Apple rather slickly has each update of each recent iOS be specific to a phone. ONE physical phone. Probably to prevent the skeleton key scenario.
Each "copy" (not really an appropriate word here) of the update is unique (I don't know the details) which makes it hard to just use the same binary to on every phone. Each "copy" only works on one phone.
There is a real advantage to back in the day: parametric statistics needs calculus but a lot of modern statistics are more simulation-based so that could be stressed. Easier to understand (or at least less difficult) and usually more accurate. Parametric statistics can wait.
Some appropriate subset of "How to Lie with Statistics" might be apropos early on and throughout the time spent. It's practical information in life, gives a deeper understanding and is relatively fun. Care needs to be taken that this isn't taken as "All Statistics Lie".
Consider bringing in language teachers for help. The words in statistics often have a subtle (or huge) difference from common usage and they may be able to help with that. I had a mathematics background when I started statistics and wasted a lot of time in early days because "variable" meant something different than what I was used to.
RealNetworks has a service, "RealTime", that works across most platforms for doing just this kind of thing. The use case explained to me was a family sharing video where much of the family is Windows but also there is a Unix person, a few Apple-or-nothing, and another few "Android All the Way".
Since this indeed describes my extended family, it was helpful.
> No company would want to give north korea or isis a reason to actively target undersea cables.
It might give them MORE reasons but, given my understanding of their agenda, those two (at least) already have reasons
to want a capability of targeting undersea cables.
A bit more in the sensor department might at least give warning that something is about to be damaged
and info about the thing doing the damaging.
It might be worth looking at INGRES (not INGRESS) and their business history.
They've managed to stay in business as long as Unix has had commercial databases (albeit with a close call every decade or so) and currently are in a similar position to yours but are still standing and still innovating. Many lessons in tech company survival, some of them of the "don't do that" variety to be learned there.
Sadly, the people that know the name tend to think of Ingres as what it was way back in the 70's-80's, not what it is, so the company is called "Actian" these days.
I wonder if sleep apnea is considered dementia in this context?
Sleep apnea is highly correlated with obesity at that age and it can give the sufferer a disturbingly
similar experience to senile dementia when severe and untreated.
Having gone through some hand nerve damage over the years I found it useful to have more than 1 keyboard;
having my hands in different positions during the day has proved useful to preventing further problems.
Most of my typing is done on a Unicomp Model M, which is very much an IBM Model M. I type most
reliably there although the I can type longer at the Kinesis models and probably would be almost as fast if there
if I really devoted the effort to it.
I find the clickety-clack of Model M type switches cheerful and I need all the happy thoughts possible when debugging Ansible scripts.
I probably wouldn't inflict that on people in an open office.
I thought I was sleeping well because I fell asleep easily and stayed asleep. Nope: That
was my body trying to make up in quantity what the sleep lacked in quality. I thought my problem was
caused by too many electronic distractions (yeah some, but not most of it).
You don't get enough deep and REM sleep, you don't have focus and your ability to remember new things takes a BIG hit.
My problem was ridiculously easy to treat and I deeply regret spending several years not realizing I was being fuzzier than
I needed to be for want of a couple slightly uncomfortable nights wired up.
2) Turning off the router at night
Also helpful: I put my home router on a timer. 10pm, BANG! No internet on anything but my phone, which is OK to use
for short periods as an internet device and keeps me in touch if need be. Nonetheless it's much easier for me to decide to close
my eyes now. That probably only works because my phone screen isn't very big.
Pity we can't have this for capacitors (or so I expect: too cheap a part). I've never lost anything to an exploding battery but exploding capacitors....yes. On the other hand, the capacitors I'm involved with have never been directly dangerous to my flesh.
At my job it was noticed I was getting increasingly conservative about the systems. Some of that was justified but eventually I found I had a medical problem that made learning new things hard; it had been gradually messing with memory....very very slowly so as to be hard to notice until it became obvious something was very wrong indeed and being fired became likely.
Learning new stuff when you can't reliably remember what you learned the day before will rapidly decrease ones enthusiasm, even if one recognizes change as necessary.
Before losing insurance, I started insisting on checking out possible causes. If you're lucky (I was) there might be a simple fix: diet change, CPAP, whatever. That's the good news. Not so good: the longer a problem goes on, the longer it may take to recover and one may never get back to 100%. Very scary but it's better to get back 90% than to continue to degrade.
I'm convinced that for some significant fraction of older workers, this kind of thing can be some or all of their problem and I urge people reading this who have memory and learning problems they didn't use to have: check out stuff like sleep apnea, vitamin deficiency and the like.
