor citizens every move was because the technology did not yet exist. If it had existed, they would have been doing it then. Now, the technology exists, a little later than 1984, and the battle is on. Let's not forget it's corporations who aid this endeavor because our data turns us into economic sales drivers, little profit centres each of us.
^^^THIS. With the addition that the committee are nearly all accountants who review test screenings for number of laughs etc and believe what worked in their spreadsheets before will always work ie the opposite of originality. Statistics do not make art. A personal, driving auteur vision makes good cinema. Good cinema is art, not accountancy. We have a similar problem in the cookie-cutter inanity of much current pop music, which has tended to neuter what was left of the abrasive hardness of good rock, pop and soul music. Of course, lest myopic nostalgia ruin my point, 95% of everything always was crap. But is seems to be harder to find that good stuff now.
If insect evolution works like bacteria (and I don't know if it does), then if we stop growing this GM crop altogether for long enough, then insect DNA should "forget" how to defend against this toxin. Nature abhors waste, so useless genes tend to get jettisoned from the gene pool given enough generations with no selection pressure to keep them in. At least, this is what happens with antibiotic-resistant bacteria: if an antibiotic is not used at all for long enough, bacterial DNA "forgets" how to make the cell line resistant and it once again becomes vulnerable. Resistance is the reason penicillin became a lot less broadband than it originally was, and the resulting relative lack of use might mean it should become more effective again.
This of course assumes that resistant strains have not already entered the wild and become widespread. With bacteria that is particularly problematic since bacteria can transfer resistance between different types of bacteria in a contagious fashion. An GM crops also have a habit of entering the wild, in which case we will be less able to reduce the exposure of insects to that crop, which might keep their resistance maintained. Disclaimer: I am not a biologist.
But who cares? If you're so worried about meeting your goals you would love working for McDonalds where they have excellent goals for how many burgers you should flip per hour and you will be greatly rewarded if you meet those goals.
Made me think of Kevin Spacey's memorable character in American Beauty, rekindling the joy of his teen years and finding happiness working as a burger flipper - after extorting a lifetime salary from his telemarketing employer.
Doesn't sound to me like he's at that major conflict stage yet, but your post should serve as a salutary warning. If OP even looks like he is blackmailing his bureaucratic management, the institutional antibodies will sink him as hard and fast as they can.
^^^^THIS! Be sure you develop it out of hours with a written agreement with your employer that all rights to the software are yours. Get a lawyer. Take time off and take your software on the road to other institutions who are likely customers. Sell them licenses, signing only after you quit your day job. Provide excellent support and maintain the software. ==> New Career(TM).
How employable are you? I've always taken the view that the more useful I am, the better are my prospects at work. Maybe you are super duper employable and that doesn't matter - is that true of anyone anymore? I've created or sustained my own job by showing senior management what needs to be done more than once. Wouldn't you want to hire someone who shows creativity and will implement cost-saving solutions regardless of what a piece of paper says their job should be? And isn't someone who is creative and solves problems a better candidate for promotion and likely to enjoy their work more than an apparatchnik who ticks boxes and watches the clock?
Nonetheless some managers are threatened by underlings showing initiative and will look for a way to block you. And yes I have been screwed before. It's always dull bureaucracies like educational institutions that do not reward creativity in admin and infrastructure staff who are seen as non-core replaceables. Never believe promises of what great things will happen for you in the future if you bust your balls doing such-and-such, it's usually a con. So: I'd agree with those posting who say you should make a solid proposal to management (don't be greedy). Get quotes from external contractors to show how cost-effective your proposal is. Whatever you do, don't appear to be blackmailing management - that will backfire badly. Weigh up what the benefits might be of implementing your solution if they don't want to cough up money. For example, will it make you indispensable if you are the only one who can maintain the code? There's a lot of people out there on the unemployment line right now.
You're right. I just love the speed of a light desktop running all from ram even on old machines. Like AC, I want it to work sufficiently though for the set of use cases I use. You can still have drag and drop, configure to open applications when you click on a file, set keyboard shortcuts etc. What else is really needed? But I'd probably draw the line at Ratpoison - just that bit too hair shirt.
When I've run Gnome or KDE, it's usually because some package I needed insisted on parts of one of those as dependencies eg k3b. I know the major interfaces have to keep one eye on a touchscreen future, despite the fact that tablets and smartphones are being dominated by iOS and Android and the latter is already free. And they've done this dance where they built in a huge amount of complexity to enable features and then they go and disable features.
