Don't fear aging -- just make use of your time
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
I'm not 40 yet, but I can vouch for experience being worth far more than youthful exuberance in actually getting something done. Perhaps a few employers prefer those with less experience and more energy; but when it comes to coding, experience and knowledge can mean orders of magnitude higher productivity. Also, experience gives you a much broader knowledge base to draw from; perhaps not as exciting as your first specialization, but well worth putting up with a bit of aging.
One final bit of advice: the only sort of older employees that look bad in the hiring process are those who don't seem to have made much of their time. Don't be afraid to rest when you need to, but don't just sit around -- keep aggressively learning and doing, whether directly related to your work or not. And contributing to prominent open-source products can look pretty good on your resume too;^)
If you are considering coming but are annoyed about wearing black and white, be reassured you will be welcome wearing whatever you want, whether you are a Linux user or not. The "black and white" theme is just an idea for attracting attention, and we'll see how it works; but what's really important is that you show up.
Interesting response, and also quite predictable. Unfortunately the exceptions for reverse engineering are so narrow as to be useless, and are not preventing the MPAA from suing over DeCSS. Please see my more detailed commentary on the DMCA at: http://www.tuxers.net/dmca/dmca-notes.txt
I completely disagree. The DMCA is pretty clearly unconstitutional, but it takes many years and much pain and suffering for such cases to get to the Supreme Court, and by then a new attack on our liberties will be underway. The DMCA is in a comment period right now, so NOW is the time to act.
I understand that a truly huge rally would attract much more attention. And if someone wants to organize one, more power to them -- I agree it would be a good idea. But for now, this protest was done on fairly short notice with no budget and it *is* attracting a reasonable amount of attention. The goals of this protest will have been met if we get on the local TV news and get our our message locally. Consider it a first step.
Sounds to me like they'd probably have a case against the RIAA for restraint of trade under the Sherman Act as well. Collectively, the RIAA is acting as a cartel and attempting to prevent competition from outsiders, which is being done "by improper means" (various forms of making intentionally false public statements calculated to harm MP3.Com's business) and "for an improper purpose" (to prevent outsiders from competing with the RIAA members). And there is a possibility of treble damages.
If the RIAA lawsuit is frivolous and/or based on false information in its filings, there could be additional claims -- there is strong precedent for antitrust liability for abusing the legal system for anticompetitive purposes.
...was when he blacked out the city of Colorado Springs. He had a special power hookup from the city for his experiments, and was at one point bouncing electromagnetic pulses into the earth at its resonant frequency and producing lightning coming *up from the ground* for several hundred feet. But the lightning eventually jumped across the insulators in his power connection and fried the power transformer, causing a city-wide blackout.
Colorado Springs is still a very interesting place, between the witches, cattle mutilators, Tesla fanatics, old printer's home, CSOC, NORAD, and a number of fundamentalist Christian publishing houses. A little of everything. Anyway, Tesla is a shoo-in.
An additional problem with Gutenberg is that the Chinese had invented movable type and most other aspects of printing centuries earlier. At most Gutenberg was important in popularizing printing; and what's more there were many others doing the same right around the same time in Europe (it is unclear exactly who was first). Benjamin Franklin had a well-rounded career in a variety of scientific, business, and political areas. George Washington Carver invented quite a few of the plant byproducts we take for granted today. No-brainers that everyone else mentions too: Da Vinci Newton Tesla Einstein After this it gets a bit thick, with dozens of great mathematicians and scientists to choose from. I think it is important to pick those with contributions in either a broad field or multiple unrelated areas. Other strong candidates: Kant Pasteur Marie Curie Edison Feynman Bardeen
On chronology: I recall NetBSD being available by early 1993; in fact I used it prior to using Linux. Minix and 386BSD were the real pioneers in this genre and date back long before the lawsuit with AT&T was resolved. Minix wasn't quite open source and was very limited; while 386BSD degenerated into a series of patches upon patches, and after a while full releases came out late to never. A lot of its users simply gave up and switched to NetBSD or Linux.
