Yes and you will be the only human on earth that knows what it does.

I started at 30 during dot-com, am well into my 40's now and feel like my opportunities are only beginning. My salary is 4x what I made 10 years ago and I am seeing tsunamis of opportunity. This is a great industry, and a great industry to grow and to work in over the long haul. Don't let anybody tell you different. Put this FUD in your FUD-bucket with all the FUD that Bloomberg spews day after day.

If they want a newbie that knows a lot of abstract book-learnin and bangs his head against the wall for a week on a problem that I can solve in 10 minutes let them continue the illusion that they are saving money.
I will be over here doing great work, advocating the high value practices of the industry, and getting higher and higher salaries from smart employers.
For that matter, forget even thinking about those longer hours and just pay your coders by the line. That will get you ahead.

PHP, Ajax, Java, apps? You are on the subjects that are hot hot hot in most tech segments. Your experience with customers and the business side of things is a real asset and will be considered a major plus for any reasonable employer. You will not be suited for all possible coding jobs, but nobody is. Age is only considered a determent because people think that you will be stuck up and set in your ways. Show that you are flexible and hungry for new challenges. If you are looking in Seattle, SF, New York or other comparable market you will find a home. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough. Concentrate on your strengths, be awesome, be passionate and the world is your oyster.

Buy a whiteboard and google for interview questions and write code in dry-erase every day. Once you get in the interview chair you will be ready.
And best of luck to you.

Ugh, the level to which this has been mis-quoted shows a lack of understanding by the TPM authors bordering on idiocy.

The previously made sheet of graphene was cited to be 76 centimeters square. but the original article http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/June/20061001.asp notes that the sheet was 76 Centimeters on the diagonal which would be 54 centimeters on a side if it was a perfect square: 2916 square centimeters.

So if we were to use their own retarded logic system, the claim of attempting a sheet that was one kilometer square, that would actually mean one kilometer on the diagonal. so a centimeter wide and just under a kilometer long would suffice to satisfy the claim.

I know we all get it. A hacker is not a criminal, a hacker is one who likes to tinker and break new ground by using tools for things other than they were intended. Kevin Mitnick was not a hacker, Nikola Tesla was a hacker. I agree the distinction is important. But guess what, we lost that fight.

The best thing we can do today is to come up with another word that means what hacker used to mean.

How about bit wrangler? Or just come up with something yourself and start using it and let the best jargon win. But hacker has been lost to us, it is no longer our word. You dig?

And who pays put in the event of collecting that 1M guarantee? Seagate? Probably not.

And the award for best use of completely pulling numbers out of his ass goes to ...

If it were 1 or 2 out of 9 liberal art students on the IT department, maybe we could then give some better error messages than hex codes or "method of object not found"

Having a team of diverse backgrounds does make it stronger and more compentent to serve a world of diverse needs.

"Stem Cell Tourists Take Costa Rica Off the Agenda"

Really did people seeking rip-off and dangerous stem cell treatments decide the Costa Rica was just not cool enough any more? No, exactly the oppisite, Costa Rica decided to no longer offer rip-off and dangerous stem cell treatments.

like as in "Costa Rica takes Stem Cell Tourism Off the Agenda"

I hate being the grammar nazi but really, English, do any of you people here speak it?

Sounds like the ancients were wise and resourceful people with a keen sense of priority.

That is because the essence of his article is that it does not matter what segment of cloud computing you use, if you application is not *designed* to scale, it will not scale. No matter if it was sold to do so or not.

This is that same idea that if you take a single threaded app and put it on an 8 core proc, you will not get any performance boost from the single core. If your data set has to join a trillion rows to a billion rows, you can throw all the parallelism you want at it and you will just have a thousand boxen trying to perform the same join a thousand times and performance will not improve.

On the other hand if you have a single table or name value pairs, you can split work among many many machines and have what used to take a week happen in minutes. But not all problems can be modeled to fit that kind of process, and even fewer of them actually are.

Really? I would happily wait 2 more days for Architectural Digest or the Economist in effort to reduce government spending and national fuel consumption. What possibly are you receiving by regular post that is day-critical?