Highlighting the menu item seems to work ok, like Win does now when a new program is installed.
It should be in the context menu of each item to "change category", so you can easily move it to another one, or a completely new one. If it's easy to move em around (without the awful UI nightmare of dragging amongst popup menus) people would do it. People tend to like putting things in categories, *if* it's obvious and easy to do.
In all seriousness, you have no idea if I or anyone else you encounter is self-aware. You only know you are. A rabbit is, therefore, pretty much on the same level for you, subjectively, as other people. Just because they behave differently, in ways we don't socially interpret easily, doesn't mean much.
One should err on the side of caution. But then we wouldn't have rabbit stew.
MS simply made the Start Menu hard to navigate and (once lots of programs are installed) and hard to customise. If they'd just started with *categories* at the top level, instead of a single, bloated "Programs" list, and then put a "Create Category" button somewhere, people would get the idea.
Default categories (ie. top level start menu folders) would be: "Office", "Internet", "Media", "System" and "Help". I think that's all they had to do. It's *hard* for most people to clean up their Start menu, and unless you're technical, you've no idea you can make your own efficient and neat arrangements. Most people's Programs menu is a screwed up mess after a few months. That's where MS failed to innovate.
Totally agree. In XP I had folders at the root of the start menu, each starting with a unique letter. All internet-related programs were under "Internet" folder, also had a "Quick" folder.
So to open Firefox, I simply hit Win + I + F. Notepad = Win + Q + N. Calculator = Win + Q + C. That's 3 keys. Takes under a second. No hitting Enter, no unnecessary typing. Nothing is more user friendly for me than that.
Can I do that in Win 7? Not without the Classic Start Menu utility. Sorry, app.
I support 120+ users. One thing I've noticed during our Windows 7 migration is that our staff do not use the start menu at all.
That's not surprising if your 120+ users are in a controlled corporate environment where they only use a handful of apps for work. Is that the case? If so, your example is the exception not the norm. This is about the most common type of user.
Bingo. That's the source of all our woes - why the economy is unstable, why companies get "too big to fail", why we have patent and copyright craziness, why companies seek to influence policy at the highest level.
If we didn't have certain stupid laws - which force companies to pursue increased profit, market share, share price, growth, growth, growth - we would not have such a volatile business culture. It has become neurotic and almost counter-productive with the desire to dominate and control.
Companies, believe it or not, originally came from the idea that members of a society got together to build something with the primary goal of benefiting their society. Where did that idea go? It seems to be a happy coincidence these days, if a company's goals align beneficially with that of wider society.
Oh god, I hate Radiolab and their psychadelic, annoying and inane take on broadcast radio. Give me The Science Show on Oz's ABC Radio any day over Radiolab.
I just want to be able to concentrate on what's being said, so I can learn something, not be "entertained" or be treated like an ADHD sufferer in danger of losing interest if only one person is talking at a time or something.
Taxes are not simply "extracted from the economy". Where do you think the economy would be without roads, laws, libraries, public services etc. which are paid for by taxes?
If you want me to agree that Apple has done as much harm as Microsoft, you're going to be a long fucking time ranting.
As someone who was around in the 80's, the benefits of the MS ecosystem vastly outweighed the "damage". So they played hardball and won the "PC wars". MS created a market for any hardware vendor to set up shop and make cool stuff for PCs. I'm sure you understand how challenging it was for MS to make Windows *open* like that, so anyone could write drivers and sell PC hardware. It was a friggin IT and business revolution.
Apart from that, think of all the kids, me included, who learned how computers worked by being able to open it up and upgrade memory and parts. The fact that Windows was *fiddly* - drivers needed updating and whatnot - made it essential to *learn* about computers. It was like having an electronics hobby kit from back in the old(er) days.
Imagine the alternative, if Apple had won.
Now tell me again how much "damage" MS did. People have selective memories. Regardless of MS business practices, I think we should thank our stars we got Gates' vision, not Jobs', during the emergence of the personal computer.
It's not surprising then, that it's hard for people to see their blindspots, because they are relatively rare.
