yes, exactly. i don't even pretend to know a shard of what's available in emacs. i think of it like being able to afford a full-size, professional mechanic's toolbox: you won't have a clue what half of those tools do, but if you run into some weird problem, you can figure out the tool and solve the problem without buying something else.
MAAS might be catching up, what with adding LXD to the mix. Used to be just KVM hosting, but using an LXD container as a VM host makes this a lot easier for me to run my "kitchen table data center" (four ginormous laptops hooked to a switch). It's got some growing to do, for sure -- like, it would be nice to dump QEMU and just use LXD containers as VMs -- but that's probably in their roadmap. Worth a try if you're into bare-metal stuff.
Years ago, HP had an incredibly powerful product (secure banking server, using NSA's CMW code), placed in all 325 of the largest banks in the world (not kidding) with a very stupid name. I've forgotten it, but it was a humdinger-darlin'-dumba$$ name that meant something sexually grotesque in Swedish or something. I took over as the product manager in 2000, and immediately went for the rebranding. Granted, HP was large, but the rebranding went absolutely great. First, the customers were actually happy to not have to refer to this mature product by a stupid name, and second, the uptake increased almost immediately to encompass about another 150 large banks, who said, "yeah, we wanted the features, but we weren't going to tell our customers we were protected with the "VirtualVulvaScraper" (or whatever the $#%^&&*@!! name was). It only worked to our advantage to do this, and it paid off at every stage. Never underestimate how relieved a customer will be to see a product they like grow up and start using more elegant branding.
Nope,chemistry was my thing. Went all the way to the International Science Fair (high school) and won big there. Then got a National Merit, had choices of Hopkins, Stanford, etc., but stayed at Bama for family reasons (sick mom). To be fair, I also cared a lot about radio & computing, so switching to EE wasn't a big shock, but better career prospects w/o having to do a PhD.
Start of my junior year in chemistry at Alabama, went in to talk to my adviser (his fifth year teaching there). He was sweating over paperwork, said it was the first time he made enough to file a tax return. I said, "Excuse me, I've got to go change my major." And I did. Never looked back.
I just told my boss I was moving, and let them offer.
Working for HP in Atlanta, I'd already proved myself during the '96 Olympics, when even the 12 miles to work was impossible. In 2000, our rent went out of sight; we owned 7 rural acres -- about 800 miles away -- so we just decided to move. I figured my boss would let me telecommute, but I didn't ask for it: I just told him, very honestly, that I was moving, and why. He said, "That's fair. I support you in this move, if you understand that you won't have the same advancement opportunities as someone who's in the office." I agreed, and that was that. I worked another 15 years that way, until HP fell apart and I wanted to change jobs.
Hard to do in a comment, but the real value of containers, etc., is really microservices and micro-environments.
If you dig in, there are dozens of similarities to both the Unix shell kit and the Unix kernel design. The translatable wisdom starts with principles — do one thing well, smaller is better, and hugely, let data be the interface that assembles individual tools into a process / flowchart / blockchain / supply chain / etc ad nauseum. Let those principles guide your design and how your containers envelope the problem. Like I said, hard to explain in a post, but the gist is that “everything old is new again, except I invented it!”
I'm 60, and going strong. Most important is bring not only depth and breadth of knowledge but also wisdom to the work. As a graybeard, you're expected to add value because of your years. For example, when my office was going nuts about Kubernetes, devops, etc., it got me a raise to compare this new tech to the original Unix philosophy and point out some lessons learned in Unix design that would help with our containers. Everybody reinvents everything, every 5 or 10 years; use your history to add value, and you have a unique selling point that can't be duplicated.
Gibson's "The Peripheral." Not just a prescient story, but a veiled commentary on how easily we're using technology as a proxy for being there, and all the psychological changes that come along for the ride. "Neuromancer" was meh for me, but this one really reads well on all levels.
