Well, generally when you think of a 40 year old programmer, you think of someone who has been doing it for a while. When you are comparing a "40 year old programmer" with a "24 year old programmer" you are assuming there is an experience gap. In other words, it's the experience, not the age, which is relevant. If your 40 year old programmer only has 2 years experience if compared to the 24 year old programmer who also only has 2 years experience.. then I have no idea who would be better, but I suspect a lot of things would have more impact than age (better soft skills for instance).
I can't imagine (though not sure as I really don't get HR types sometimes) that starting later would hurt you... assuming you arn't expecting the same huge salary as someone the same age but with 15 years experience would (I think this is the real reason older folk have trouble getting jobs as they age.. ). As said the days where they care if they can get 30 years out of you are gone. From my view you would be just as viable a candidate as someone younger with the same experience.. possibly more viable.. who knows.
My whole point was that execution is poor. Built on technologies that as I stated, were never designed for real work.
That said, even though it should be built in at the foundation layer, data integrity can be built into the application layer (although in a lot of cases it's not.. and this is the result of what I said.. lack rigorous design and process).
I actually think web apps are a good idea. The problem is in their execution.
Specifically the problem is that while web apps are becoming popular for "real applications".. they are still being developed in a style suitable for your personal blog.
Which is where I think the mixing of experience with new ideas needs to come into play. You need old experienced guys getting young "web types" to go through proper program design, development and testing. You also need web technologies to evolve from their "copy+paste from the web and modify as needed" state into something designed for real work.
I like to think you need a mixture of the extremes.
You need the "fresh outa university" types who want to re-write everything in executable UML and shift to SCRUM. That's where a lot of your new ideas come from.
You also need the guy's with 25 years experience seeing this shit go wrong to keep them in check.
You can't change your development paradigm with every graduating class.. and you need the old-timers to keep things moving in the right direction. That said, I wouldn't want to have a whole company of them. We'd still be using COBOL.
Claims of agism always seemed funny to me in the context of programming (or really most industries).
Someone with 25 years experience is far more employable than someone with 5 years because they... have more experience?
It's not like the "olden days" where how many years of service you'd get out of someone mattered. Now people are lucky if they have the same job for 5 years. Manpower requirements fluctuate so much in today's industry that the days of "get a job out of school and stay there till you retire" are long gone.
And there is value in young blood as well, but you really need a mixture of people out of university with new ideas and people with experience to make them work (or who understand why they won't). Even if a person loses touch with current technologies, it is worth having people around who have seen a lot of shit fail and know the warning signs.
This of course assumes we arn't talking about someone who learns to program at the age of 40 or something.. then all bets are off I guess.
A guy where I work is retiring in two months. We have known this for like a year and we are _still_ scrambling to get all the info out of his head (we maintain some very old systems... and he was around when they were _designed_). If I retired tomorrow no one would give a shit. "Just hire another c/c++/java guy with a little asm". Obviously this more more related to knowledge than skill.. but still.. that's value!
Also.. interesting (yet pretty thin) way of getting the stats! And I can't be the only one who was pleasantly surprised not to find some huge 50 page report at the pointy end of that link.
Yeah.. screw something up.. hit the reset switch.. all is good! You probably could destroy the thing if you really tried, but it was a great machine to just mess around with.
Also miss when upgrading memory involved some vague instruction, a tube of chips, and a soldering iron! I always wanted to get a floppy drive for the thing.. reading old Cocoa magazines (nostalgia trip) they were all the rage. Never did though:(
explaining the gory details of what we already know? Ok maybe for a general audience this is news, but for any tech minded person, I imagine this was already well understood.
I learnt to program before I had access to the internet, on a Dragon32 (TRS-80 clone), from one source of information: a single book. I remember re-reading a paragraph many many times over to squeeze a little more understanding out of it). I can _still_ remember the specific memory address you had to poke to squeeze a little extra performance out of the processor.
Now days (and I think we all know this or at least relate to it), I have the stuff I use frequently memorized, and anything else I relegate to “stuff I can just look up”.
Would also note that it isn’t just the internet (at least for programming). Auto-complete and intuitive naming also plays a big part in the lack of need to memorize stuff.
Just mixing, maybe not. Effects can definitely chew CPU up though.
I use my desktop (i7 and a tonne of ram) as a guitar amp.. just doing convolution based amp/cabinet modeling gets CPU usage up pretty high. Add in some reverb (also convolution based) and while the box isn't exactly struggling.. it definitely notices.
And that's just one instrument with a limited set of effects.