Not necessarily. We all know we have blind spots, we *just don't like to think about them*. Cognitive dissonance, forgetfulness, cognitive bias, wishful thinking, various arbitrary assumptions about our own capabilities and limitations, decision-making based on emotion / faith / anecdotes.. on and on.
In fact I believe our cognitive blind spots far outweigh our ability to act reasonably and rationally beyond what has proven necessary for survival up to now. We're great at living together in small communities. We're great at thinking and inventing our way out of reliance on the vagaries of the immediate environment.
What we're crap at is looking beyond our own individual concerns and consciously guiding the future of our species. Evolution hasn't had time yet to create enough humans that are truly global thinkers. Forget that, we aren't even designed to band together to chase off bullies, because we're each too individually fearful. Elephants can though, and Bonobo monkeys - females band together to chase off aggressive males. But we don't - we find it hard to think together like that. We certainly don't think as a species. We're designed to think as a family, as a small social group, and somewhat as a small community. But that's it, with very few exceptions. People in small communities will help strangers in distress - not so in large cities. We dissociate, we can't think of masses of people in a personal way.
But to manage all these masses of impersonal people, we have created a system of government that panders to individual, short-term concerns, to keep us all happy. Four-year elections based around hot local issues, or irrational Lib/Dem commitments. One saving grace is our inclination towards empirical measurement of everything - science - using which we create regimes for all sorts of things, from food to education to cultural standards. But these decisions are still driven by immediate concerns. Green energy is all well and good, but how does it affect my budget, my job, my family? A truly rational, far-thinking species would not have the economic and governmental systems we do. They're farcical, really.
Hell, we can't even legislate to rid the world of poverty and homelessness, because it's "too hard" or "too far away". We have this weird ability to empathise locally while dissociating globally. I guess because we simply have never had to empathise globally before.
Anyway, all this is just my conjecture, but it seems to be that we simply are not designed to tackle the kinds of problems that arise from rampant population growth. But then, what species is?
True. Another thing that's often overlooked is defining "capacity", particularly with web apps. The customer needs to know that their web app was written as an intranet app, for example, supporting a small number of users in a small business.
Say one day they're bought out, and the software suddenly has to support 1000 users instead of 20. They might have reason to complain if it falls down - because your queries/processes made for hundreds of records choke when there are a few million. Some idea of capacity and scalability should be part of the spec.
Fair enough, but porn isn't exactly harmless either. Same way alcohol is benign, until you start using it as a social crutch or in addictive ways. I've heard talks, by people who work with kids, who say continual exposure to porn in one's teens can have a detrimental effect on expectations of women in relationships.
The whole anal thing, for instance. Clueless young men can start to see it as an expectation of their clueless female partners. Watching porn isn't like watching a slasher film. You don't necessarily want to try chopping someone's head off, but you wouldn't mind trying a few things in the porn vid.
So I think it can - if we keep sweeping it under the carpet and not talking to kids about it properly - change the nature of sexual relationships. Relationships should be focussed on love and caring in the foremost, sex following from that. Porn, however, shows sex is a very unattached and uncaring fashion. I'm not anti-porn by any means, but - at the risk of being flamed - I think we DO need to "think of the kids".
Not ban the stuff, just explain it for what it is. Yes, kids know it's all an act, it's fiction, that's the not the point. The question is around how it influences behaviour and expectations within young relationships.
Then Windows 9 (like Windows 7) will take the good and strip out the bad
I'm not even sure later versions of Windows will be as successful as XP, unless MS can continue to push people to upgrade. Main reason is I think MS has lost the plot when it comes to UI design.
If you've seen Visual Studio 11, you'll know what I mean. Very few developers like it, and MS has always been good at developer tools. Something has gone wrong at MS in the UI department, and that's very bad news now that competition with Apple has become serious. MS is not Apple and perhaps shouldn't even try to be. Strange thing to say perhaps, but I think MS needs to find its identity again, like IBM has.
Windows 7 is technically very good, but the UI - for ease of use and keyboard navigation - still irritates me. I have Win7 on my "server" PC, but continue to use XP on my laptop every day. Gave Win7 every chance to impress me, and have persisted with it for a while now, but I won't be installing it on my laptop until absolutely necessary.
