I am now considering making another change: I am seriously considering teaching high school. To my surprise, getting a teaching credential requires quite a bit of effort and time, and of course money. (For a 41-year-old with a B.A. and a J.D., the prospect of going back to college again is a bit unsettling.)
The state of Texas is experiencing a major shortage of qualified teachers. If you have a bachelor's degree you can actually teach while you work on your teacher's certificate. I believe that you have two years to get the teacher's certificate, but that should not be too hard because those who already have a bachelor's degree only have to take an additional 30 hours to get the certificate.
Doing it this way you can take a college course or two each semester you teach and spend the summers doing the major work on the teaching certificate. This way also enables you to get some good teaching experience while you go to school -- you would not want to go to school for two years just to find out you hate teaching!
Check with your state, they may have a similar program. Good luck with your impending career change!
I am probably the most non-traditional student you will ever run into: I am 43 and have earned over 240 college hours with no college degree yet!
I have been taking computer courses at Houston Community College for the last three years. HCC offers some excellent courses and is much cheaper than the University of Houston. Texas now has a common course numbering scheme for IT courses so transferring these credits to upper-level universities is not a problem.
Before anyone dismisses community colleges out of hand I would like to point out that many community colleges have IT certificates that students can earn without having to take non-IT courses. If you already have taken the core courses you can specialize in IT courses.
In my case, I had previously earned 90+ hours at Rice University and 70+ hours at the University of Houston, so I did not have to take English, History, Poli Sci, etc. I was able to take nothing but IT courses (except for an English technical writing course and several courses in Real Estate that I have taken for fun).
The end result? I now have five IT certificates and have gotten lots of experience in many IT technologies (C/C++, Unix/Linux, SQL/databases) and I ended up with a cool job with HCC Distance Education as a Hardware/Software Tech.
I mainly do tech support and training for students, faculty and staff. I also got my very own server (running Red Hat) and I also get to spend a lot of time hacking webpages together with PHP/MySQL. I can say for sure that my computer training at HCC prepared me wonderfully for my current job, so I don't hesitate to recommend community college IT courses to others.
Many feel that community colleges are always behind the tech curve but I know HCC is not that way. HCC offers Oracle courses that track the Oracle certificate preparation courses that cost thousands more. This summer I am taking courses in Perl/CGI/DBI and XML, which I believe are not offered by any other university or community college in the Houston area.
As far as funding goes, community colleges also work with the federal and state financial aid programs and scholarship programs. I was lucky enough to win a two year $5,000 National Science Foundation scholarship. Since I am a Texas veteran with no V.A. benefits left, I get tuition waivers. After I pay for books, I am actually making money by going to school!
Also, many community colleges have COOP programs where students can get work experience as they go to school. You may want to investigate community college COOP programs in your area to see if your students could benefit from them.
in my native U.S., facial tissues are called "kleenex," regardless of the supplier: Scott, Kimberly-Clarke, Weyerhauser, or Kleenex...
Right. In the U.S. if you want a cola drink you ask for a "coke" even if you want a Pepsi. If you want to make a copy you ask to use someone's "xerox machine" regardless of the manufacturer.
the dude is fighting a force of nature - he's either going to die frustrated or come to terms with it.
I have a feeling that most people will bet on the former rather than the latter outcome...
Lying to an agent of the government is not perjury. You have to be under oath to commit perjury.
You give a false statement to a federal agent, are you going to admit on the stand that you lied to the agent or are you going to repeat your lie in open court? If you lie you can get convicted of perjury, admit you lie and you probably lose your case.
While you are technically correct that lying to a federal agent may not be perjury, in reality the lie to the federal agent will most likely come back to hurt you in the long run.
Making my address and phone number public information does nothing to stop spam. If you want to report spam from my domain, use spamcop.
But it does make apparent who is supposedly responsible for the domain. You are the one responsible for your domains, aren't you? So why don't you willing to take phone calls from people regarding the domains you are responsible for?
And as far as spamcop goes, why do you want outsiders to police your domains? Why don't you adopt a Harry Truman "the buck stops here" attitude and police your domains yourself? If more people did that we would have a lot less spam.
I don't trust you to read the headers properly.
Excuse me -- I didn't realize it took a Ph.D. to decode e-mail headers!
[as an aside: while you may think you are superior than the average Slashdot geek, you really need to find a better way to describe your rad skillz to others because the way you just did with this statement made you come across as just another net-asshole with an (unjustified) superiority complex.]
I haven't had a single piece of spam sent from my domain ever.
