I have to admit, that actually *is* sorta cool. Imagine, you can probably repair a bit on that computer with a well-bent paperclip. When everything goes down the drain, this thing will still be up and running, maintainable and you will be able to build your own spare parts for it using a regular toolbox and a soldering iron.
Then again, my very first computer, a PC 1402 Sharp Pocket Computer from 1986 with cashstrip printer is probably like a bazillion times faster and more powerfull than that thing. It would probalby take less than two weeks to replace the entire workflow with a single cheap-ass current programmable calculator and you could add some features along the way. That makes it quite strange too. Cool, but very strange.
1st Rule on scaling: If you have a scaling problem, you don't have a problem.
Wrong approach. Yes, many have said it and I'll say it again and it will remain true for all eternity.
If you think you've got the next Google or Facebook up your sleve - well so be it.
Build your app, use regular common sense when doing it and the rest just happens. I've handled upwards of 20 Million active users with user tracking and billing with a few thousand hits per second per product in an internet gaming company and I can tell you that when scaling with a product has to happen - it will, and if server duplication is done with Perl magic by a handfull of admins, cloning one drive to the next using a checklist on a wiki.
The thing you will need most when you have to scale is money. The time building the perfect scaling system from scratch from the get-go is a million times more worth if it is spent on building business contacts and getting VCs and Angels with good contacts and/or cash to invest on board. If your app isn't a total mess of spagetti code and ignores the most basic of architectual rules your better set for scaling than most large apps out there. For example: Click around Ebay for a few moments and try to imagine what's going on beind the scenes there, and think of how it grew and how and when Ebay started out. I'm currently working on a financial app for a *very* large international bank. The apps foundation is 8 year old copy-pasted & slightly modified grey goo of Dreamweaver HTML/JS and anti-object oriented PHP 4, an app so bizare it defies any description - and yet it is the key product of the shop and beats the competing Java app in terms of usability and flexibility.
Anybody here will tell you that scaling a PHP app to a billion users won't work and you should forget PHP right away. And yet Facebook is here and they're scaling pretty well as far as I can tell. They even got a few devs working on a PHP JIT compiler (HipHop) the last few years. Again, as you see: Scaling problems are *exactly* the kind of problems you want to have.
Bottom line: Make it work, make it beautifull and worry about scaling when it happens. All else is nonsense.
P.S.: Premature scaling worries aside, in terms of technology today I'd go for Nginx and JavaScript in the Front and Back, using Node.js as the server-side technology. It seems stable enough to build something serious with it and you've got one PL for both server and client. It's like in the good old days of Netscape Webserver.... My 2 cents.
Chromebooks are specifically designed for that demografic/generation of users that confuse(d) Google and the Web (the internet userbase that roughly joined around 2005) and those that came after that.
Google is spot on with this strategy and I know at least a handfull of users for which Chrome OS would be one of the better choices for an OS.
After quite some hefty turmoil in the last few months I downgraded my long-term lifestyle expectancies a bit and took on a job as a web-developer (LAMP, HTML5/CSS3/Ajax - the whole lot). The job pays 10000 Euros less than my last one but is in a neat small company building and maintaining PHP applications for a boring but solid vertical market.... Anyway: The the companies boss has a policy of providing a top-grade work environment. I got a brand new 27" iMac - we (5 employees, 2 part-time freelancers) all are using either 27" iMacs or MacBooks with 27" Tunderbolt displays, we all have topg-grade Duo-Back Chairs and, this is a very good thing I've come to notice in the 2 weeks I'm there - we all have a desk that can change its height electrically. With the simple push of a button we can raise our desks to standing height, which is a huge plus when your stitting in front of the computer 8,5 hrs a day. Have a little presentation or demo-discussion for one or two co-workers? Raise your desk to standing height and all gather around for little stand-in.... I actually find it fun to work at the office.
Bottom line: Better work environments pay off almost instantly. If you want to do some good, you'll try and get this across to your boss.
Add a working zero-fuss DB Structure and Data Sync to some DB Tool project. Sequel Pro, the web-based PHPmyAdmin or something else. That's a feature desperately needed.
Age discrimination will be a problem, as people have mentioned allready. Allthough, "discrimination" against people who simply aren't good enough is going to be your problem aswell.
However, if you want to move to the desk doing smart work, I'd suggest you learn to programm stuff that is close to your current field. What are those 'building products' you talk about? AC, climate controll, heating, intercom devices, etc.? Those need programming and network admining don't they? And the probably have specialized programming environments and programming languages you have to work in to make them to the special stuff, configure them and so on.
You should simply get into doing stuff closely related to you current field. You should now the brands and vendors of 'building products' that need regular programming and maintenance and your experience 'in the field' should give you an extra advantage on top of that, if it only is bragging rights and resumee fluff.
Moving from QBasic into stuff like serious web or mobile development is something you probably would fail at. And trust me: It's something you do not want to do anyway. Doing semi-embedded stuff coming from the MS-DOS times on the other hand is just right up your alley.
I believe, and have been believing for more than a decade now, that we are in a transition into a new era, which would best be simply described as an age of cyberpunk. Giant quasi-national corps and mainly administrative nations ruling large chunks of regular ultra-economized life with the fringes morphing into different, post-industrial citizen societies alltogether, with areas where money isn't worth as much as reputation or skill or simular non-monetary values such as honor or membership in some group like something quasi-religious or something. Human interaction will be paid for, stuff and convenience will come free.