As for Win8, it seems MS is trying to change the UI experience completely for PCs, which is a major gamble. Brave, but.. it's not broke, is it? Apple came up with a great new UI for a *great new device*. The PC still uses a mouse, and all the same usability rules apply as did 10 years ago. So.. we'll see.
I doubt the validity of both the claims and the question in this article.
Indeed. Neither are we a "cloud-based world", a ridiculous thing to say. I don't see people un-installing their PC apps for cloud apps, except where web-mail is used over installing an email client. Wake me up when we have cloud-based web browsers.:)
Mobile apps are also native apps - they're not "cloud-based", except for communication and updates.
"mobile devices are eclipsing PCs as the center of people's computing lives"? Hardly. The centre of people's *social* lives, sure. I'll agree when the PC on my desk at work is scrapped, along with the desk itself, and I can do everything from home on a tablet. Which would be a pain in the ass right now.
Windows 8 is a decent UI for a phone. I tend to think most computer savvy people will use it more or less like Windows (and every other graphical OS) has always been used.
oh, but they do have that but it's a bit hidden and it's only available via Apps for hosted domains
God, waste of time, and requires you have your own domain name. Why not just create a Yahoo email account, and use their excellent disposable email system? Forward all the mail to your Gmail account. Best of both worlds.
Yahoo allows you to actually *delete* a disposable address, so if it gets spammed, you just kill it. Also it shows you a list of what you've created, which is a great reminder if you forget one which wasn't obvious (usually I use the site's domain name).
Admit it, Yahoo has the best disposable address system.:)
I use Yahoo for all my disposable addresses, because Gmail's system is useless. a) The disposable address starts with your real address (youremail+alias), how daft is that? b) It uses the "+" sign, which is quite often rejected as an invalid character.
Yahoo is the best system I know of for disposable addresses. The Yahoo account is forwarded to my Gmail account anyway, so it's the best of both worlds. It takes all of 10 seconds to create a new Yahoo disposable, and I can see them all in a list, which is a great reminder sometimes if I forget what I used for a particular site (though usually it's the same as the domain name).
As an introvert I've had many people confuse this with depression and unhappiness, and I fear the people doing this study might be falling into the same trap.
I don't think so, as they are actually testing for signal signs of depression, and correlating those with internet behaviours. There are established indicators for depression in psychology, others for introversion and what-have-you. But not a lot can be gleaned from that anyway. One can't start hypothesising intelligently about depression just from one apparently correlating activity.
Anyone who generalises about depression is going to get it wrong. People get depressed for different reasons, and behave differently with it. Statements like "depressed people are naturally seeking human contact" are just silly. Depression manifests in a lot of different ways and we don't know much about it yet.
> How much thought and value do people place in FaceBook updates?
You seem to be assuming everything on FB is a personal profile of some nondescript person. This isn't the case. I'm sure there are great pages you follow, and maybe a couple of great people, who offer interesting and useful content for your newsfeed.
I'm in Oz, I follow the ABC, a couple of community organisations, and subscribe to the posts of only 8 people I actually know - ones that don't post irrelevant crap all day, but things that may also be part of our real-life conversations.
Facebook is pretty useful if you use it selectively.
There actually is indication that FB is fumbling. They run on advertising, and advertisers are starting to wonder if the advertising works - or at least is worth the current level of spend. If FB is ever forced to reduce advertising fees, that will be a *major* loss of face. Currently we are pondering how much of their success is hype, but if fees go down, so does revenue and their last defence against doubt.
I'm also much like the OP, just over 40, no degree but lots of technical experience, freelancing for the past 8 years.
However I'm more interested in doing something that, like you, merge my skills and the more community/people interests I developed over my 30's. Could I ask what area of work you found that had that blend of interest and ability for you? I figure the more I ask people for their experiences, the more ideas I'll get.:)
Interesting. One way of thinking about it is a progression. Surviving till your teens, you could reproduce but not transfer very much knowledge onto the next generation. Surviving into your 20's, more experience and information is transferred.
