I doubt many employers want a mediocre jack-of-all-trades kind of guy.
In my opinion, a mile wide/inch deep skillset gets you nowhere.
There is no doubt that mediocre, or inch-deep, skills are useless. But I've made a career out of being a highly-skilled jack-of-all-trades, and it works fabulously.
Pick an interesting area and do it for several years. Then pick a different area and do that for several more.
I've been a programmer/analyst for business software, a network engineer, and a system administrator, among other things. Do it long enough to get good at it, and then transition to another area.
The skills you gain in one area will be invaluable in other areas. Your sysadmin tells you that the program you wrote is killing the server or the network? You'll have an idea what they are talking about, and how to avoid it, once you've walked in their shoes. Your local Mouse-Clicking-Solutions-Expert tells you that a certain sysadmin task will require you to press "OK" four hundred times? You'll know how to avoid that through automation or scripting once you've done some programming.
Let your boss know you are interested in trying something different. "Hey, I heard about the XYZ project. If anything comes up for our department, I'd be interested" and so on. I've had opportunities come up simply because I was the first one to mention being interested, even before there was anything available.
The most important part is don't wait for somebody to ask you if you want to do something. Try stuff out at home. Volunteer to do extra stuff. Ask questions. Don't wait for a job opening to come up; start doing more advanced work and the promotion will follow.
I refuse to pay any more money to Bill, or for any software that run on his OS, so I found myself in the same situation.
I was going to actually pay the extra money for TurboTax for Mac, figuring if that was the cost of avoiding Bill's monopoly, I better put my money where my mouth is.
Then I came across TaxAct, which is much cheaper than either TurboTax or TaxCut. I almost caved in to spend money on the Windows version, because they let you download a free version where you only pay when you file, but I couldn't get it to run under Wine or WineX.
Their online version worked great with Mozilla 1.4. My federal and state returns, both with efiling, cost me $18 total. A very good price.
As a result the mundane bores us more. Yes sometimes when I should be focusing I'm not, but that's because it's so _boring_.
Yes, life is full of boring things. I want stimulation. I want instant gratification. I want sugar and movies on demand and Britney Spears and overnight delivery and instant downloads and on and on and on.
Ever since our ancestors 10000 years ago stopped eating every fruit and seed they found, and started planting some of them in the ground and waiting half a year instead, life started getting more boring. The basis of civilization is the deferment of gratification.
Try looking up "panem et circenses". On the other hand, don't bother; it'll be too boring. How about this one: "Here we are now, entertain us".
Interesting how you can go from Juvenal to Kurt Cobain, and see there is still nothing new under the sun.
For what it is worth, I have ADHD. I don't watch TV precisely because I get sucked in and suddenly I find it is three hours later and that's three hours I'm not getting back ever again. I don't need any further excuses for asocial behavior; I start out with enough of that without TV to boost it.
I'm an ESX user. I obviously can't verify whether the ESX kernel was "based on" Linux or not, but it presents an extremely effective appearance of being a Linux kernel to software running in the "console OS", the controlling part of the system
The console OS in ESX 1.5 and 2.0 is based on RedHat 7. We regularly install generic RedHat 7.1 or 7.2 RPMs for various things, like SMBFS or PAM modules, and it works perfectly.
It seems to me like the underlying VM controller is all new, like they say. But the console OS is a barely-modified Linux kernel running as a specially-privileged VM in the VM controller.
If people like Mr. Rubenstein expect her to understand them, she suggests, perhaps they should learn to speak in a language she can understand, rather than ridiculous acronyms and suffixes.
that particular sentence is particularly annoying. if you go to china, YOU learn chinese or hire a translator. otherwise you don't go to china.
Uh, OK, but when a Chinese person comes to your country, you expect them to learn and use your language.
We computer people have injected these machines into our existing society with an existing language, and expect everyone to learn the new contrived language of acronyms and associated cruft.
Miriam's age doesn't matter. Human behavior is 10000 years old, computers and today's software are not. Computers should fit people. Otherwise we are doing a bad job at creating them.
