Don't use your age as an excuse. I'm old enough to be your father and I picked up PL/SQL this decade. Stop making excuses, get off your ass, and hop to it. Decide what type of development you want to do, and then pick the most popular language in that field and LEARN it.
I just turned 56, and as coincidence has it, was out of work for 2 years after boom.dot.bust. I understand your position, really. Can I offer some advice?
1) Experience counts for more than manic energy, but to properly take advantage of your accumulated knowledge requires some changes in work habits.
2) So be less expensive. I make 2/3 of what I made during the boom. But it's better than not working.
3) I completely understand. Been there, done that, burned bridges. What counts is how one behaves moving forward. Would you rather tell the truth, or would you rather be employed?
I'm not likely to ever see a dime from SS, and my 401K would have been hilarious had it happened to, say, the cast of Jersey Shore. So I'll work until they find my corpse typing endless yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyys with my face. I've grown accustomed to the notion. You might have to get used to the idea that in your forties you do have, by necessity, more than 20 years in the workforce, so strategise as early as possible.
I think "company loyalty" was always a myth. It was a marketing ploy that may have had a few believers, but most of us paid lip service to it and just tried to live our lives.
More to the topic, I learned PHP in my forties and wrote a CMS, and I passed the Oracle SQL*Plus course on the day of my fiftieth birthday.
You don't become less capable in middle age, you become differently capable. I know that sounds painfully Politically Correct but in this case it's true.
To us computer geeks, the PC was underpowered and expensive even for the time. And that broken keyboard... Ugh.
We got a few in at work when they first came out but weren't happy with them. It wasn't until clones with a 286 and Selectric-type keyboard started to become available that it really took off. (Wow, remember when a 286 was fast??)
Your mileage, as always, may vary, I guess.
And as far as the PC's role in popularizing computing, um, did I imagine those computer shows I attended before the PC came out?
When I used to do this, the problem was that doing a cost transfer to another agency was labor intensive for very little benefit to your own agency, since you could only transfer the depreciated value and you had to subtract shipping and handling and local DL to manage it. Total bottom line: It may actually cost you money out of your own agency's budget to transfer the equipment to another agency. Often did, in my experience.
And, I'm sorry to tell you this, but individual government agencies are not graded on how much money a different agency saves. Transferring computer gear to another government agency who needs it doesn't do anything for my agency, and may even coast me money. I know, this is messed up, but it is what it is.
There are ways around it -- you'll see desperate volunteers sneaking equipment to another agency in their own transportation, for instance. But it's risky.
Government agencies are not set up to share nice. This is the root cause of a lot of the waste that outsiders see.
> Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"
I would guess not. Rather than dilute the server market, negatively affect server manufacturers' profit margins and chance a bad news event, (and incidentally have to admit to bad planning) they'll crush the servers.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. The difference, though, is that the power mac still runs OSX acceptably (albeit an earlier version) and I have literally crates of software for it. It would cost money to upgrade to an intel Mac (for instance), and then I'd have to rebuy software, and it's just plain not worth it. It's not necessary to have the latest thing, it's just necessary to be able to acceptably do the things for which one needs a computer. (I understand this is a controversial stance amongst fanbois.)
No, a nefarious plot is when my wife's rotten little dog jumps up on the bed and wipes her butt on my pillow when I'm at work. I'd call this a long term move to encourage new markets. But I used to work in marketing.
> In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."
Just wondering. The PC example in the article has better specs than any I have at home, and is better than the machine I have at work. As far as Macs go, I still have a Power Mac (dual 800) that works, and it's value to me is the cost of a Mac to replace it if I recycled it. Is there really enough churn in the marketplace in this down economy to make this work?
It occurs to me that we are diverging from the point. There *are* relatively safe(er) small cars out there -- a Volvo for instance is safer than a Ford Fiesta, and people can make individual choices to improve their chances of surviving an accident. But the push for more fuel-efficient cars inevitably puts more cars on the road (even if those cars are not yours or mine) that aren't as sturdy or safe as a Volvo for cost reasons, and I think that's what the article is addressing. Inevitably, as fuel economy is forced upwards, at least some auto makers will cut corners in order to sell cars with higher gas mileage.
> Shit, my 2 door coupe has eight airbags in it. It has front and rear crumple zones. It has side impact protection built into the structure.
But that makes it safer than what? Safer than a small light car would be without these features, not necessarily safer than an F350 pickup.
> Fuel economy is however fuck all to do with that.
Seriously? You are seriously stating that fuel economy has nothing to do with the fact that your car is smaller and lighter, and you are as a result, despite the 15 airbags and crumple zones, more vulnerable than, say, if you were driving a 1974 Chrysler Town and Country with a properly adjusted shoulder belt?
