Of course :-)

more webapp-focussed - http://blog.moonfruit.com/post/2012/08/08/Perl-Application-Developer

or more systems focussed (scaling, soa etc ) - http://blog.moonfruit.com/post/2012/08/08/Perl-Platform-Developer

Bizarrely no-one put contact details on those blog posts, but email jobs@moonfruit.com if you are interested. 61 would not be our oldest programmer :-)

You're not too old for a permanent job at 61! Srsly, how many permanent staff stay more than 3-6 years anyway?

{spam}btw we are hiring perl programmers in london (w12/oxford circus) and tbh I'd love to hire someone who is keeping up and interested in new things - nosql, scalability, soa etc{/spam} - seems like lovefilm slurped up every perl programmer left in london :-)

Sorry, I meant that continuing to support XP means writing updates to fix newly-found security holes. If they don't, they'll look bad when the inevitable rampant virus emerges and takes over 43% of the world.

For offline use, go nuts and keep your machine for as long as you like.

IMO the cool thing about the raspi is that you can just give one each to your kids. The laptop is still sufficiently expensive to be shared, and fixing it so the others can get to wikipedia for homework research is sufficiently annoying and time consuming to discourage too much messing about.

I gave my 6-year-old his own account on my macbook; within a week he had magically managed to change some font anti-aliasing option that affected all users. Took me hours to fix, he now has a completely locked-down account. I can give him a raspi of his own and if it breaks everyone can still use the family computer while he uses his sister's raspi to automatically reimage the OS on his SD card.

Given that they have been required to produce 'posters' since primary school and the first thing they want to do is change the font to comic sans, *yes*, they all know how to open a document and change a font.

At least since year 2 (6 year olds), anyway. TFA is about secondary ICT, which is incredibly *still* about powerpoint/word up to GCSE level.

When I asked one teacher if they taught any programming in ICT responded 'There's no point, because any language we teach them will be obsolete by the time they leave' (he didn't see the irony that he was teaching kids to use office 2003 in 2011). Would love to see the look on his face today :-)

The source says 'children as young as four' have mobiles, meaning that 55% of all 4-9 year olds must have a mobile in order for the "33% of under tens" to be true

One-third of 8-10 year olds I can believe (most people I know are getting their kids phones when they start secondary school at 10-11), but 55% of 4-9 less so.

There's a nice gap there in *theoretical* raw power. As the OP pointed out, in reality there's pretty much nothing in it. And the point is moot, as the wii is running them both ragged in terms of sales.

As a wise man once said: 'in theory there's no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is.'

Seriously, this sounds like Good News for the industry. An API for set top boxes that is more open than OpenTV, and has a sensible desktop client which can preview what it will look like on deployed machines?

Flash can scale for 4:3 and 16:9 machines instead of having a single bitmap font (cf: opentv, mheg, liberate). It antialiases fonts properly (cf: liberate, or 'at all' wrt opentv/mheg). It renders predictably (cf: ce-html). It allows you to use your own display fonts (cf: liberate, mheg), and predict how much content will display per page programatically (scrolling bad, paging good).

It allows for compression of content using zlib, for vector, resolution-independent graphics (smaller than the equivalent, SD-res jpeg).

I'm just hoping it gets deployed widely and that they find a sensible way to have a hardware player.

Which is why fusion-io is different from normal SSDs. The devices have 20% or more spare capacity and use a log-based FS with block mapping, so your writes don't go through the read/erase/rewrite cycle.

Obviously there is a little slowdown once the 20% has been used up and it goes into garbace-collection mode, but there are plenty of white papers around about steady-state usage (ie once it has started GC) and you can opt to use even less of the physical capacity in order to get more performance. See http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/OracleFlash15.pdf for example.