Pick your standard William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel on the subject and you get the picture of what I mean.
The simple fact is: we are living in paradise with a bizare abundance of things quite a few of which would have been considered impossible in the 50ies.
The shit our field has been whishing for humanity all along has finally arrived. You can get computers that would have been considered borderline magic two and a half decades ago and would have taken up a mid-sized 5-story building; so powerfull, lightweight, easy to use and with software usefull and manifold beyond comprehension for a single individual, so cheap, they can be payed for with 4 days of regular manual unskilled labor!
Just last night I saw a poster of an offering for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi for 250 Euros. Two-hundred and fifty fucking euros! I payed more than 2 times that much for my friggin Sony MD700 Minidisk player back in 1997, a device so old-school in its tech and so single-purpose, it close to appears to come out of the early steam age compared to my HTC Flyer.
The truth is we've basically just about arrived at where we wanted to go. 5 years into the future algorithms and large computing clusters won't just be interpreting language, they will be translating it, and quite probably in real time. Tablets will have print resolution, weigh less than a book, have 15+ hours of uptime of the grid, be forever connected for a token fee and do *anything* you would want to be able to do with such a device... and then some. And they will cost as much as a round-trip to the next big city.
Jobs are dropping left, right and center because they aren't needed anymore. Imagine when paper documents have finally moved out. An entire field of jobs will simply vanish.
I made compareatively big bucks developing in Flash/AS3 5 years ago. Proprietary lock-in stuff. Neat, but adobe totally missed the touch-screen dev train. Tough luck. Now I'm lucky if I even get one gig in that field every two years. I'll probably be doing specialized vertical market PHP and webdev the next few years for less money and after that, who knows? Even the LAMP stack is so old-tech I feel like in an entertainment programme when developing for it.... Maybe afters this I'll become a massager for old lonely ladies and do touch-screen development just for the kicks on the side.
Bottom line: The world our field lives in and caters to is changing. Fast. We're seeing to that ourselves. It's the age of cyberpunk, plain and simple. That's what I call it anyway.
The answer is "Yes, these new-fangled non-pc devices do cover everyday tasks for the layman user and thus are a good full-time replacement for a PC."
Personally I'd check out the Asus Transformer and the Chromebook for devices with KB integrated, and the Google Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 line of tablets.
Remember to clarify a few things first:
Printing required? Data transfer / backup required? Optical media reading required? (Audio CD, DVD Video?)
There are solutions for 1 and 2, especially on Android, some involve using WiFi for data transfer, so your mom would maybe need some kind of external WiFi HDD or something. If optical media is required, you'd have to look carefully at what's needed and search for an apropriate drive.... Dunno if WiFi optical drives exist.
All those things aside, if your mom isn't a developer, designer or about to go into video editing or something and doesn't need a full M$ Office suite because her friends all use it to send stuff around, then a modern tablet is a very good computer.
In terms of the field, there are two basic things you can aim for: One of the popular fields (Web, Mobile, Games) or the big-bucks||safe-job fields (ERP, non-trivial Databases (big-table or big-company), *nix maintenance, embedded systems, specialized vertical markets, Enterprise Client/Server, etc.)
It depends on what you want to do.
Once you've chosen your field, you choose your technology and then your PL. For Web and Mobile, using anything else than free open source technologies these days is silly and pointless, for Games and all the other stuff it probably will be some proprietary closed source stack/technology.
The PL itself should be an official independant standard either way. Which PL it will be in the end depends entirely on the choices made above.
If you want to make a solid and future-safe switch, I'd stick to the chosen field and become an expert. Better jobs that way.... Unless the technology goes entirely belly up. Happens rarely, but was the case just recently with Flash/AS3 - which, for example, got me by the balls, since AS programming was my main source of income until two years ago.
Give him a new mail account. And tell him not to trust anything, even if you sent it. And tell him that mails are basically electronic postcards that can be easyly searched, scanned and manipulated, even the sender and the reciever. If he's still with you, tell him a bit about mailheaders and look at them with him.... Although I personally wouldn't bother going to much into the details of email, they are insane anyway, in my opinion. (The Type A email security incident you describe pretty much proves my point).
Clean his system, give him a fresh thunderbird install with a new account and - if he fell like doing this - set up an encrypted mail communication between you and him. Explain which part of that makes it a sufficiently secure means of communication and which part can still be compromised (his, your's or anybody elses system).
If he's a person who's usage patterns are covered by Ubuntu, offer to move his system to that.... I got my daughter an ubuntu netbook for her birthday. The amount of hassle-freeness is refreshing. It does suck that sound and mic are causing trouble on Ubuntu 12LTS, but that's a minor tradeoff for the lack of headaches I've gotten in return.
I've had this sort of idea quite a few times. A few simple multiplayer games and a batch of cheap zero-fuss compatible controllers. The Android devices are open and widespread enough to make this sort of thing commercially viable. And these guys have on litte edge over the Ouya: They're focusing on their own set of launch games built around console multiplayer. Wouldn't if be cool if you could play their games on the Ouya using their controllers? Their controllers look more complex and seem to cater more to the hardcore console gaming community, but this is tres cool none-the-less.
