They "get" that twitter lets you share everything that bounces around your head with everyone. They just don't fall for it. They are well aware that most of everyone's thoughts are better shared in summary form at much greater intervals. They are aware that everyone brushes their teeth and that there's no need to announce it. They figure that if it's not important enough for YOU to remember it an hour later, it's not important enough to tell everyone else about it.

I wish I had mod points in this thread.

Us "old folks" have learned valuable lessons like:

• Just because it's in your head doesn't mean it belongs out in public
• Nothing can ever really be removed from the internet.
• Nobody cares what you had for lunch or who you think is hot.
• Unless you're a parolee, nobody has a right to know where you are and what you're doing every minute of the day. Nor do we care.
• We've seen thin clients before. We've seen thick clients before. We've seen pretty much everything before.
• Yes, it's cool that you can browse the web on your phone. No, we're not willing to fork over an extra $600 a year for the World's Most Expenive Data Plan so we can watch TV on a screen that we wouldn't piss on if it was on a desk.
• When someone asks for something bizzare and/or impossible in the current time frame, we have no problem saying "There's absolutely no way this is going to happen." That's why we're SCUBA Diving in the Caribbean while you're at work millimeters away from a heart attack.

And that's why big companies don't want "old guys"

Is it? Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?

I can't speak for all "old timers", but I'm north of 50 and can speak for a lot of us. We get new technology just fine. I beleive large tech companies don't like us because we've already seen a lot of the "new technology" before, dressed in slightly different clothing. Sometimes more than once. And generally we aren't all that impressed with a lot of it.

Google Maps? Pretty cool. Twitter and almost anything to do with text messages? Complete useless bullshit designed to let the cell phone companies monetize dead space in network packets and let the site owners sell masses of personal information for data mining.

Honestly, if I wanted a code monkey or someone to design the next kind of brand new useless crap, I wouldn't hire me either. I'm too selective about what I'll do and who I'll do it for.

OTOH, by the time someone hits 50, they should be on their own. Consulting pays much better, the working conditions are absolutely spectacular and there is much more of a sense of accomplishment when you can help businesses grow and become (more) profitable, instead of grinding out code. In the distant past, I could say "See that network driver? That's mine!" now I can say, "See that company expanding and hiring people? I did that."

Anybody who has been in this business for 30 years or more has a ton of expertise to offer and shouldn't be pissing their time away at Google anyway. I like Google. I own their stock. But I'm certainly not going to work there.

I'm a professional programmer - and it's we who have to deal with these sorts of practical issues. I hope you're not doing a non-academic job, if your response is to tell customers who break your system that they're the ones with the problem.

My clients are very happy and have been since the early 1970's, which judging from your picture is right around the time you were born.

They're happy, because together, we work out system requirements that fit their business needs and define their data validation and storage in ways that are useful for all their business processes, past present and whatever part of the future we can predict.

This does not generally allow for all possible forms of naming, especially those that tend to be poorly defined, move around a lot or aren't made up out of letters from commonly used character sets. And it has not been a problem. However if you would like to make it a problem, please feel free.

I think the point may have gone over your head

I understand the point completely. I just don't accept it. It's a recipe for creating data that won't inter-operate with the rest of the world.

And the article says no such thing. Can you point me to where the article said "People have names which are pictures and not text"? Yes, that would be an unreasonable restriction, as you're trying to conflate text with images. But none of the points the article makes come anywhere near close.

I've got bad news for you. "Text is images." The only reason you haven't needed to treat it this way is because various character sets and fonts define specific images as numbers.

All of the points are reasonable cases. Are you seriously suggesting that the points are anywhere near as unreasonable as your example? Go on, give us an example that the article actually gives, rather than arguing with a straw man.

Sure. 32 - 40 are "problems" with people who either have no name or have a name that changes, making it useless for identification. There are also a smattering of other whiny complaints that more or less mean that a name can not be used to identify a person because it's big or changes over time or contains unpleasant characters that some lazy programmers choose to not handle properly.

You can feel free to get wrapped around the axle about non-problems. I see an academic job in your future.

I found the article to be contrived and pointless.

Yes, there are people and entities that do not fit into a normal name slot in a database, and no, I don't care at all because it hasn't been a problem for anything I've written in the last thrity years. When someone pops up and says "My name is this thing I drew on the sidewalk using chipmunk poop, and it doesn't fit in your database", I'll say "Yes, you're right it doesn't, then go have a beer.