I drive a motorcycle to work (or did before the accident, and will again when I recover) and I get just under 50 miles to the gallon, as opposed to the 13 mpg my truck gets, but I don't try to fool myself that it's safe for any reasonable meaning of the word. Nor do I blame the larger vehicles on the road for my choice in transportation. My daughter's little car has integral roll cage and side airbags, but I don't try to fool myself that it's as safe as the old Chrysler we used to have. But the little car gets 35 mpg and and the Chrysler got 9, and sacrifices needed to be made.
I strongly suspect the safety gap between little economy cars and rolling tanks could be narrowed, and I'm glad someone is looking at the problem. Aren't you?
> The biggest joke here is the assumptions that 1) small, light cars can't be safe and 2) that deaths in small light cars won't reduce as we pull big, heavy cars off the roads.
I don't think those are the assumptions.
I'd say that the assumptions are:
1) At this time, small, light cars are generally not built to be reasonably safe for cost reasons
2) the deaths in small light cars due to single car accidents, small light cars colliding with each others and then colliding with large immovable objects like bridge abutments, and collisions with large commercial vehicles, will remain a significant number even after all the Hum-Vees are taken off the road.
And the conclusion, that small light cars could be made safer seems reasonable to me. Does it not seem reasonable to you?
"If the domain allowed it" is the operative phrase. One usually doesn't go out looking for a job as a C# programmer, especially in a down economy. One goes out looking for a programmer position, and then codes in whatever language the job provider wants them to. (and if it happens to be C#, bonus!) I mean, seriously. There are a lot of programming languages, and some are better than others at particular jobs, but that's not by any means the only consideration. If you want to continue making that mortgage payment, that is.
I think you mean ADHD, unless "ADDH" is some new affliction of which I am not aware. (This is certainly possible.) You could have a whole story arc on how the school system has diagnosed hir as attention deficit and pressured the parents to put hir on ritalin. And they'll do it, because the school administrators said to, and they know best.
...and seriously, we really need to come up with a term for "multiracial-except-white", as that is what most PC sources mean by "multiracial". I'm multiracial in the genetic sense, but my skin is light enough that most people mistake me for white.
When I registered my daughter for school the first time, the (mandatory) race section of the form did not include "multiracial" or "other (specify)" (it does now -- we have made some progress) and she did not match any of the choices. I explained this to the administrator, who looked at my daughter and checked "white". Ok... That's not racially prejudiced at all...
I just finished watching the (really excellent, recommended) Justice League series by WB, and the last season, where the core members were seriously discussing taking over governments, suspending elections and personal liberties "temporarily" and just running things themselves, was really fascinating. And chilling.
But that doesn't necessarily invalidate what you said. "Liberal" doesn't mean the same thing it used to.
> You say that as though a heap of people would be unemployed if it wasn't for the holy.Net descending from on high. [...yadda...]
Wow, are you barking up the wrong tree. Actually I say that as though I personally know.NET programmers who would probably NOT have been employed during the long dry period after boom.dot.bust were it not for.NET and how (this is important) certain companies valued it. Which is the case. This has nothing to do with how holy.NET might or might not be. It has very much to do with how companies were incorporating.NET (which is their decision to make, not yours) who happened to be hiring at the time.
And during that dry period, and this one, by the way, every person who is employed writing or supporting.NET applications is someone who is not looking for a job somewhere else, which is a good thing, both for them and for the other people looking for jobs. Regardless of whether these programmers in question could get jobs elsewhere, I think it's arguable that.NET's existence has generally increased the number of positions in support and development of web applications. This is entirely separate from my personal feelings regarding the technology, which are not positive, and which I will not enumerate here.
Right, and the.NET development environment arguably has no parallel. The only issue is that it's a.NET development environment.
Now, one could argue that C# has uses beyond the.NET environment, but is it really used all that much outside.NET? (This is an honest question -- I don't know.)
But more to the point, I suspect that if you have a job anywhere else -- say, Microsoft's OS team, or Oracle's AWR team, or Red Hat's kernel team or IBM's Z-series applications team(s) -- you'll have to program in whatever language the rest of the team is programming in, even if it's COBOL. No matter how good C# is.
Besides, there's been black superheros at least back to the sixties, and that seems perfectly normal. Or am I confused and they mean something else by "black"?
Somewhere, probably way back in this particular story arc, I will have stopped reading. Liberals will buy the comic to show solidarity to a multiracial-except-white (we need to come up with a word for that...), multigendered, differently-abled superhero to show solidarity, but they won't actually read it because, you know, it's a comic book. "Besides, the whole concept of "superhero" is fascist. Didn't you read the paper on Nietzsche's friendship with Hitler? I have a copy right here."