By late 1993 Linux was way ahead of NetBSD in user base (perhaps 100,000 at that time). This is mostly because NetBSD was not aimed at general technical home users with PCs like Linux was, it was aimed at UNIX people. As a result:
1) Linux was much earlier at taking advantage of PC hardware, without necessarily trying to make it look like real UNIX workstations. It arguably still does a better job of this, even compared to FreeBSD. This isn't necessarily an advantage if you are already familiar with UNIX workstations, but if you know PCs it is less confusing.
2) Linux wasn't really UNIX. Linux developers haven't been afraid to add features or implementations that are different from standard UNIX design as long as the standard UNIX semantics continue to work. This may sound like a disadvantage, but it enabled Linux to gain a lot of users, and some truly brilliant developers, from the DOS/Windows world. By several estimates over half of Linux users had never used any kind of UNIX before. These DOS/Windows people added features and documentation that made future DOS/Windows people more comfortable, and it became self-perpetuating.
3) Linux (in SLS, and in late 1993 Slackware) was much earlier in having distributions that could be installed fairly easily on typical cheap PC hardware. True, they were horrid by today's standards, but the NetBSD installation of the time was far, far harder. This locked in a fair number of users back in the 1993-1994 timeframe, before FreeBSD provided a BSD installation that was more or less as easy as those for Linux. Presumably NetBSD is much easier now; but back then hardly anyone who didn't already know UNIX quite well could have installed it. This is not intended as a criticism -- NetBSD simply did not aspire to be a mass-market OS at the time, and as a result, it wasn't.
True, Linux networking wasn't really stable at all back in 1993, but for home use that didn't matter much yet -- in fact PPP was not even widely available at ISPs until about a year later, and by then Linux had workable support for it.
I was the *non-lawyer*, but I'll offer some comments as the others are staying away from this flame-ridden topic;^)
First, Hawk and many others had already warned that many such lawsuits were to be expected given the damning evidence in the FoF.
Second, the FoF have little standing outside of their own case until/unless they become part of a final court decision. But they provide an excellent roadmap for anyone else to follow, including what conclusions to pursue, what witnesses to call, and how Microsoft will attempt to respond. The $49 vs. $89 snippet alone could be fantastically helpful if it can be backed up.
The class action suit(s) and the Caldera private suit could constrain some of the proposed remedies, because it may be quite complicated to apportion major monetary damages across multiple new companies if Microsoft is split up. If Microsoft's cash hoard and its Win9x monopoly business go together, that would be the one to take the money from, but that risks all the real Microsoft talent fleeing to a new company that has all the real forward-looking assets. At any rate the private liability accumulated by Microsoft will have to be consciously planned for during the remedies phase and also in any possible settlement.
I am impressed by the Judge's persistence in trying to get the parties to settle (which in this case is mostly about getting Microsoft to face reality). Many of the best outcomes require Microsoft's good-faith cooperation, which to date has been AWOL in the various rounds of settlement talks.
Hawk, have you taken a look at the potential charge of market division? Do you consider it supportable by the FoF, and if so, do you expect the DOJ to list it as part of their proposed Conclusions of Law? What sort of remedies are normally applied to market division offenses?
The experts were partly picked by Slashdot and partly self-selected, and I don't know exactly how the final decisions were made. I have the least legal background of the panelists, but I know enough to say that there was quite a bit of serious antitrust law expertise represented on the panel, and there was great diversity of opinion within the panel outside of the most basic issues.
It is also important to point out that many of the other viewpoints expressed elsewhere are knee-jerk reactions from people who haven't even read the FoF, who are not very familiar with the relevant antitrust law, or who have a clear vested interest in one side or the other. If you find highly divergent opinions that pass these tests, I want to hear them!
---
I was only actually in the courtroom one day, but I can vouch for Judge Jackson being quite alert the whole time I was there despite long, boring delays in which nothing was happening while various administrivia were performed. Picture this going on for many weeks Monday through Thursday. I'd be QUITE surprised if the Judge missed anything important due to napping -- and remember that those many weeks were just the rebuttals and closing arguments; you also have to count in the many pretrial hearings, the depositions themselves (some of which are still sealed), and the many meetings in chambers to which the public is not privy. -- DCN
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not 40 yet, but I can vouch for experience being worth far more than youthful exuberance in actually getting something done. Perhaps a few employers prefer those with less experience and more energy; but when it comes to coding, experience and knowledge can mean orders of magnitude higher productivity. Also, experience gives you a much broader knowledge base to draw from; perhaps not as exciting as your first specialization, but well worth putting up with a bit of aging.
