prosaic-hacker

This is a good revelation but is a technique that is old as the hills. My first post university programming job was working for CAE Electronics, a Flight Simulator company. The simulations ran on a variety minicomputers of the era, primarily DEC Vax 780 and successors or Gould SEL during my time there.

If memory serves me correctly the simulation ran like a super loop on a microcontroller every 50ms or 33ms. On each loop the dispatcher would run a selection of the core simulation functions some every loop, some at every 2nd, 4th or more loops. The system was called banding. The dispatch table was redone to optimize the needs of that particular simulator.

There were various optimization outside of the main cpu as the peripheral devices did computation as well. Also as the systems got faster there was time left over for the normal OS to run low priority function with non real-time requirements.

The technique was not new in my time and had been used on the previous generation of Xerox systems about a decade earlier.

The article talks about long forgotten reasons why things are as they are.

I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was always supposed to be 0. When the IT team that did the automation of the report, discovered field was the number of bombs that fell that week on a property owned by the company during the London Blitz. Not a big consequence to the company but the story had been lost.

I am from a earlier generation. Owned a TI SR-51A last year of High school, Then a HP-29c first year of University. I vaguely remember the SR-51A had an limited equation programming : multiply by a constant and add a constant. I remember writing sort routines for the 29c using its indirect register access to treat a block of registers as an array. Bench-marked various sorts. I think minutes to sort 20 items.

About 1/4 of a Security Now podcast or 1/2 of the Amp Hour or Embedded.

I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.

At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.

I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )

>>There are an amazing number of "business critical" applications that are running ancient libraries, protocols, etc.

Do you know of any examples of these "walking wounded" applications? Can we bring some attention to reduce their foot print.

I teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Grad School, Gaming in their parents basement since they were 10)

When one of the skills click (some try 2 or 3 of the ones we teach) and they start working the says that life is happening for them. The failures, in retrospect, become steps the had to take to get where they are. Perseverance is probably good personality trait to develop.

I chose my handle to have the word prosaic in it because I did many thing in tech (and other fields), none at extraordinary levels, but all done by learning by trying things out. You don't have to be wildly successful in life, prosaic can be good enough.

Early 80's VMS had a Keep/Purge system for history of files. Everytime you edited a file a version number was bumped up by 1. There was a command, "purge", I think that set the Keep count which was default to 3.

This would have been within the contemporary Dos and disk capabilities and size of 160-360kBytes, although slow (5-15 seconds).

When Dave Cutler moved from DEC to MS I expected the Dos console under windows to get that same feature. Disappointed. A gajillion lost hours could have be saved.

TL;DR Don't sweat the future, it will mess up eventually. Just Do something now that is productive for a while and don't be afraid to change you mind or your job.

Doing the same thing I have been doing since I was your age. Learning some that interest me now that could be useful.

Started out as a math and science geek: Organic Chemistry was the target. Two chance encounters: one with two real working chemists that warned me to get a PHD to get a real job. I was to impatient to do that much school so the second chance encounter was with a obsolete computer that was plotting graphs and space games on paper. Three years os CS later I was working on Flight Simulation. The 1st PC era happened and 5 years later I switched to install 1st gen PC networks. Then Unix got big and I did Sysdmin on that for a while. Then Perl programing which morph into webdev for handful of years.

Then I was "old" at least to the HR 15 guy, years my junior, who would not hire me, so I became a manager. Then there were to many managers I went back to school and got an accounting degree. Did that for a bunch of years and started teaching System Administration. Now looking for my next obsession.

I have seen the effect of tools building in several contexts. The most successful were teams that respected the process in that they each, could and would build tools themselves and would adopt other's tools.

Without the symmetry then the creators has to make sure to keep up the pace on the global progress or be label as distracted by the tool creation.

Worst case the tool creators get separated from the main production and have to maintain the core groups utilities (which will become any code they don't want to maintain).

Tools have to be short to build, widely useful, and placed in a repository that is collectively maintained.

Remember the context that created the need for the tool may move on and the existing tools will have to be upgraded. The group should have a plan how to handle that.

I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Friday.

I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.

As for PCs and Laptops. All are old BF buys or rescued "garbage". I am setting up a Dell Latitude E5420 (2013) for a current need. (Official disposed by my employer and intercepted before sent to electronic recycling.) Other resurrected acquisitions that are operational are from 2013 and 2015. I can do this because "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career".

I like keeping this systems out of the garbage for a few more years.

Ageism is not death. Just a bump in the road.

I am well past 60. For the first 30 odd years I was an individual contributor in both programming and system administration and manager of the same.

When one of the financial crises and ageism ended my management career, I went back to school and switched fields. After a few years I got the chance to teach new computer support professionals in vocational program. I have been doing that for 15 years.

As a side note for ageism "victims" our school is growing and is struggling to find enough competent teachers (Window/Linux Admin, Database, Scripting, Networking, VMs, Cloud, Mobile devices...).

Check out your local vocational programs. You can find permanent or bridge work teaching at this level. Usually industry experience is more important for these jobs than a teaching degree.