While it seems to generate anger from some on Slashdot, it really is a problem that a non-trivial number of older tech workers have and one that they can solve: Stay up to date and relevant with your knowledge. Tech is a fast and continually moving field, so you always need to be learning.

When older IT folks have a problem, and many do not, it is usually this. I work at a university so we see a huge range of ages. We have student workers who are 18-22 and of course start with basically zero experience, and we have staff ranging from 20s-80s. Some of those older staff are amazing. They are up to date on the latest stuff and have mountains of experience to draw on. They can come up with extremely elegant solutions to problems, can see pitfalls that others can't (because they've encountered them before) and so on.

However others are worthless stick-in-the-mud types. They do things 10, 20, 30 years out of date. They are clueless about new tech, new methods, new threats. They are extremely inefficient in their solutions, etc, etc. They are basically impediments to real work getting done. Things like trying to use NIS authentication, or treating Windows 10 like Windows XP, etc.

While I'm not saying that will magically make ageism go away, or that it'll make every company value older workers, it really will keep you valuable and relevant and your chances of being able to find and keep work will be much higher. Not every company is full of young kids working 80 hours a week on some hot new trend. In fact I'd say most aren't. There are lots of big, established, firms that want to get shit done and need tech people to do it. Chances are you can find work with one of them, but only if you are actually useful.

Also related to that, but think about getting a relevant certification periodically and keeping it current. It is a way to demonstrate to HR/PHB types that you are continuing to learn, a way to quantify your skills, and actually an opportunity for learning. It is a good way to quantify continuing education. Also while I don't know that they open many doors, they can keep doors from being closed.

Most EU nations are visa waiver with the US, meaning you don't need a visa to come over for tourism or business if you are a citizen in those countries (and vice versa for US citizens). Basically all of the EU has visa waiver status with the US, as well as a few other places (there are 38 countries total). So given that this is all about changes to the visa program, it doesn't affect you if you are from a VWP country (or Canada, which is completely visa exempt to the US, and Palu, Marshall Islands and Micronesia which have a compact of free association so their citizens can just move to the US any time they like).

Now if you were coming over for a long period of time, more than 90 days, or were coming over as a student you'd need a visa and then this shit would apply. But just normal business travel from the EU won't change.

Ya it isn't completely clear since the article and summary are mixing cases but I can see a contempt ruling if you agreed you had a password, supposedly provided it, it didn't work, and then you tried to play dumb. While you aren't required to testify against yourself, that doesn't mean you can actively work to try and screw the court over.

So what to do if you are in a situation where the police demand you hand over a password? Keep your mouth shut. Same advice as defense attorneys will give for all things involving law enforcement. Tell them you want a lawyer and you aren't answering any questions. Your lawyer can then advise you on how to proceed. That is the whole thrust of the Miranda warning: You can keep your mouth shut and not answer any questions and wait to talk to a lawyer. You have that right, and they have to let you know you do. So use it.

But for sure don't do something stupid like say "Sure here's the code," and give them a fake code. There is no way that can help you, and multiple ways it can hurt you.

Redhat/Fedora is completely fine booting on a Secure Boot system, so is Ubutnu. There are plenty of distros that don't support it, of course, and if your preferred one doesn't go poke at them. Despite being driven by MS it is a standard part of UEFI and open to all. A distro just gets their bootloader signed with the proper X.509 certificate and is good to go. It does require a bit of time and money, and more than a bit of planning and design, but it is 100% doable and not a bad thing security wise. No silver bullet, but then nothing in computer security is.

There are a lot of people that use laptops for extremely low powered shit. They literally do nothing but surf the web, send e-mails (often also from a browser), consume media (again from a browser), and maybe write a document or spreadsheet (yet again, maybe in a browser). You can get away with a pretty low spec system for that and still have an ok experience. So maybe they find this worth it in trade for a longer battery life. Remember the reason we get long batteries these days is not because they've increased in storage a ton, but because we do better with low power states.