I like they way things are heading with this new Android console gaming craze.... Having been in the gaming industry myseld in the past, I'm seriously thinking about maybe developing a title for this approaching market.
Pretty good healthcare in some parts of the world. Arabia and parts of the Byzantine Era, for instance, were a high culture more than a thousand years ago with complete health care coverage and other public services. Including stuff you'd have considered high-tech right up to magical in other parts of the world. Water clocks, aquaeducts, mechanical devices, sophisticated smithery and metal working, a school system, superiour math, accounting and efficiency measurement techniques, etc. As for the public healthcare, there are written acounts of people being thrown out of hospitals because they were still enjoying the pampering even though they were well again.
Which, on a sidenote, goes to show how things go down the drain once religious fanatics take over.
I give Ouya a solid chance to disrupt console gaming and living-room computing on a totally new level. The two simple facts that it is a) dirt cheap and b) anybody who has one can develop for it, carries some hefty oomph that is probably already making some Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo execs getting nervous as we speak. I say it is no coincidence that Nintendo has anounced their Wii U Devkit will be free of charge for anybody who wants one.
If this baby gains critical mass, which I hope and expect it will, it could very well become the best selling piece of electronics hardware in history. Bulk produce the Ouya beyond a few million pieces and you have a console with solid general purpose computing capabilities that most of earths population can afford. If that isn't killer potential, I don't know what is.
It looks weird. Like a 2000ish color Palm with a PhoneKB attached. This device probably won't take the lead because it doesn't have enough of those flashy elaborated calculator buttons. Seriously, the HP50G or simular devices simply looks cooler and has a more sturdy 'professional-looking' engineering-feel finish. That's my theory anyway.
But, as for smaller non-graphing calculators in general though, I have to say that Casio beats TI and the others hands down. I just bought the Casio FX86 DE Plus (it's the most powerfull permitted in exams at my College) and like it's predecessor the naturaly display (textbook style entry) along with the term-buffer, 7 variables and value table generation (the last step before grafing) are just plain awesome. Wouldn't want to go without it.
IMHO, git is a shining example of bad design. You need too much info on how it works on the inside, to be able to use it. It is simply way too complicated. I regret the fact that it seems to be the most popular VCS for open-source projects. I'd prefer something simpler like bzr.
Git is very often explained wrong. Especially for those brain-damaged by the use of CVS or SVN. (I myself was/am too). And yes, 'brain-damaged' is a quite fitting term in this case. Think switching from Basic to OOP Java. That's the magnitude we're talking about here.
A matter of fact is that Git is extremely easy to understand, as every concept it covers is exactly everything you need to know about versioning in order to understand versioning correctly. The main problem I think is that with distributed Git, everything one knows about Subversion as a commit actually is covered by 'git push' which, as it involves merging two single repositories, allways includes a merge. Imperative merges are rarely done in regular use of centralized subversion, which is why Git may seem cumbersome initially. However, it never gets more complicated that understanding that concept of 'git push', your regular special-case superset of a merge. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of the Git workflow. Since basically everything team related always has a merge involved, merges begin to lose their scare and become a part of every-day regular versioning usage. Which is exactly how it should be.
Once one has gotten over the initial speed bump in learning, especially the one involved in moving from Subversion to Git, the insights are bedazzling. If you've used Git correctly in a Subversion replacement scenario, going back to SVN appears like going from Linux to DOS and you finally understand what Linus Torwalds was ragging about in that famous Google TechTalk on Git. And that's just for the regular versioning stuff you know from SVN, and not even including things like 'git rebase' or other luxuries.
After moving from SVN to Git - which took a few weeks time to get the hang of - I have to say that I now would second almost everything Linus Torwalds has to rag on about Subversion. Whenever I'm at my job where we use SVN, it feels like I've stepped back a decade or two. The crappyness of subversion and the elegance of git are simply unfathomable if you haven't used both extensively in versioning your projects. I personally find that even if you use Git as a drop in replacement for Subversion, mimicking the workflows including a centralised repos only used for pushing towards and pulling from, it still is light-years ahead of Subversion in every (un)imaginable way. Even the small things like configuring your ignores compare like Linux and DOS commandline between Git and Subversion respectively.
My KO criteria for Git 2-3 years ago used to be the lack of usable GUIs for Git and the abundance of mature SVN GUIs. However, today I'd stick with Git, even if all GitGUIs would vanish overnight.
My conclusion: I strongly suggest you bite the bullet and wrap your head around what that what appears first as some arcane concept of Git and get to use it regularly. You'll very quickly find that Git has it right and Subversion has it wrong in countless ways you weren't even aware of. That's my experience anyway.... The downside of that will be, of course, that you will lose your blissfull ignorance of the crappyness of subversion and will suffer whenever required to use it, be it at your job or elsewhere.:-)
Seriously. Modern ovens are the epitome of tens of thousands of years of cooking. And quite hightech too. Doesn't get any geekier than that. Frying with an induction pan maybe, but you asked about turkey and that goes into the oven.
Seems as though the patent is legit. Although it's not nice of them to sue without talking to the From1 builders first.... Or did they attempt to do that and got rejected? If so, it's their given right to start legal action. Could Form1 licence the patent is the next question I'd ask.