Addons for web browsers (e,g. Certificate Patrol in Firefox, there are others) can clue you into certificate changes. Rather like Ghostery (which shows where stuff is loading from in a web page): it is an eye opener.
In todays economy there are still a few pockets of stability and they tend to be in the
places I put in this list. Not all positions, but some. E.g. We do hire some temps but they know they
are temps and are about 5% of the workforce. I obviously don't work for Microsoft.
These are places where they need (and more importantly: know they need) some working memory
of how the place is runs. They are places where it is a big hairy deal to hire or fire certain positions.
They are of a size that it is not unusual for exactly ONE person to know how to do a critical task.
Even if cross trained, there is usually one (or maybe two) people who are really good at that critical
task so you better have responsible people who would like to stay awhile.
I am a sysadmin, I've been here for a decade, my most junior co-sysadmin has been here for years.
No degree by the way, just a massive list of accomplishment. Me, I have a degree in a related field
and fewer accomplishments.
Even our web people have been here for years. That said, we all sometimes find ourselves working
outside our original job descriptions from time to time. Money is tight but they want us to stay as long as
we are doing a job that needs (or will soon need) doing.
My particular organization has been through many expansions and contractions in the last century
but makes extraordinary efforts to keep sharp people. My part is to stay sharp and grow. We have
let go sharp people in the recent contraction, but we try to avoid it.
In 2013 this is an exceptionally good situation to be in I know but these situations exist and are
worth looking for.
Emphasize stability if you can, this can make age a plus. Not that age guarantees stability or youth means not responsible but you are more likely to be considered in a place looking for stability.
County government,especially smaller counties. They typically run on shoestrings but they can really appreciate someone who can keep systems running well. Likewise midsize towns and cities.
If you have some oddball skills, that can be a plus. In fact if you know INGRES, are willing to live in Seattle and are stable: Drop me a line!
Medical computing often wants someone a little older. Banking will often hire someone older.
Midsized organizations 100-500 can be an especially rich vein, places that have been around
awhile so gray hair isn't unusual and small enough not to automate the initial job search. They
also often have enough work to keep a small team busy.
Surprisingly, these can be research departments at
Universities (yes, they sometimes happily hire people without degrees. Who
better knows a degrees worth for day to day computing? Arguing with the person
with an MS who wants to convert everything to Python is not fun.).
I think it a fair bet there are security companies watching the news that are going to be more accepting of someone older than they were a month ago.
Some of us need the Socratic Dialog. I was driven to learn about mathematics. I had real drive and read a LOT. I was smart. Yay me. I managed to mis-learn a heck of a lot that way. It wouldn't have been so bad later on but I mis-learned some basic things. It was unpleasant and time consuming to go back and edit out what I got wrong and I needed someone outside my own head. I couldn't see what's wrong in my own head alone. Sadly, even in college, that kind of teaching isn't available so much but it's golden.
As funny as that is:
"I'm Autistic" seems a more powerful social excuse than "I have Aspergers".
In any case: most of us whatever-we-ares still need to do our limited best not to be jerks.
If we want a social life: Labels are more of a tool to find strategies to be less of an asshole than an excuse
for being one....and pathetically, getting all pedantic on a funny joke is probably itself an example of assholery.
Sorry dmomo.
OK, many people involved are probably retired or dead by now, but way back in the early eighties there was the ISO networking standard which was to replace TCP/IP and it was HEAVILY pushed by ITU. It had it's charms but man it was heavy.
"ISO will replace TCP/IP in 5 years" was a real thing. After 10 years the phrase became a joke. Now it isn't even that.
Ever wondered why the L in LDAP stands for "Lightweight"? It started as a radically simplified version of ISO directory services.
Almost nobody used ISO (including ITU, which at the time preferred paper over networks internally) but ITU really pushed it over that toy internet thing. They also charged a lot of money to buy the bookshelf-meters of ISO documentation...only available on paper for the most part.
It is probably completely unfair to the ITU of 2012 but I find myself worried whenever they are mentioned in the same breath as "internet".
If you are asking these questions (they are good questions) this is likely WAY above your pay grade. You need to find the people that know the regs and tech and get them involved. Now. Slashdot is nice but it's nowhere near sufficient and much posted will be simply wrong if you care about your career even when technically correct (and a lot won't be).
The number of ways to screw this up (assuming it is even allowed) are mind boggling and there are at least three major categories of ways to screw up: Military, Technical and Political.
Please note you may be opening a can of worms not just with the Navy but the country you are berthed at! There are places where encrypted internet traffic is not looked upon kindly.
The trade offs are non trivial. Having on-ship access means devices are more likely to stay on board, which is a very good thing. Installing high speed internet access can make any data leaks go faster, not a good thing. If you do this you need
every t crossed and every i dotted.