So it follows that, for a species that survives mainly on skills & know-how not instinctively known, the more information that can be transferred from older people to younger, the better.
Therefore, the evolution of the *preference to have older people in your community*. It's not "middle-age" that evolved, as such. What probably evolved is the desire we have to lengthen our lifespan!
Perhaps the only reason we have a desire to live longer, is the "selfish gene" of passing as much knowledge to new generations as humanly possible.
Of course now we ignore old people, so there goes that theory.:)
My personal reason for never signing one is, the only reason to want me to sign one is so that it's easier to sue me in the future.
What's wrong with simply asking for a sunset clause? Perfectly reasonable and has been a feature in the ones I've seen and signed. You can talk about fight club once it's been around a few months and everyone knows about it anyway. My conditions usually are:
a) Specific to business processes and company "secrets", not technical knowledge related to my profession.
b) Sunset 6 months after interview if not chosen (that's long enough in this game), and don't tell me your overall business strategy - I only need to know that if you employ me.
c) If chosen to do the work, same as above, excluding all technical knowledge I gain on the job as a natural evolution of my own profession.
d) A "non-competitive" clause for maximum of 1 year - unless I decide the business plan is common enough (eg. a file hosting site) that the clause would seriously affect gaining future work in that time (very rare situation though).
Everyone's been fine with that so far, and I've been freelancing for several years. Also, it comes across as competent and professional.
CEOs are sometimes nervous just because they think they need to tell you *everything* about their business in an interview. I let them know that's not the case, and keep the discussion to technical requirements as much as possible. They generally feel more at ease after that.
How is it "invading" someone's privacy when they willingly give away their personal information to you?
Uh, in the same way the government looking over your shoulder to see how you vote is, even though you've turned up to do so of your own volition in broad daylight. Jesus, what a dumb question.
Slashdot Mirror
Highlighting the menu item seems to work ok, like Win does now when a new program is installed.
It should be in the context menu of each item to "change category", so you can easily move it to another one, or a completely new one. If it's easy to move em around (without the awful UI nightmare of dragging amongst popup menus) people would do it. People tend to like putting things in categories, *if* it's obvious and easy to do.
a creature so stupid to not even be self aware
In all seriousness, you have no idea if I or anyone else you encounter is self-aware. You only know you are.
A rabbit is, therefore, pretty much on the same level for you, subjectively, as other people.
Just because they behave differently, in ways we don't socially interpret easily, doesn't mean much.
One should err on the side of caution. But then we wouldn't have rabbit stew.
MS simply made the Start Menu hard to navigate and (once lots of programs are installed) and hard to customise. If they'd just started with *categories* at the top level, instead of a single, bloated "Programs" list, and then put a "Create Category" button somewhere, people would get the idea.
Default categories (ie. top level start menu folders) would be: "Office", "Internet", "Media", "System" and "Help". I think that's all they had to do. It's *hard* for most people to clean up their Start menu, and unless you're technical, you've no idea you can make your own efficient and neat arrangements. Most people's Programs menu is a screwed up mess after a few months. That's where MS failed to innovate.
Totally agree. In XP I had folders at the root of the start menu, each starting with a unique letter.
All internet-related programs were under "Internet" folder, also had a "Quick" folder.
So to open Firefox, I simply hit Win + I + F. Notepad = Win + Q + N. Calculator = Win + Q + C.
That's 3 keys. Takes under a second. No hitting Enter, no unnecessary typing.
Nothing is more user friendly for me than that.
Can I do that in Win 7? Not without the Classic Start Menu utility. Sorry, app.
I support 120+ users. One thing I've noticed during our Windows 7 migration is that our staff do not use the start menu at all.
That's not surprising if your 120+ users are in a controlled corporate environment where they only use a handful of apps for work. Is that the case? If so, your example is the exception not the norm. This is about the most common type of user.
the only way to further increase profits
Bingo. That's the source of all our woes - why the economy is unstable, why companies get "too big to fail", why we have patent and copyright craziness, why companies seek to influence policy at the highest level.