"Techie" != Software Engineer and with 40 you shouldn't be calling yourself software engineer anymore. Software Architect and Consultant maybe.... It's partly marketing but there's also more to it:
With 40 one should be well their way to becoming at least half way familiar with management procedures. Not because it's cool, but it's the only thing that causes more wisdom and experience to make sense to anyone who would want to make use of it. I may be way smarter and more experienced than most of the people I work with, but if I can not leverage that experience by providing some sort of usefull leadership, I'm of lesser use that the 20 year old coder who sits in the corner doing stuff, simply because I'm more experienced, ask more money and put up with less shit.... I bicker more than my comrades, but I should be in a position where this is an *advantage* to my boss.
As far as the general observation of software developer shelf-life, I'd basically second what is said in the GP.
Bottom line: Always have a fallback and be prepared to proactively work on your career, also in terms of leadership and softskills and be prepared to move in to a position where you don't get paid for the work you do but for the responsibilities you take. Then software engineer shelf-life isn't a problem, it's simply a stepping stone on the usual career ladder.
Seriously, AFAICT, there are many FOSS VM solutions out there by now. And from what I've heard, none of them are extremely difficult to set up or run. They just follow different obvious or more hidden concepts and strategies, and thus may be suited better for certain setups. But as I say, a good FOSS project will have a good website, either by dedicated people who respect their webdesigners (allways a good sign of a professional non-elitist crew) or build by a dedicated company that puts money into the project.
Enter FOSS VM into Google, broadly scan the websites and take the one that 'looks' best and take it from there. If you run into requirements or usage scenarios that don't fit the one you then know you want to cover, switch.
I've never understood the Gnome hype to begin with.
I did like the fact that FOSS has two large desktop kits competing each other - that is a neat luxury - but the hype about Gnome I couldn't understand. The only thing Gnome really had going for it, compared to KDE or generic custom WM setups like a WindowMaker environment, in my opinion, was that you could, back then in 2001, with a litte work, get your desktop look totally different and awesome compared to anything else on the planet. But that was a large part to the relatively hassle-free GTK theming, and not on behalf of Gnome. And the people who did that usually did it using Enlightenment as their main environment as the way better choice anyway. And even without E, in my opinion WM or some default Fluxbox setup allways looks better than a bland and somewhat half-assed Gnome UI.
For the better part of the last decade Nautilus was flaky software in beta stage compared to KDEs Konqueror. Konqueror would kick Nautiluses ass up and down the street in terms of features and usability. It was the best FM on the entire plantet, and probably still is... although I haven't been keeping up with all the details, changes and redos in the FOSS Desktop world since about 2006 so I couldn't really say. FOSS developers have a tendency to break things just to redo entire core-pieces of code or come up with new projects.... What was that FM thing for KDE a few years back? Dolphin or something?... Dunno, didn't care. I just remember thinking: "Oh, great, some guy fucking up Konqueror and thinking he can do better than about a decade of FM projekt work. Great."... Anyway, I am now using Gnome (2.something) on debian stable because it is the default and it's still way better than windows, but it does bug me with shit I'd expect not to have to put up with in 2012. The Filemanager (still nautilus? couldn't tell) wets its pants when accessing a dir across samba with the svn extension blocking the FM for minutes. Firefox has rendering errors in the tabs, and while the desktop pager works as expected, as far as I can tell it looks very much the same as it did eleven years ago in 2001. And even then E and WM had pagers at least as good, and you could run and customize them with a few lines of easy configging.
With KDE its a simular thing, althoug I'd say they did (and do) way better with the integrated desktop thing. KDE allways had Windows-style performance hog qualities, but they *did* offer the full Desktop experience. I'd bet that to this very day a well configured KDE is the best GUI on the planet, on a machine that can handle the workload. And yes, I know the Mac, I'm typing this on an MB Air with Snow Leopard. However, it wasn't that the KDE team hadn't also been smoking their share of crack while coding. Some dimwhit back in the 90ies had the brilliant Idea to copy the entire Windows KB shortcuts and make them KDE default, thus fucking with the entire userbase of opinion leaders that actually cared about them: The core FOSS unix crowd. As far as I know it has been that way since then. Granted, rare things are as easy to config as KB shortcuts in KDE, but come on! That's, in my book, at least as bad a markting move as Gnome is doing now with v3. Allthough I have to say that ever since Gnome v3 came about posts about gnome on slashdot have at least trippled.... Maybe not so bad marketing after all. Gnome is refreshing its mindshare with its moves, that's for sure.
Whatever way you put it, the real anoyances with Linux on the desktop are still the same they were 15 years ago when I started using it, and they have nothing to do with wether the Gnome (or any other desktop or WM) crew has decided to make a paradigm shift or not.
I've seen the screens of Gnome 3, I've installed the newest Ubuntu with Unity on a netbook for my daughter (yes, yes, odd and dumbed down, but it's not the end of the world there are some neat ideas in Unity and the Terminal works as exp
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I have to admit, that actually *is* sorta cool. Imagine, you can probably repair a bit on that computer with a well-bent paperclip. When everything goes down the drain, this thing will still be up and running, maintainable and you will be able to build your own spare parts for it using a regular toolbox and a soldering iron.
Then again, my very first computer, a PC 1402 Sharp Pocket Computer from 1986 with cashstrip printer is probably like a bazillion times faster and more powerfull than that thing. It would probalby take less than two weeks to replace the entire workflow with a single cheap-ass current programmable calculator and you could add some features along the way. That makes it quite strange too. Cool, but very strange.