I still have my Apple//e green monochrome monitor. My kids play video games on it when the big TV is being used for something else.
The big TV itself is just a 35" NTSC monitor which I got cheap when a previous employer went bankrupt in 1995. The VCR is the tuner.
Come to think of it, the bedroom TV is a composite monitor from the same previous employer, with a VCR tuner too. I think I only have one real TV in the house.
Incoming, outgoing, or both? The workarounds can be different depending on which it is.
And yes you can run it on non-standard ports. 26 is fairly common.
Except that the great wide world can't send mail to you if you're listening there. The sender has to be specifically configured for that.
One thing I'm doing as a backup to my main connection is (everybody get ready to cringe) UUCP over TCP port 540. It's an easy config in the Unix/Linux world with Taylor UUCP. Sendmail handles it fine. No, no bang paths-- just plain domain names.
This would be a workaround for a problem on incoming mail. In my case, my primary MX record points to my mail server, and my secondary MX points to my UUCP relay site (bungi.com). If a sender can't connect to me, they go to the secondary where it queues. I run an hourly UUCP poll over TCP, which picks up anything waiting. If my main connection went down or were blocked, I could retrieve incoming mail with any generic PPP dial-up account.
I know, sounds kludgy, but it works fine.
This would work as a workaround for outgoing blockage also, but it would be much easier to use your ISP's outgoing mail server.
You mean the escrow company holding the source? Bzzzt. Nope, sorry. All they do is warrant that they will hold whatever media the software author gave them. They will not warrant that the contents of the media are worth anything. Escrow companies and lawyers go hand in hand. They won't be the scapegoats.
This happened at my company. Software vendor gave escrower a bad CD. When they went bankrupt, escrow company gave us the bad CD. We "got what we paid for".
Even if you could sue them, what good is that? In six years when the suit is settled, you'll get some money? In the mean time, your software is SOL.
Yeah, gotta love it. These are the same people who snort at "intelligent design" but then join SETI@Home because they think they can empirically identify intelligence...
including support for MMU-less systems that do not have a hardware-controlled memory management scheme
Well, it's about time-- I've been waiting years to run this Linux thing directly on my original IBM AT. Now I can yank out that Intel Inboard/386 hack I had to add in to get it to work. That has always bugged me.
At least it can just be unplugged with no regrets. Unlike cutting my other original IBM AT case with the Dremel to get that stupid ATX motherboard in there; no going back on that one. Stupid progress.
If you suffered from it, more than likely you would know it by now.... The students I have dealt with were all diagnosed in early to mid childhood.
Not necessarily. My daughter is 17 and only got diagnosed 2 years ago. We always knew she was different, but didn't really know why. It didn't become a problem until high school age as the pressure (academic and social) increased. We struggled through quite a bit getting the proper diagnosis and care for her. There can be many intermingled things that muddy the diagnosis.
Asperger's has a set of components including sensory integration dysfunction, language processing issues, rigid thinking patterns and social issues, the extent of which vary in each person. It also can come along with other disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADD/ADHD, and clinical depression. Sorting through these and figuring out which thing is contributing to which symptom can take a long time to sort out.
And it can all be dependent on adequate availability of child and youth mental health resources in your area. In many parts of the country, there is a shortage of teen-specific mental health help, which really can have much different needs than either younger children or adults. Heck, it's tough enough being a teenager without Aspergers or OCD or ADHD.
Once you have a good diagnosis, you can then know what kind of coping skills will help. The coping skills for ADHD and OCD and sensory integration disfunction are not all the same.
Interestingly, once a family member has been accurately diagnosed with Asperger's, you start to recognize small pieces of the constituent parts in other family members.
I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution
Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work?
<troll>Trying it out would be more useful than just thinking about it.</troll>
Yes, it works fine. As well as Wine does for any Windows app. I'm running it at home. My kids are impressed at how much faster their 486s run as terminals compared to running a local copy of Windows. They're also disappointed that game support sucks.