If we didn't have certain stupid laws - which force companies to pursue increased profit, market share, share price, growth, growth, growth - we would not have such a volatile business culture. It has become neurotic and almost counter-productive with the desire to dominate and control.
Companies, believe it or not, originally came from the idea that members of a society got together to build something with the primary goal of benefiting their society. Where did that idea go? It seems to be a happy coincidence these days, if a company's goals align beneficially with that of wider society.
Oh god, I hate Radiolab and their psychadelic, annoying and inane take on broadcast radio. Give me The Science Show on Oz's ABC Radio any day over Radiolab.
I just want to be able to concentrate on what's being said, so I can learn something, not be "entertained" or be treated like an ADHD sufferer in danger of losing interest if only one person is talking at a time or something.
Taxes are not simply "extracted from the economy". Where do you think the economy would be without roads, laws, libraries, public services etc. which are paid for by taxes?
If you want me to agree that Apple has done as much harm as Microsoft, you're going to be a long fucking time ranting.
As someone who was around in the 80's, the benefits of the MS ecosystem vastly outweighed the "damage". So they played hardball and won the "PC wars". MS created a market for any hardware vendor to set up shop and make cool stuff for PCs. I'm sure you understand how challenging it was for MS to make Windows *open* like that, so anyone could write drivers and sell PC hardware. It was a friggin IT and business revolution.
Apart from that, think of all the kids, me included, who learned how computers worked by being able to open it up and upgrade memory and parts. The fact that Windows was *fiddly* - drivers needed updating and whatnot - made it essential to *learn* about computers. It was like having an electronics hobby kit from back in the old(er) days.
Imagine the alternative, if Apple had won.
Now tell me again how much "damage" MS did. People have selective memories. Regardless of MS business practices, I think we should thank our stars we got Gates' vision, not Jobs', during the emergence of the personal computer.
It's not surprising then, that it's hard for people to see their blindspots, because they are relatively rare.
Not necessarily. We all know we have blind spots, we *just don't like to think about them*. Cognitive dissonance, forgetfulness, cognitive bias, wishful thinking, various arbitrary assumptions about our own capabilities and limitations, decision-making based on emotion / faith / anecdotes.. on and on.
In fact I believe our cognitive blind spots far outweigh our ability to act reasonably and rationally beyond what has proven necessary for survival up to now. We're great at living together in small communities. We're great at thinking and inventing our way out of reliance on the vagaries of the immediate environment.
What we're crap at is looking beyond our own individual concerns and consciously guiding the future of our species. Evolution hasn't had time yet to create enough humans that are truly global thinkers. Forget that, we aren't even designed to band together to chase off bullies, because we're each too individually fearful. Elephants can though, and Bonobo monkeys - females band together to chase off aggressive males. But we don't - we find it hard to think together like that. We certainly don't think as a species. We're designed to think as a family, as a small social group, and somewhat as a small community. But that's it, with very few exceptions. People in small communities will help strangers in distress - not so in large cities. We dissociate, we can't think of masses of people in a personal way.
But to manage all these masses of impersonal people, we have created a system of government that panders to individual, short-term concerns, to keep us all happy. Four-year elections based around hot local issues, or irrational Lib/Dem commitments. One saving grace is our inclination towards empirical measurement of everything - science - using which we create regimes for all sorts of things, from food to education to cultural standards. But these decisions are still driven by immediate concerns. Green energy is all well and good, but how does it affect my budget, my job, my family? A truly rational, far-thinking species would not have the economic and governmental systems we do. They're farcical, really.
Hell, we can't even legislate to rid the world of poverty and homelessness, because it's "too hard" or "too far away". We have this weird ability to empathise locally while dissociating globally. I guess because we simply have never had to empathise globally before.
Anyway, all this is just my conjecture, but it seems to be that we simply are not designed to tackle the kinds of problems that arise from rampant population growth. But then, what species is?
True. Another thing that's often overlooked is defining "capacity", particularly with web apps. The customer needs to know that their web app was written as an intranet app, for example, supporting a small number of users in a small business.