Actually, if you want to see clean code that works well, try the traditional ex/vi source. It's something like 20K lines, but very neat functional programming all the way down.
Honestly? I think IBM isn’t as relevant as they’d like to be, so they’re buying a Nike. They haven’t thought about the details, or worked out the long term. It could still go either way, but RH will chamge some over time. The real problem will probably be the perception, largely thanks to Oracle and it’s behavior with Sun. Does make you wonder if open source is a sustainable business model in the ultra-long-term.
I have rewritten the BSD calendar app in every language I can get my hands on, from Perl to Go to Emacs Lisp to.... It isn't that I want a calendar app, but it has helped me to develop strong fluency in porting code from one language to another, both at work and in my side projects.
If you are willing to learn good German eventually, there are many place in Germany that could meet your requirements. It is relative easy to get a freelancer's Visa, and this gives you much time to learn German to pass the B1 exam required for a permanent stay. The healthcare alone will make it worth it, but the intellectual climate is strong everywhere, even among stay-at-home-partners.
I learned the piano well enough to play for money in college. Close your eyes - it’s all muscle memory. Experiment and learn multiple chords and keys. And it takes about 7 years practicing 3-5 Times a week.
Health and fitness. I see the subthread about producing income, but you can’t produce income if you’re dead, and you can’t produce as much income if you’re fat, out-of-shape, and can’t hink straight for hours at a time. Not to mention that fitness allows people over 25 to more easily expand the executive functions in the brain, which increases your ability to produce income.
Read "The Clean Coder." Robert Martin addresses this very issue directly. He mentions some modem code that was hideous, but worked very effectively. Knowing that code doesn't last very long before having to be replaced, he realized that it wasn't worth the confusion. Look just a bit longer term than your first year or two: will this code end up being overcome by events within that timeframe? If so, don't mess with it.
I am a business account. I have an option to pay more each month and not experience these limits. Is that not what net neutrality is designed to avoid?
Changed and changed back: I started as a programmer in Summer 1980; by 1994 I was tech writing, and then ghosting business books, and finally ghosting fiction. Seeing the low returns of even really good authors -- for one popular business book, I got $30K to ghost it, the author ended up making only $7K -- I decided to re-tool and learn Web languages. Now I'm a reasonably-well-paid Wiki administrator for a medium-size public medical software firm. I don't think it's one career, it's kinda surfing in place.
This is an example of binary thinking prevalent in self-help books. The scientific reason is, IMNSHO, trying to sell books with simple, easy-to-follow logic, which is irresistible when you're in a dilemma. But it is only a good idea when the consequences of the fear are not so great that you cannot quickly recover.
Are you afraid of being homeless and destitute? Good. That is a good fear to have, and you shouldn't "make it happen." Afraid of jumping off a four-story building? Likewise, good. Afraid of bungee-jumping? That one's questionable, but still not a bad fear. Afraid of asking for a date? Okay, you need to do that one a little so you get over it. Short answer? It depends on the fear and the consequences of failure.
I usually do the thing I am afraid of _if my fear seems irrational_. I have had good success with this: about 70% of the time, I overcome the irrational fear, about 30% of the time, I am still just as afraid later. If my fear is healthy, I leave it alone. So far, I have also had good success with this.
~$500+ per month making custom-designed handbags; not just sewing bags, mind you, but one-offs for individuals : word-of-mouth, facebook, friends, etc. Can't afford to advertise, couldn't handle the demand without hiring, don't want it to get too big.
Making ~$500+ per month designing handbags, word of mouth / text / facebook posts. Not just sewing bags mind you, unique bags designed to fit each person. Problem is throughput -- I'll have to hire soon or keep it smallish.
You might try to see if it's come kind of contextual speedwriting. I learned a version of speedwriting in college in which the letter "e" and the letter "i" are exactly the same and deduced later by context; likewise, the letter "h" and the letters "la" appear to be the same. In other words, it might be more of a crude symbolic code. Just a thought.