My 2 cents.
1st Rule on scaling: If you have a scaling problem, you don't have a problem.
Wrong approach. Yes, many have said it and I'll say it again and it will remain true for all eternity.
If you think you've got the next Google or Facebook up your sleve - well so be it.
Build your app, use regular common sense when doing it and the rest just happens. I've handled upwards of 20 Million active users with user tracking and billing with a few thousand hits per second per product in an internet gaming company and I can tell you that when scaling with a product has to happen - it will, and if server duplication is done with Perl magic by a handfull of admins, cloning one drive to the next using a checklist on a wiki.
The thing you will need most when you have to scale is money. The time building the perfect scaling system from scratch from the get-go is a million times more worth if it is spent on building business contacts and getting VCs and Angels with good contacts and/or cash to invest on board. If your app isn't a total mess of spagetti code and ignores the most basic of architectual rules your better set for scaling than most large apps out there. For example: Click around Ebay for a few moments and try to imagine what's going on beind the scenes there, and think of how it grew and how and when Ebay started out. I'm currently working on a financial app for a *very* large international bank. The apps foundation is 8 year old copy-pasted & slightly modified grey goo of Dreamweaver HTML/JS and anti-object oriented PHP 4, an app so bizare it defies any description - and yet it is the key product of the shop and beats the competing Java app in terms of usability and flexibility.
Anybody here will tell you that scaling a PHP app to a billion users won't work and you should forget PHP right away. And yet Facebook is here and they're scaling pretty well as far as I can tell. They even got a few devs working on a PHP JIT compiler (HipHop) the last few years. Again, as you see: Scaling problems are *exactly* the kind of problems you want to have.
Bottom line:
Make it work, make it beautifull and worry about scaling when it happens. All else is nonsense.
P.S.: ... My 2 cents.
Premature scaling worries aside, in terms of technology today I'd go for Nginx and JavaScript in the Front and Back, using Node.js as the server-side technology. It seems stable enough to build something serious with it and you've got one PL for both server and client. It's like in the good old days of Netscape Webserver.
Good luck.
Chromebooks are specifically designed for that demografic/generation of users that confuse(d) Google and the Web (the internet userbase that roughly joined around 2005) and those that came after that.
Google is spot on with this strategy and I know at least a handfull of users for which Chrome OS would be one of the better choices for an OS.
After quite some hefty turmoil in the last few months I downgraded my long-term lifestyle expectancies a bit and took on a job as a web-developer (LAMP, HTML5/CSS3/Ajax - the whole lot). The job pays 10000 Euros less than my last one but is in a neat small company building and maintaining PHP applications for a boring but solid vertical market. ... Anyway: The the companies boss has a policy of providing a top-grade work environment. I got a brand new 27" iMac - we (5 employees, 2 part-time freelancers) all are using either 27" iMacs or MacBooks with 27" Tunderbolt displays, we all have topg-grade Duo-Back Chairs and, this is a very good thing I've come to notice in the 2 weeks I'm there - we all have a desk that can change its height electrically. With the simple push of a button we can raise our desks to standing height, which is a huge plus when your stitting in front of the computer 8,5 hrs a day. Have a little presentation or demo-discussion for one or two co-workers? Raise your desk to standing height and all gather around for little stand-in. ... I actually find it fun to work at the office.
Bottom line: Better work environments pay off almost instantly. If you want to do some good, you'll try and get this across to your boss.
My 2 cents.
Add a working zero-fuss DB Structure and Data Sync to some DB Tool project. Sequel Pro, the web-based PHPmyAdmin or something else. That's a feature desperately needed.
My 2 cents.
Age discrimination will be a problem, as people have mentioned allready. Allthough, "discrimination" against people who simply aren't good enough is going to be your problem aswell.
However, if you want to move to the desk doing smart work, I'd suggest you learn to programm stuff that is close to your current field. What are those 'building products' you talk about? AC, climate controll, heating, intercom devices, etc.? Those need programming and network admining don't they? And the probably have specialized programming environments and programming languages you have to work in to make them to the special stuff, configure them and so on.
You should simply get into doing stuff closely related to you current field. You should now the brands and vendors of 'building products' that need regular programming and maintenance and your experience 'in the field' should give you an extra advantage on top of that, if it only is bragging rights and resumee fluff.
Moving from QBasic into stuff like serious web or mobile development is something you probably would fail at. And trust me: It's something you do not want to do anyway. Doing semi-embedded stuff coming from the MS-DOS times on the other hand is just right up your alley.
Good luck.
My 2 cents.
I believe, and have been believing for more than a decade now, that we are in a transition into a new era, which would best be simply described as an age of cyberpunk. Giant quasi-national corps and mainly administrative nations ruling large chunks of regular ultra-economized life with the fringes morphing into different, post-industrial citizen societies alltogether, with areas where money isn't worth as much as reputation or skill or simular non-monetary values such as honor or membership in some group like something quasi-religious or something. Human interaction will be paid for, stuff and convenience will come free.
Pick your standard William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel on the subject and you get the picture of what I mean.
The simple fact is: we are living in paradise with a bizare abundance of things quite a few of which would have been considered impossible in the 50ies.