Heh. Nice to know you keep tight rein over your "domain", however you also mentioned that you have registered more than one domain. Can you also assure us that not one piece of spam has ever originated from any of the domains you have registered?
If you can that is because you probably have only registered vanity domains used by no one other than yourself...
Bzzzt! Wrong. Yahoo! sent out an email to every customer, telling them exactly what had happened, and giving explicit instructions on how to view and change the settings.
Nope, that statement is incorrect. I signed up for the Yahoo map service a day or two before they pulled this stunt. I used my web mail address to sign up as I did not need a Yahoo mail account.
The next few days I got lots more spam than usual, and was wondering what was going on. After I saw in Slashdot what Yahoo had done, I immediately went to Yahoo to *OPT OUT AGAIN*.
The funny thing is that *I OPTED OUT OF EVERYTHING* when I signed up for the map service; however they went against my explicit wishes and opted me in to their spam lists without telling me anything at anytime.
I NEVER received an e-mail from Yahoo telling me they were going to opt me in to their spam lists against my will. The ethical thing to do would have been to warn me when I signed up for the Yahoo Map service that they were going to change their TOS and opt me in even though I wanted to opt out.
Had they told me that registering for the map service meant that they were going to sign me up for lots of spam, I would have NEVER, EVER signed up for the Yahoo map service (plenty of other map services out there) and my web e-mail box would have been a lot less clogged these days!
As an aside, people bitch about Real Player and how installing it signs you up for spam lists when you don't scroll down the too-tiny window and uncheck the hidden boxes, but that is a one-time problem. Real has never put me on spam lists against my will after I told them I wanted to opt out...
Are you suggesting that the government should pass criminal penalties up to five years in prison for lying?
That already exists. Lie to an agent of the government and get caught, it is called perjury and is already punishable by imprisonment.
Don't forget that even though Network Solutions is not an agent of the government, it has been given its power by the government.
Ensuring that no one lies to NSI is (in theory) a good idea so that all domains have a valid contact person. If you don't like that you can register your domain in another country with less restrictive registration requirements.
Just don't get pissed off if I block your domain due the lack of a valid contact person to complain to when someone in your domain spams me...
WARNING:... Even looking at the registry can cause the heavens to open and the sky to fall.
You are joking, right? The lack of a:-) leads me to believe you are being serious.
Always backup your registry before booting up windows.
Pray tell, how do you do that? Access the drive from an emergency windows boot partition? Boot from a floppy?
And why do you even have to backup the fscking registry in the first place? Why have such a fragile mechanism for storing important system information?
If Bill were to pull up stakes tomorrow and fire every one of his employees and shut down Microsoft, we'd all be fucked.
That's right, if M$ goes out of business we would not be able to run Linux, BSD, Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL, Gnome, KDE, etc. All of a sudden our PCs would become expensive paperweights!
In reality, more people would buy Macs, so they would end up with better hardware. Many would turn to Linux and end up with a better OS. When all those people start using different hardware and operating systems, eventually the apps will follow...
-- Insightful? Fuck off, you bunch of mewling pukes. Nothing on Slashdot is insightful.
If she has Netscape but not IE, well what am I supposed to do to help her?
Download and install Netscape. You can get the 4.7x and 6.x versions as free downloads; however, you are correct about the problems not having Internet Explorer can cause Windows users.
IE is only really needed for one thing: automating the Microsoft Windows Update website. Seeing as how often you need to update Windows, I would tend to agree with you about how important IE is to the average Windows user...
On one hand, I want to say "This fucking insanity has to stop."
On the other, I don't know if I should direct the statement at Microsoft or its customers.
To put it in terms of the current illegal drug problem: you probably would be better served directing this statement at the junkies (MS users) and not the to the dealer (Microsoft). If anything the ongoing "War on [Some] Drugs" has proven is that you will never solve the drug problem on the supply side. If any reduction in drug use is to be made at all, it will most likely happen on the demand side...
The true slavery of MS is trying to find your stupid Windows 98 disk!
Which is why many Windows users copy the CAB files to their hard drive. In effect you end up with a few hundred megs of wasted hard disk space but you now longer have to waste time looking for the stupid CDROM...
It's been a while since I've installed it as a plugin, but I don't recall being given the choice on WAV files the last time I installed it
Fair enough, but when installing Real or Quicktime you do get asked about the associations. I am very careful to make sure I choose the right associations but if a non-expert is installing these products then they could possibly run into some problems.
No applet or plugin should associate itself with a media type without some means to undo that specific association.
