I think it would be a tragedy if humans stopped exploring space, but...
Is it appropriate for government agencies to conduct PR for their own pet projects or even missions?
Sure, I think it's a good cause, but should the ag department be lobbying for more food support and the EPA for more research on, say, nuclear-powered vehicles? What about if the army lobbied for support of the mounted cavalry?
Perhaps its the citizens who should set policy and the government who implements it, eh?
I wouldn't have thought a video game could have a need, although for a player I guess is something a game might need. The question is (perhaps I should have RTFA): how do they fill it? Some people fill their need for sex with ice cream.
Certainly this is news for nerds! Had it been the players' needs being filled with video games, well, that wouldn't be very interesting would it?
I prefer text mail but hardly anyone sends it any more. And outside the hacker community it seems you don't get much html mail...you get worse: a short note (e.g. "please see attached meeting summary") with a ONE PARAGRAPH WORD FILE ATTACHED!
mega-moronism. As a result the DoD will just get more word virus files and less html mail.
Wouldn't it be cool if regular programs had some kind of "move interface" mode? Clicking the send button could animate a folding up airletter and then *whoosh* as it transmitted? Cad software that made annoying beeps as you rotated the image? Funny, cycle-wasting beeps and whirling graphics as you performed some CPU-intensive operations?
It would make trade shows more fun and be great BOFH fodder!
For me, and I suspect many people, there's very little difference between spam and non-spam advertising.
Which isn't a good thing. "Advertising" has a certain amount of cultural acceptability (thus there's insufficient complaining when ads appear in schools, on trains, or on bus shelters). By getting themselves lumped in with advertising the spammers get a certain amount of "benefit of the doubt."
Of course we could be lucky and have the association go the other way....we can only hope.
Maybe the homeland security act argument is bogus, but given that he seems to think that the it's a vital defense device, perhaps he should try using the second amendment to the US constitution. That would trump the FCC act, if he could make it stick.
Buying insurance just on your own is expensive. There are various parameters you can fiddle to help (e.g. register kid and parents separately, though this means you don't share a deductible; set your deductible as high as possible -- here the highest I could get was $5000/yr, which really ends up being more like $10K), but it's really expensive -- we were paying about $300 a month and were in perfect health -- that was almost 4K + deductible per annum.
(it's even worse for a small company under 25 employees!)
If you're a member of the IEEE or any other "entrepreur" association you qualify for a group policy via them. That's usually a good deal. For example a quick search of "self-employed association" just showed as its first hit an association that offers health insurance. I have no connection and won't shill for them by including the URL.
If you live in CA I hear Kaiser is quite good though I've never used 'em myself.
Good luck. You'll find a lot of "well baby" visits will be needed in the first year or so. Well, at more than you need as an adult anyway. The insurance companies usually subsidise them because it's cheaper to catch something in the bud.
And finally, in all seriousness, consider moving to my home country, Australia. There's a preference for computer programmers under 40, and it's a great place to be or raise a kid. (though I live in California right now myself...)
Oh and have fun. One thing to be careful of / manage: I basically didn't work for the first couple of years after my kid was born and again when he was perhaps 4-6. That was really great. Try to find a way to balance the time with the family with making sure there's some regular income!
First, ignore the fact that it was an attempted solicitation of a minor. That's irrelevant to the issue.
It would seem to make intuitive sense that intensionally, IM is an electronic communication which is within the intentions of the legislators (sorry to slip into the language of formal logic here -- as we see below it hardly has a place in the law).
The problem is that the courts have not followed that same approach in other "obvious" cases. For example the fourth amendment to the US constitution seems clear in that people and their homes, cars, possessions and the like shouldn't be messed without a probable cause and warrant. But the courts have consistently chipped away at this (scanning your house via IR, looking into cars, seizure without a warrant, etc) by interpreting what the constitution says literally. If you accept that, you cannot accept this otherwise sensible judgement.
This morning, because of this thread, I listened to the radio on the way to work. One of the DJs was pushing the Zune pretty hard (in two separate inter-song banter sessions), and I think he was trying to do a good job because he sounded kinda natural except both times he rattled off the Zune tagline (not the "social" one but some other one) three times in about 90 seconds, which sounded weird.
What made it funny rather than sad was that when he wasn't talking about the Zune he kept mentioning the iPod ("yeah, I listen to blah, really loud blasting from my iPod, but when I pull up at a light..."). Now maybe it was involuntary because he had MP3 on the brain, and maybe it was a mind-game reaction to having been sold by management, but it really sounded like he spoke that way automatically.