People need to publicall call companies DISHONEST when they do things like that.
They do. All the time!
Problem is it changes nothing. A few lucky people can live without a phone (or a credit card, or internet, or whatever competition-limited utility you want to talk about) but most have little choice but to bend over and take it.
The president of my ISP could come to my house and piss on my shoes.. and I'd probably keep my subscription. They are the only provider.. and I kinda need internet to live.
There are two critical problems at work here in my opinion:
The first is that "free market will decide" tends not to work on stuff with huge barriers for entry and almost universally required. A few lucky people can say "screw credit cards, I'm only going to use cash" or can live without a phone... but most don't have the option. They have to pick one provider from the available options, all of which mostly offer the same "bend over" treatment. You need legislation for this kind of stuff.
The next is that a huge number of users prefer convenience over all else. Personally I think it should be an absolute hassle to use my credit card. It should involve one time passwords, independent transaction authorization, various identity checks, passwords, etc. Most users would balk at this however... they want to hand their plastic over and be on with their day.
Same reason they don't prevent you from going over data caps. They _could_ just cut you off.. or send a notice, or warning, or something.. but why would it be in their interest to do so.
No one has the money, and very few people share your mysterious enthusiasm for tin cans in orbit.
I think a few people do, but yeah, not enough for an industry.. unless they can bring down the price and risk by a lot. Personally I don't care about space at all... but there are definitely a few people who would spend at least as much as they would on a 2 week cruise just for the experience of, as you said, staying in a tin.
I do forsee the private sector exploiting the resources of space at some point. Mining asteroids/other planets.. turning the moon into a waste dump.. whatever.
No one cared then, no one's cared in 15 years. FIFTEEN YEARS and NOT A SINGLE BOLT in space.
Indeed. I think it still needs some government support to get the tech up to where a private company could take over. The gap between "what we have to do" and "zomg enormous profits!!!" is still too large.
Maybe you can pay for it by getting an extremely dangerous but very high paying job working a mining operation on the moon;p
Seriously though... this is what I see being the ultimate outcome of the private sector in space. Tourism will be there, probably first, but eventually the focus will shift towards exploiting the resources that are out there.
I can totally see a company form up that takes nuclear waste (and other waste) and hurls it into the sun.
Is all this a good thing or a bad thing... I really don't know!
Or even offered a donation link! I don't use it much any more (most machines I'm on are running linux or solaris)... but I'd donate just because of how much I used it in the past!
I love how low-key the whole thing is. It's like, a hugely ubiquitous tool that's been around (and still works) for like a decade... and it doesn't even have it's own domain! Any other project with even half the success of putty would be selling tshirts and cups and have spots at conventions by now.
Was an AM2 or AM3. G34 looks cool (8 and 12 core procs may be overkill for a desktop... then again.. no such thing right!), but last time I looked there was very limited selection in terms of motherboards. If there are more when I do my next upgrade I may go this route.
Good to see they've gone with the bolt-on HSF route. I really think it's the best way. A little inconvenient but you know that thing is staying put (unless as you said, you use those stock ones that are supposed to snap in).
The plastic nub dealie the HSF clips on to snapped, and the HSF basically sprung off the CPU.. I was at work when it happened so not sure how long it was like that, but the machine never booted again!
(I now use Intel chips... I very much appreciate the whole "bolted to the motherboard" thing they've got going).
I use liquid cooling on my desktop, and while it does a better than a traditional fan, the hassle of setting it up and the larger number of "things that can go wrong" would to make this a hard sell for consumer PCs or even business servers.
Submerged systems are even worse. I build one that submerged a reasonably powerful computer in (21 gallons) of mineral oil.. and it was very effective. It was also heavy, hard to move, even harder to do maintenence on, and was full of fun surprises (turns out oil will wick up through cables... ). I can actually see this maybe catching on in the high-end server market however, because you could probably have an extreme density of servers in the oil (or probably something better like that expensive 3M stuff) and maybe even refrigerate the oil some how (no condensation == no problem!).
Am I the only one here that wears a beard, you sissies? ROFLMAO!!!!
I do, but I shave the neck and the little wispy bits on my cheek so as to avoid the RMS look;p
And yeah, "straight razor culture" cracks me up. I mean, I don't have a problem with it, and I guess for _everything_ there is gonna be a group of people who take it very seriously (see also: every day carry), but the fact that there are entire forums (very active ones) dedicated to proper care, maintenance, and application of _razors_ has always made me chuckle a little.