This must come up a lot and I guarantee the Navy has a stack of rules somewhere. If you are lucky: self-consistent ones.
...and a random thought: Would setting up WiFi be "interesting" in compartmentalized steel ship?
Have you had statistics training? If not, please get a little.
I may be the only mathematician who had this problem (I wasn't all that good) but Statistics threw me for a loop at
first (I was briefly fairly competent eventually). Statistics isn't calculus; calculus is a big part of classical statistics.
A pure mathematician hitting statistics cold may have almost as big a problem a student with little mathematics.
Mathematics knowledge can actually get in the way at first.
The big breakthrough for me was realizing a random variable isn't much like the variables I was used to.
That I had to think differently.
Once past that, I was at an advantage again because I had gotten through undergrad calculus and
linear algebra but until then, I was MORE confused than the soft science majors around me.
Programs compatible with KeePassX (or ports of KeePassX) exist for pretty much everything: Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, Android, iOS but they often have slightly different names (e.g. the program I use on iOS is KyPass) which makes it seem less available than it is.
I understand the AA Book, "Pass it On" (which I haven't read darn it), mentions Bill W being one of those who did LSD in a research medical setting. Interesting guy.
If I have that wrong, PLEASE correct.
Me too but I don't think the problem was Pascal so much, as how it was taught.
In my Pascal class (typical for its time), pointers were taught as an abstract concept.
When I started learning C, a pointer was just an address in RAM. THAT was
way easier for me to wrap my head around. Doing pointer arithmetic nailed the idea down.
After that, pointers made sense to me in both languages.
When it comes to desktops, laptops and even small sets of servers, I'm agreeing.
BUT I'd posit tight code matters now MORE than it did then; it just doesn't matter so much in desktops (or laptops and even newish smart phones) much any more.
There are a lot of price-sensitive micro-controller devices in this world.
It can also matter, perversely, in really large server farms. If you need to update 10,000 machines, it's nice if the update is relatively small. As for efficiency: if you can get by with 9,000 machines instead of 10,00 machines...that's an optimization worth doing.
...and a beautiful thing it is for fast booting (after the first time) and if you mostly run the same few programs. Not so pleasant where files are rapidly changing but just the ticket for a laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple rather slickly has each update of each recent iOS be specific to a phone. ONE physical phone. Probably to prevent the skeleton key scenario.
Each "copy" (not really an appropriate word here) of the update is unique (I don't know the details) which makes it hard to just use the same binary to on every phone. Each "copy" only works on one phone.
Just a few thoughts:
There is a real advantage to back in the day: parametric statistics needs calculus but a lot of modern statistics
are more simulation-based so that could be stressed. Easier to understand (or at least less difficult) and usually
more accurate. Parametric statistics can wait.
Some appropriate subset of "How to Lie with Statistics" might be apropos early on and throughout the time spent.
It's practical information in life, gives a deeper understanding and is relatively fun. Care needs to be taken that this
isn't taken as "All Statistics Lie".
Consider bringing in language teachers for help. The words in statistics often have a subtle (or huge) difference
from common usage and they may be able to help with that. I had a mathematics background when I started statistics
and wasted a lot of time in early days because "variable" meant something different than what I was used to.
RealNetworks has a service, "RealTime", that works across most platforms for doing just this kind of thing. The use case explained to me was a family sharing video where much of the family is Windows but also there is a Unix person, a few Apple-or-nothing, and another few "Android All the Way".
Since this indeed describes my extended family, it was helpful.
> No company would want to give north korea or isis a reason to actively target undersea cables.
It might give them MORE reasons but, given my understanding of their agenda, those two (at least) already have reasons
to want a capability of targeting undersea cables.
A bit more in the sensor department might at least give warning that something is about to be damaged
and info about the thing doing the damaging.
It might be worth looking at INGRES (not INGRESS) and their business history.
They've managed to stay in business as long as Unix has had commercial databases (albeit with a close call every decade or so) and currently are in a similar position to yours but are still standing and still innovating. Many lessons in tech company survival, some of them of the "don't do that" variety to be learned there.
Sadly, the people that know the name tend to think of Ingres as what it was way back in the 70's-80's, not what it is, so the company is called "Actian" these days.
I wonder if sleep apnea is considered dementia in this context?
Sleep apnea is highly correlated with obesity at that age and it can give the sufferer a disturbingly
similar experience to senile dementia when severe and untreated.
A competent epidemiologist would control for the "They die before they develop dementia" effect.
Given this is a peer reviewed study I think it hugely likely they controlled for that.