What is wrong with uninstalling the old product? Also, installing the new program will reset the associations for you. I prefer WinAmp for WAV files, so I just install WinAmp. I don't even have to uninstall the Windows Media Player.
And speaking of the Windows Media Player, I don't see where your complaint is coming from. Simply upgrade the player at the Windows Update site. If you upgrade IE you also get offered a chance to update your Windows Media Player. It is really not that hard.
The big problem with doing it this way is that you will have to fix the associations that Microsoft so thoughtfully broke for you afterwards...:-<
Hiring good lawyers would conflict with their mandate to hemorrhage money as quickly as possible.
I think that hiring outside lawyers leads to more misspent taxpayer money, especially when most universities already have in house lawyers. Outside lawyers usually charge a lot more in hourly fees, which are additional costs borne by the taxpayers who are already paying for the university's in house legal staff.
If the school had any decent in house lawyers they probably would have tried to settle with the student quickly and quietly. It looks like they didn't even try and immediately went to outside counsel.
It is obvious that the student tried to reach a settlement with the school's outside lawyers, but they don't seem to want to play ball with the student. It seems like the school's outside lawyers want to go to trial, where they can really rack up the legal fees, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag...
The new york times article indicates he recieved the cease and desist letter and the trademark infringement suit "last month, two days before his second-year final exams." Poppycock. He's had six months to work this out.
Hmmm... me thinks you have mis-parsed the sentence. Let's look at the quote in question:
These days it also includes copies of cease-and-desist letters from the school's lawyers and the trademark infringement suit Mr. Dorhauer received last month, two days before his second-year final exams.
In other words, "These days [his website] also includes copies of cease-and-desist letters from the school's lawyers and [his website also includes] the trademark infringement suit Mr. Dorhauer received last month, two days before his second-year final exams.
The lawsuit was filed two days before his final exams. The quote indicates that his website contains both the cease-and-desist letters he received earlier and the lawsuit that was filed two days before final exams. It does NOT say the he received the cease-and-desist letters two days before final exams.
His replies to this attempted legal exortion being perpetrated by LSU and its lawyers indicate that he has been trying to deal with this for the last six months, but the university's lawyers are not trying very hard to solve this without going to court.
In fact, the university's lawyers will probably make more money if this goes to trial, so it seems like they are not making a good faith effort to solve this without going to court...
* 31. Florida Voting Chaos - not a damn thing to do with computers
Florida has everything to do with computers.
How are the votes counted? What exactly is "chad"? If you don't know by now that they are the little holes punched in an IBM computer punch card then you have not been paying very much attention!
While it is true that the whole Florida situation is not strictly about buggy software, it could have been averted with better hardware (punch card readers that spit out incorrectly punched cards for manual counting) or better training (have election personnel ensure that there are no hanging chad on the voters' ballots). It also pointed out the importance of well designed User Interfaces, because if some of those ballots had been better designed, the number of errors committed by confused voters would have gone way down.
IMO Florida pointed out some of the major weaknesses of the current computer voting scheme. Computer vote counting is intended to reduce human intervention in order to reduce fraud. If humans have to handle voters' punch cards more or conduct manual counts then it leads to potentially more opportunities for election fraud by unscruplous election personnel...
Unless you can differentiate The Catholic Church's, Luther's, and Calvin's stances on this...
All I am doing is spewing out dogma fed to me by the Catholic Church when I was a child. IMO the Catholic Church is as big a cult as Scientology and their childhood programming is very hard to overcome.
I noticed you did not explain what the hell you are talking about. If you knew you would have let the rest of us in on it raising the level of discussion, but you chose not to...
Besides, I am an atheist. Why should I care about the who, what, where and when of deluded people quibbling over an imaginary "God"?
you are too ignorant about the debate over original sin to even comment on this.
Life is to short to spend it splitting hairs with pointed-headed fools who would rather engage in personal attacks than in an honest exchange of information. I'd rather spend the time doing something productive.
And F.Y.I., I will comment on what I damn well want to comment on when I damn well want to comment on it. Jesus, give someone a shiny new Slashdot login and they think they are in charge of the joint!
You shouldn't be so surprised that J. Random Support-Tech is a bit clueless.
If, in a given sample of support techs, technical skills are evenly distributed from inexperienced < -- > expert, what are the odds that that a random support tech is clueless? I'd say the odds are low as most support techs would fall somewhere in the middle and just as many clued-in techs would exist as clueless techs...