Remember that the low end keeps getting better, whereas the target they are trying to reach largely stays the same. The needs for office productivity work haven't really grown in a long time, but computer power has. That makes it an easier target to reach. We even saw this with desktops: Around the Core 2 days desktops stopped sucking. What I mean is that back in the day, even when you got a brand new computer it still sucked. The fastest 486 out there was still slow as dogshit for normal work. Booting up an OS with GUI took minutes, printing out a document took 100% of the computer's power. So every upgrade was noticeable better but regular work. However around about the Core 2 that stopped being true. They were "fast enough". Newer ones were faster and that was nice, but not so much that you'd notice or care a ton.

Plus don't underestimate the worship of the Cult of Thin(tm) these days. This should be very low power compared to a normal laptop, and thus something they can potentially slim down to stupid proportions. That alone is a selling point to some people.

Not saying I'll buy one, but I understand my standards for computers are much higher than many people's.

It can let an attacker move laterally in your network. The "But it is behind a firewall I don't have to worry," is not good security. Someone gets in to your network they are behind the firewall and can make use of it. So they do something like get on to a user's workstation because said user is a dope who will click anything. Ahh but you aren't worried, after all said user doesn't have access to any important data, isn't a local admin and is running Windows. All the important Linux stuff is safe. ...however this vulnerability is still live. So they use that system they are on to scan your Linux shit, find this, and exploit it to move in to those systems. Now suddenly they've infected a bunch of your systems, more important ones, and at a higher privilege. From there they can hop around further. For example maybe you or one of your other admins is lazy and uses SSH keys to auth, and just stores the private key in your home directory for convenience. They get root on a system, find this key, and now can SSH to any Linux system on your network.

Pretty quick everything is owned thoroughly. The fact that vulnerable stuff was behind your firewall meant little, because they found another way in.

Nope, sorry. I know that is how people like to sell it, but that's not how it works. State universities have their tuition controlled by a board of regents and funding regulated by the state and those states have been cutting and cutting and cutting. If you are interested, go and get the numbers from any of them you wish. Being public, they have to have their books open. Also realize it isn't like they can charge a lot and pocket the money like a private business. Again, the books are open, you are welcome to go and see where the money goes.

I work at a state university so I've seen it happen. Year after year the state kept cutting the universities' allocation. I don't mean "cutting the rate of increase" or even "not increasing it" I mean outright saying "You have $500 million less from us than you did last year." The response from the universities has been to make cuts where they can, try to bring in more private research dollars, and to skyrocket tuition. It turns out that the facilities, computers, materials and people you need are not cheap, the dollars have to come from somewhere.

Or at least get a concrete definition, because it seems to just mean "those damn kids" at this point. The year range is extremely hazy, and ever expanding from what I've seen. Originally what I saw was people born from 1982-1995, 82 because that's the first year that would be the graduating class of 2000 and hence the name. However as of late I've seen it defined as broadly as 1980 up until now.

Ok well first off it seems rather silly to include almost a 40 year period as a "generation" since there would be many children literally in the same "generation" as their parents which makes no sense (a family generation is offspring). Makes the term pretty meaningless.

That aside if you are going to define it so broadly, then you can't make any generalizations about said group since they are very different people and faced very different problems. I'd be a "millennial" by that definition, but I'm 37. I've been working professionally for over 15 years, when I got in to the workforce, the big depression hadn't happened, when I went to university costs hadn't gone nuts, I've owned a home for a decade, etc.

So the experiences I've had have little in common with our students who are 18-22 and will be entering the workforce soon. They get called "millennials" too which would maybe be accurate for the tail end of the initial definition. What they are going to deal with going in to the workforce is very different then what I had to, and their school has been WAY more expensive because the state has been cutting tax money to public schools for over a decade.

So I think the media bitching about millennials needs to stop at the very least until they can work out a concrete definition of a "millennial". Stop acting like everyone under 40 is some kind of homogeneous group, it is absurd on the face of it.