Having gone through some hand nerve damage over the years I found it useful to have more than 1 keyboard;
having my hands in different positions during the day has proved useful to preventing further problems.
Most of my typing is done on a Unicomp Model M, which is very much an IBM Model M. I type most
reliably there although the I can type longer at the Kinesis models and probably would be almost as fast if there
if I really devoted the effort to it.
I find the clickety-clack of Model M type switches cheerful and I need all the happy thoughts possible when
debugging Ansible scripts.
I probably wouldn't inflict that on people in an open office.
Two things helped me so far:
1) A Sleep Study
I thought I was sleeping well because I fell asleep easily and stayed asleep. Nope: That
was my body trying to make up in quantity what the sleep lacked in quality. I thought my problem was
caused by too many electronic distractions (yeah some, but not most of it).
You don't get enough deep and REM sleep, you don't have focus and your ability to remember new things takes a BIG hit.
My problem was ridiculously easy to treat and I deeply regret spending several years not realizing I was being fuzzier than
I needed to be for want of a couple slightly uncomfortable nights wired up.
2) Turning off the router at night
Also helpful: I put my home router on a timer. 10pm, BANG! No internet on anything but my phone, which is OK to use
for short periods as an internet device and keeps me in touch if need be. Nonetheless it's much easier for me to decide to close
my eyes now. That probably only works because my phone screen isn't very big.
Pity we can't have this for capacitors (or so I expect: too cheap a part). I've never lost anything to an exploding battery but exploding capacitors....yes. On the other hand, the capacitors I'm involved with have never been directly dangerous to my flesh.
At my job it was noticed I was getting increasingly conservative about the systems. Some of that was justified but eventually I found I had a medical problem that made learning new things hard; it had been gradually messing with memory....very very slowly so as to be hard to notice until it became obvious something was very wrong indeed and being fired became likely.
Learning new stuff when you can't reliably remember what you learned the day before will rapidly decrease ones enthusiasm, even if one recognizes change as necessary.
Before losing insurance, I started insisting on checking out possible causes. If you're lucky (I was) there might be a simple fix: diet change, CPAP, whatever. That's the good news. Not so good: the longer a problem goes on, the longer it may take to recover and one may never get back to 100%. Very scary but it's better to get back 90% than to continue to degrade.
I'm convinced that for some significant fraction of older workers, this kind of thing can be some or all of their problem and I urge people reading this who have memory and learning problems they didn't use to have: check out stuff like sleep apnea, vitamin deficiency and the like.
Addons for web browsers (e,g. Certificate Patrol in Firefox, there are others) can clue you into certificate changes. Rather like Ghostery (which shows where stuff is loading from in a web page): it is an eye opener.
I get your point but:
In todays economy there are still a few pockets of stability and they tend to be in the
places I put in this list. Not all positions, but some. E.g. We do hire some temps but they know they
are temps and are about 5% of the workforce. I obviously don't work for Microsoft.
These are places where they need (and more importantly: know they need) some working memory
of how the place is runs. They are places where it is a big hairy deal to hire or fire certain positions.
They are of a size that it is not unusual for exactly ONE person to know how to do a critical task.
Even if cross trained, there is usually one (or maybe two) people who are really good at that critical
task so you better have responsible people who would like to stay awhile.
I am a sysadmin, I've been here for a decade, my most junior co-sysadmin has been here for years.
No degree by the way, just a massive list of accomplishment. Me, I have a degree in a related field
and fewer accomplishments.
Even our web people have been here for years. That said, we all sometimes find ourselves working
outside our original job descriptions from time to time. Money is tight but they want us to stay as long as
we are doing a job that needs (or will soon need) doing.
My particular organization has been through many expansions and contractions in the last century
but makes extraordinary efforts to keep sharp people. My part is to stay sharp and grow. We have
let go sharp people in the recent contraction, but we try to avoid it.
In 2013 this is an exceptionally good situation to be in I know but these situations exist and are
worth looking for.
Emphasize stability if you can, this can make age a plus. Not that age
guarantees stability or youth means not responsible but you are more
likely to be considered in a place looking for stability.
County government,especially smaller counties. They typically run on shoestrings but they
can really appreciate someone who can keep systems running well. Likewise midsize
towns and cities.
If you have some oddball skills, that can be a plus. In fact if you know INGRES, are willing
to live in Seattle and are stable: Drop me a line!
Medical computing often wants someone a little older. Banking will often hire someone older.
Midsized organizations 100-500 can be an especially rich vein, places that have been around
awhile so gray hair isn't unusual and small enough not to automate the initial job search. They
also often have enough work to keep a small team busy.