Say one day they're bought out, and the software suddenly has to support 1000 users instead of 20. They might have reason to complain if it falls down - because your queries/processes made for hundreds of records choke when there are a few million. Some idea of capacity and scalability should be part of the spec.
ASP.Net is also nice if you don't want to go dynamic.
Reflection is alive and well in .NET. How is .NET unable to be dynamic?
Fair enough, but porn isn't exactly harmless either. Same way alcohol is benign, until you start using it as a social crutch or in addictive ways. I've heard talks, by people who work with kids, who say continual exposure to porn in one's teens can have a detrimental effect on expectations of women in relationships.
The whole anal thing, for instance. Clueless young men can start to see it as an expectation of their clueless female partners. Watching porn isn't like watching a slasher film. You don't necessarily want to try chopping someone's head off, but you wouldn't mind trying a few things in the porn vid.
So I think it can - if we keep sweeping it under the carpet and not talking to kids about it properly - change the nature of sexual relationships. Relationships should be focussed on love and caring in the foremost, sex following from that. Porn, however, shows sex is a very unattached and uncaring fashion. I'm not anti-porn by any means, but - at the risk of being flamed - I think we DO need to "think of the kids".
Not ban the stuff, just explain it for what it is. Yes, kids know it's all an act, it's fiction, that's the not the point. The question is around how it influences behaviour and expectations within young relationships.
Then Windows 9 (like Windows 7) will take the good and strip out the bad
I'm not even sure later versions of Windows will be as successful as XP, unless MS can continue to push people to upgrade. Main reason is I think MS has lost the plot when it comes to UI design.
If you've seen Visual Studio 11, you'll know what I mean. Very few developers like it, and MS has always been good at developer tools. Something has gone wrong at MS in the UI department, and that's very bad news now that competition with Apple has become serious. MS is not Apple and perhaps shouldn't even try to be. Strange thing to say perhaps, but I think MS needs to find its identity again, like IBM has.
Windows 7 is technically very good, but the UI - for ease of use and keyboard navigation - still irritates me. I have Win7 on my "server" PC, but continue to use XP on my laptop every day. Gave Win7 every chance to impress me, and have persisted with it for a while now, but I won't be installing it on my laptop until absolutely necessary.
As for Win8, it seems MS is trying to change the UI experience completely for PCs, which is a major gamble. Brave, but.. it's not broke, is it? Apple came up with a great new UI for a *great new device*. The PC still uses a mouse, and all the same usability rules apply as did 10 years ago. So.. we'll see.
I doubt the validity of both the claims and the question in this article.
Indeed. Neither are we a "cloud-based world", a ridiculous thing to say. I don't see people un-installing their PC apps for cloud apps, except where web-mail is used over installing an email client. Wake me up when we have cloud-based web browsers. :)
Mobile apps are also native apps - they're not "cloud-based", except for communication and updates.
"mobile devices are eclipsing PCs as the center of people's computing lives"? Hardly. The centre of people's *social* lives, sure. I'll agree when the PC on my desk at work is scrapped, along with the desk itself, and I can do everything from home on a tablet. Which would be a pain in the ass right now.
Windows 8 is a decent UI for a phone. I tend to think most computer savvy people will use it more or less like Windows (and every other graphical OS) has always been used.
oh, but they do have that but it's a bit hidden and it's only available via Apps for hosted domains
God, waste of time, and requires you have your own domain name. Why not just create a Yahoo email account, and use their excellent disposable email system? Forward all the mail to your Gmail account. Best of both worlds.
Yahoo allows you to actually *delete* a disposable address, so if it gets spammed, you just kill it. Also it shows you a list of what you've created, which is a great reminder if you forget one which wasn't obvious (usually I use the site's domain name).
Admit it, Yahoo has the best disposable address system. :)
Gmail aliases are unlimited. Not just 500.
I use Yahoo for all my disposable addresses, because Gmail's system is useless.
a) The disposable address starts with your real address (youremail+alias), how daft is that?
b) It uses the "+" sign, which is quite often rejected as an invalid character.
