I'm 60 and working as a System Administrator at NASA. I would much rather be doing software development, but this is what I could get. My savings are such that I have hopes of retiring early, but a major concern with that would be health care. I'm just not sure that the ACA will be there for me to use when I need it. I think a fair number of us old techies would gladly retire if we could get Medicare at 60, or earlier.

Managua was hit by a meteoroid. If anyone saw the bright light of its fall to earth, they saw a meteor. If any part of it survived, that's meteorite. Thank you.

I'm actually using Epiphany, the new browser, to post this. Slashdot was one of the first sites I visited and co-incidentally there was an article about it right at the top! So far, it does seem to be a nice upgrade to the previous Midori browser, which I found essentially unusable.

I still have my CARDIAC, which stood for CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation. A teacher gave it to me in Junior High, about 1971, and it helped get me interested in computers. I'll have to check out the spreadsheet version.

As an aside, I love old computer names that end in -AC. My Mac Pro is named prozac.

This is not a new policy. The implementation of full disk encryption has been underway for some time. We are doing laptops first, then desktops. The current fire drill is because a laptop with PII was stolen at NASA HQ and it was one that had not yet had full disk encryption installed.

NASA IT staff are as overworked and under appreciated as anywhere. If NASA had wanted full disk encryption done sooner, they could have added the resources to make it happen. And that would have taken resources from missions, like Curiosity and the James Webb telescope. It's all about priorities.

I remember 300 baud modems. Cool that one still works today. The oldest operating bit of technology in my house is my 120 year old Seth Thomas kitchen clock, which is currently being cleaned, but I use it daily.

I've had "DEV CAR" in Maryland for over twenty years. It's on its third car, which I call DEV CAR 3.0.

I work in the vis studio that produced the animations and I can tell you that file formats are a big problem with images this size. We usually work in TIFF, and while the TIFF format has no specific resolution limits, it is effectively limited to 4GB per image due to the use of internal 32-bit offsets. The full Blue Marble NG data sets simply don't fit in common image formats. Work is being done on a "big TIFF" spec that includes 64-bit offsets and other improvements that will accomodate much larger images.

Jim Williams