Can't we just outsource it? All our other intelligence is outsourced.

I live in Longmont, Co and there are a *ton* of harddrive companies around here. Many of them hire for embedded programmers (mostly C and C++). If you know Pascal, C is not a big jump away. Also, I used to work at a weather research facility and there are tons of scientists there that all write Fortran to do their weather modelling. You'd still be very useful in both of those fields. Search harddrive places and harddrive controller places - all very 'embedded programming' friendly.

The best advice that I can offer is:

* Use the best tool for the job (don't use SQL for everything, key/value DBs are better for *many* tasks)
* Index smartly (don't index on the whole string if needed, try just the first few chars sometimes)
* Make sure your indexes fit in memory
* Other than that, just log long-running queries and optimize those.

- Steve

How exactly are you supposed to know what *He* wants to do unless you have him try it out? Most kids are pretty open to all things interesting and fun. If you can make coding interesting and fun...there you go. If he doesn't like it after your best shot, after getting the best advice you can, then go try something else. While there is not much connection between playing games and coding, at least there is *A* connection. Better that than "Ooooh my kid likes WOW maybe he will end up being a Blacksmith"

I agree. Scripts and "patchwork" and "duct tape" is easier to maintain for an IT person than a huge program that may be more robust and more well though-out, but if something breaks in the large application, you need to re-design, and get the developer to change things, QA, deploy, etc ... With duct tape and scripts, an IT guy can make a quick change and be back up and running in no time. It's all about maintainability for me. If I can't get into the tool and get my hands dirty and mess around with it, it's a black box to me and unmaintainable. K.I.S.S. - keep things as simple as possible if you want to be able to maintain them. The more complexity that you introduce into an infrastructure the more documentation you need, the more people you need, and the slower your response will be to fix it when it breaks (and things *always* break).

Yar! That LFNB (it sucks we need that acronym) article he wrote was sad and true. I wasn't expecting the world to transform into ponies and rainbows when I voted for Obama, but I sure as hell didn't expect this.

Do not forget Apple loves to make new hardware incompatible with older hardware. My Mac Pro can not run newer video cards. My only thinking at the time, is that GPU's become too slow over the long term, CPU is just fine still. We'll they prevented me from using the new cards even though they'd run fine in Windows on the same hardware.

So I went out and built a more powerful machine than my Mac Pro, and I dont have to buy shiny new video cards, I just go SLI with a second one of the type I bought with the machine I built. Then upgrade to a new shiny card, when a single model blows my SLI pair out of the water.

I went with Linux, then Mac, then back to Windows 7. What I have learned, you can use anything and make it work, but Linux shines for servers, Apple is a trap to be avoided, and Windows has finally gotten their act together.

Well what it's worth the first tech demos about it were disclosed 4-5 months ago and more details now an month ago. They usually disclose technical things earlier on rather like Apple who goes fully by PR and marketing (and where it makes sense to disclose products and have strict NDA's to keep it secret just prior launch to keep all the fanboys hype it)

find a scheme
like if it is October 2010 make your password
11Nov2010Ber!!
If it is December
12Dec2010Ber!! ect
Passwords that have rationale behind them are very easy to remember, can be very complex and sometimes easy to type.

The sysadmin to go with it.

Ubuntu is all well and good until you need something that is not covered by its package manager. It's all well and good until some piece of hardware only has limited support via some hack.

The problem with Linux is that even with all the advancements, it's still a fragmented platform that only works properly if you stay within it's narrow selection of hardware that is known to work.

Doesnt' netstumbler already do this?