They have good, in depth coverage of current topics. For example, they were one of the first mainstream publications to give accurate, factual coverage of the financial crisis while it was unfolding. Their contributors write well and their editors are top notch. There are usually one to two articles worth reading every month, each about five pages.
If people put as much effort into getting off of XP as they spend fighting the inevitable, they would not be facing these challenges right now. Microsoft has made it quite clear that they are going to sunset the product. There have been newer, better operating systems released that provide an easy upgrade path. Unless someone is running a single core processor, Windows 7 is faster and more stable than XP.
And if the newer Microsoft OSes are sooooo terrible, "There is always Linux." (Or OSX)
These "Save XP" articles are tired and played out. Move on guys. When I read these articles, all I hear is, "Whaaaaaaa. I have procrastinated for the last five years and now I'm fucked. Save me from my own ineptitude!!!"
For a community focused on OSS and Linux. For a community that has consumed Lord only knows how many terabytes of storage bashing XP and touting the glories of ANYTHING ELSE. For a community like that, one would think that XP going EOL would be celebrated with much merriment and significant rejoicing. Oddly enough, it seems that one would be wrong.
Someone would have to convert it from the physical disk into data stored on an array somewhere. Either that, or Netflix needs to invest in a bunch of DVD juke boxes.
My point is that the video files, the files themselves, are not already sitting on spinning disks somewhere. Unless the production company has them archived, the masters are probably stored in a warehouse / data center somewhere. While those files are likely "digital", they are not in a format ready to be streamed.
That is a "classic". They have a lot of those on there. I have recently watched a few of the old Clint Eastwood classics on there recently as well. (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. Fist Full of Dollars)
What you describe and reality are about 180 degrees opposite. The reality is that the older movies are DVD only. The newer stuff can be streamed.
My theory is that the newer releases are already digital and the distribution agreements are in place. To make the old DVDs available online someone would have to invest the time to shift them into digital format. Then there are the licensing agreements. Granted, licensing is a legal issue and not a technical one, but nobody is going to invest the time and money required to update the licensing terms for some obscure DVD that was released in 1997 because they know that fewer than a coupled hundred people are ever going to want to view it.
Banks and credit card companies should be monitoring accounts for fraudulent activities FOR FREE. They charge account holders monthly service fees to maintain the account. A basic tenant of maintaining the account is making sure that criminals are not racking up fraudulent charges / making fraudulent withdrawls.
The whole "credit monitoring" industry is a system of a broken system.
Helping with homework is such a broad subject that stretches from answering the occasional question, to doing the assignment for the kid. Based on my limited experience, the important thing to keep in mind is helping the child develop good behaviors. Show the child that doing homework is important by setting time aside every day for homework. Be engaged with the kid and communicate with them about what is going on at school. Give them some flexibility. "What order do you want to tackle your homework in?" "Do you want to go 30 or 45 minutes between breaks?" "How much of this semester long project do you want to get done this week?"
Homework is less about mastering subject matter and more about developing good habits. Kids go to school "all day". Parents definitely work all day. Those are jobs. The people who excel in their professions are the people who put in the extra effort. Professionals who put in the extra effort usually do it because they are fortunate enough to enjoy their profession. Kids do not get that perk. They are stuck with the subjects they have to learn. A parent who comes home from work and "tunes out", implicitly communicates to the kid that doing so is acceptable behavior. The parent who comes home and helps the kid with homework sets the example that just because they've "put in their 8 hours", it does not mean that they are done with their responsibilities.
Those of us who work in IT inherently set examples of strong work ethics, by being on call all the time. The challenge is to balance the work responsibility with finding time for the family. In most cases, having the discipline to not check emails for 2 hours while helping the kid with homework helps to establish healthy boundaries with employers as well.
One last perk... it helps you get laid. Oddly enough, mothers are turned on by men who help their children succeed. Go figure.
Earlier in the chain the point I was alluding to is that by 40 years old, presumably with 15-20 years of experience, the hypothetical coder should have enough successes under his belt that he has people to vouch for him.