The shit our field has been whishing for humanity all along has finally arrived. You can get computers that would have been considered borderline magic two and a half decades ago and would have taken up a mid-sized 5-story building; so powerfull, lightweight, easy to use and with software usefull and manifold beyond comprehension for a single individual, so cheap, they can be payed for with 4 days of regular manual unskilled labor!
Just last night I saw a poster of an offering for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi for 250 Euros. Two-hundred and fifty fucking euros! I payed more than 2 times that much for my friggin Sony MD700 Minidisk player back in 1997, a device so old-school in its tech and so single-purpose, it close to appears to come out of the early steam age compared to my HTC Flyer.
The truth is we've basically just about arrived at where we wanted to go. 5 years into the future algorithms and large computing clusters won't just be interpreting language, they will be translating it, and quite probably in real time. Tablets will have print resolution, weigh less than a book, have 15+ hours of uptime of the grid, be forever connected for a token fee and do *anything* you would want to be able to do with such a device ... and then some. And they will cost as much as a round-trip to the next big city.
Jobs are dropping left, right and center because they aren't needed anymore. Imagine when paper documents have finally moved out. An entire field of jobs will simply vanish.
I made compareatively big bucks developing in Flash/AS3 5 years ago. Proprietary lock-in stuff. Neat, but adobe totally missed the touch-screen dev train. Tough luck. Now I'm lucky if I even get one gig in that field every two years. I'll probably be doing specialized vertical market PHP and webdev the next few years for less money and after that, who knows? Even the LAMP stack is so old-tech I feel like in an entertainment programme when developing for it. ... Maybe afters this I'll become a massager for old lonely ladies and do touch-screen development just for the kicks on the side.
Bottom line: The world our field lives in and caters to is changing. Fast. We're seeing to that ourselves.
It's the age of cyberpunk, plain and simple. That's what I call it anyway.
My 2 cents.
The answer is "Yes, these new-fangled non-pc devices do cover everyday tasks for the layman user and thus are a good full-time replacement for a PC."
Personally I'd check out the Asus Transformer and the Chromebook for devices with KB integrated, and the Google Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 line of tablets.
Remember to clarify a few things first:
Printing required?
Data transfer / backup required?
Optical media reading required? (Audio CD, DVD Video?)
There are solutions for 1 and 2, especially on Android, some involve using WiFi for data transfer, so your mom would maybe need some kind of external WiFi HDD or something. ... Dunno if WiFi optical drives exist.
If optical media is required, you'd have to look carefully at what's needed and search for an apropriate drive.
All those things aside, if your mom isn't a developer, designer or about to go into video editing or something and doesn't need a full M$ Office suite because her friends all use it to send stuff around, then a modern tablet is a very good computer.
My 2 cents.
There is no such thing as intelligence, only interest. - Richard Feynman
Choose the field, then the language.
In terms of the field, there are two basic things you can aim for: One of the popular fields (Web, Mobile, Games) or the big-bucks||safe-job fields (ERP, non-trivial Databases (big-table or big-company), *nix maintenance, embedded systems, specialized vertical markets, Enterprise Client/Server, etc.)
It depends on what you want to do.
Once you've chosen your field, you choose your technology and then your PL. For Web and Mobile, using anything else than free open source technologies these days is silly and pointless, for Games and all the other stuff it probably will be some proprietary closed source stack/technology.
The PL itself should be an official independant standard either way. Which PL it will be in the end depends entirely on the choices made above.
If you want to make a solid and future-safe switch, I'd stick to the chosen field and become an expert. Better jobs that way. ... Unless the technology goes entirely belly up. Happens rarely, but was the case just recently with Flash/AS3 - which, for example, got me by the balls, since AS programming was my main source of income until two years ago.
Good luck.
My 2 cents.
Actually Agent Smith compared us to a virus, rather than a microbe
It's the smell!
Give him a new mail account. And tell him not to trust anything, even if you sent it. And tell him that mails are basically electronic postcards that can be easyly searched, scanned and manipulated, even the sender and the reciever. If he's still with you, tell him a bit about mailheaders and look at them with him. ... Although I personally wouldn't bother going to much into the details of email, they are insane anyway, in my opinion. (The Type A email security incident you describe pretty much proves my point).
Clean his system, give him a fresh thunderbird install with a new account and - if he fell like doing this - set up an encrypted mail communication between you and him. Explain which part of that makes it a sufficiently secure means of communication and which part can still be compromised (his, your's or anybody elses system).
If he's a person who's usage patterns are covered by Ubuntu, offer to move his system to that. ... I got my daughter an ubuntu netbook for her birthday. The amount of hassle-freeness is refreshing. It does suck that sound and mic are causing trouble on Ubuntu 12LTS, but that's a minor tradeoff for the lack of headaches I've gotten in return.
Good luck.
... I think I'm switching to Haiku.
*Tadum* *Crash* *Thud*
I've had this sort of idea quite a few times. A few simple multiplayer games and a batch of cheap zero-fuss compatible controllers. The Android devices are open and widespread enough to make this sort of thing commercially viable. And these guys have on litte edge over the Ouya: They're focusing on their own set of launch games built around console multiplayer. Wouldn't if be cool if you could play their games on the Ouya using their controllers? Their controllers look more complex and seem to cater more to the hardcore console gaming community, but this is tres cool none-the-less.
