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?

Look dumasses the proper moderation on this post is either "funny" or "flamebait" not "interesting. Seriously, what turnip truck did you all fall off of? Were your irony genes mutated by cosmic rays or microwave ovens?

Really, here on Slashdot you assert that a modern centralized datacenter is unneeded? You think that maintaining myriad and inconsistent IT systems is a good use of state funds. Really?

Yeah, but this article is discussing the state if the industry, not how an expert user can avoid popups and other scareware/malware.
There are loads of machines out there being infected today by doing normal browsing on reputable sites. With the current industry practice of n-number of redirects through n-number of networks for 3rd party ad serving it makes it near impossible to track down those of nefarious intent on an incident level.

Once again it is not the .01% of us slashdotters that are the problem with malware infections, it is the millions of joe sixpacks that care not to go through the trouble that it takes to install and then browse with these specialized browsers and plugins.

I for one agree, something must be done; and "open letters" like this are often how the conversation starts.