I'm not sure I would have caught it had I not been paying attention.
My favorite is from a couple of years ago: a fun local DJ who makes it clear when he is trying to do a good job and when he's not (who I guess hated Comcast) had a placed ad to make. So he opened up a discussion with his co-DJ, something like, "Did you catch the new COMCAST video on demand service last night on COMCAST? It was great. Did you know COMCAST has so many channels, why COMCAST has channels for everyone? I enjoyed watching terms of endearment last night on COMCAST and I liked it so much I watched it again on COMCAST. In fact they have a terms of endearment channel on COMCAST that shows it 24 hours a day. In fact I think I'll say COMCAST again about 10 more times because the minute's not up: COMCAST COMCAST...." you get the idea.
If only all the ads were so good. At least I remember the product... and know to avoid it!
...usually it's pretty obvious that the story came from a company...
The problem is: how do you know?
Perhaps you only notice the poorly-done ones. After all, it's common to have radio DJs do spots for local businesses, which also is clearly an ad. But it's also common for DJs to work product mentions into the morning banter. The same applies to TV: how can you tell if that news segment on the local Coke plant was just a random filler or an ad placement by the bottler? What's the difference?
Yeah, perhaps I am in the minority, but a quick poll (10 iPods among us) yields a grand total of two who knew it could do anything but play music/videos/tv: me ('coz I read your article) and one guy who says he knew there was a clock but had not ever used 'em. So in my unscientific poll I am a minority.
Basically your article seemed to be: "Wireless. Same space as an iPod. Lame."
As for my comment: yeah, I realized (yes yes, just after pressing "submit") that I was totally wrong on the price. But though I have mod points right now I couldn't mod my own comment as '-1 factually wrong'
This is a ridiculous review. I have an iPod and don't want a Zune, but regardless, how many people use the world clock (I didn't even know my iPod had one -- nor would I care!)? Those pseudo "missing features" miss the point: it plays music, costs less, and sounds about the same.
For women's shoes the standard unit of measure is the Imelda. In your wife's case that would be a bit over 2%.
(My wife and her friends refer to anyone with more than about.025 imelda as a "shoe whore", a term they don't seem to consider in any way uncomplimentary.)
Yeah this post seems off-topic, but what the hell, it's a math post, and math is pretty important to celestial navigation!
What I really want can't be provided by Apple... a fast 320GB notebook drive. That would change my life.
Well, Apple won't sell it to you but you can buy it: there's a company that offers to replace your DVD drive with a hard disk. If you can function OK on the road without a CD/DVD drive (and use an external at home) then this will give you what you asked for.
Hmm, just found 'em: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/. They apparently consider it a self-install procedure! I'm not sure most people should Try It At Home but whatever.
Meanwhile, you've got a bunch of meat heads washing cars, taking donations, etc,
Maybe the silicon heads could wash some cars too? Who knows, some of those football donations might turn into chess club donations.
Last I heard, my head was made of meat too, though you'd risk Kuru (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)) were you to eat it.
dnnrly: ankhcraft has it right (see below for my credentials for why I say this). Your customers are presumably operating under GMP and/or GLP (the pharmaceutical equivalent of ISO9000 and which is all described in CFR Title 21). They need a basis for your attestation as to the function and performance of the product you provide. Your using vendors claiming to adhere to ISO 9000 is really just a (reasonable!) way for you to not do as much cross-checking on their execution. If you import the software package and review it you can then make whatever performance claims you feel comfortable making -- probably far more robust ones than you could about most of your other outside vendors!
Don't forget that you do have to do all these checks. As a pharma manufacturer I tell the FDA that I rely on CoAs from my vendors, but I rely on them only by getting samples from them, cross-checking their work, and then also cross-checking that on the raw materials that are actually used in manufacturing. And I check during the manufacturing process and after manufacture as well just in case!
But you can't reasonably do all this for, say, a whole O/S. It's just too big and too complicated. This is why you'll see medical systems (or avionics) running on LynxOS or Green Hills' OS rather than standard Linux, ITRON or eCos (though eCos is small enough that you could probably review it yourself too). Regretfully, some are starting to ship with Windows which I am sure has not been subject to the equivalent review.
So why am I so confident in saying this?
I am currently in the pharma business and running under GMP right now myself so am painfully aware of what it requires.
