I use the headphone jack on my work laptop pretty much all day, every work day. Working in an IT "cube farm" I couldn't work without it.

Occurrences of cancer are not down. It is the mortality rates that have reduced. Of course those with more wealth can afford to pay for treatment, can afford the "time off" to get those treatments and can afford the travel that is often required to get said treatment.

Just yesterday we retired our last Intergraph machine manufactured in 1994.

Also any exploits of the suffix information would need to either be done very quickly or in such a way that the owner did not know it was missing or compromised. Because the first thing you would do upon realizing that your suffix list has been stolen is go and change your passwords to use a new set of suffix's.

Yup. Cray's advantage has always been the engineering behind the interconnects and the highly optimized compilers. The people behind those are still around.

The situation presented by the OP is not really age related. It has a lot more to do with attitude and personality. I work in IT and turned 50 a couple weeks ago. I spend a significant amount of my time trying to keep up with technology advancements. Most of the people I work with and know that work with technology do not try to keep up with things unless they must to do their job. It really comes down to a matter of interest. Some people have an innate interest in technology and learning as much as they can about it. Others do not. What you do for a living really has little to do with it.

I believe under current law the border patrol has authority anywhere within 100 miles of the border. This means something like 75%+ of the US population lives within the border patrols area of operation and they can stop you at any time to do a "border search". The thing about this is that the rules and laws that control what the border patrol can do are way different than what most other law enforcement organizations work under. A fair amount of due process stuff just goes right out the window.

It depends on what your goal is. Do you want to stop the change requests or reduce them?

If you just want to reduce them put in a change control process and make sure everyone, including IT, follows it, no exceptions other than a true production stop situation. Half the request will go away simply because someone has to actually fill out a form and commit stuff to writing.

If you want to stop all but the most essential stuff do charge backs for everything you do. The moment the actual cost of making changes moves out of IT, requests will drop off drastically. People will ask for all kinds of stuff as long as it doesn't cost them anything. The moment they have to pay for it they pay a lot more attention to things and only pay for what they really need..

One big problem I have seen is that developers are never given any sort of training related to documenting. That and standards are seldom in place. So you can tell developers to document stuff, but if they are never shown what to do or how to do it, it just isn't going to get done in a useful way.

It really does depend on the specific job.

For example the skill set needed to administer an Oracle database hasn't really changed in a long time. Have new tools come along that have better UI? Sure, but the process to create a database, do backups, make a clone, optimize a query, etc. haven't changed in ages.

As for people that right code, the real skill set of a good programmer never goes stale. Being familiar with one specific language or framework is really a very small part of a good programmers skill set. Any good programmer can pick up a different language of framework fairly quickly. Understanding various design patterns, development techniques, good comunications skills, etc. never go stale and are always relevant.

It seems Mr. Bloom is referring to experience with specific versions of software or hardware as the skill set. Not the actual skills it takes to effectively use that software or hardware.

It will not work with VS Express, but it will apparently work with VS Shell, which is free. VS Shell is just the IDE without any of the language compilers included.

The last numbers I saw in 2010 stated that the license cost for Blu-Ray was US$4.50 per player. That is over and beyond any hardware costs. So when you are talking about many millions of units shipped that becomes real money saved.

It's not the price relative to other choices that make high speed rail usage in China relatively low. It is the fact that the average monthly wages in China are something like 2000-3000 Yuan. Sure there are plenty of people in a company the size of China that make more then that, but the majority just plain can't afford to travel at all.

I paid for and used a copy of Trumpet a lot. Although I probably used it on 3 or 4 different PCs, one at a time, over the course of a couple years.

Where I have worked, about 1500-2000 employee manufacturing companies, the IT organization has fallen under two different places in the org chart. The VP-IT either reported directly to the President/CEO or to the VP-Finance & Accounting, who in turn reported to the President/CEO.