If you have old-school skills from the 70s and 80s there are probably tons of well-paid things to do with them, like embedded device programming, that pay more than your average "modern" language. Small devices are often programmed today in a similar way to big computers in the old days (ie. C and assembler). Loads of VB programs still running out there that need maintainers, which decreasing numbers of people know about or want to start learning. Lots of them in finance which will pay nicely, especially if you know about the older legacy versions and even more so if you know how to port them to newer versions to update them. Perl is still used everywhere too. If you insist on modernising, I suppose it's all about Python now, though we do lots of very Perl-like things using python regexes, and most of what you know about Perl will carry over there if you spend an afternoon looking at the syntax.
Why do people like to criticise diaspora so much -- it's currently running with 2 million users (https://diasp.eu/stats.html) and anyone can sign up just by going to joindiaspora.com, seems to have been working fine for some time for me.
Sure, it won't take over the whole world, but neither did linux or android at first, maybe one day they all will. In the mean time there's some quite fun geeky banter on the streams there, think of it as slashdot with media clips while it's still growing. Much more interesting than looking at baby photos from random people you don't actually like from your old school on facebook.
I think the last decade/has/ produced many big work advances. For example in the last couple of months at work I have: attended remote video meetings in Europe, the US and Africa without having travel or cause pollution, and opening up Africans to work on the same projects as us; routinely worked from home over fast broadband, reducing commuting and pollution massively; replaced all my books with Kindle pdfs, which give everyone on the planet access to everything ever written from their homes (which might be far from libraries, eg in Africa again); invested in funds spanning S America, China, Russia, Africa and the Middle East with a few mouse clicks; had purchases recommended to me my supermarket datamining that predicts what I want to buy and optimises its supply chains accordingly to massively reduce waste on shelves and in warehouses; rapid-prototyped my CAD designs; bought stuff made in China and distributed all over the world extremely cheaply and distributed via ebay; used wikipedia and social nets to find incredibly detailed infomration on everything I ever wanted to know, and to make contact with work collaborators for future projects all over the world. It's easy to forget that even in 2000 these were all just fantasies in Wired magazine. See Friendman's "The world is flat" for many more examples of how the IT revolution really has transformed how we work locally and internationally.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have old-school skills from the 70s and 80s there are probably tons of well-paid things to do with them, like embedded device programming, that pay more than your average "modern" language. Small devices are often programmed today in a similar way to big computers in the old days (ie. C and assembler). Loads of VB programs still running out there that need maintainers, which decreasing numbers of people know about or want to start learning. Lots of them in finance which will pay nicely, especially if you know about the older legacy versions and even more so if you know how to port them to newer versions to update them. Perl is still used everywhere too. If you insist on modernising, I suppose it's all about Python now, though we do lots of very Perl-like things using python regexes, and most of what you know about Perl will carry over there if you spend an afternoon looking at the syntax.
...though ironically it does now :-)
I wonder why google isn't indexing public diaspora pages then?
Why do people like to criticise diaspora so much -- it's currently running with 2 million users (https://diasp.eu/stats.html) and anyone can sign up just by going to joindiaspora.com, seems to have been working fine for some time for me. Sure, it won't take over the whole world, but neither did linux or android at first, maybe one day they all will. In the mean time there's some quite fun geeky banter on the streams there, think of it as slashdot with media clips while it's still growing. Much more interesting than looking at baby photos from random people you don't actually like from your old school on facebook.
Mine looks like this: https://joindiaspora.com/people/c66e3f4e39e7dfac
I think the last decade /has/ produced many big work advances. For example in the last couple of months at work I have: attended remote video meetings in Europe, the US and Africa without having travel or cause pollution, and opening up Africans to work on the same projects as us; routinely worked from home over fast broadband, reducing commuting and pollution massively; replaced all my books with Kindle pdfs, which give everyone on the planet access to everything ever written from their homes (which might be far from libraries, eg in Africa again); invested in funds spanning S America, China, Russia, Africa and the Middle East with a few mouse clicks; had purchases recommended to me my supermarket datamining that predicts what I want to buy and optimises its supply chains accordingly to massively reduce waste on shelves and in warehouses; rapid-prototyped my CAD designs; bought stuff made in China and distributed all over the world extremely cheaply and distributed via ebay; used wikipedia and social nets to find incredibly detailed infomration on everything I ever wanted to know, and to make contact with work collaborators for future projects all over the world. It's easy to forget that even in 2000 these were all just fantasies in Wired magazine. See Friendman's "The world is flat" for many more examples of how the IT revolution really has transformed how we work locally and internationally.