Yahoo is the best system I know of for disposable addresses. The Yahoo account is forwarded to my Gmail account anyway, so it's the best of both worlds. It takes all of 10 seconds to create a new Yahoo disposable, and I can see them all in a list, which is a great reminder sometimes if I forget what I used for a particular site (though usually it's the same as the domain name).
As an introvert I've had many people confuse this with depression and unhappiness, and I fear the people doing this study might be falling into the same trap.
I don't think so, as they are actually testing for signal signs of depression, and correlating those with internet behaviours. There are established indicators for depression in psychology, others for introversion and what-have-you. But not a lot can be gleaned from that anyway. One can't start hypothesising intelligently about depression just from one apparently correlating activity.
Anyone who generalises about depression is going to get it wrong. People get depressed for different reasons, and behave differently with it. Statements like "depressed people are naturally seeking human contact" are just silly. Depression manifests in a lot of different ways and we don't know much about it yet.
I think you're talking about introversion, while the article is about depression.
> How much thought and value do people place in FaceBook updates?
You seem to be assuming everything on FB is a personal profile of some nondescript person. This isn't the case. I'm sure there are great pages you follow, and maybe a couple of great people, who offer interesting and useful content for your newsfeed.
I'm in Oz, I follow the ABC, a couple of community organisations, and subscribe to the posts of only 8 people I actually know - ones that don't post irrelevant crap all day, but things that may also be part of our real-life conversations.
Facebook is pretty useful if you use it selectively.
There actually is indication that FB is fumbling. They run on advertising, and advertisers are starting to wonder if the advertising works - or at least is worth the current level of spend. If FB is ever forced to reduce advertising fees, that will be a *major* loss of face. Currently we are pondering how much of their success is hype, but if fees go down, so does revenue and their last defence against doubt.
I'm also much like the OP, just over 40, no degree but lots of technical experience, freelancing for the past 8 years.
However I'm more interested in doing something that, like you, merge my skills and the more community/people interests I developed over my 30's. Could I ask what area of work you found that had that blend of interest and ability for you? I figure the more I ask people for their experiences, the more ideas I'll get. :)
Interesting. One way of thinking about it is a progression. Surviving till your teens, you could reproduce but not transfer very much knowledge onto the next generation. Surviving into your 20's, more experience and information is transferred.
So it follows that, for a species that survives mainly on skills & know-how not instinctively known, the more information that can be transferred from older people to younger, the better.
Therefore, the evolution of the *preference to have older people in your community*. It's not "middle-age" that evolved, as such. What probably evolved is the desire we have to lengthen our lifespan!
Perhaps the only reason we have a desire to live longer, is the "selfish gene" of passing as much knowledge to new generations as humanly possible.
Of course now we ignore old people, so there goes that theory. :)
My personal reason for never signing one is, the only reason to want me to sign one is so that it's easier to sue me in the future.
What's wrong with simply asking for a sunset clause? Perfectly reasonable and has been a feature in the ones I've seen and signed. You can talk about fight club once it's been around a few months and everyone knows about it anyway. My conditions usually are:
a) Specific to business processes and company "secrets", not technical knowledge related to my profession.
b) Sunset 6 months after interview if not chosen (that's long enough in this game), and don't tell me your overall business strategy - I only need to know that if you employ me.
c) If chosen to do the work, same as above, excluding all technical knowledge I gain on the job as a natural evolution of my own profession.
d) A "non-competitive" clause for maximum of 1 year - unless I decide the business plan is common enough (eg. a file hosting site) that the clause would seriously affect gaining future work in that time (very rare situation though).
Everyone's been fine with that so far, and I've been freelancing for several years. Also, it comes across as competent and professional.
CEOs are sometimes nervous just because they think they need to tell you *everything* about their business in an interview. I let them know that's not the case, and keep the discussion to technical requirements as much as possible. They generally feel more at ease after that.
How is it "invading" someone's privacy when they willingly give away their personal information to you?
Uh, in the same way the government looking over your shoulder to see how you vote is, even though you've turned up to do so of your own volition in broad daylight. Jesus, what a dumb question.