I'm nearly 59 and I still do freelance technical work (admittedly sometimes in niche programming languages, a good place for us) and keep up with a lot of technology innnovation. The secret (if there is one) is that I'm a lifelong anorak and I enjoy all this, actually the last 10-15 years have been the most interesting.
A lot of the time, it still doesn't really feel like work, but I hated work politics which is why I stayed freelance, most of my life.
Of course, we can standardise the batteries and built exchange stations like miniature versions of those container ports (think of the batteries as containers).
But I suspect, each manufacturer will patent the form factor of their battery (even if it delivers within the same parameters) for maximum lock-in.
Exactly, I used to burn little holes in my shirts with the ferric chloride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)_chloride that we were using to etch circuit boards (they were masked with wax or aluminium paint). My mother was not pleased with this.
Then, as a private project, I built a half adder with washing machine relays but it never worked properly because of power supply problems (which was the 12v transformer from my train set).
As parent already said (but they're so PESKY and disrespectful): Hey you kids, GET OFF MY LAWN
They did a lot of creative work in the area that people who had some kind of objection to the system or harboured injustice were mad and should be locked up.
I live in a pretty poor part of London and I watch our borough council (Tower Hamlets, for Slashdot Brits) mess people about, break promises and betray people (and then spin about how great they are) on a daily basis. These are people, often, who are not very articulate (poor english too, sometimes) and may not have a great many mental tools for dealing with this (the necessary tools would probably be the patience of a saint, anyway).
So, this bitterness is quite normal, understandable and (for me) not a mental illness. I fear that what I describe goes on elsewhere too.
This more childish attention seeking from the BBC. They're losing audience share even in my demographic (50ish, middle class) who used to be their cheerleaders.
I noticed that the operating system word was not mentioned throughout the whole of this childish and possibly illegal prank. Perhaps that's because Eric Huggers (and lately a lot of his Msoft minions) are now at the top of BBC technology.
As for Spencer Kelly of Click (which is a product placement program rather than a serious one) he's admitted publically that he doesn't know much about computers:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/programmes/click_online/meet_the_team/default.stm
It's sad to see a great institution brought so low and we still have to pay for these tossers (to use the technical word).
Actually both the city of London (which would tend to contain Tories, they're often investment bankers) and the BBC (which contains champagne socialists) both use a lot of open source, mainly scripting languages, databases and web servers.
However, in both cases, anybody 'political' wouldn't actually dirty their hands with 'software' AND software engineers wouldn't dirty their hands with 'politics'.
As for the 'report' it's basically self-promotion by the company in order to peddle its wares.
I think they missed the point. I teach older people about computers and the internet. They do need to know about how to use them, everybody does now.
They need appreciation of the advantages (get knowledge, get work, find good deals, enrich your life) and dangers (unreliable information, viruses, data loss).
However they don't need to know how to program or take them apart. Hey! That's MY job!
Actually I'm 58, been in the computer industry about 30 years and I do projects in the east end of London (which is the poor part) with Linux. So the above is probably not a great generalisation.
At one of these projects, a schoolkid came in for homework and said 'I need Microsoft Powerpoint'. We tried not to laugh and said, 'we haven't got that but we do have something that'll do the same thing'.
We were very struck by the 'brand' thing which we guess came from his school. So we seem to have the same kind of problems in the UK.
I guess I could give a flip, slashdot-style reply but this is a serious question, deserving a serious answer.
I'm 58, I still code, usually only three months every year because that's all the 'extra' cash that I need. I enjoy that time, meet a lot of very bright younger people and learn new stuff, Ruby on Rails at present.
At the moment, I run several times a week, take fish oil, have a pretty good diet (fish, steamed veggies), swim when I can, don't smoke. But I eat ice-cream and pizza too, just not every meal. I've started to play guitar again, now I have some time, too.
I do a certain amount of voluntary work with local charities which means I'm out, talking to people and not sitting in front of TV (well I do do some of that...)
In short, I take some care of myself and live as fully as I can. I don't make too many assumptions about the horizons closing down either, although it's clear I don't run as strongly as I did twenty years ago and I'm slower with code.
It's not a race, the idea is to live fully as possible at any age.
I'm 58 and still coding, I just started a contract this week. I downshifted back to 'code' from more 'senior' roles because I don't need to work all year and I like to code.