I am basing all of this on my own career and 15 years of experience. I am at the point where I have people trying to hire me left and right to work on projects. That is a mixture of merit (my past successes and present capabilities), combined with who I know.
You do not want to work for those people. In the real world, people want employees who can get the job done. When people get hired based on personal connections, it is usually because the manager believes that they have the skills necessary to get the job done. Despite the common perception, competition for projects and jobs is fierce in the corporate world. You cannot win projects and get things done on tight timelines with a bunch of incompetents. Sure, there are losers around. I work with a few of them. They are about 10-15% of the population, and on a 5-7 year time line, 95% of them get weeded out.
The above goes for the private sector. In the public sector, forget about it. If the State of California is any indicator, personal connections and ineptitude are par for the course. My wife works for the state, and the stories that she tells me about the frustrations that she puts up with just boggle my mind sometimes.
I am in the same position. I have earned every job, with the exception of the summer internship at the company where my worked, when I was 15, on merit. My first IT job I got through AppleOne of all places. I was making $8 an hour. I landed in my current position through Dice.com after realizing that my last job was a dead end. I had to go through the resume screen, the interview process with a bunch of strangers I had never met, the whole nine yards.
I have seen too many people get jobs the other way, and it has made me jaded.
The NSA has taps on the backbone, and they want us to believe that they are only searching for specific email addresses? Give me a break. Email addresses are way too easy to setup and discard. Any spy / terrorist with any modicum of trade craft training is going to go through email addresses like a fat girl goes through ice cream.
If people are really using email to coordinate attacks against the United States, then by all means go after them. But please, stop treating us like we are stupid. Do not piss on my leg and tell me it is raining. The NSA got caught, at least man up to it. What is the line the cops use? "Just tell me the truth, and I will get the DA to take it easy on you." ???
I agree. Our worst programmer is the guy who has been on the job the longest. His code is an absolute mess, but since he was the first programmer in the practice, he gets a pass due to his knowledge of the application. The rest of the team is gradually migrating it to a new platform, salvaging what they can and scrapping the rest.
This is a tough one. If a 40 year old programmer is trying to make it through a blind recruitment process instead of leveraging contacts that they should have been making while in their previous positions, then it is their own fault. One of the biggest fallacies in the work place is that people get hired and promoted on merit. The reality is that people get hired and promoted based on who they know.
Reach up and touch that glass ceiling. Caress it. Press your face up against it.
Then realize that you are putting it there.
I hate office politics and nonsense myself. I also realized that I was never going to make the salary that I wanted if I remained a sysadmin / engineer. Now I manage a team of DevOps guys and mentor their professional development. My goal is to give everyone of them the experience and potential to operate at my level, either when I move up, or when they get tired of working for me / the company and want to go somewhere else.
If you have not read The 48 Laws of Power, I highly suggest it. There is a quote in there, "Either you are playing the game, or you are a pawn in it." It is a harsh view of reality, but it is also inescapable. Either you take control of your own career and move up, or you end up reporting to people who are more ambitious than you are. In my situation, I had to do it out of self preservation. I cannot work for incompetent people, it drives me insane. So I out perform them, make sure that everyone sees what my contributions are, and accept the fact that I cannot succeed on my own.
That last piece is the most important. At the end of the day, you can only do so much as an individual. There is only so much that a single person can contribute to the organization. To be truly valuable, you have to be able to guide others and help a team collaborate to achieve a goal. As a programmer, if your code is so damn good that it belongs in a textbook, then you should be mentoring other programmers and helping them become better at what they do. If you are so fed up with politics and nonsense, you owe it to your organization to show them how to get things done, without resorting to all of that nonsense. Anybody can gripe about how things suck. Very few can provide alternatives.
Adjust their salary expectations to reflect the dynamics of the marketplace. Or form a cartel / union to protect their wages.