I've previously (in previous companies) had plenty of customers who themselves run under ISO 9000 (in telecom, avionics, automotive systems, medical devices, military etc) and so know what they demand of themselves and of their vendors (e.g: downtime requirements of less than 3 minutes per decade)
I was a cofounder of the first free software (we predated the term "Open Source") business, Cygnus Support, where we had those ISO 9000 customers and satisfied them.
you're not my company. You'll have to cross-check my suggestions yourself.
In other words I'm probably the only person on the planet who's been under GMP, under software ISO9000 and also been a free software developer.
Yeah, luckily most of the voice systems also allow you to type instead of talking, but even those that do often don't advertise it.
But what gets my goat (err, I didn't know I had a goat) is *holes like Verizon: I pay to call for phone number lookup and then have to spend extra time listening to an ad before going forward (for which I have to wait unless I wish to speak Spanish). You have to pay attention too or otherwise you miss when it changes to the actual reason for the call.
Creeps! Yet another reason for me to dump them when the contract is up.
At my last company the following people interviewed candidates:
The hiring manager
someone with particular expertise in the domain we needed and the candidate claimed to have (even if not in the team that person would be hired into)
all the team mates for that person (or many of them)
The idea is that we'd have a good feel for the person's abilities and how they fit in and they'd get a better idea of whom they'd be working with.
Whoever went first was supposed to ask a simple programming question which required answering it on the board. The asker was always someone senior so you didn't have a newby try to show off. We always told the candidate what we were doing, something along the lines of "Just solve this little problem on the board. It's OK if you miss a semicolon or something; the idea is just to get an idea of how you think." It's amazing how many people failed these trivial examples. If you flopped, we cut things short so as not to waste the candidate's time or (especially) ours. Examples:
"Here's an array of numbers. Please return another array with them sorted". (or sometimes "sort them in place"). One candidate allocated two temporary arrays and still managed to permute, but not sort the array. Oh and he returned a pointer to a locally-allocated array on the stack. Another just copied the array, and took a lot of prompting to figure out why. That guy actually sent me an alternate solution the next day -- and it was wrong too.
Another one (a systems programmer with "years of kernel experience") I asked how strace worked. After I explained what it did, he said it recompiled the code. I suggested that it could be run for a static binary to which I didn't have the source or symbols. He became abusive and started flaming me for "these stupid questions that don't relate to the job" (too bad for him system performance was the job area).
A couple of people ended up copying the array but when asked "are you sure?" would go "damn" and fix it. That was fine -- we assured them that it was OK and clearly just the stress of an interview. Then we'd tell them that they would be amazed at how many people couldn't pass and apologize for the elementary nature of the problem and say that that they shouldn't worry about the silly mistake which of course we all make from time to time even when not under pressure.
It's just as bad when a company rejects a candidate just for making a stupid mistake. In fact people who see the mistake and deal with it (even if they're embarassed) are people with integrity. Those are the people I would hope we all want to work with. Frankly it sucks to put them under pressure but I don't know a better way to squeeze out the impostors.
It's also important that the candidates get as much opportunity to see their future coworkers as possible. If they hate us, well, better they flush us up front than we all waste time.
At my current company we have a slightly different approach (unfortunate but unavoidable due to certain atypical circumstances) and can't do this. And a couple of ringers have snuck through.
The other one I always wonder about is why Dell feels the need to seal every single component inside the box of a new PC in plastic, even if it's just a single sheet of paper...
That's easy. It guarantees that everything is together in one piece (and marginally might reduce the chance of snagging). If your job is to pack a dell box it's then "grab one unit out of bin 462, place in box. Then grab one unit out of bin 874 and place in box" and so on. No need to write an additional sentence as to what constitutes "one unit".
Depends where you look, but basically don't worry
on
How Old is Too Old?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Surprisingly, lots of good advice so far. As someone who's started five companies and generated almost 1000 jobs, let me give you my perspective:
Some companies, generally big ones, will rule you out. Cynicism aside ("all companies are evil"), they, or rather the HR departments, use age as a shorthand for value, even though it's illegal. At 30 you'll be in the sweet spot for many of them, but without the necessary experience. Conclusion: most large companies will probably not be right for you (though exceptions exist, but they are few).
When I hire, I look for people with drive and the ability to control their lives. E.g. completing a degree is not crucial (some of the best never did) but shows that you can complete a long task. If you go back to school, especially after a hiatus, it shows either that you don't know what you want to do when you grow up and are aimless, or that you know how to pick yourself up and take control over your life. I don't expect 20 year olds to have that kind of understanding; hence doing it at 24 is actually a positive sign to me.