Student loan debt is so high because the cot of university has skyrocketed. Go have a look at what a state school costs now as opposed to what it did when you went, and adjust for inflation.

The problem is all you "muh bootstraps" types (and by the way you benefited from plenty of things, even if you don't realize it) want to keep cutting spending and a popular area is assistance to public education. So the state aid to universities go down, but costs do not. Universities can't just "make cuts and do more with less" so they have to get more money at some point, and that is done by increasing tuition.

You can't shift costs from the government to the individual and then hate on the individual for having trouble bearing those costs.

So surely you don't have a smartphone then, since they are such a waste?

It became useless long before the Internet became a huge thing. Their selection became worse and worse, their prices got stupid, and their customer service was crap.

While Internet businesses certainly have hurt traditional retailers, it isn't like it has been a death knell. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc all seem to be able to be consistently profitable. I could get everything I get from Target on Amazon, but Target is convenient, economical, and a good shopping experience so I buy from whichever suits me for a given thing.

Radioshack would have died without Amazon, they have far too many other stores offering competition.

I mean they have serious issues, including some really incompetent sales staff, but the store is full of shit people buy. Appliances, TVs, clothes, tools, etc. So people do shop there, they do make money, just not as much as they should. It's also a kind of store that is relevant today. You can see similarities to Sears in Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy and so on. Now they aren't all once-to-one the same and clearly some of the other retailers are doing it much better, but the idea of a large store where you buy many kinds of things is one people like and shop at.

Radioshack though, they stopped selling pretty much anything useful. They became more or less a second rate cellphone store. Nobody was interested in that since it turns out your cellphone provider has their own stores (no matter which one it is) not to mention all the other big box stores with cellphones in them. They were just never able to figure out what to become after DIY electronics became less of a thing.

Have a look at a Gigabyte Aero 15. It is about half a pound heavier than a MBP but still pretty light n' thin, and with that you get a GTX 1060. This generation of nVidia mobile cards almost exactly match their desktop counterparts specs wise, so that's a lot of dGPU power.

They are looking at their narrow market, their company and thinking it is everyone. The best example is the VPN retard saying that Windows has gone away. Ummmm..... no. The massive Wannacrypt outbreak at companies is prima facie evidence that is wrong. There is lots of Windows all over the place at companies from tiny mom n' pop shops up to the biggest in the world. It is on desktops, servers, controlling equipment, etc, etc and people are still needed to run it.

I'm sure in his little world, there are no Windows admins. A VPN service likely uses Linux for its server OS, and he just rents VPS's from places like Azure. So in their little company they are all Linux all the time. That's nice, but not at all representative of what is going on in the larger world and if he had any amount of perspective he'd know that.

Anyone who thinks a trend seen at a single company, even a big one, can be generalized to the whole world is silly.

Though to be fair it is partially cause by a common problem with bad programmers. There are a lot of programmers that can only do a couple of languages, or will only do a couple of languages and see them as the tool for every job. They know Java so Java is the One True Way(tm) and they try to solve every problem using it.

I have a friend who is a programming consultant, and quite a good one, and a common problem he has is that companies will disbelieve the breadth of his language experience. He has to convince/demonstrate to them that indeed he has a bunch of tools in his box and he uses the right one for the job. They are used to consultants that do one or two things only.

If anything, that demonstrates to me that we are NOT done with needing coders. We have such a need for them that people who aren't very good can still get work. If you have a profession where you can get more people than you need, you get to pick and choose and get only those that are really good. When you have to take poor performers, it means you need more than you can get.

When the only programmers getting work are the kind that are very good at solving problems, that view languages just as different tools to be used as optimal solutions, who can generate simple and elegant solutions to complex problems, then I'll say we have enough programmers and programming jobs are going away. So long as we have tons of code hacks that can only program in one language and generate code that barely compiles, let alone can be maintained, yet can still find work, well that means we still need more people.