You can't handle every edge case in the universe because you'll never actually release anything.

Searching for "zombie on newsweek yields this:

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
Internal Server Error (500)

The requested URL /content/newsweek/search.html resulted in an error in /apps/newsweek/components/content/search/search.jsp.
Exception:

java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.newsweek.cq.search.SearchList.size(SearchList.java:186)
        at com.newsweek.cq.search.SearchList.isPaginating(SearchList.java:190)
        at org.apache.jsp.apps.newsweek.components.content.search.search_jsp._jspService(search_jsp.java:369)
        at org.apache.sling.scripting.jsp.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:70)
        at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)
        at org.apache.sling.scripting.jsp.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(JspServletWrapper.java:394)
        at org.apache.sling.scripting.jsp.JspServletWrapperAdapter.service(JspServletWrapperAdapter.java:59)
        at org.apache.sling.scripting.jsp.JspScriptEngineFactory.callJ

I would suggest learning that it's pointless to test for something you can't fix. You'll waste much less time and energy.

Your provider won't care even a Tiny Iota about your results. If you show that their network is fine, they'll ignore you. Even if you prove their network is not fine and all the packets are routed though a Sinclair ZX80 in Clive's basement they'll still ignore you. If you're really lucky, you might get a nice, polite "Fuck you very much, We're not fixing it."

Knowledge is knowing that they have 3000ms latency between nodes. Wisdom is knowing that the only thing you can do is vote with your wallet.

Fast-working mechanics would just replace the O2 sensor. Good mechanics make sure the O2 sensor really is the problem before they replace it. Like I said, OBD II codes provide a starting point for a diagnosis, not an end point. My point was that taking the car to the dealer has become such an expensive time-consuming ordeal with no assurance of an actual fix that it's cheaper for me to take a half hour and toss in $50 worth of parts at home than it is to take it in for service.

In fact, obtaining good service has become such a problem that I now lease vehicles because they have almost no significant problems during the first couple of years, and then they're somebody else's problem.

Same thing with an O2 sensor. Just because it says "O2 Sensor Three is reading incorrectly" doesn't necessarily mean the O2 Sensor is bad.

Sure, maybe cosmic rays are causing a false reading, but oddly enough, quite often when it says "O2 sensor is reading incorrectly", the O2 sensor is bad.

When the shop charges $150 for labor and another $150 for the sensor (not even counting what it costs me to take time off from work to screw with the car), I'm more than happy to take a gamble and spend $50 on a new O2 sensor at AutoZone, and see if everything is happy.

Same thing for the ignition. I just don't care whether the problem is a loose wire or a bad plug or bar karma. If I can buy $12 worth of plugs and $50 worth of wires and be done with it, I'm way ahead of the game. I don't actually need to know which one it was.

I like a woman with curves, but everybody they showed me looked like "Land of The Giants" or The Thing That Ate The Buffet. I didn't give anybody more than zero.

The last few looked big enough to pick up the Volkswagen and toss it like a Tonka toy.

It turns out that guys that need Viagra are at a hugely increased risk of a heat attack in the next few years. The same blocked arteries that make it difficult to get an erection are a needed for other functions such as "living". Erectile Dysfunction is a really great indicator for severe Coronary Artery Disease.

Doctors are taking the easy way out and handing out boner pills instead of scheduling tests to see how long is is before the patient goes in for the "last roundup".

If this EVER happend to my kid, I would be down at this principal's office, telling him to shove thier policy up their ass sideways and my son would absolutely not be serving any detention over a friggin' piece of candy.

They want to press? I'll be pressing buttons on the phone for my lawyer and the local newsmedia myself. Legal nightmare, PR nightmare, financial nightmare... they'll have all of that for sure.

No shit.

By the time it was over, I'd have a very public apology and the principal would ponder the question "Am I being an asshole?" for a long time before interfering with the next kid.

It's worth it just to teach the kid that sometimes it's necessary to stand up for yourself.

Or slashdot geek reality. I still have documents from the '70s that I like to reference every now and then. hell I have hardware older than that which gets dragged out now and then and turned on to see if it still works.

Nobody really cares what you keep, or where you keep it because you're don't have any infomation that's of interest to anybody doing data mining.