As another poster said: make sure you will be doing what you want and that you're not going back to school as a tool for decision avoidance (see previous point!). Try some somple programming out -- get a book, poke at your computer, take a short course at the local community college (need not go on your resume if you don't want). javascript, surprisingly, is a good introductory interactive tool since you can just press reload in your browser to see what happened.
Finally: from your post, you might find being a sysadmin fun. That's good because with a small amount of skill you can get a simple sysadmin job, even if it's just flipping backup tapes or babysitting servers at night. Once you're in the job you can go to school at night and you can also work your way up -- the "age thing" won't matter anyway. And the best sysadmins are programmers, but the vast majority are not, so again you can slide in and decide how much you want to have. Oh yeah: to contradict myself: these super-entry-level sysadmin jobs only exist at big companies, and are the kind they are least likely to worry about age at. Though again, they might worry about pointless certifications.
Anyway: seize the moment and go for it. The longer you dither the longer you will answer the question by default.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be a tragedy if humans stopped exploring space, but...
Is it appropriate for government agencies to conduct PR for their own pet projects or even missions?
Sure, I think it's a good cause, but should the ag department be lobbying for more food support and the EPA for more research on, say, nuclear-powered vehicles? What about if the army lobbied for support of the mounted cavalry?
Perhaps its the citizens who should set policy and the government who implements it, eh?
I wouldn't have thought a video game could have a need, although for a player I guess is something a game might need. The question is (perhaps I should have RTFA): how do they fill it? Some people fill their need for sex with ice cream.
Certainly this is news for nerds! Had it been the players' needs being filled with video games, well, that wouldn't be very interesting would it?
I prefer text mail but hardly anyone sends it any more. And outside the hacker community it seems you don't get much html mail...you get worse: a short note (e.g. "please see attached meeting summary") with a ONE PARAGRAPH WORD FILE ATTACHED!
mega-moronism. As a result the DoD will just get more word virus files and less html mail.
Pathetic....and in this case I don't mean DoD.
Wouldn't it be cool if regular programs had some kind of "move interface" mode? Clicking the send button could animate a folding up airletter and then *whoosh* as it transmitted? Cad software that made annoying beeps as you rotated the image? Funny, cycle-wasting beeps and whirling graphics as you performed some CPU-intensive operations?
It would make trade shows more fun and be great BOFH fodder!
Of course we could be lucky and have the association go the other way....we can only hope.
In any case homeland security is being used as a justification for trying to keep useful stuff out of peoples' hands, so his argument is self-defeating.
Err, why change now?
Buying insurance just on your own is expensive. There are various parameters you can fiddle to help (e.g. register kid and parents separately, though this means you don't share a deductible; set your deductible as high as possible -- here the highest I could get was $5000/yr, which really ends up being more like $10K), but it's really expensive -- we were paying about $300 a month and were in perfect health -- that was almost 4K + deductible per annum.
(it's even worse for a small company under 25 employees!)
If you're a member of the IEEE or any other "entrepreur" association you qualify for a group policy via them. That's usually a good deal. For example a quick search of "self-employed association" just showed as its first hit an association that offers health insurance. I have no connection and won't shill for them by including the URL.
If you live in CA I hear Kaiser is quite good though I've never used 'em myself.
Good luck. You'll find a lot of "well baby" visits will be needed in the first year or so. Well, at more than you need as an adult anyway. The insurance companies usually subsidise them because it's cheaper to catch something in the bud.
And finally, in all seriousness, consider moving to my home country, Australia. There's a preference for computer programmers under 40, and it's a great place to be or raise a kid. (though I live in California right now myself...)
Oh and have fun. One thing to be careful of / manage: I basically didn't work for the first couple of years after my kid was born and again when he was perhaps 4-6. That was really great. Try to find a way to balance the time with the family with making sure there's some regular income!
First, ignore the fact that it was an attempted solicitation of a minor. That's irrelevant to the issue.
It would seem to make intuitive sense that intensionally, IM is an electronic communication which is within the intentions of the legislators (sorry to slip into the language of formal logic here -- as we see below it hardly has a place in the law).
The problem is that the courts have not followed that same approach in other "obvious" cases. For example the fourth amendment to the US constitution seems clear in that people and their homes, cars, possessions and the like shouldn't be messed without a probable cause and warrant. But the courts have consistently chipped away at this (scanning your house via IR, looking into cars, seizure without a warrant, etc) by interpreting what the constitution says literally. If you accept that, you cannot accept this otherwise sensible judgement.