Surprisingly, these can be research departments at
Universities (yes, they sometimes happily hire people without degrees. Who
better knows a degrees worth for day to day computing? Arguing with the person
with an MS who wants to convert everything to Python is not fun.).
I think it a fair bet there are security companies watching the news
that are going to be more accepting of someone older than they were
a month ago.
Some of us need the Socratic Dialog. I was driven to learn about mathematics. I had real drive and read a LOT. I was smart. Yay me. I managed to mis-learn a heck of a lot that way. It wouldn't have been so bad later on but I mis-learned some basic things. It was unpleasant and time consuming to go back and edit out what I got wrong and I needed someone outside my own head. I couldn't see what's wrong in my own head alone. Sadly, even in college, that kind of teaching isn't available so much but it's golden.
As funny as that is: "I'm Autistic" seems a more powerful social excuse than "I have Aspergers". In any case: most of us whatever-we-ares still need to do our limited best not to be jerks. If we want a social life: Labels are more of a tool to find strategies to be less of an asshole than an excuse for being one. ...and pathetically, getting all pedantic on a funny joke is probably itself an example of assholery.
Sorry dmomo.
"ISO will replace TCP/IP in 5 years" was a real thing. After 10 years the phrase became a joke. Now it isn't even that.
Ever wondered why the L in LDAP stands for "Lightweight"? It started as a radically simplified version of ISO directory services.
Almost nobody used ISO (including ITU, which at the time preferred paper over networks internally) but ITU really pushed it over that toy internet thing. They also charged a lot of money to buy the bookshelf-meters of ISO documentation...only available on paper for the most part.
It is probably completely unfair to the ITU of 2012 but I find myself worried whenever they are mentioned in the same breath as "internet".
I believe the Soviets had a "hatch-back" earlier. I expect it makes suiting up quite a bit faster and simpler.
If you are asking these questions (they are good questions) this is likely WAY above your pay grade. You need to find the people that know the regs and tech and get them involved. Now. Slashdot is nice but it's nowhere near sufficient and much posted will be simply wrong if you care about your career even when technically correct (and a lot won't be).
...and a random thought: Would setting up WiFi be "interesting" in compartmentalized steel ship?
The number of ways to screw this up (assuming it is even allowed) are mind boggling and there are at least three major categories of ways to screw up: Military, Technical and Political.
Please note you may be opening a can of worms not just with the Navy but the country you are berthed at! There are places where encrypted internet traffic is not looked upon kindly.
The trade offs are non trivial. Having on-ship access means devices are more likely to stay on board, which is a very good thing. Installing high speed internet access can make any data leaks go faster, not a good thing. If you do this you need every t crossed and every i dotted.
This must come up a lot and I guarantee the Navy has a stack of rules somewhere. If you are lucky: self-consistent ones.
I may be the only mathematician who had this problem (I wasn't all that good) but Statistics threw me for a loop at first (I was briefly fairly competent eventually). Statistics isn't calculus; calculus is a big part of classical statistics.
A pure mathematician hitting statistics cold may have almost as big a problem a student with little mathematics. Mathematics knowledge can actually get in the way at first.
The big breakthrough for me was realizing a random variable isn't much like the variables I was used to. That I had to think differently. Once past that, I was at an advantage again because I had gotten through undergrad calculus and linear algebra but until then, I was MORE confused than the soft science majors around me.
Programs compatible with KeePassX (or ports of KeePassX) exist for pretty much everything: Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, Android, iOS but they often have slightly different names (e.g. the program I use on iOS is KyPass) which makes it seem less available than it is.
I understand the AA Book, "Pass it On" (which I haven't read darn it), mentions Bill W being one of those who did LSD in a research medical setting. Interesting guy. If I have that wrong, PLEASE correct.
In my Pascal class (typical for its time), pointers were taught as an abstract concept.
When I started learning C, a pointer was just an address in RAM. THAT was way easier for me to wrap my head around. Doing pointer arithmetic nailed the idea down.
After that, pointers made sense to me in both languages.
When it comes to desktops, laptops and even small sets of servers, I'm agreeing. BUT I'd posit tight code matters now MORE than it did then; it just doesn't matter so much in desktops (or laptops and even newish smart phones) much any more. There are a lot of price-sensitive micro-controller devices in this world. It can also matter, perversely, in really large server farms. If you need to update 10,000 machines, it's nice if the update is relatively small. As for efficiency: if you can get by with 9,000 machines instead of 10,00 machines...that's an optimization worth doing.
...and a beautiful thing it is for fast booting (after the first time) and if you mostly run the same few programs. Not so pleasant where files are rapidly changing but just the ticket for a laptop.