;^)
One final bit of advice: the only sort of older employees that look bad in the hiring process are those who don't seem to have made much of their time. Don't be afraid to rest when you need to, but don't just sit around -- keep aggressively learning and doing, whether directly related to your work or not. And contributing to prominent open-source products can look pretty good on your resume too
DCN
If you are considering coming but are annoyed about wearing black and white, be reassured you will be welcome wearing whatever you want, whether you are a Linux user or not. The "black and white" theme is just an idea for attracting attention, and we'll see how it works; but what's really important is that you show up.
DCN
Interesting response, and also quite predictable. Unfortunately the exceptions for reverse engineering are so narrow as to be useless, and are not preventing the MPAA from suing over DeCSS. Please see my more detailed commentary on the DMCA at:
http://www.tuxers.net/dmca/dmca-notes.txt
David C Niemi
I completely disagree. The DMCA is pretty clearly unconstitutional, but it takes many years and much pain and suffering for such cases to get to the Supreme Court, and by then a new attack on our liberties will be underway. The DMCA is in a comment period right now, so NOW is the time to act.
David C Niemi
I understand that a truly huge rally would attract much more attention. And if someone wants to organize one, more power to them -- I agree it would be a good idea. But for now, this protest was done on fairly short notice with no budget and it *is* attracting a reasonable amount of attention. The goals of this protest will have been met if we get on the local TV news and get our our message locally. Consider it a first step.
Regards,
David C Niemi
Sounds to me like they'd probably have a case against the RIAA for restraint of trade under the Sherman Act as well. Collectively, the RIAA is acting as a cartel and attempting to prevent competition from outsiders, which is being done "by improper means" (various forms of making intentionally false public statements calculated to harm MP3.Com's business) and "for an improper purpose" (to prevent outsiders from competing with the RIAA members). And there is a possibility of treble damages.
If the RIAA lawsuit is frivolous and/or based on false information in its filings, there could be additional claims -- there is strong precedent for antitrust liability for abusing the legal system for anticompetitive purposes.
Any lawyers care to comment?
...was when he blacked out the city of Colorado Springs. He had a special power hookup from the city for his experiments, and was at one point bouncing electromagnetic pulses into the earth at its resonant frequency and producing lightning coming *up from the ground* for several hundred feet. But the lightning eventually jumped across the insulators in his power connection and fried the power transformer, causing a city-wide blackout.
Colorado Springs is still a very interesting place, between the witches, cattle mutilators, Tesla fanatics, old printer's home, CSOC, NORAD, and a number of fundamentalist Christian publishing houses. A little of everything. Anyway, Tesla is a shoo-in.
An additional problem with Gutenberg is that the Chinese had invented movable type and most other aspects of printing centuries earlier. At most Gutenberg was important in popularizing printing; and what's more there were many others doing the same right around the same time in Europe (it is unclear exactly who was first). Benjamin Franklin had a well-rounded career in a variety of scientific, business, and political areas. George Washington Carver invented quite a few of the plant byproducts we take for granted today. No-brainers that everyone else mentions too: Da Vinci Newton Tesla Einstein After this it gets a bit thick, with dozens of great mathematicians and scientists to choose from. I think it is important to pick those with contributions in either a broad field or multiple unrelated areas. Other strong candidates: Kant Pasteur Marie Curie Edison Feynman Bardeen
On chronology: I recall NetBSD being available by early 1993; in fact I used it prior to using Linux. Minix and 386BSD were the real pioneers in this genre and date back long before the lawsuit with AT&T was resolved. Minix wasn't quite open source and was very limited; while 386BSD degenerated into a series of patches upon patches, and after a while full releases came out late to never. A lot of its users simply gave up and switched to NetBSD or Linux.