I've seen a lot of things but I don't know everything and usually come away from a contract having met some good people and having learnt.
I think that retained enthusiasm for computing and still being teachable and curious mean that I'm still getting hired.
I say we impose heavy fines on all UK government departments that have lost data. Wait a minute...maybe we'll just have create corporal discomfort using USB sticks instead.
Well, we now have giant telescreens (for the government sponsored 'games'), cameras everywhere, amateur snoopers, organisations with names like Ofwat, Ofgem (long live MiniTrue), continuous foreign wars and external threat (remember Goldstein?) and, of course, double think, quackspeak etc. at every level.
Like many people, I'm leaving...before we get to the public executions.
One of my big reasons for dislike of Microsoft and others with market muscle is the forced adoption cycle, just for reasons of marketing and bottom line.
In the case of operating systems, increasing bloat means that a lot of hardware goes into landfill and a lot more energy is used, each time. Even when the hardware doesn't go into landfill, it's recycled (more often than necessary) using and distributing toxic chemicals.
As another poster said, 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' that used to be one basis for good engineering and it's certainly got ecological consequences.
Well, Groves already set out his stall...
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm fighting back this year by buying more and more from employee-owned (John Lewis, I'm from the UK) organisations, cooperatives (Telephone Coop, local credit union), mutuals (Royal London) and anything else that doesn't have shareholders and then lastly for-profits with a verifiable social agenda and a record of honourable behaviour (harder and harder to find though).
I'm having a hard time explaining that open-source/Windows is an ethical choice too, many people here seem to only understand that in the context of food-miles and sweatshops, not in the context of technology.
As I work for non-profits, they often say 'we get really good discounts from Microsoft', so we don't want any, without considering the deeper implications. I now send them to this: http://www.freegeekvancouver.org/en/node/125 comprehensive and well-stated.
I worked for 30 years in IT and dropped out of full-time work after 2 horrible years in Citigroup. I'm grateful to them now, they created a crisis that made things change.
I'm lucky in that I still enjoy IT and feel that these coming years are getting more and more interesting.
I teach IT part-time at a charity for older people (I'm one, almost) in London, code on my own open source projects, travel, paint and play the guitar badly. In other words I have a portfolio of things that I do.
I also downsized my house and paid the mortgage and traded consumer goods for more freedom.
As another poster said 'what do you WANT to do?' in my case it's a list not a scalar.
As a 56 year dinosaur, I see more possibilities than ever for proper computer science:
- user tailored and AI augmented search - well engineered 'green' hardware/software/datacentres (well you see what I mean) - well engineered micro-kernels - physical/computing interface work and telepresence - problems connected with seed AI - rational management of complexity and systems integration (I'm in the middle of a dinosaur friendly glue code gig right now) - modelling tools and problems, especially what's happening and not happening to our environment
That's about 30 seconds of very non-scientific thought and I'm sure many people on slashdot have zillions more whether or whether not they agree with this particular list-let.
The solution is simple, just send an advance party of experienced house cleaners to clean the surface up a litte. They can send the full dust bags into moon orbit using little mini-thrusters. This also provides much-needed employment for the badly paid.
I would have suggested a fleet of Roomba carrrying vessels but they might take over the moon and clain it for the Roomba republic.
I hope this comment is helpful for the many valuable people working on this problem.
I'm so glad someone else noticed this. I posted this entry http://blog.bigwaveheuristics.com/index.php?p=93 on my blog a little while before. Now that the world is so full of technology it's not good enough to be 'governed' by a clique of mouthy and science-averse laywers.
We now have all these cameras instead of the police, who mainly rush up and down running people over.
They no longer see any role as 'guardians of the peace' that's the role of the cameras.
The problem with this picture is that the cameras are intrusive (I don't want to be watched by morons all the time) and worse reactive (trouble develops and has to be supressed rather than being prevented).
Most minor crime is not reported in the UK because a) the police can't be bothered b) if bothered they have very low clear up rates anyway (in spite of a huge budget, dna databases, helicopters etc. etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you can exchange batteries simply and fast, you don't need rapid recharge.
I'm nearly 59 and I still do freelance technical work (admittedly sometimes in niche programming languages, a good place for us) and keep up with a lot of technology innnovation. The secret (if there is one) is that I'm a lifelong anorak and I enjoy all this, actually the last 10-15 years have been the most interesting.