There is a different between them forgetting to invite you to a wedding and them forgetting to invite you to a movie.
As a non-facebook (or really any social networking) user I accept that I miss the occasional "thing". My friends will post stuff like "anyone want to go see " and I'm cool with missing out on that kinda stuff occasionally. I think it would be unfair to expect them to remember to specifically call _me_ every time they are arranging something because I'm that jerk that won't just create a facebook account. All part of the deal.
People en-masse haven’t gotten any smarter. There are still enough people who will fall for scams and do business with the kind of people who advertise via spam. Some good tech is currently making an effective barrier between the idiots and the spammers, but the idiots are still there, so the profitability is still there. Give the bad guys a little time. They’ll come up with new ways of getting around our current filters.
Of course the other theory is that spam has become “less interesting” in light of other new and exciting ways of screwing with people. Once those dry up though, I think the guys with the suits will fall back on classic reliable spam to make their money.
I kinda like stuff like this. I'd rather someone blurt out an honest opinion that I disagree with vice read some prepared and soulless press release.
People whine about people in high positions not being honest and spin-talking... but any time one of them does just come out and say something that wasn't prepared by a team of writers... they get jumped on.
I'll agree though, the fact that this was his opinion and not "the mozilla corporate stance" should have been made more clear.
I don't quite agree. The two have completely opposing sets of demands and objectives:
- Businesses want stuff that is stable and doesn't change much. Rolling something out in an enterprise is tricky. You have to test that all the (really shitty) in-house web apps still work, verify that it is compatible with the entire system base, sometimes get systems recertified (depending on the environment). IE6 is _still_ in widespread use.
- Users want the latest and greatest, and generally don't mind dumping support for legacy garbage after a reasonable amount of time. Additionally "rolling out the new version" is just clicking the "update now" button when the dialog comes up.. and you can even opt out of that and just have it automatic.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, generally when you think of a 40 year old programmer, you think of someone who has been doing it for a while. When you are comparing a "40 year old programmer" with a "24 year old programmer" you are assuming there is an experience gap. In other words, it's the experience, not the age, which is relevant. If your 40 year old programmer only has 2 years experience if compared to the 24 year old programmer who also only has 2 years experience .. then I have no idea who would be better, but I suspect a lot of things would have more impact than age (better soft skills for instance).
I can't imagine (though not sure as I really don't get HR types sometimes) that starting later would hurt you... assuming you arn't expecting the same huge salary as someone the same age but with 15 years experience would (I think this is the real reason older folk have trouble getting jobs as they age.. ). As said the days where they care if they can get 30 years out of you are gone. From my view you would be just as viable a candidate as someone younger with the same experience .. possibly more viable.. who knows.
My whole point was that execution is poor. Built on technologies that as I stated, were never designed for real work.
That said, even though it should be built in at the foundation layer, data integrity can be built into the application layer (although in a lot of cases it's not.. and this is the result of what I said.. lack rigorous design and process).
I actually think web apps are a good idea. The problem is in their execution.
Specifically the problem is that while web apps are becoming popular for "real applications" .. they are still being developed in a style suitable for your personal blog.
Which is where I think the mixing of experience with new ideas needs to come into play. You need old experienced guys getting young "web types" to go through proper program design, development and testing. You also need web technologies to evolve from their "copy+paste from the web and modify as needed" state into something designed for real work.
I like to think you need a mixture of the extremes.
You need the "fresh outa university" types who want to re-write everything in executable UML and shift to SCRUM. That's where a lot of your new ideas come from.
You also need the guy's with 25 years experience seeing this shit go wrong to keep them in check.
You can't change your development paradigm with every graduating class.. and you need the old-timers to keep things moving in the right direction. That said, I wouldn't want to have a whole company of them. We'd still be using COBOL.
Claims of agism always seemed funny to me in the context of programming (or really most industries).
Someone with 25 years experience is far more employable than someone with 5 years because they... have more experience?
It's not like the "olden days" where how many years of service you'd get out of someone mattered. Now people are lucky if they have the same job for 5 years. Manpower requirements fluctuate so much in today's industry that the days of "get a job out of school and stay there till you retire" are long gone.
And there is value in young blood as well, but you really need a mixture of people out of university with new ideas and people with experience to make them work (or who understand why they won't). Even if a person loses touch with current technologies, it is worth having people around who have seen a lot of shit fail and know the warning signs.
This of course assumes we arn't talking about someone who learns to program at the age of 40 or something.. then all bets are off I guess.