If you got me randomly you would get 240+ undergraduate college hours (Poli Sci/History/Comp Sci), and a varied computer history: DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, Unix, Linux, mainframes, Novell, TCP/IP, PHP, Perl, C/C++, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Oracle, MySQL.
I actually have enough "clue" where I was able to help one of our students fix the damage Gator did to her machine BEFORE I read in CNET about Gator using pop-up downloads on unsuspecting users. You have sinned by overgeneralizing, which requires some mighty big assumptions on your part and you know what they say about assumptions...
If he knew so much about how to keep your systems running, he'd probably have your job instead...
What is so great about your job? Are you a system/network admin who lives in a data center or NOC? Or a programmer who is chained to his cubicle cranking out code? Or some IT manager, ruining dreams and aspirations of the programmers, admins and techs alike?
I am a hardware/software tech at a large community college. The job has its ups and downs but the best part is a varying routine and casual atmosphere (jeans and Hawaiian shirts are what I usually wear).
Early in the semester you spend a lot of time supporting students and as the semester progresses those calls go down then instructor calls go up. Later in the semester you start doing other projects in between prepping for the next semester.
Some days (like today) happen to suck -- WindowsUpdate/Symantec: lather, rinse, repeat. Other days rule -- coding dynamic pages using PHP/MySQL and going to Slashdot to do a little IT "research":->
Some days you get to set up the LCD projector for a presentation for some event. Other days you drive to one of the other campuses to train one of the instructors how to effectively use a piece of software. Other days you download and install the newest SSH or PHP to prevent a potential exploit from bringing down your server.
Sure I get paid less, but I don't have to specialize so much I do the same thing day in and day out. I like the flexibility of my current position so much that I know that I would have to make substantially more money to work in many other IT jobs out there.
Besides, I like two weeks off *PAID* during Xmas break and one week off *PAID* during Spring break...
I want legal recourse. I want a private right of action.
While I feel that any law should have a private lawsuit component, do you really want to file ten lawsuits to go after ten spammers? 100 lawsuits for 100 spammers? Could you afford to do this?
Most people probably couldn't afford to do this (I know I can't). For those of us too poor to take on a private cause of action, maybe a class action lawsuit would do the trick, but that too isn't cheap.
If you can afford to file individual lawsuits, more power to you, but the sad fact is that these days an individual does not usually have very much power when acting alone unless they have a huge bank account...
For example, the moderator that shoved the post you're replying to down "Flamebait", simply because he doesn't ever want to hear anything that could possibly make him think that Microsoft wasn't evil in every way.
That sucks, because I thought it was a very funny response to my crack about undocumented APIs. The lack of:-) led me to believe that he/she was being sarcastic. Sarcasm seems to be way over the heads of many around here...
You're a rarity though - someone who actually IS joking...
IMHO, while an occasional skrimish is O.K., life is already too short to spend too much time waging a dogmatic OS war...
You show me ONE feature that can't be implemented by an external developer to the same quality and performance as Microsoft attain.
Holding the bar kind of low there, aren't you?:->
Is it only me or do most Windows zealots at/. seem to lack a sense of humor? It gets tiring having to constantly type:-) and:-> to tell the humorless out there that your post is a joke...
you're on so much crack that your nose is about to explode.
P.S. Crack is smoked, powdered coke is inhaled. If you are going to use drug references at least get them right!
Slashdot Mirror
Doing it this way you can take a college course or two each semester you teach and spend the summers doing the major work on the teaching certificate. This way also enables you to get some good teaching experience while you go to school -- you would not want to go to school for two years just to find out you hate teaching!
Check with your state, they may have a similar program. Good luck with your impending career change!
I am probably the most non-traditional student you will ever run into: I am 43 and have earned over 240 college hours with no college degree yet!
I have been taking computer courses at Houston Community College for the last three years. HCC offers some excellent courses and is much cheaper than the University of Houston. Texas now has a common course numbering scheme for IT courses so transferring these credits to upper-level universities is not a problem.
Before anyone dismisses community colleges out of hand I would like to point out that many community colleges have IT certificates that students can earn without having to take non-IT courses. If you already have taken the core courses you can specialize in IT courses.
In my case, I had previously earned 90+ hours at Rice University and 70+ hours at the University of Houston, so I did not have to take English, History, Poli Sci, etc. I was able to take nothing but IT courses (except for an English technical writing course and several courses in Real Estate that I have taken for fun).
The end result? I now have five IT certificates and have gotten lots of experience in many IT technologies (C/C++, Unix/Linux, SQL/databases) and I ended up with a cool job with HCC Distance Education as a Hardware/Software Tech.