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Cognitive function is not all that counts in being successful in life. Emotional intelligence ('maturity'), judgement and experience ('wisdom') might increase with age and might be fair trade for a slight decline in raw processing power. Life can get easier post-50 with these skills.
Before, I had no interest in these. Now, with Apple spitting the dummy over this triviality, these dolls turn into collector's items overnight. What a dumb PR move by Apple and what a waste of resources to bother with this. As if any doll could sacrilegious to the memory of St Steve of Cupertino.
Poster did not specify the host species of the vagina he likes to penetrate. There is no reason to expect a /.'er living in a basement to prefer primate vaginas over, say, the more readily accessible canine vaginas, or - if you live in New Zealand or Wales - the vaginas of fluffy even-toed ungulates.
197 out of 200 bonobo owners and their family members surveyed couldn't answer, as they were being penetrated in all their orifices by bonobos. The other three were busy spitting out bonobo semen.
Some people in Jersey pay well for this service. Snooki, is that you?
It's easy, only one line of code.
Spoken like somebody who's never left his mom's basement.
Spoken like a pessimist or loser. Same thing.
^^^THIS. Forget about age, get over it. Be young minded. They're all still into retro music/tech/fashion anyway. I was into retro *thirty* years ago when retro came in the first time, so to me it's all just the same. Culture has just looped in circles because the late boomers were the last generation with the numbers and economic clout to actually redefine culture (eg rock, punk, funk, techno, retro fashion and the entire edifice of "indie" were all *boomer* inventions).
Gen Y like to hang out with dad and mum anyway. I'm just like dad. The under 35s do not have a problem with 50yo+ people (esp. men), we just *think* they do because when we were their age there was still something called a 'generation gap'. That gap has evaporated if you're only slightly hip and have a sense of humor. Oh and if you can play the guitar quite well they will love you. Gen Y doesn't know how to play guitars it seems, they think guitar is a sample.
get your certification as a Project Management Professional from pmi.org and start pimping yourself out at $150/hr+.
Last time I looked at that pmi stuff it was all bullshit. I could crap that out my own arse without even finding a bull. People will pay $150/hr for that certification? You're spamming or joking, right? Right?
I am galvanized by the image of a horde of effeminate young men in paste-emblazoned oversized glasses mincing their way into battle to the tune of "Benny and the Jets".
^^^THIS (and similar). Ignore all naysayers.
With that experience he could get a basic familiarity with *Nix systems and teach himself C to a working level in a few months max without trying very hard. And if you know C, then Java will be easy. Shell and Javascript will be easy. Object-oriented may be harder though - I know this because I learned structural programming (Fortran and the like) as a student and I find OoP a bit alien - but I haven't tried at all - if he is motivated surely he can learn that.
He could look for companies/jobs that maintain old systems - and his military background will be a plus. I knew a guy at Sun or somewhere who was the only one who could maintain some old product they had to service. Your dada could maybe enter somewhere as a manager or in a related field (QA, custumer support etc) and do some coding parenthetically. And FORTRAN never went away btw. It's still the preferred language for heavy number-crunching mathematical modeling afaik. PASCAL never went away either - it has been reborn in different forms and is popular in those forms in the gaming industry. Nothing is knew under the sun.
So you say you were an early bloomer if not a prodigy. Good for you. Be warned that many prodigies fail to achieve the predicted heights in their art and still others fail in the ancillary skills needed for success (eg Mozart was a pauper). And peaking very early in any field presents high risks, politically as well as in terms of setting the benchmark so high for oneself that it can never be bettered. It's a pernicious and ageist myth that middle aged and older people cannot learn new skills and cannot blossom in new endeavors.
This is rather awful, negative counsel. Pessimism gets no-one anywhere except to loserville. These days everyone should be prepared to change careers at least three times over the course of their working lives, including in middle age. There is no success without risking failure.
This. Orwell knew that the only reason governments did not monitor citizens every move was because the technology did not yet exist. If it had existed, they would have been doing it then. Now, the technology exists, a little later than 1984, and the battle is on. Let's not forget it's corporations who aid this endeavor because our data turns us into economic sales drivers, little profit centres each of us.