By late 1993 Linux was way ahead of NetBSD in user base (perhaps 100,000 at that time). This is mostly because NetBSD was not aimed at general technical home users with PCs like Linux was, it was aimed at UNIX people. As a result:
1) Linux was much earlier at taking advantage of PC hardware, without necessarily trying to make it look like real UNIX workstations. It arguably still does a better job of this, even compared to FreeBSD. This isn't necessarily an advantage if you are already familiar with UNIX workstations, but if you know PCs it is less confusing.
2) Linux wasn't really UNIX. Linux developers haven't been afraid to add features or implementations that are different from standard UNIX design as long as the standard UNIX semantics continue to work. This may sound like a disadvantage, but it enabled Linux to gain a lot of users, and some truly brilliant developers, from the DOS/Windows world. By several estimates over half of Linux users had never used any kind of UNIX before. These DOS/Windows people added features and documentation that made future DOS/Windows people more comfortable, and it became self-perpetuating.
3) Linux (in SLS, and in late 1993 Slackware) was much earlier in having distributions that could be installed fairly easily on typical cheap PC hardware. True, they were horrid by today's standards, but the NetBSD installation of the time was far, far harder. This locked in a fair number of users back in the 1993-1994 timeframe, before FreeBSD provided a BSD installation that was more or less as easy as those for Linux. Presumably NetBSD is much easier now; but back then hardly anyone who didn't already know UNIX quite well could have installed it. This is not intended as a criticism -- NetBSD simply did not aspire to be a mass-market OS at the time, and as a result, it wasn't.
True, Linux networking wasn't really stable at all back in 1993, but for home use that didn't matter much yet -- in fact PPP was not even widely available at ISPs until about a year later, and by then Linux had workable support for it.
I was the *non-lawyer*, but I'll offer some comments as the others are staying away from this flame-ridden topic ;^)
First, Hawk and many others had already warned that many such lawsuits were to be expected given the damning evidence in the FoF.
Second, the FoF have little standing outside of their own case until/unless they become part of a final court decision. But they provide an excellent roadmap for anyone else to follow, including what conclusions to pursue, what witnesses to call, and how Microsoft will attempt to respond. The $49 vs. $89 snippet alone could be fantastically helpful if it can be backed up.
The class action suit(s) and the Caldera private suit could constrain some of the proposed remedies, because it may be quite complicated to apportion major monetary damages across multiple new companies if Microsoft is split up. If Microsoft's cash hoard and its Win9x monopoly business go together, that would be the one to take the money from, but that risks all the real Microsoft talent fleeing to a new company that has all the real forward-looking assets. At any rate the private liability accumulated by Microsoft will have to be consciously planned for during the remedies phase and also in any possible settlement.
I am impressed by the Judge's persistence in trying to get the parties to settle (which in this case is mostly about getting Microsoft to face reality). Many of the best outcomes require Microsoft's good-faith cooperation, which to date has been AWOL in the various rounds of settlement talks.
Hawk, have you taken a look at the potential charge of market division? Do you consider it supportable by the FoF, and if so, do you expect the DOJ to list it as part of their proposed Conclusions of Law? What sort of remedies are normally applied to market division offenses?
The experts were partly picked by Slashdot and partly self-selected, and I don't know exactly how the final decisions were made. I have the least legal background of the panelists, but I know enough to say that there was quite a bit of serious antitrust law expertise represented on the panel, and there was great diversity of opinion within the panel outside of the most basic issues.
It is also important to point out that many of the other viewpoints expressed elsewhere are knee-jerk reactions from people who haven't even read the FoF, who are not very familiar with the relevant antitrust law, or who have a clear vested interest in one side or the other. If you find highly divergent opinions that pass these tests, I want to hear them!
---
I was only actually in the courtroom one day, but I can vouch for Judge Jackson being quite alert the whole time I was there despite long, boring delays in which nothing was happening while various administrivia were performed. Picture this going on for many weeks Monday through Thursday. I'd be QUITE surprised if the Judge missed anything important due to napping -- and remember that those many weeks were just the rebuttals and closing arguments; you also have to count in the many pretrial hearings, the depositions themselves (some of which are still sealed), and the many meetings in chambers to which the public is not privy. -- DCN