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Don't use your age as an excuse. I'm old enough to be your father and I picked up PL/SQL this decade. Stop making excuses, get off your ass, and hop to it. Decide what type of development you want to do, and then pick the most popular language in that field and LEARN it.
And get off my lawn.
Grumble.
I just turned 56, and as coincidence has it, was out of work for 2 years after boom.dot.bust. I understand your position, really. Can I offer some advice?
1) Experience counts for more than manic energy, but to properly take advantage of your accumulated knowledge requires some changes in work habits.
2) So be less expensive. I make 2/3 of what I made during the boom. But it's better than not working.
3) I completely understand. Been there, done that, burned bridges. What counts is how one behaves moving forward. Would you rather tell the truth, or would you rather be employed?
I'm not likely to ever see a dime from SS, and my 401K would have been hilarious had it happened to, say, the cast of Jersey Shore. So I'll work until they find my corpse typing endless yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyys with my face. I've grown accustomed to the notion. You might have to get used to the idea that in your forties you do have, by necessity, more than 20 years in the workforce, so strategise as early as possible.
I think "company loyalty" was always a myth. It was a marketing ploy that may have had a few believers, but most of us paid lip service to it and just tried to live our lives.
More to the topic, I learned PHP in my forties and wrote a CMS, and I passed the Oracle SQL*Plus course on the day of my fiftieth birthday.
You don't become less capable in middle age, you become differently capable. I know that sounds painfully Politically Correct but in this case it's true.
To us computer geeks, the PC was underpowered and expensive even for the time. And that broken keyboard... Ugh.
We got a few in at work when they first came out but weren't happy with them. It wasn't until clones with a 286 and Selectric-type keyboard started to become available that it really took off. (Wow, remember when a 286 was fast??)
Your mileage, as always, may vary, I guess.
And as far as the PC's role in popularizing computing, um, did I imagine those computer shows I attended before the PC came out?
When I used to do this, the problem was that doing a cost transfer to another agency was labor intensive for very little benefit to your own agency, since you could only transfer the depreciated value and you had to subtract shipping and handling and local DL to manage it. Total bottom line: It may actually cost you money out of your own agency's budget to transfer the equipment to another agency. Often did, in my experience.
And, I'm sorry to tell you this, but individual government agencies are not graded on how much money a different agency saves. Transferring computer gear to another government agency who needs it doesn't do anything for my agency, and may even coast me money. I know, this is messed up, but it is what it is.
There are ways around it -- you'll see desperate volunteers sneaking equipment to another agency in their own transportation, for instance. But it's risky.
Government agencies are not set up to share nice. This is the root cause of a lot of the waste that outsiders see.
> Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"
I would guess not. Rather than dilute the server market, negatively affect server manufacturers' profit margins and chance a bad news event, (and incidentally have to admit to bad planning) they'll crush the servers.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. The difference, though, is that the power mac still runs OSX acceptably (albeit an earlier version) and I have literally crates of software for it. It would cost money to upgrade to an intel Mac (for instance), and then I'd have to rebuy software, and it's just plain not worth it. It's not necessary to have the latest thing, it's just necessary to be able to acceptably do the things for which one needs a computer. (I understand this is a controversial stance amongst fanbois.)
No, a nefarious plot is when my wife's rotten little dog jumps up on the bed and wipes her butt on my pillow when I'm at work. I'd call this a long term move to encourage new markets. But I used to work in marketing.
> In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."
And so... it worked.
Just wondering. The PC example in the article has better specs than any I have at home, and is better than the machine I have at work. As far as Macs go, I still have a Power Mac (dual 800) that works, and it's value to me is the cost of a Mac to replace it if I recycled it. Is there really enough churn in the marketplace in this down economy to make this work?
It occurs to me that we are diverging from the point. There *are* relatively safe(er) small cars out there -- a Volvo for instance is safer than a Ford Fiesta, and people can make individual choices to improve their chances of surviving an accident. But the push for more fuel-efficient cars inevitably puts more cars on the road (even if those cars are not yours or mine) that aren't as sturdy or safe as a Volvo for cost reasons, and I think that's what the article is addressing. Inevitably, as fuel economy is forced upwards, at least some auto makers will cut corners in order to sell cars with higher gas mileage.
> Shit, my 2 door coupe has eight airbags in it. It has front and rear crumple zones. It has side impact protection built into the structure.
But that makes it safer than what? Safer than a small light car would be without these features, not necessarily safer than an F350 pickup.
> Fuel economy is however fuck all to do with that.
Seriously? You are seriously stating that fuel economy has nothing to do with the fact that your car is smaller and lighter, and you are as a result, despite the 15 airbags and crumple zones, more vulnerable than, say, if you were driving a 1974 Chrysler Town and Country with a properly adjusted shoulder belt?