A lot of the time, it still doesn't really feel like work, but I hated work politics which is why I stayed freelance, most of my life.
Of course, we can standardise the batteries and built exchange stations like miniature versions of those container ports (think of the batteries as containers).
But I suspect, each manufacturer will patent the form factor of their battery (even if it delivers within the same parameters) for maximum lock-in.
Exactly, I used to burn little holes in my shirts with the ferric chloride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)_chloride that we were using to etch circuit boards (they were masked with wax or aluminium paint). My mother was not pleased with this.
Then, as a private project, I built a half adder with washing machine relays but it never worked properly because of power supply problems (which was the 12v transformer from my train set).
As parent already said (but they're so PESKY and disrespectful): Hey you kids, GET OFF MY LAWN
They did a lot of creative work in the area that people who had some kind of objection to the system or harboured injustice were mad and should be locked up.
I live in a pretty poor part of London and I watch our borough council (Tower Hamlets, for Slashdot Brits) mess people about, break promises and betray people (and then spin about how great they are) on a daily basis. These are people, often, who are not very articulate (poor english too, sometimes) and may not have a great many mental tools for dealing with this (the necessary tools would probably be the patience of a saint, anyway).
So, this bitterness is quite normal, understandable and (for me) not a mental illness. I fear that what I describe goes on elsewhere too.
This more childish attention seeking from the BBC. They're losing audience share even in my demographic (50ish, middle class) who used to be their cheerleaders. I noticed that the operating system word was not mentioned throughout the whole of this childish and possibly illegal prank. Perhaps that's because Eric Huggers (and lately a lot of his Msoft minions) are now at the top of BBC technology. As for Spencer Kelly of Click (which is a product placement program rather than a serious one) he's admitted publically that he doesn't know much about computers: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/programmes/click_online/meet_the_team/default.stm It's sad to see a great institution brought so low and we still have to pay for these tossers (to use the technical word).
Actually both the city of London (which would tend to contain Tories, they're often investment bankers) and the BBC (which contains champagne socialists) both use a lot of open source, mainly scripting languages, databases and web servers.
However, in both cases, anybody 'political' wouldn't actually dirty their hands with 'software' AND software engineers wouldn't dirty their hands with 'politics'.
As for the 'report' it's basically self-promotion by the company in order to peddle its wares.
How about sql-fairy http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/ that's open source and very complete?
I think they missed the point. I teach older people about computers and the internet. They do need to know about how to use them, everybody does now. They need appreciation of the advantages (get knowledge, get work, find good deals, enrich your life) and dangers (unreliable information, viruses, data loss). However they don't need to know how to program or take them apart. Hey! That's MY job!
Actually I'm 58, been in the computer industry about 30 years and I do projects in the east end of London (which is the poor part) with Linux. So the above is probably not a great generalisation. At one of these projects, a schoolkid came in for homework and said 'I need Microsoft Powerpoint'. We tried not to laugh and said, 'we haven't got that but we do have something that'll do the same thing'. We were very struck by the 'brand' thing which we guess came from his school. So we seem to have the same kind of problems in the UK.
I guess I could give a flip, slashdot-style reply but this is a serious question, deserving a serious answer.
I'm 58, I still code, usually only three months every year because that's all the 'extra' cash that I need. I enjoy that time, meet a lot of very bright younger people and learn new stuff, Ruby on Rails at present.
At the moment, I run several times a week, take fish oil, have a pretty good diet (fish, steamed veggies), swim when I can, don't smoke. But I eat ice-cream and pizza too, just not every meal. I've started to play guitar again, now I have some time, too.
I do a certain amount of voluntary work with local charities which means I'm out, talking to people and not sitting in front of TV (well I do do some of that...)
In short, I take some care of myself and live as fully as I can. I don't make too many assumptions about the horizons closing down either, although it's clear I don't run as strongly as I did twenty years ago and I'm slower with code.
It's not a race, the idea is to live fully as possible at any age.
I'm 58 and still coding, I just started a contract this week. I downshifted back to 'code' from more 'senior' roles because I don't need to work all year and I like to code.
I've seen a lot of things but I don't know everything and usually come away from a contract having met some good people and having learnt.
I think that retained enthusiasm for computing and still being teachable and curious mean that I'm still getting hired.
BTW, you young-uns get off my lawn!
It was a joke, I'm glad that people discovered for themselves how illogical it was! I probably should have made it more joke-like though.