The biggest problem is Wine's varying level of support for the various DLL's required. This is standard Wine FAQ stuff. You can get widely different results based on whether you use Microsoft DLLs or Wine's built-in reimplementations. Licensing would be a big issue using Microsoft's DLLs.
The second biggest problem is that you're essentially doing streaming video over the LAN, so you can forget about arcade games or anything with high screen update rates. That's a terminal problem, not Wine. TuxTyping has the same problem. (Can anyone recommend a *good* typing tutor that works with LTSP?)
Standard desktop apps work fine. It bugs me to admit it, but I still find Irfanview under Wine to be a better picture browser that the other X/KDE/Gnome ones I've tried.
There is another
Web-based card catalog project on SourceForge (GPL) called
glibs. It needs some work but may be a good starting point for a personal catalog. It has a MARC file import facility.
Slashdot Mirror
Pick an interesting area and do it for several years. Then pick a different area and do that for several more.
I've been a programmer/analyst for business software, a network engineer, and a system administrator, among other things. Do it long enough to get good at it, and then transition to another area.
The skills you gain in one area will be invaluable in other areas. Your sysadmin tells you that the program you wrote is killing the server or the network? You'll have an idea what they are talking about, and how to avoid it, once you've walked in their shoes. Your local Mouse-Clicking-Solutions-Expert tells you that a certain sysadmin task will require you to press "OK" four hundred times? You'll know how to avoid that through automation or scripting once you've done some programming.
Let your boss know you are interested in trying something different. "Hey, I heard about the XYZ project. If anything comes up for our department, I'd be interested" and so on. I've had opportunities come up simply because I was the first one to mention being interested, even before there was anything available.
The most important part is don't wait for somebody to ask you if you want to do something. Try stuff out at home. Volunteer to do extra stuff. Ask questions. Don't wait for a job opening to come up; start doing more advanced work and the promotion will follow.
I was going to actually pay the extra money for TurboTax for Mac, figuring if that was the cost of avoiding Bill's monopoly, I better put my money where my mouth is.
Then I came across TaxAct, which is much cheaper than either TurboTax or TaxCut. I almost caved in to spend money on the Windows version, because they let you download a free version where you only pay when you file, but I couldn't get it to run under Wine or WineX.
Their online version worked great with Mozilla 1.4. My federal and state returns, both with efiling, cost me $18 total. A very good price.
Ever since our ancestors 10000 years ago stopped eating every fruit and seed they found, and started planting some of them in the ground and waiting half a year instead, life started getting more boring. The basis of civilization is the deferment of gratification.
Try looking up "panem et circenses". On the other hand, don't bother; it'll be too boring. How about this one: "Here we are now, entertain us". Interesting how you can go from Juvenal to Kurt Cobain, and see there is still nothing new under the sun.
For what it is worth, I have ADHD. I don't watch TV precisely because I get sucked in and suddenly I find it is three hours later and that's three hours I'm not getting back ever again. I don't need any further excuses for asocial behavior; I start out with enough of that without TV to boost it.
Looks like it has a fairly broad scope covering on-the-air broadcast management. It appears that it is already being used by several radio stations.
The console OS in ESX 1.5 and 2.0 is based on RedHat 7. We regularly install generic RedHat 7.1 or 7.2 RPMs for various things, like SMBFS or PAM modules, and it works perfectly.
It seems to me like the underlying VM controller is all new, like they say. But the console OS is a barely-modified Linux kernel running as a specially-privileged VM in the VM controller.
We computer people have injected these machines into our existing society with an existing language, and expect everyone to learn the new contrived language of acronyms and associated cruft.
Miriam's age doesn't matter. Human behavior is 10000 years old, computers and today's software are not. Computers should fit people. Otherwise we are doing a bad job at creating them.
I still have my Apple //e green monochrome monitor. My kids play video games on it when the big TV is being used for something else.
The big TV itself is just a 35" NTSC monitor which I got cheap when a previous employer went bankrupt in 1995. The VCR is the tuner.