^^^THIS. With the addition that the committee are nearly all accountants who review test screenings for number of laughs etc and believe what worked in their spreadsheets before will always work ie the opposite of originality. Statistics do not make art. A personal, driving auteur vision makes good cinema. Good cinema is art, not accountancy. We have a similar problem in the cookie-cutter inanity of much current pop music, which has tended to neuter what was left of the abrasive hardness of good rock, pop and soul music. Of course, lest myopic nostalgia ruin my point, 95% of everything always was crap. But is seems to be harder to find that good stuff now.
If insect evolution works like bacteria (and I don't know if it does), then if we stop growing this GM crop altogether for long enough, then insect DNA should "forget" how to defend against this toxin. Nature abhors waste, so useless genes tend to get jettisoned from the gene pool given enough generations with no selection pressure to keep them in. At least, this is what happens with antibiotic-resistant bacteria: if an antibiotic is not used at all for long enough, bacterial DNA "forgets" how to make the cell line resistant and it once again becomes vulnerable. Resistance is the reason penicillin became a lot less broadband than it originally was, and the resulting relative lack of use might mean it should become more effective again.
This of course assumes that resistant strains have not already entered the wild and become widespread. With bacteria that is particularly problematic since bacteria can transfer resistance between different types of bacteria in a contagious fashion. An GM crops also have a habit of entering the wild, in which case we will be less able to reduce the exposure of insects to that crop, which might keep their resistance maintained. Disclaimer: I am not a biologist.
But who cares? If you're so worried about meeting your goals you would love working for McDonalds where they have excellent goals for how many burgers you should flip per hour and you will be greatly rewarded if you meet those goals.
Made me think of Kevin Spacey's memorable character in American Beauty, rekindling the joy of his teen years and finding happiness working as a burger flipper - after extorting a lifetime salary from his telemarketing employer.
Doesn't sound to me like he's at that major conflict stage yet, but your post should serve as a salutary warning. If OP even looks like he is blackmailing his bureaucratic management, the institutional antibodies will sink him as hard and fast as they can.
Also correct.
Totally correct. Unless you are a star academic who pulls large grants, awards and consultancies every year, you are an expendable PoS.
Very true indeed, *unless* you are trying to break into a new career or job area and need to prove your goods first.
^^^^THIS! Be sure you develop it out of hours with a written agreement with your employer that all rights to the software are yours. Get a lawyer. Take time off and take your software on the road to other institutions who are likely customers. Sell them licenses, signing only after you quit your day job. Provide excellent support and maintain the software. ==> New Career(TM).
How employable are you? I've always taken the view that the more useful I am, the better are my prospects at work. Maybe you are super duper employable and that doesn't matter - is that true of anyone anymore? I've created or sustained my own job by showing senior management what needs to be done more than once. Wouldn't you want to hire someone who shows creativity and will implement cost-saving solutions regardless of what a piece of paper says their job should be? And isn't someone who is creative and solves problems a better candidate for promotion and likely to enjoy their work more than an apparatchnik who ticks boxes and watches the clock?
Nonetheless some managers are threatened by underlings showing initiative and will look for a way to block you. And yes I have been screwed before. It's always dull bureaucracies like educational institutions that do not reward creativity in admin and infrastructure staff who are seen as non-core replaceables. Never believe promises of what great things will happen for you in the future if you bust your balls doing such-and-such, it's usually a con. So: I'd agree with those posting who say you should make a solid proposal to management (don't be greedy). Get quotes from external contractors to show how cost-effective your proposal is. Whatever you do, don't appear to be blackmailing management - that will backfire badly. Weigh up what the benefits might be of implementing your solution if they don't want to cough up money. For example, will it make you indispensable if you are the only one who can maintain the code? There's a lot of people out there on the unemployment line right now.
C is withering and dying? Isn't it still used more than any other language: http://langpop.com/
You're right. I just love the speed of a light desktop running all from ram even on old machines. Like AC, I want it to work sufficiently though for the set of use cases I use. You can still have drag and drop, configure to open applications when you click on a file, set keyboard shortcuts etc. What else is really needed? But I'd probably draw the line at Ratpoison - just that bit too hair shirt.
When I've run Gnome or KDE, it's usually because some package I needed insisted on parts of one of those as dependencies eg k3b. I know the major interfaces have to keep one eye on a touchscreen future, despite the fact that tablets and smartphones are being dominated by iOS and Android and the latter is already free. And they've done this dance where they built in a huge amount of complexity to enable features and then they go and disable features.