I mainly do tech support and training for students, faculty and staff. I also got my very own server (running Red Hat) and I also get to spend a lot of time hacking webpages together with PHP/MySQL. I can say for sure that my computer training at HCC prepared me wonderfully for my current job, so I don't hesitate to recommend community college IT courses to others.
Many feel that community colleges are always behind the tech curve but I know HCC is not that way. HCC offers Oracle courses that track the Oracle certificate preparation courses that cost thousands more. This summer I am taking courses in Perl/CGI/DBI and XML, which I believe are not offered by any other university or community college in the Houston area.
As far as funding goes, community colleges also work with the federal and state financial aid programs and scholarship programs. I was lucky enough to win a two year $5,000 National Science Foundation scholarship. Since I am a Texas veteran with no V.A. benefits left, I get tuition waivers. After I pay for books, I am actually making money by going to school!
Also, many community colleges have COOP programs where students can get work experience as they go to school. You may want to investigate community college COOP programs in your area to see if your students could benefit from them.
While you are technically correct that lying to a federal agent may not be perjury, in reality the lie to the federal agent will most likely come back to hurt you in the long run.But it does make apparent who is supposedly responsible for the domain. You are the one responsible for your domains, aren't you? So why don't you willing to take phone calls from people regarding the domains you are responsible for?
And as far as spamcop goes, why do you want outsiders to police your domains? Why don't you adopt a Harry Truman "the buck stops here" attitude and police your domains yourself? If more people did that we would have a lot less spam.Excuse me -- I didn't realize it took a Ph.D. to decode e-mail headers!
[as an aside: while you may think you are superior than the average Slashdot geek, you really need to find a better way to describe your rad skillz to others because the way you just did with this statement made you come across as just another net-asshole with an (unjustified) superiority complex.]Heh. Nice to know you keep tight rein over your "domain", however you also mentioned that you have registered more than one domain. Can you also assure us that not one piece of spam has ever originated from any of the domains you have registered?
If you can that is because you probably have only registered vanity domains used by no one other than yourself...
The next few days I got lots more spam than usual, and was wondering what was going on. After I saw in Slashdot what Yahoo had done, I immediately went to Yahoo to *OPT OUT AGAIN*.
The funny thing is that *I OPTED OUT OF EVERYTHING* when I signed up for the map service; however they went against my explicit wishes and opted me in to their spam lists without telling me anything at anytime.
I NEVER received an e-mail from Yahoo telling me they were going to opt me in to their spam lists against my will. The ethical thing to do would have been to warn me when I signed up for the Yahoo Map service that they were going to change their TOS and opt me in even though I wanted to opt out.
Had they told me that registering for the map service meant that they were going to sign me up for lots of spam, I would have NEVER, EVER signed up for the Yahoo map service (plenty of other map services out there) and my web e-mail box would have been a lot less clogged these days!
As an aside, people bitch about Real Player and how installing it signs you up for spam lists when you don't scroll down the too-tiny window and uncheck the hidden boxes, but that is a one-time problem. Real has never put me on spam lists against my will after I told them I wanted to opt out...
Don't forget that even though Network Solutions is not an agent of the government, it has been given its power by the government.
Ensuring that no one lies to NSI is (in theory) a good idea so that all domains have a valid contact person. If you don't like that you can register your domain in another country with less restrictive registration requirements.
Just don't get pissed off if I block your domain due the lack of a valid contact person to complain to when someone in your domain spams me...
And why do you even have to backup the fscking registry in the first place? Why have such a fragile mechanism for storing important system information?
In reality, more people would buy Macs, so they would end up with better hardware. Many would turn to Linux and end up with a better OS. When all those people start using different hardware and operating systems, eventually the apps will follow...Least of all this post!
IE is only really needed for one thing: automating the Microsoft Windows Update website. Seeing as how often you need to update Windows, I would tend to agree with you about how important IE is to the average Windows user...
And speaking of the Windows Media Player, I don't see where your complaint is coming from. Simply upgrade the player at the Windows Update site. If you upgrade IE you also get offered a chance to update your Windows Media Player. It is really not that hard.
The big problem with doing it this way is that you will have to fix the associations that Microsoft so thoughtfully broke for you afterwards...
Why don't you get off your rear and learn how to do that rather than whine about it?
Most Windoze users are so lazy that they want everything done for them...
If the school had any decent in house lawyers they probably would have tried to settle with the student quickly and quietly. It looks like they didn't even try and immediately went to outside counsel.