Come to think of it, the bedroom TV is a composite monitor from the same previous employer, with a VCR tuner too. I think I only have one real TV in the house.
One thing I'm doing as a backup to my main connection is (everybody get ready to cringe) UUCP over TCP port 540. It's an easy config in the Unix/Linux world with Taylor UUCP. Sendmail handles it fine. No, no bang paths-- just plain domain names.
This would be a workaround for a problem on incoming mail. In my case, my primary MX record points to my mail server, and my secondary MX points to my UUCP relay site (bungi.com). If a sender can't connect to me, they go to the secondary where it queues. I run an hourly UUCP poll over TCP, which picks up anything waiting. If my main connection went down or were blocked, I could retrieve incoming mail with any generic PPP dial-up account.
I know, sounds kludgy, but it works fine.
This would work as a workaround for outgoing blockage also, but it would be much easier to use your ISP's outgoing mail server.
This happened at my company. Software vendor gave escrower a bad CD. When they went bankrupt, escrow company gave us the bad CD. We "got what we paid for".
Even if you could sue them, what good is that? In six years when the suit is settled, you'll get some money? In the mean time, your software is SOL.
Yeah, gotta love it. These are the same people who snort at "intelligent design" but then join SETI@Home because they think they can empirically identify intelligence...
Well, it's about time-- I've been waiting years to run this Linux thing directly on my original IBM AT. Now I can yank out that Intel Inboard/386 hack I had to add in to get it to work. That has always bugged me.
At least it can just be unplugged with no regrets. Unlike cutting my other original IBM AT case with the Dremel to get that stupid ATX motherboard in there; no going back on that one. Stupid progress.
Not necessarily. My daughter is 17 and only got diagnosed 2 years ago. We always knew she was different, but didn't really know why. It didn't become a problem until high school age as the pressure (academic and social) increased. We struggled through quite a bit getting the proper diagnosis and care for her. There can be many intermingled things that muddy the diagnosis.
Asperger's has a set of components including sensory integration dysfunction, language processing issues, rigid thinking patterns and social issues, the extent of which vary in each person. It also can come along with other disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADD/ADHD, and clinical depression. Sorting through these and figuring out which thing is contributing to which symptom can take a long time to sort out.
And it can all be dependent on adequate availability of child and youth mental health resources in your area. In many parts of the country, there is a shortage of teen-specific mental health help, which really can have much different needs than either younger children or adults. Heck, it's tough enough being a teenager without Aspergers or OCD or ADHD.
Once you have a good diagnosis, you can then know what kind of coping skills will help. The coping skills for ADHD and OCD and sensory integration disfunction are not all the same.
Interestingly, once a family member has been accurately diagnosed with Asperger's, you start to recognize small pieces of the constituent parts in other family members.
Every business has special needs. See the recent discussion right here just a few days ago.
Compiere and SQL Ledger sound promising, though.
Anyways, the database is up again; check out those pics at bolis.com
Yes, it works fine. As well as Wine does for any Windows app. I'm running it at home. My kids are impressed at how much faster their 486s run as terminals compared to running a local copy of Windows. They're also disappointed that game support sucks.
The biggest problem is Wine's varying level of support for the various DLL's required. This is standard Wine FAQ stuff. You can get widely different results based on whether you use Microsoft DLLs or Wine's built-in reimplementations. Licensing would be a big issue using Microsoft's DLLs.
The second biggest problem is that you're essentially doing streaming video over the LAN, so you can forget about arcade games or anything with high screen update rates. That's a terminal problem, not Wine. TuxTyping has the same problem. (Can anyone recommend a *good* typing tutor that works with LTSP?)
Standard desktop apps work fine. It bugs me to admit it, but I still find Irfanview under Wine to be a better picture browser that the other X/KDE/Gnome ones I've tried.
It's designed to give you a remote virtual desktop for an instance of the OS. It is more like LTSP for Mac than it is like VNC.
Of course, it is not simply another Mac app, and would involve wiping the machine and starting over, so it's not for the faint-of-heart...
Also, a previous /. on library software