I drive a motorcycle to work (or did before the accident, and will again when I recover) and I get just under 50 miles to the gallon, as opposed to the 13 mpg my truck gets, but I don't try to fool myself that it's safe for any reasonable meaning of the word. Nor do I blame the larger vehicles on the road for my choice in transportation. My daughter's little car has integral roll cage and side airbags, but I don't try to fool myself that it's as safe as the old Chrysler we used to have. But the little car gets 35 mpg and and the Chrysler got 9, and sacrifices needed to be made.
I strongly suspect the safety gap between little economy cars and rolling tanks could be narrowed, and I'm glad someone is looking at the problem. Aren't you?
You don't understand the question...
> The biggest joke here is the assumptions that 1) small, light cars can't be safe and 2) that deaths in small light cars won't reduce as we pull big, heavy cars off the roads.
I don't think those are the assumptions.
I'd say that the assumptions are:
1) At this time, small, light cars are generally not built to be reasonably safe for cost reasons
2) the deaths in small light cars due to single car accidents, small light cars colliding with each others and then colliding with large immovable objects like bridge abutments, and collisions with large commercial vehicles, will remain a significant number even after all the Hum-Vees are taken off the road.
And the conclusion, that small light cars could be made safer seems reasonable to me. Does it not seem reasonable to you?
"If the domain allowed it" is the operative phrase. One usually doesn't go out looking for a job as a C# programmer, especially in a down economy. One goes out looking for a programmer position, and then codes in whatever language the job provider wants them to. (and if it happens to be C#, bonus!) I mean, seriously. There are a lot of programming languages, and some are better than others at particular jobs, but that's not by any means the only consideration. If you want to continue making that mortgage payment, that is.
I think you mean ADHD, unless "ADDH" is some new affliction of which I am not aware. (This is certainly possible.) You could have a whole story arc on how the school system has diagnosed hir as attention deficit and pressured the parents to put hir on ritalin. And they'll do it, because the school administrators said to, and they know best.
When I registered my daughter for school the first time, the (mandatory) race section of the form did not include "multiracial" or "other (specify)" (it does now -- we have made some progress) and she did not match any of the choices. I explained this to the administrator, who looked at my daughter and checked "white". Ok... That's not racially prejudiced at all...
> PS: All superheroes are liberals.
I just finished watching the (really excellent, recommended) Justice League series by WB, and the last season, where the core members were seriously discussing taking over governments, suspending elections and personal liberties "temporarily" and just running things themselves, was really fascinating. And chilling.
But that doesn't necessarily invalidate what you said. "Liberal" doesn't mean the same thing it used to.
> You say that as though a heap of people would be unemployed if it wasn't for the holy .Net descending from on high. [...yadda...]
Wow, are you barking up the wrong tree. Actually I say that as though I personally know .NET programmers who would probably NOT have been employed during the long dry period after boom.dot.bust were it not for .NET and how (this is important) certain companies valued it. Which is the case. This has nothing to do with how holy .NET might or might not be. It has very much to do with how companies were incorporating .NET (which is their decision to make, not yours) who happened to be hiring at the time.
And during that dry period, and this one, by the way, every person who is employed writing or supporting .NET applications is someone who is not looking for a job somewhere else, which is a good thing, both for them and for the other people looking for jobs. Regardless of whether these programmers in question could get jobs elsewhere, I think it's arguable that .NET's existence has generally increased the number of positions in support and development of web applications. This is entirely separate from my personal feelings regarding the technology, which are not positive, and which I will not enumerate here.
Right, and the .NET development environment arguably has no parallel. The only issue is that it's a .NET development environment.
Now, one could argue that C# has uses beyond the .NET environment, but is it really used all that much outside .NET? (This is an honest question -- I don't know.)
But more to the point, I suspect that if you have a job anywhere else -- say, Microsoft's OS team, or Oracle's AWR team, or Red Hat's kernel team or IBM's Z-series applications team(s) -- you'll have to program in whatever language the rest of the team is programming in, even if it's COBOL. No matter how good C# is.
So... tell me about chemtrails...
> Things white people like: white comic book super heroes.
So, my enjoyment of "master of kung fu" and "hero for hire" was ... self-hatred?
Besides, there's been black superheros at least back to the sixties, and that seems perfectly normal. Or am I confused and they mean something else by "black"?
Somewhere, probably way back in this particular story arc, I will have stopped reading. Liberals will buy the comic to show solidarity to a multiracial-except-white (we need to come up with a word for that...), multigendered, differently-abled superhero to show solidarity, but they won't actually read it because, you know, it's a comic book. "Besides, the whole concept of "superhero" is fascist. Didn't you read the paper on Nietzsche's friendship with Hitler? I have a copy right here."