What incredible nerve you have actually posing news for nerds on this site!
I just went and made this tweak..thanks!
This morning, because of this thread, I listened to the radio on the way to work. One of the DJs was pushing the Zune pretty hard (in two separate inter-song banter sessions), and I think he was trying to do a good job because he sounded kinda natural except both times he rattled off the Zune tagline (not the "social" one but some other one) three times in about 90 seconds, which sounded weird.
What made it funny rather than sad was that when he wasn't talking about the Zune he kept mentioning the iPod ("yeah, I listen to blah, really loud blasting from my iPod, but when I pull up at a light..."). Now maybe it was involuntary because he had MP3 on the brain, and maybe it was a mind-game reaction to having been sold by management, but it really sounded like he spoke that way automatically.
I'm not sure I would have caught it had I not been paying attention.
My favorite is from a couple of years ago: a fun local DJ who makes it clear when he is trying to do a good job and when he's not (who I guess hated Comcast) had a placed ad to make. So he opened up a discussion with his co-DJ, something like, "Did you catch the new COMCAST video on demand service last night on COMCAST? It was great. Did you know COMCAST has so many channels, why COMCAST has channels for everyone? I enjoyed watching terms of endearment last night on COMCAST and I liked it so much I watched it again on COMCAST. In fact they have a terms of endearment channel on COMCAST that shows it 24 hours a day. In fact I think I'll say COMCAST again about 10 more times because the minute's not up: COMCAST COMCAST...." you get the idea.
If only all the ads were so good. At least I remember the product... and know to avoid it!
Unfortunately implementing EFI requires you to license Microsoft's FAT filesystem patent which was upheld at the beginning of this year by the PTO.
I added a dispassionate (NPV) comment about this to the EFI page in the Wikipedia but had it deleted. A pity.
Check out the link. The whole story makes it even funnier, and even more appropriate to this thread!
(obvDiscl: My only connections to that site are that I read it the other day and I have owned Apple products. Oh and called Apple support myself).
Perhaps you only notice the poorly-done ones. After all, it's common to have radio DJs do spots for local businesses, which also is clearly an ad. But it's also common for DJs to work product mentions into the morning banter. The same applies to TV: how can you tell if that news segment on the local Coke plant was just a random filler or an ad placement by the bottler? What's the difference?
Yeah, perhaps I am in the minority, but a quick poll (10 iPods among us) yields a grand total of two who knew it could do anything but play music/videos/tv: me ('coz I read your article) and one guy who says he knew there was a clock but had not ever used 'em. So in my unscientific poll I am a minority.
Basically your article seemed to be: "Wireless. Same space as an iPod. Lame."
As for my comment: yeah, I realized (yes yes, just after pressing "submit") that I was totally wrong on the price. But though I have mod points right now I couldn't mod my own comment as '-1 factually wrong'
This is a ridiculous review. I have an iPod and don't want a Zune, but regardless, how many people use the world clock (I didn't even know my iPod had one -- nor would I care!)? Those pseudo "missing features" miss the point: it plays music, costs less, and sounds about the same.
Of course it might not cost less for long....
For women's shoes the standard unit of measure is the Imelda. In your wife's case that would be a bit over 2%.
(My wife and her friends refer to anyone with more than about .025 imelda as a "shoe whore", a term they don't seem to consider in any way uncomplimentary.)
Yeah this post seems off-topic, but what the hell, it's a math post, and math is pretty important to celestial navigation!
OK, BUY NAFTA! then.
Don't forget that you do have to do all these checks. As a pharma manufacturer I tell the FDA that I rely on CoAs from my vendors, but I rely on them only by getting samples from them, cross-checking their work, and then also cross-checking that on the raw materials that are actually used in manufacturing. And I check during the manufacturing process and after manufacture as well just in case!
But you can't reasonably do all this for, say, a whole O/S. It's just too big and too complicated. This is why you'll see medical systems (or avionics) running on LynxOS or Green Hills' OS rather than standard Linux, ITRON or eCos (though eCos is small enough that you could probably review it yourself too). Regretfully, some are starting to ship with Windows which I am sure has not been subject to the equivalent review.
So why am I so confident in saying this?
In other words I'm probably the only person on the planet who's been under GMP, under software ISO9000 and also been a free software developer.