I like they way things are heading with this new Android console gaming craze. ... Having been in the gaming industry myseld in the past, I'm seriously thinking about maybe developing a title for this approaching market.
My 2 cents.
Don't have one at my desk. Don't really miss it. Can take the phone from my co-worker if I need to call out. We have no shortage of phones at work.
What health care was there 200 generations ago?
Pretty good healthcare in some parts of the world. Arabia and parts of the Byzantine Era, for instance, were a high culture more than a thousand years ago with complete health care coverage and other public services. Including stuff you'd have considered high-tech right up to magical in other parts of the world. Water clocks, aquaeducts, mechanical devices, sophisticated smithery and metal working, a school system, superiour math, accounting and efficiency measurement techniques, etc. As for the public healthcare, there are written acounts of people being thrown out of hospitals because they were still enjoying the pampering even though they were well again.
Which, on a sidenote, goes to show how things go down the drain once religious fanatics take over.
I give Ouya a solid chance to disrupt console gaming and living-room computing on a totally new level.
The two simple facts that it is a) dirt cheap and b) anybody who has one can develop for it, carries some hefty oomph that is probably already making some Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo execs getting nervous as we speak. I say it is no coincidence that Nintendo has anounced their Wii U Devkit will be free of charge for anybody who wants one.
If this baby gains critical mass, which I hope and expect it will, it could very well become the best selling piece of electronics hardware in history. Bulk produce the Ouya beyond a few million pieces and you have a console with solid general purpose computing capabilities that most of earths population can afford. If that isn't killer potential, I don't know what is.
My 2 cents.
It looks weird. Like a 2000ish color Palm with a PhoneKB attached. This device probably won't take the lead because it doesn't have enough of those flashy elaborated calculator buttons.
Seriously, the HP50G or simular devices simply looks cooler and has a more sturdy 'professional-looking' engineering-feel finish. That's my theory anyway.
But, as for smaller non-graphing calculators in general though, I have to say that Casio beats TI and the others hands down. I just bought the Casio FX86 DE Plus (it's the most powerfull permitted in exams at my College) and like it's predecessor the naturaly display (textbook style entry) along with the term-buffer, 7 variables and value table generation (the last step before grafing) are just plain awesome. Wouldn't want to go without it.
My 2 cents.
IMHO, git is a shining example of bad design. You need too much info on how it works on the inside, to be able to use it. It is simply way too complicated. I regret the fact that it seems to be the most popular VCS for open-source projects. I'd prefer something simpler like bzr.
Git is very often explained wrong. Especially for those brain-damaged by the use of CVS or SVN. (I myself was/am too). And yes, 'brain-damaged' is a quite fitting term in this case. Think switching from Basic to OOP Java. That's the magnitude we're talking about here.
A matter of fact is that Git is extremely easy to understand, as every concept it covers is exactly everything you need to know about versioning in order to understand versioning correctly. The main problem I think is that with distributed Git, everything one knows about Subversion as a commit actually is covered by 'git push' which, as it involves merging two single repositories, allways includes a merge. Imperative merges are rarely done in regular use of centralized subversion, which is why Git may seem cumbersome initially. However, it never gets more complicated that understanding that concept of 'git push', your regular special-case superset of a merge. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of the Git workflow. Since basically everything team related always has a merge involved, merges begin to lose their scare and become a part of every-day regular versioning usage. Which is exactly how it should be.
Once one has gotten over the initial speed bump in learning, especially the one involved in moving from Subversion to Git, the insights are bedazzling. If you've used Git correctly in a Subversion replacement scenario, going back to SVN appears like going from Linux to DOS and you finally understand what Linus Torwalds was ragging about in that famous Google TechTalk on Git. And that's just for the regular versioning stuff you know from SVN, and not even including things like 'git rebase' or other luxuries.
I find a great introduction into the right way of grasping Git for the 'impaired by SVN usage' is this commercial video lecture by the PragProg people (10min Preview for free).
Their book on Git seems to be in the same ballpark quality wise.
After moving from SVN to Git - which took a few weeks time to get the hang of - I have to say that I now would second almost everything Linus Torwalds has to rag on about Subversion. Whenever I'm at my job where we use SVN, it feels like I've stepped back a decade or two. The crappyness of subversion and the elegance of git are simply unfathomable if you haven't used both extensively in versioning your projects. I personally find that even if you use Git as a drop in replacement for Subversion, mimicking the workflows including a centralised repos only used for pushing towards and pulling from, it still is light-years ahead of Subversion in every (un)imaginable way. Even the small things like configuring your ignores compare like Linux and DOS commandline between Git and Subversion respectively.
My KO criteria for Git 2-3 years ago used to be the lack of usable GUIs for Git and the abundance of mature SVN GUIs. However, today I'd stick with Git, even if all GitGUIs would vanish overnight.
My conclusion: ... The downside of that will be, of course, that you will lose your blissfull ignorance of the crappyness of subversion and will suffer whenever required to use it, be it at your job or elsewhere. :-)
I strongly suggest you bite the bullet and wrap your head around what that what appears first as some arcane concept of Git and get to use it regularly. You'll very quickly find that Git has it right and Subversion has it wrong in countless ways you weren't even aware of. That's my experience anyway.
My 2 cents.
First Post!
Seriously. Modern ovens are the epitome of tens of thousands of years of cooking. And quite hightech too. Doesn't get any geekier than that. Frying with an induction pan maybe, but you asked about turkey and that goes into the oven.