Everyone in IT is facing the downside of the economic cycle at this point. Twenty to thirty years ago, there were not enough people with the skills required by the marketplace. Therefore those who had the skills could command very high salaries. Now that the demographics are shifting and there are more people able to do the work, salaries are going to face downward pressure. This is further exacerbated by globalization. Is a 40 year old programmer in the States really worth 10, 20 year old programmers in Asia? How about 5, 30 year old programmers?
This is the biggest discriminatory factor that older employees are facing. Their salary expectations are considerably higher than the people they are competing against. In a lot of situations, the only way to justify those salaries is in the ability to lead a team of developers, or to check the work of less experienced developers, or to work at a higher level where the programmer is actually doing design and architecture work. For in the trenches, banging out code type of jobs, the older programmer will always be at a disadvantage.
My suggestion for anyone looking for a job is to always focus the discussion on what you can do for the company, NOT what you have done in the past. Have an honest discussion with the company about what they need, and then figure out if the skills you are bringing to the table are a good fit for that. Older programmers have experience and experience usually translates into time savings if the employee is in a position to influence projects.
If the only thing an older programmer is trying to bring to the table is some derivative of, "I can code (insert language here) as well as a 25 year old." , the odds are that discussion is not going to go anywhere. The 25 year old probably does not have a family to support, and is still willing to work stupid long hours. At 40, a person should be managing a bunch of 20-somethings, not competing with them for a job.
I used to think that the ACLU was a force for good, and they might be. But they do not know when to quit, or compromise on anything. Here we are finally getting accountability for law enforcement, and now they want to stop the program?
I wonder if anyone told them that nothing is perfect and life is all about compromises.
Slashdot Mirror
They have good, in depth coverage of current topics. For example, they were one of the first mainstream publications to give accurate, factual coverage of the financial crisis while it was unfolding. Their contributors write well and their editors are top notch. There are usually one to two articles worth reading every month, each about five pages.
Prevention versus treatment. Is that such a strange concept?
If people put as much effort into getting off of XP as they spend fighting the inevitable, they would not be facing these challenges right now. Microsoft has made it quite clear that they are going to sunset the product. There have been newer, better operating systems released that provide an easy upgrade path. Unless someone is running a single core processor, Windows 7 is faster and more stable than XP.
And if the newer Microsoft OSes are sooooo terrible, "There is always Linux." (Or OSX)
These "Save XP" articles are tired and played out. Move on guys. When I read these articles, all I hear is, "Whaaaaaaa. I have procrastinated for the last five years and now I'm fucked. Save me from my own ineptitude!!!"
For a community focused on OSS and Linux. For a community that has consumed Lord only knows how many terabytes of storage bashing XP and touting the glories of ANYTHING ELSE. For a community like that, one would think that XP going EOL would be celebrated with much merriment and significant rejoicing. Oddly enough, it seems that one would be wrong.
You get off on being pedantic, don't you?
What's your beef with Sergio Leone? He was a great director and cinematographer.
Someone would have to convert it from the physical disk into data stored on an array somewhere. Either that, or Netflix needs to invest in a bunch of DVD juke boxes.
My point is that the video files, the files themselves, are not already sitting on spinning disks somewhere. Unless the production company has them archived, the masters are probably stored in a warehouse / data center somewhere. While those files are likely "digital", they are not in a format ready to be streamed.
That is a "classic". They have a lot of those on there. I have recently watched a few of the old Clint Eastwood classics on there recently as well. (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. Fist Full of Dollars)
Are you a Netflix subscriber?
What you describe and reality are about 180 degrees opposite. The reality is that the older movies are DVD only. The newer stuff can be streamed.
My theory is that the newer releases are already digital and the distribution agreements are in place. To make the old DVDs available online someone would have to invest the time to shift them into digital format. Then there are the licensing agreements. Granted, licensing is a legal issue and not a technical one, but nobody is going to invest the time and money required to update the licensing terms for some obscure DVD that was released in 1997 because they know that fewer than a coupled hundred people are ever going to want to view it.
