Most of us get sucked into management, like a poor Millenium Falcon into the Death Star's tractor beam. More useful would be an article about how to refuse such offers, keep getting raises and offers for programming jobs as we grow older, and so on.

You will get promoted to management, at least to team lead, just by not sucking.

And in my own experience at least, in the healthcare industry, there are plenty of gray-haired technical people. And when I was helping to hire another programmer, I was hoping for a graybeard, not because of agism, but experiencism.

Huh?

This article is less critical of jQuery than the summary led me to believe. It just warns you against two things: (1) a long procedure of code for the ready argument, "The Big Main Method Problem," and (2) DOM-centric code. But neither of these are problems, and neither of them are caused or even encouraged by jQuery.

After the click-baitish FUD, the summary goes on, saying you might as well use it anyway:

The phrase "probably essential" is a weird combination of a weak and a strong word, and may be a sign of a writer who is half asleep.

Who cares? The jQuery reference is easy to browse for whatever you need right now, and there's little need to understand one part of jQuery to use another.

While my friends listened to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I listened to the soundtrack to Glory.

Is it the government that requires you to do extra work and pay extra money, or is it just life?

Recycling takes a certain amount of work. The government may be trying to split it with you. If they did all of the work, maybe the would have to charge even more.

I may be wrong, and someone will certainly say something like that the government is just being greedy or wasteful. But if it were me, I would either investigate it to know for sure or just go with it.

What about all the users who Windows tests?

+2. In a Slashdot comment, we must add links and formatting by typing HTML by hand. You would therefore think we know how to copy and paste a web address from Slashdot to Facebook, if that's what we really want to do. We don't need an icon to do it for us.

If you're going to add icons, switch the places for Share and Comments. Put the Share link to the right of the heading. Put the Comments link at the bottom. To me it seems more logical that way, it puts the Comments link back where it was.

Ditto.

SysVInit's numbering always struck me as a little hacky. But it's so simple it works. Plus everybody's used to it. When systemd appeared, I looked into FreeBSD and read about its init system. It's a total face-palm that so many years have gone by without Linux adopting something like BSD's way --- or just taking it. It's an even bigger face-palm that instead Linux adopted systemd.

Just don't do that, though.

I think of PHP as mainly a glue language between my database and views, a templating language. Maybe as an extension to Apache.

But yeah, if you're writing what you would call an application in PHP I can see why you might be frustrated.

I didn't read the article, but the summary makes it sound like it would have been a waste of time anyway:

Isn't that the case with any language? Dice could have attracted even more people with this:

Steve Jobs made products that he thought he would like himself. Since he wasn't your classic geek but instead a perfectionistic and brutal minimalist, it worked. That's often how it works with devices. Clever stuff on the inside, austere simplicity on the outside.

You don't know Steve Jobs.

I hate almost all businessmen, salesmen, and advertisers. But about Jobs you're wrong. Read the biography.

And had Google used C, it would be more likely to hire someone who's good with C, since they would need less training.

I'm sure they had something more specific in mind, but "communications" and "digital content" covers just about everything.

I'm trying to think of how to make advertising work, because I really like all of the free stuff, and I know eventually those media creators need to somehow get paid.

Pages
BAD: Animated, big, or pop-up ads
OK: Text ads, like on the side of Google Search Results. Maybe little bitty, icon-like logos of brands along the side or bottom (a few). Also, somehow the print advertising in paper newspapers was never that annoying. It was even interesting. It's worth studying why and implementing whatever the computer-screen equivalent is.

Video
BAD: 30-second commercials before my 2-minute Youtube video begins
OK: 5-second commercial at the end of the Youtube video

Games
BAD: Full-screen ads between levels, or partial-screen ads during levels.
OK: Little ads at the bottom of the Game Over screen.

Businesses spend millions of dollars to hire a celebrity endorsement, talented graphic designers and filmmakers, and others, to cater to touchy-feely emotional associations. They often focus on just getting people to think the brand is cool or trustworthy in a nebulous way, instead of simply outlining the cold, hard facts about their product. I'm not saying I endorse this way of advertising. I'm saying that the elephant in the room is that they are sabotaging it all by their rude interruptions. What kind of emotional aftertaste will I have for a brand in this scenario: Ah, funny cat video. Click. Hi, I'd like to sell you insurance! Meh, you ruined the moment.

Businessmen might think the limits I've outlined above will make their ads too subtle. But if you cross that threshold of subtlety, you ruin everything. Besides, people are a lot more detail-oriented than you think. In school I remember that Guess jeans were all the rage. The difference between Guess jeans and all of the others was a one-inch triangular patch sewn on the back. I'm even talking teenagers here. They may sometimes seem incapable of remembering historical dates, but man can they spot the difference between the Polo logo and a knock-off. That's why I think little logos will be noticed. They may even be more compelling because they are not chasing you. They're standing back, like they don't really need you, totally cool.

For those that are interested, be a little enticing. For those that aren't, don't be annoying. Because I don't think the tactic is working to hit everyone over the head in the hopes that they'll fall into some kind of stupor and buy.

After a copy of two typewritten pages with editor's marks all over them, which he says is a fourth or fifth draft:

"Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. . . . If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard." --- William Zinnser, On Writing Well

However, the first fifty pages of that book, along with The Elements of Style, have helped me write much better.