A guy where I work is retiring in two months. We have known this for like a year and we are _still_ scrambling to get all the info out of his head (we maintain some very old systems... and he was around when they were _designed_). If I retired tomorrow no one would give a shit. "Just hire another c/c++/java guy with a little asm". Obviously this more more related to knowledge than skill.. but still.. that's value!
Also.. interesting (yet pretty thin) way of getting the stats! And I can't be the only one who was pleasantly surprised not to find some huge 50 page report at the pointy end of that link.
Great machine to learn on too.
Yeah.. screw something up.. hit the reset switch.. all is good! You probably could destroy the thing if you really tried, but it was a great machine to just mess around with.
Also miss when upgrading memory involved some vague instruction, a tube of chips, and a soldering iron! I always wanted to get a floppy drive for the thing .. reading old Cocoa magazines (nostalgia trip) they were all the rage. Never did though :(
explaining the gory details of what we already know? Ok maybe for a general audience this is news, but for any tech minded person, I imagine this was already well understood.
I learnt to program before I had access to the internet, on a Dragon32 (TRS-80 clone), from one source of information: a single book. I remember re-reading a paragraph many many times over to squeeze a little more understanding out of it). I can _still_ remember the specific memory address you had to poke to squeeze a little extra performance out of the processor.
Now days (and I think we all know this or at least relate to it), I have the stuff I use frequently memorized, and anything else I relegate to “stuff I can just look up”.
Would also note that it isn’t just the internet (at least for programming). Auto-complete and intuitive naming also plays a big part in the lack of need to memorize stuff.
Just mixing, maybe not. Effects can definitely chew CPU up though.
I use my desktop (i7 and a tonne of ram) as a guitar amp .. just doing convolution based amp/cabinet modeling gets CPU usage up pretty high. Add in some reverb (also convolution based) and while the box isn't exactly struggling.. it definitely notices.
And that's just one instrument with a limited set of effects.
People need to publicall call companies DISHONEST when they do things like that.
They do. All the time!
Problem is it changes nothing. A few lucky people can live without a phone (or a credit card, or internet, or whatever competition-limited utility you want to talk about) but most have little choice but to bend over and take it.
The president of my ISP could come to my house and piss on my shoes .. and I'd probably keep my subscription. They are the only provider .. and I kinda need internet to live.
There are two critical problems at work here in my opinion:
The first is that "free market will decide" tends not to work on stuff with huge barriers for entry and almost universally required. A few lucky people can say "screw credit cards, I'm only going to use cash" or can live without a phone ... but most don't have the option. They have to pick one provider from the available options, all of which mostly offer the same "bend over" treatment. You need legislation for this kind of stuff.
The next is that a huge number of users prefer convenience over all else. Personally I think it should be an absolute hassle to use my credit card. It should involve one time passwords, independent transaction authorization, various identity checks, passwords, etc. Most users would balk at this however... they want to hand their plastic over and be on with their day.
Same reason they don't prevent you from going over data caps. They _could_ just cut you off.. or send a notice, or warning, or something.. but why would it be in their interest to do so.
This probably requires legislation to happen.
No one has the money, and very few people share your mysterious enthusiasm for tin cans in orbit.
I think a few people do, but yeah, not enough for an industry .. unless they can bring down the price and risk by a lot. Personally I don't care about space at all... but there are definitely a few people who would spend at least as much as they would on a 2 week cruise just for the experience of, as you said, staying in a tin.
I do forsee the private sector exploiting the resources of space at some point. Mining asteroids/other planets .. turning the moon into a waste dump.. whatever.
No one cared then, no one's cared in 15 years. FIFTEEN YEARS and NOT A SINGLE BOLT in space.
Indeed. I think it still needs some government support to get the tech up to where a private company could take over. The gap between "what we have to do" and "zomg enormous profits!!!" is still too large.
Maybe you can pay for it by getting an extremely dangerous but very high paying job working a mining operation on the moon ;p
Seriously though... this is what I see being the ultimate outcome of the private sector in space. Tourism will be there, probably first, but eventually the focus will shift towards exploiting the resources that are out there.
I can totally see a company form up that takes nuclear waste (and other waste) and hurls it into the sun.
Is all this a good thing or a bad thing... I really don't know!
Or even offered a donation link! I don't use it much any more (most machines I'm on are running linux or solaris)... but I'd donate just because of how much I used it in the past!
I love how low-key the whole thing is. It's like, a hugely ubiquitous tool that's been around (and still works) for like a decade... and it doesn't even have it's own domain! Any other project with even half the success of putty would be selling tshirts and cups and have spots at conventions by now.
