The I.T. industry (development in the uk) is a strange place to be. I've been a professional developer for 18 years and every day problems are the same now as they have always been. Project mismanagment, lack of understaning of the tech involved and persistant scope creep.

Most of this is management managing what they don't understand, but I often wonder if it's also because of the attitude that when you reach 40 you're too old.

In most industries experience is valuable but in it and dev skills easily get outdated and requires that 20 year old attitude of doing a days work then sitting up till 2-3am playing with new tech that you find 'exciting'. When you get older you've seen so many changes you realise its an always changing industry and the latest new tech will be old tech in 2-3 years anyway so why bother.

Gone a bit off track but my point is that young peeps still have that obsession to learn evrything new and they still believe they can fix all problems they come across. Us older folks know that unless you get in with a knowledgable company you'll be in a constant battle between producing good stuff and getting the management to understand what you do.

I think that what the media (Sony BMG/Warner bros etc) failed to realise is that cd sales have fallen for a number of reason. The main one being quality. I know people who download mp3s off the net, but they are also the same people with huge cd collections. They download a cd first and if they go WOW! they buy it. If they aren't too keen on it then they rarely, if ever play it again. The question then is, is that piracy in the sense of someone stealing just to cheat someone else? All these figures everyone bands about of X billion lost to piracy are generally rubbish. Just because someone downloaded a photoshop torrent doesn't mean they will ever use it more than twice so they would NEVER HAVE BOUGHT IT in the first place. That's the key, its not lost revenue because it would never have been a sale. The media industries need to look at their value again and how their CLIENTS want to use their goods. Up until now physical formats (Betamax, vhs, vinyl, cd, dvd) have meant we all go out re-buy everything we bought before every few years (I'm not 18 ;) in a new format. I've personally bought many films 2-3 times (video, dvd, lost dvd, special edition versions). Digital media that you 'actually own' therefore scares the hell out of the industry. How can they recharge you for a new format or if you lose your disc? So they come up with DRM which says what you may and may not do. Now if they had sensibly made this reasonable they could have had their drm and no-one would have moaned. Lets say, silly idea I know "Upon purchasing this [song|video|film] you are given the right to transcode the media and use it on any device for private viewing/listening whilst its unique id has not been found elsewhere in circulation." Which would encourage people to keep their content to themselves. If a large amount of media on-line they then have a route back to the purchaser (which may be a pirate gang or credit card theft, but at least they have a trail and its a normal crime). They also have a record of who bought what so for a small administration fee (or probably insurance) they can pull up everything I own and let me have it again when my house burns down.