It is obvious that the student tried to reach a settlement with the school's outside lawyers, but they don't seem to want to play ball with the student. It seems like the school's outside lawyers want to go to trial, where they can really rack up the legal fees, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag...
We have never figured out how to scroll down a web page on our own.
We would have NEVER been able to see the disclaimer in question without your help...
The lawsuit was filed two days before his final exams. The quote indicates that his website contains both the cease-and-desist letters he received earlier and the lawsuit that was filed two days before final exams. It does NOT say the he received the cease-and-desist letters two days before final exams.
His replies to this attempted legal exortion being perpetrated by LSU and its lawyers indicate that he has been trying to deal with this for the last six months, but the university's lawyers are not trying very hard to solve this without going to court.
In fact, the university's lawyers will probably make more money if this goes to trial, so it seems like they are not making a good faith effort to solve this without going to court...
How are the votes counted? What exactly is "chad"? If you don't know by now that they are the little holes punched in an IBM computer punch card then you have not been paying very much attention!
While it is true that the whole Florida situation is not strictly about buggy software, it could have been averted with better hardware (punch card readers that spit out incorrectly punched cards for manual counting) or better training (have election personnel ensure that there are no hanging chad on the voters' ballots). It also pointed out the importance of well designed User Interfaces, because if some of those ballots had been better designed, the number of errors committed by confused voters would have gone way down.
IMO Florida pointed out some of the major weaknesses of the current computer voting scheme. Computer vote counting is intended to reduce human intervention in order to reduce fraud. If humans have to handle voters' punch cards more or conduct manual counts then it leads to potentially more opportunities for election fraud by unscruplous election personnel...
I noticed you did not explain what the hell you are talking about. If you knew you would have let the rest of us in on it raising the level of discussion, but you chose not to...
Besides, I am an atheist. Why should I care about the who, what, where and when of deluded people quibbling over an imaginary "God"?Life is to short to spend it splitting hairs with pointed-headed fools who would rather engage in personal attacks than in an honest exchange of information. I'd rather spend the time doing something productive.
And F.Y.I., I will comment on what I damn well want to comment on when I damn well want to comment on it. Jesus, give someone a shiny new Slashdot login and they think they are in charge of the joint!
Since Catholics believe that Adam and Eve are our ancestors, that means original sin is guilt by heritage.
P.S. don't let the Church hear you speak out against their dogma. You saw what they did to Galileo...
If you got me randomly you would get 240+ undergraduate college hours (Poli Sci/History/Comp Sci), and a varied computer history: DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, Unix, Linux, mainframes, Novell, TCP/IP, PHP, Perl, C/C++, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Oracle, MySQL.
I actually have enough "clue" where I was able to help one of our students fix the damage Gator did to her machine BEFORE I read in CNET about Gator using pop-up downloads on unsuspecting users. You have sinned by overgeneralizing, which requires some mighty big assumptions on your part and you know what they say about assumptions... What is so great about your job? Are you a system/network admin who lives in a data center or NOC? Or a programmer who is chained to his cubicle cranking out code? Or some IT manager, ruining dreams and aspirations of the programmers, admins and techs alike?
I am a hardware/software tech at a large community college. The job has its ups and downs but the best part is a varying routine and casual atmosphere (jeans and Hawaiian shirts are what I usually wear).
Early in the semester you spend a lot of time supporting students and as the semester progresses those calls go down then instructor calls go up. Later in the semester you start doing other projects in between prepping for the next semester.
Some days (like today) happen to suck -- WindowsUpdate/Symantec: lather, rinse, repeat. Other days rule -- coding dynamic pages using PHP/MySQL and going to Slashdot to do a little IT "research"
Some days you get to set up the LCD projector for a presentation for some event. Other days you drive to one of the other campuses to train one of the instructors how to effectively use a piece of software. Other days you download and install the newest SSH or PHP to prevent a potential exploit from bringing down your server.
Sure I get paid less, but I don't have to specialize so much I do the same thing day in and day out. I like the flexibility of my current position so much that I know that I would have to make substantially more money to work in many other IT jobs out there.
Besides, I like two weeks off *PAID* during Xmas break and one week off *PAID* during Spring break...
Most people probably couldn't afford to do this (I know I can't). For those of us too poor to take on a private cause of action, maybe a class action lawsuit would do the trick, but that too isn't cheap.
If you can afford to file individual lawsuits, more power to you, but the sad fact is that these days an individual does not usually have very much power when acting alone unless they have a huge bank account...
Is it only me or do most Windows zealots at