Which socket did you AMD have?
Was an AM2 or AM3. G34 looks cool (8 and 12 core procs may be overkill for a desktop... then again.. no such thing right!), but last time I looked there was very limited selection in terms of motherboards. If there are more when I do my next upgrade I may go this route.
Good to see they've gone with the bolt-on HSF route. I really think it's the best way. A little inconvenient but you know that thing is staying put (unless as you said, you use those stock ones that are supposed to snap in).
I've got a roasted AMD chip that begs to differ ;p
The plastic nub dealie the HSF clips on to snapped, and the HSF basically sprung off the CPU .. I was at work when it happened so not sure how long it was like that, but the machine never booted again!
(I now use Intel chips... I very much appreciate the whole "bolted to the motherboard" thing they've got going).
Assuming the head sink recovers before you get thermal damage.
But yeah, I imagine this would be a non-issue.
I use liquid cooling on my desktop, and while it does a better than a traditional fan, the hassle of setting it up and the larger number of "things that can go wrong" would to make this a hard sell for consumer PCs or even business servers.
Submerged systems are even worse. I build one that submerged a reasonably powerful computer in (21 gallons) of mineral oil .. and it was very effective. It was also heavy, hard to move, even harder to do maintenence on, and was full of fun surprises (turns out oil will wick up through cables... ). I can actually see this maybe catching on in the high-end server market however, because you could probably have an extreme density of servers in the oil (or probably something better like that expensive 3M stuff) and maybe even refrigerate the oil some how (no condensation == no problem!).
Am I the only one here that wears a beard, you sissies? ROFLMAO!!!!
I do, but I shave the neck and the little wispy bits on my cheek so as to avoid the RMS look ;p
And yeah, "straight razor culture" cracks me up. I mean, I don't have a problem with it, and I guess for _everything_ there is gonna be a group of people who take it very seriously (see also: every day carry), but the fact that there are entire forums (very active ones) dedicated to proper care, maintenance, and application of _razors_ has always made me chuckle a little.
There is a different between them forgetting to invite you to a wedding and them forgetting to invite you to a movie.
As a non-facebook (or really any social networking) user I accept that I miss the occasional "thing". My friends will post stuff like "anyone want to go see " and I'm cool with missing out on that kinda stuff occasionally. I think it would be unfair to expect them to remember to specifically call _me_ every time they are arranging something because I'm that jerk that won't just create a facebook account. All part of the deal.
It may have hit a slump, but it’ll be back.
People en-masse haven’t gotten any smarter. There are still enough people who will fall for scams and do business with the kind of people who advertise via spam. Some good tech is currently making an effective barrier between the idiots and the spammers, but the idiots are still there, so the profitability is still there. Give the bad guys a little time. They’ll come up with new ways of getting around our current filters.
Of course the other theory is that spam has become “less interesting” in light of other new and exciting ways of screwing with people. Once those dry up though, I think the guys with the suits will fall back on classic reliable spam to make their money.
As much of an ass that I think geohot is.. I have to agree. Man has some serious talent.
Really makes me wonder what the hell he'll be doing at facebook. Surely he could be doing something more interesting then cranking out IOS apps.
Ironically Hotz wasn't the first school-aged hacker to be rewarded for his cyber-crime rather than a prison sentence.
Wouldn't call this irony. The whole ex-hacker/burgler/forger/etc turned ultra-well paid employee working for the "good guys"[tm] is an old cliche.
Hell, in some lines of work, doing a little jail time (or at least almost doing some) to earn some rep might just be part of the plan.
I kinda like stuff like this. I'd rather someone blurt out an honest opinion that I disagree with vice read some prepared and soulless press release.
People whine about people in high positions not being honest and spin-talking... but any time one of them does just come out and say something that wasn't prepared by a team of writers ... they get jumped on.
I'll agree though, the fact that this was his opinion and not "the mozilla corporate stance" should have been made more clear.
I don't quite agree. The two have completely opposing sets of demands and objectives:
- Businesses want stuff that is stable and doesn't change much. Rolling something out in an enterprise is tricky. You have to test that all the (really shitty) in-house web apps still work, verify that it is compatible with the entire system base, sometimes get systems recertified (depending on the environment). IE6 is _still_ in widespread use.
- Users want the latest and greatest, and generally don't mind dumping support for legacy garbage after a reasonable amount of time. Additionally "rolling out the new version" is just clicking the "update now" button when the dialog comes up.. and you can even opt out of that and just have it automatic.