I say we impose heavy fines on all UK government departments that have lost data. Wait a minute...maybe we'll just have create corporal discomfort using USB sticks instead.
Well, we now have giant telescreens (for the government sponsored 'games'), cameras everywhere, amateur snoopers, organisations with names like Ofwat, Ofgem (long live MiniTrue), continuous foreign wars and external threat (remember Goldstein?) and, of course, double think, quackspeak etc. at every level. Like many people, I'm leaving...before we get to the public executions.
The hole is very, very, very small but with apparatus in my secret laboratory, I can see it very clearly. I hope that clears the whole thing up.
One of my big reasons for dislike of Microsoft and others with market muscle is the forced adoption cycle, just for reasons of marketing and bottom line.
In the case of operating systems, increasing bloat means that a lot of hardware goes into landfill and a lot more energy is used, each time. Even when the hardware doesn't go into landfill, it's recycled (more often than necessary) using and distributing toxic chemicals.
As another poster said, 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' that used to be one basis for good engineering and it's certainly got ecological consequences.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove/paranoid.htm with 'only the paranoid survive'. Hey, those bleeding-heart commies have taken business that is rightfully OURS, that means war.
I'm fighting back this year by buying more and more from employee-owned (John Lewis, I'm from the UK) organisations, cooperatives (Telephone Coop, local credit union), mutuals (Royal London) and anything else that doesn't have shareholders and then lastly for-profits with a verifiable social agenda and a record of honourable behaviour (harder and harder to find though).
I'm having a hard time explaining that open-source/Windows is an ethical choice too, many people here seem to only understand that in the context of food-miles and sweatshops, not in the context of technology.
As I work for non-profits, they often say 'we get really good discounts from Microsoft', so we don't want any, without considering the deeper implications. I now send them to this: http://www.freegeekvancouver.org/en/node/125 comprehensive and well-stated.
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/data/d0082635.html grump, grump it's one of the pleasures of being old, no if only I could remember where I left my computer...
I worked for 30 years in IT and dropped out of full-time work after 2 horrible years in Citigroup. I'm grateful to them now, they created a crisis that made things change.
I'm lucky in that I still enjoy IT and feel that these coming years are getting more and more interesting.
I teach IT part-time at a charity for older people (I'm one, almost) in London, code on my own open source projects, travel, paint and play the guitar badly. In other words I have a portfolio of things that I do.
I also downsized my house and paid the mortgage and traded consumer goods for more freedom.
As another poster said 'what do you WANT to do?' in my case it's a list not a scalar.
I've got hardware that does this already, it's called an axe. It's a little harder to restore single-user mode afterwards though.
As a 56 year dinosaur, I see more possibilities than ever for proper computer science:
- user tailored and AI augmented search
- well engineered 'green' hardware/software/datacentres (well you see what I mean)
- well engineered micro-kernels
- physical/computing interface work and telepresence
- problems connected with seed AI
- rational management of complexity and systems integration (I'm in the middle of a dinosaur friendly glue code gig right now)
- modelling tools and problems, especially what's happening and not happening to our environment
That's about 30 seconds of very non-scientific thought and I'm sure many people on slashdot have zillions more whether or whether not they agree with this particular list-let.
The solution is simple, just send an advance party of experienced house cleaners to clean the surface up a litte. They can send the full dust bags into moon orbit using little mini-thrusters. This also provides much-needed employment for the badly paid.
I would have suggested a fleet of Roomba carrrying vessels but they might take over the moon and clain it for the Roomba republic.
I hope this comment is helpful for the many valuable people working on this problem.
I'm so glad someone else noticed this. I posted this entry http://blog.bigwaveheuristics.com/index.php?p=93 on my blog a little while before. Now that the world is so full of technology it's not good enough to be 'governed' by a clique of mouthy and science-averse laywers.
We now have all these cameras instead of the police, who mainly rush up and down running people over.
They no longer see any role as 'guardians of the peace' that's the role of the cameras.
The problem with this picture is that the cameras are intrusive (I don't want to be watched by morons all the time) and worse reactive (trouble develops and has to be supressed rather than being prevented).
Most minor crime is not reported in the UK because a) the police can't be bothered b) if bothered they have very low clear up rates anyway (in spite of a huge budget, dna databases, helicopters etc. etc.)
It's time for something different but not this.