Yeah, luckily most of the voice systems also allow you to type instead of talking, but even those that do often don't advertise it.
But what gets my goat (err, I didn't know I had a goat) is *holes like Verizon: I pay to call for phone number lookup and then have to spend extra time listening to an ad before going forward (for which I have to wait unless I wish to speak Spanish). You have to pay attention too or otherwise you miss when it changes to the actual reason for the call.
Creeps! Yet another reason for me to dump them when the contract is up.
At my last company the following people interviewed candidates:
- The hiring manager
- someone with particular expertise in the domain we needed and the candidate claimed to have (even if not in the team that person would be hired into)
- all the team mates for that person (or many of them)
The idea is that we'd have a good feel for the person's abilities and how they fit in and they'd get a better idea of whom they'd be working with.Whoever went first was supposed to ask a simple programming question which required answering it on the board. The asker was always someone senior so you didn't have a newby try to show off. We always told the candidate what we were doing, something along the lines of "Just solve this little problem on the board. It's OK if you miss a semicolon or something; the idea is just to get an idea of how you think." It's amazing how many people failed these trivial examples. If you flopped, we cut things short so as not to waste the candidate's time or (especially) ours. Examples:
- "Here's an array of numbers. Please return another array with them sorted". (or sometimes "sort them in place"). One candidate allocated two temporary arrays and still managed to permute, but not sort the array. Oh and he returned a pointer to a locally-allocated array on the stack. Another just copied the array, and took a lot of prompting to figure out why. That guy actually sent me an alternate solution the next day -- and it was wrong too.
- Another one (a systems programmer with "years of kernel experience") I asked how strace worked. After I explained what it did, he said it recompiled the code. I suggested that it could be run for a static binary to which I didn't have the source or symbols. He became abusive and started flaming me for "these stupid questions that don't relate to the job" (too bad for him system performance was the job area).
A couple of people ended up copying the array but when asked "are you sure?" would go "damn" and fix it. That was fine -- we assured them that it was OK and clearly just the stress of an interview. Then we'd tell them that they would be amazed at how many people couldn't pass and apologize for the elementary nature of the problem and say that that they shouldn't worry about the silly mistake which of course we all make from time to time even when not under pressure.It's just as bad when a company rejects a candidate just for making a stupid mistake. In fact people who see the mistake and deal with it (even if they're embarassed) are people with integrity. Those are the people I would hope we all want to work with. Frankly it sucks to put them under pressure but I don't know a better way to squeeze out the impostors.
It's also important that the candidates get as much opportunity to see their future coworkers as possible. If they hate us, well, better they flush us up front than we all waste time.
At my current company we have a slightly different approach (unfortunate but unavoidable due to certain atypical circumstances) and can't do this. And a couple of ringers have snuck through.
- Some companies, generally big ones, will rule you out. Cynicism aside ("all companies are evil"), they, or rather the HR departments, use age as a shorthand for value, even though it's illegal. At 30 you'll be in the sweet spot for many of them, but without the necessary experience. Conclusion: most large companies will probably not be right for you (though exceptions exist, but they are few).
- When I hire, I look for people with drive and the ability to control their lives. E.g. completing a degree is not crucial (some of the best never did) but shows that you can complete a long task. If you go back to school, especially after a hiatus, it shows either that you don't know what you want to do when you grow up and are aimless, or that you know how to pick yourself up and take control over your life. I don't expect 20 year olds to have that kind of understanding; hence doing it at 24 is actually a positive sign to me.
- As another poster said: make sure you will be doing what you want and that you're not going back to school as a tool for decision avoidance (see previous point!). Try some somple programming out -- get a book, poke at your computer, take a short course at the local community college (need not go on your resume if you don't want). javascript, surprisingly, is a good introductory interactive tool since you can just press reload in your browser to see what happened.
Finally: from your post, you might find being a sysadmin fun. That's good because with a small amount of skill you can get a simple sysadmin job, even if it's just flipping backup tapes or babysitting servers at night. Once you're in the job you can go to school at night and you can also work your way up -- the "age thing" won't matter anyway. And the best sysadmins are programmers, but the vast majority are not, so again you can slide in and decide how much you want to have. Oh yeah: to contradict myself: these super-entry-level sysadmin jobs only exist at big companies, and are the kind they are least likely to worry about age at. Though again, they might worry about pointless certifications.Anyway: seize the moment and go for it. The longer you dither the longer you will answer the question by default.