As someone who graduated from high school two years ago, I can tell you that certifications are not everything. Although I have taken two years of Cisco Networking at Carson High School, I did not take the CCNA test at the end.
Because I really wanted to with computers and I wanted to help people, I worked for a non-profit organization that recycles and refurbishes computers for the community. I did not get paid much, but I had a place to live and I was happy. A year later, a local company made a presentation to us (ComputerCorps) and wanted to use us to beta test their products.
After they made their presentation, they saw the utilities I wrote and the projects I've. They offered me a job as a programmer on the spot before even asking me what certifications I have. After six months, I became that company's lead programmer and network administrator. I am also a part-owner of that company.
Although certifications are nice, they do not get you the job. They may get you in the door at some places, but determination and experience are the real factors that get you the job.
In what sort of situation would I want more virtual linux machines, where UML wouldn't suffice? When would I need to run NetBSD and linux together, when everything that runs on one can be recompiled easily for the other?
Our company uses Xen in order to provide our customers with their own virtual server for services that we provide. We used UML at first, but found the performance very poor. While researching Xen, we got response times 2 to 10 times faster than the same site on UML. And UML had a nasty habit of crashing under high stress (on our servers at least).
So in our case (yours results may vary), Xen was faster and more reliable.
There may be some overhyping.. which is normal. But this is not just another "usermode linux clone." We used Xen in R&D for our company and started using it in a production environment in about two weeks. This replaced the User Mode Linux environment we were already using. Performance increased noticeably and we have had no kernel panics with Xen, while we did have at least one every week with UML with data intensive applications. And considering that Xen can run a standard harddrive image (or the harddrive itself) with very little to no modification, it can be a good replacement to already running VMs such as VMware if you are in a totally Linux environment.
One piece of software will not meet everyone's needs, but please don't disreguard a piece of software until you have tried it yourself and speak from experience.
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As someone who graduated from high school two years ago, I can tell you that certifications are not everything. Although I have taken two years of Cisco Networking at Carson High School, I did not take the CCNA test at the end.
Because I really wanted to with computers and I wanted to help people, I worked for a non-profit organization that recycles and refurbishes computers for the community. I did not get paid much, but I had a place to live and I was happy. A year later, a local company made a presentation to us (ComputerCorps) and wanted to use us to beta test their products.
After they made their presentation, they saw the utilities I wrote and the projects I've. They offered me a job as a programmer on the spot before even asking me what certifications I have. After six months, I became that company's lead programmer and network administrator. I am also a part-owner of that company.
Although certifications are nice, they do not get you the job. They may get you in the door at some places, but determination and experience are the real factors that get you the job.
-steve
In what sort of situation would I want more virtual linux machines, where UML wouldn't suffice? When would I need to run NetBSD and linux together, when everything that runs on one can be recompiled easily for the other?
Our company uses Xen in order to provide our customers with their own virtual server for services that we provide. We used UML at first, but found the performance very poor. While researching Xen, we got response times 2 to 10 times faster than the same site on UML. And UML had a nasty habit of crashing under high stress (on our servers at least).
So in our case (yours results may vary), Xen was faster and more reliable.
One piece of software will not meet everyone's needs, but please don't disreguard a piece of software until you have tried it yourself and speak from experience.