Glad I could help.
Seems as though the patent is legit. Although it's not nice of them to sue without talking to the From1 builders first. ... Or did they attempt to do that and got rejected? If so, it's their given right to start legal action.
Could Form1 licence the patent is the next question I'd ask.
"Techie" != Software Engineer and with 40 you shouldn't be calling yourself software engineer anymore. Software Architect and Consultant maybe. ... It's partly marketing but there's also more to it:
With 40 one should be well their way to becoming at least half way familiar with management procedures. Not because it's cool, but it's the only thing that causes more wisdom and experience to make sense to anyone who would want to make use of it. I may be way smarter and more experienced than most of the people I work with, but if I can not leverage that experience by providing some sort of usefull leadership, I'm of lesser use that the 20 year old coder who sits in the corner doing stuff, simply because I'm more experienced, ask more money and put up with less shit. ... I bicker more than my comrades, but I should be in a position where this is an *advantage* to my boss.
As far as the general observation of software developer shelf-life, I'd basically second what is said in the GP.
Bottom line:
Always have a fallback and be prepared to proactively work on your career, also in terms of leadership and softskills and be prepared to move in to a position where you don't get paid for the work you do but for the responsibilities you take. Then software engineer shelf-life isn't a problem, it's simply a stepping stone on the usual career ladder.
My 2 cents.
Seriously, AFAICT, there are many FOSS VM solutions out there by now. And from what I've heard, none of them are extremely difficult to set up or run. They just follow different obvious or more hidden concepts and strategies, and thus may be suited better for certain setups. But as I say, a good FOSS project will have a good website, either by dedicated people who respect their webdesigners (allways a good sign of a professional non-elitist crew) or build by a dedicated company that puts money into the project.
Enter FOSS VM into Google, broadly scan the websites and take the one that 'looks' best and take it from there. If you run into requirements or usage scenarios that don't fit the one you then know you want to cover, switch.
Good luck.
I've never understood the Gnome hype to begin with.
I did like the fact that FOSS has two large desktop kits competing each other - that is a neat luxury - but the hype about Gnome I couldn't understand. The only thing Gnome really had going for it, compared to KDE or generic custom WM setups like a WindowMaker environment, in my opinion, was that you could, back then in 2001, with a litte work, get your desktop look totally different and awesome compared to anything else on the planet. But that was a large part to the relatively hassle-free GTK theming, and not on behalf of Gnome. And the people who did that usually did it using Enlightenment as their main environment as the way better choice anyway. And even without E, in my opinion WM or some default Fluxbox setup allways looks better than a bland and somewhat half-assed Gnome UI.
For the better part of the last decade Nautilus was flaky software in beta stage compared to KDEs Konqueror. Konqueror would kick Nautiluses ass up and down the street in terms of features and usability. It was the best FM on the entire plantet, and probably still is ... although I haven't been keeping up with all the details, changes and redos in the FOSS Desktop world since about 2006 so I couldn't really say. FOSS developers have a tendency to break things just to redo entire core-pieces of code or come up with new projects. ... What was that FM thing for KDE a few years back? Dolphin or something? ... Dunno, didn't care. I just remember thinking: "Oh, great, some guy fucking up Konqueror and thinking he can do better than about a decade of FM projekt work. Great." ...
Anyway, I am now using Gnome (2.something) on debian stable because it is the default and it's still way better than windows, but it does bug me with shit I'd expect not to have to put up with in 2012. The Filemanager (still nautilus? couldn't tell) wets its pants when accessing a dir across samba with the svn extension blocking the FM for minutes. Firefox has rendering errors in the tabs, and while the desktop pager works as expected, as far as I can tell it looks very much the same as it did eleven years ago in 2001. And even then E and WM had pagers at least as good, and you could run and customize them with a few lines of easy configging.
With KDE its a simular thing, althoug I'd say they did (and do) way better with the integrated desktop thing. KDE allways had Windows-style performance hog qualities, but they *did* offer the full Desktop experience. I'd bet that to this very day a well configured KDE is the best GUI on the planet, on a machine that can handle the workload. And yes, I know the Mac, I'm typing this on an MB Air with Snow Leopard. However, it wasn't that the KDE team hadn't also been smoking their share of crack while coding. Some dimwhit back in the 90ies had the brilliant Idea to copy the entire Windows KB shortcuts and make them KDE default, thus fucking with the entire userbase of opinion leaders that actually cared about them: The core FOSS unix crowd. As far as I know it has been that way since then. Granted, rare things are as easy to config as KB shortcuts in KDE, but come on! That's, in my book, at least as bad a markting move as Gnome is doing now with v3. Allthough I have to say that ever since Gnome v3 came about posts about gnome on slashdot have at least trippled. ... Maybe not so bad marketing after all. Gnome is refreshing its mindshare with its moves, that's for sure.
Whatever way you put it, the real anoyances with Linux on the desktop are still the same they were 15 years ago when I started using it, and they have nothing to do with wether the Gnome (or any other desktop or WM) crew has decided to make a paradigm shift or not.
I've seen the screens of Gnome 3, I've installed the newest Ubuntu with Unity on a netbook for my daughter (yes, yes, odd and dumbed down, but it's not the end of the world there are some neat ideas in Unity and the Terminal works as exp