Banks and credit card companies should be monitoring accounts for fraudulent activities FOR FREE. They charge account holders monthly service fees to maintain the account. A basic tenant of maintaining the account is making sure that criminals are not racking up fraudulent charges / making fraudulent withdrawls.
The whole "credit monitoring" industry is a system of a broken system.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Helping with homework is such a broad subject that stretches from answering the occasional question, to doing the assignment for the kid. Based on my limited experience, the important thing to keep in mind is helping the child develop good behaviors. Show the child that doing homework is important by setting time aside every day for homework. Be engaged with the kid and communicate with them about what is going on at school. Give them some flexibility. "What order do you want to tackle your homework in?" "Do you want to go 30 or 45 minutes between breaks?" "How much of this semester long project do you want to get done this week?"
Homework is less about mastering subject matter and more about developing good habits. Kids go to school "all day". Parents definitely work all day. Those are jobs. The people who excel in their professions are the people who put in the extra effort. Professionals who put in the extra effort usually do it because they are fortunate enough to enjoy their profession. Kids do not get that perk. They are stuck with the subjects they have to learn. A parent who comes home from work and "tunes out", implicitly communicates to the kid that doing so is acceptable behavior. The parent who comes home and helps the kid with homework sets the example that just because they've "put in their 8 hours", it does not mean that they are done with their responsibilities.
Those of us who work in IT inherently set examples of strong work ethics, by being on call all the time. The challenge is to balance the work responsibility with finding time for the family. In most cases, having the discipline to not check emails for 2 hours while helping the kid with homework helps to establish healthy boundaries with employers as well.
One last perk... it helps you get laid. Oddly enough, mothers are turned on by men who help their children succeed. Go figure.
Feel free to consolidate all of the anti-Intel, pro-AMD posts here.
I will get it started to help out.
My AMD chip runs twice as fast at half the power, overclocked to 5Ghz on air. It's totally stable. Only idiots buy Intel chips.
The article briefly mentions this, but does anyone have any additional detail? Are they using opportunistic TLS on SMTP connections?
Earlier in the chain the point I was alluding to is that by 40 years old, presumably with 15-20 years of experience, the hypothetical coder should have enough successes under his belt that he has people to vouch for him.
I am basing all of this on my own career and 15 years of experience. I am at the point where I have people trying to hire me left and right to work on projects. That is a mixture of merit (my past successes and present capabilities), combined with who I know.
You do not want to work for those people. In the real world, people want employees who can get the job done. When people get hired based on personal connections, it is usually because the manager believes that they have the skills necessary to get the job done. Despite the common perception, competition for projects and jobs is fierce in the corporate world. You cannot win projects and get things done on tight timelines with a bunch of incompetents. Sure, there are losers around. I work with a few of them. They are about 10-15% of the population, and on a 5-7 year time line, 95% of them get weeded out.
The above goes for the private sector. In the public sector, forget about it. If the State of California is any indicator, personal connections and ineptitude are par for the course. My wife works for the state, and the stories that she tells me about the frustrations that she puts up with just boggle my mind sometimes.
I am in the same position. I have earned every job, with the exception of the summer internship at the company where my worked, when I was 15, on merit. My first IT job I got through AppleOne of all places. I was making $8 an hour. I landed in my current position through Dice.com after realizing that my last job was a dead end. I had to go through the resume screen, the interview process with a bunch of strangers I had never met, the whole nine yards.
I have seen too many people get jobs the other way, and it has made me jaded.
Mail from Bob:
Hey Alice, I have teh car bombz ready for the infidelz. You got Mallory hooked up on the jihadi kick yet? We need a driver.
The NSA has taps on the backbone, and they want us to believe that they are only searching for specific email addresses? Give me a break. Email addresses are way too easy to setup and discard. Any spy / terrorist with any modicum of trade craft training is going to go through email addresses like a fat girl goes through ice cream.
