I've never understood why Comcast and other cable companies have never embraced being a "pipe provider," per your model. It is by far the most profitable of their business units.

People will accept Win 8 as long as it works. Me and Vista were total flops because they were highly unstable, among lots of other warts. Most consumers will probably revert to "classic mode" once they get it, but they won't flat-out reject it the way they did Vista. Remember, Microsoft's OS sales rely on sales of new computers. If 8 works, then I wouldn't expect the downgrade debacle that happened with Vista. Then it's just a matter of how many people are buying new Windows computers.

It's really about the only option we have remaining to escape the ever-growing police state.

If it makes you feel any better, the bureaucrat is most likely overpaid, not underpaid.

"I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT."

I don't know if this is 180 degrees from earlier marketing messages. In Microsoft's case, at least.

That's kind of what we see when the reality of the situation intersects with the dream being sold before the technology matured. In an "all other things remaining constant" scenario, that would spell doom for IT admins. But as the cloud market matures, physical hardware costs diminish, power requirements get lower (meaning less money spent on electricity), and hosting/bandwidth centers decrease their prices. For certain operations, it doesn't even make sense for a full cloud deployment. Which is why the tactic Microsoft is taking is to sell hybrid models, and it's also probably what led Amazon to unveil its VPC.

Who knows what the future holds? In 1993, still less than two decades ago, we could not have predicted what this Internet thing would turn into. Maybe we'll be out of jobs in a few years, or maybe this opens up new and different challenges for the future. Regardless, I have to get back to work.

Since it is weakly typed, Javascript can be very difficult to debug, in areas deep in your code. You can ease your transition by writing unit tests for all your Javascript code. Get comfortable with a Javascript unit testing framework, and write tests first. Then, when you are debugging problems in your tests, you will be training yourself to recognize the common problems that occur in Javascript code.

+1

Length in career varies greatly by individual. Tech is no different than any other career -- if you want to continue with it, that means you do what it takes to keep your value high, through continual learning, and self-reflection and improvement. People will either wash out (by choosing not to keep up), or they will choose to drop out, by either migration to management or moving to a different career path. As someone else stated, we're looking at a relatively new industry, so it's hard to judge how many "old" people there are in it. The dot com crash of 2000 sent a LOT of people scrambling away from tech, never to return. That was a draining of the pool from which we'd be seeing a lot of 40-somethings today.

I'm in my mid-30s, and I feel pretty fortunate to remain in demand. However, I also realize it's because I have always striven to stay current with my skills. I spend my free time looking ahead to what is coming, and not just rest on what I have done in the past, and it has continually paid off.

Ding ding ding!

I think we have a winner, folks. Sometimes good things just don't make the cut when you're in survival mode.

Advantage: SirWhoopass

If telecommuting is common in the company, then visibility is hardly a concern. People in the hierarchy get trained to look for results, not presence.

If you are the only person who is remote, then it can present more of an issue.

Lots of people can write code. Few are the complete package in this business. Nobody wants to learn the little things, such as builds, deployment, etc. Get interested in the "boring" stuff, like testing and test automation. Learn everything there is to know about build and configuration management with your tools of choice. Then practice all those things copiously. This is an area of deficiency in nearly every organization, so identifying that need and making yourself into the person who can fill it will go a long way toward making more hirable, regardless of how you learned your trade.

You've invented a new pastime: armchair industrialism.

Corn does not make cattle ill, and it is not cheap because of subsidies, but because it is ridiculously easy to grow. The subsidies of which you speak have been for ethanol, and they have put upward price pressure on corn. Furthermore, cattle are not fed antibiotics because they are sick, but because the antibiotics are growth promoters. Finally, the blame on livestock antibiotics is most likely misplaced. The antibiotics used for growth promotion are exclusive to that purpose. We do not see high instances of resistant bacterial infections among farmers. Meanwhile, the epicenter of MRSA outbreaks is nearly always hospitals, and they are resistant to one or more specific medically-used antibiotics.

There's just no compelling reason to use G+. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and it's not like G+'s UX sets itself so far above anything else on the web that friends will drop Facebook in droves.

G+ is a Facebook knockoff, and Google is going to have to do something pretty drastic to shake that perception if they are to see an uptick in real users.

How is a research project like this useful, exactly? Big budget science projects like this seem to me to epitomize wasteful and improper spending by government. Billions of dollars will be pumped into this project, which may or may not produce interesting results, and will be of abstract value at best to society.