If people are really using email to coordinate attacks against the United States, then by all means go after them. But please, stop treating us like we are stupid. Do not piss on my leg and tell me it is raining. The NSA got caught, at least man up to it. What is the line the cops use? "Just tell me the truth, and I will get the DA to take it easy on you." ???
I agree. Our worst programmer is the guy who has been on the job the longest. His code is an absolute mess, but since he was the first programmer in the practice, he gets a pass due to his knowledge of the application. The rest of the team is gradually migrating it to a new platform, salvaging what they can and scrapping the rest.
This is a tough one. If a 40 year old programmer is trying to make it through a blind recruitment process instead of leveraging contacts that they should have been making while in their previous positions, then it is their own fault. One of the biggest fallacies in the work place is that people get hired and promoted on merit. The reality is that people get hired and promoted based on who they know.
Reach up and touch that glass ceiling. Caress it. Press your face up against it.
Then realize that you are putting it there.
I hate office politics and nonsense myself. I also realized that I was never going to make the salary that I wanted if I remained a sysadmin / engineer. Now I manage a team of DevOps guys and mentor their professional development. My goal is to give everyone of them the experience and potential to operate at my level, either when I move up, or when they get tired of working for me / the company and want to go somewhere else.
If you have not read The 48 Laws of Power, I highly suggest it. There is a quote in there, "Either you are playing the game, or you are a pawn in it." It is a harsh view of reality, but it is also inescapable. Either you take control of your own career and move up, or you end up reporting to people who are more ambitious than you are. In my situation, I had to do it out of self preservation. I cannot work for incompetent people, it drives me insane. So I out perform them, make sure that everyone sees what my contributions are, and accept the fact that I cannot succeed on my own.
That last piece is the most important. At the end of the day, you can only do so much as an individual. There is only so much that a single person can contribute to the organization. To be truly valuable, you have to be able to guide others and help a team collaborate to achieve a goal. As a programmer, if your code is so damn good that it belongs in a textbook, then you should be mentoring other programmers and helping them become better at what they do. If you are so fed up with politics and nonsense, you owe it to your organization to show them how to get things done, without resorting to all of that nonsense. Anybody can gripe about how things suck. Very few can provide alternatives.
Adjust their salary expectations to reflect the dynamics of the marketplace. Or form a cartel / union to protect their wages.
Everyone in IT is facing the downside of the economic cycle at this point. Twenty to thirty years ago, there were not enough people with the skills required by the marketplace. Therefore those who had the skills could command very high salaries. Now that the demographics are shifting and there are more people able to do the work, salaries are going to face downward pressure. This is further exacerbated by globalization. Is a 40 year old programmer in the States really worth 10, 20 year old programmers in Asia? How about 5, 30 year old programmers?
This is the biggest discriminatory factor that older employees are facing. Their salary expectations are considerably higher than the people they are competing against. In a lot of situations, the only way to justify those salaries is in the ability to lead a team of developers, or to check the work of less experienced developers, or to work at a higher level where the programmer is actually doing design and architecture work. For in the trenches, banging out code type of jobs, the older programmer will always be at a disadvantage.
My suggestion for anyone looking for a job is to always focus the discussion on what you can do for the company, NOT what you have done in the past. Have an honest discussion with the company about what they need, and then figure out if the skills you are bringing to the table are a good fit for that. Older programmers have experience and experience usually translates into time savings if the employee is in a position to influence projects.
If the only thing an older programmer is trying to bring to the table is some derivative of, "I can code (insert language here) as well as a 25 year old." , the odds are that discussion is not going to go anywhere. The 25 year old probably does not have a family to support, and is still willing to work stupid long hours. At 40, a person should be managing a bunch of 20-somethings, not competing with them for a job.
I used to think that the ACLU was a force for good, and they might be. But they do not know when to quit, or compromise on anything. Here we are finally getting accountability for law enforcement, and now they want to stop the program?
I wonder if anyone told them that nothing is perfect and life is all about compromises.
That's a great article. Thanks for sharing.