The majority of what you are teaching them is not application specific. People are constantly having to learn new, different, or upgraded applications. This can be a painful period of adjustment, but it is not starting from scratch. Once they're comfortable with the new app, they begin leveraging all the bulk of their prior experience acquired from previous apps to getting actual work done in the new app.
If you see what I mean.
For that matter, in practice, most of us keep a selection of apps and choose the best one for the task at hand rather than insisting on trying to do everything with a single app.
So, while the choice of app may have some importance, it isn't hugely important.
That said, I agree with the advice to use multiple apps. It ensures you cover more ground (rather than missing features/techniques that a specific app doesn't support), and it teaches your students how to deal with switching apps.
It could also be interesting to assign different groups of students different apps for the same project. Then have them compare their experiences.
There's no double standard here. Organizations are praised for moving towards more openness. Opening a little is movement in the right direction. Closing a little is movement in the wrong direction.
I skip releases for my Linux boxen & those upgrades are free.
(Well, I might have been paying for the bandwidth I use to d/l them whether I upgrade or not, but they really aren't free: There's still the time & aggrevation that an upgrade costs, usually without enough benefits to compensate.)
In general, I avoid OS upgrades (beyond patches) as long as possible.
Although, some of the parental control features of Tiger have been making me want to upgrade my one Mac that is still running Panther.
Personally, I think everyone should take the time & hard road to really understand computers the way you only can with an open source operating system. I mean, these machines are amazing, but it takes time to understand them & learn how to use them to their fullest. Heck, I figure I'll be doing that the rest of my life.
But, I recognize that I'm weird & that lots of other people--for some reason--don't really want to do that. To them I say, "Don't bother with Linux or FreeBSD." It's not that I don't think they're smart enough or good enough--I think they are. But they've told me they don't want to go down that path.
So, I heartily recommend they get a Mac.
(Unless they have a particular use for a computer that is particularly well suited to something else.)
Plus, the great thing about the modern Mac is its Unix underpinnings. While its user experience is great for my wife & my kids, it also will allow my kids to--should they want to--make meaningful explorations into the deeper realms on the same machine they use for everyday tasks. It's Terminal.app, ssh client, & X server will allow them full access to their account on the Linux boxen at the house, too.
True: Notes is much more than email platform. In fact, it isn't email platform at all. It's just been used to build one.
I've used Notes at three different jobs (& not for email at one), & I have known many people at other companies that have used it. The only person I've actually spoken to who liked it was one CEO.
In my experience, most Notes users--whether usinig it for email or not--never see the features that really make Notes what it is. They just see a (usually) mediocre user experience.
Articles like the following one make be think that my experience is fairly common.
Yeah. Although I have two problems with Notes' calendaring.
1. It can't seem to recognize an event that has been forwarded to me instead of email directly to me. I have to manually add the event to my calendar.
2. It doesn't want to inter-operate with anything, so I have to use the Notes client, or I'll miss all my meetings.
Oh...& just the general fact that Notes is all-around annoying. The software that is universally hated by its users but that a few sadistic people get to inflict on everyone in their company.
As I've written before, domain names aren't property, & we should stop treating them as such. It should not be possible to sell a domain name. Your only options should be to keep it or release it. Someone taking money to release a domain should be charged with bribery.
(I'm all for the registrars continuing to charge, as long as they are just being a registrar & not playing the squatting game.)
I'm generally very libertarian & capitalist, but treating domain names as a commodity is just insanity.
Reversing the domain name would be cool. http://org.w3.www/People/Berners-Lee
Sticking to only dots or slashes would be cool (though it is nice to distinguish when the URL is switching from DNS naming to something else). http://org/w3/www/People/Berners-Lee
But the protocol is now unacceptibly out of order. We need to move it to its proper place in the heirarchy://org/w3/www/http/People/Berners-Lee
There we go! Finally, switching between http & https won't seem like switching universes to the browsers anymore.
Of course, the "www" & "http" are redundant. A good DNS admin should not have an A record for "www" but a CNAME record. The "www" node name should only be used for http & https. (This is more of a "best practices" thing than a URL change.)//org/w3/http/People/Berners-Lee
Even though people should avoid dealing with raw URLs as much as possible, it'd still be nice to keep ugliness like "www" or "http" out of them. (Again, really a best practices thing.)//org/w3/web/People/Berners-Lee
The double-slash...it serves a purpose. It announces that this URL follows the normal "path" conventions. This is nice when you're writing generic code to munge URLs. I suppose ":/" could do that just as easily as "://". Our new URL scheme, though, is so different at this point...
Ho w about reversing the DNS part of a non-URL email address? timbl@org.w3
But then the username is out of order: org.w3@timbl
But then, what if your username is your full name? org.w3@tim.berners-lee
Now your name is out of order--unless you're asian. I guess we'll have to mandate that usernames always be surname first.
Or--maybe--we could recognize that these unified namespaces are combinations of individual namespaces & that each individual namespace follows rules that make sense for it & that it is madness to try to get all these disparate namespaces to follow a single set of rules. Maybe.
But then, I don't use non-ad-supported Windows either.
Although, I suppose if the ads mean I don't have to pay an up-front price, I might put it on Bochs for those rare occasions when I want to view a web site in MSIE or something.
A major hurdle preventing the growth of Linux with non-professional users has been installation the operating system and dealing with the resultant compatibility issues.
Non-professional users shouldn't be using raw Linux or even the standard GNU/Linux distributions that Slashdot readers use. Non-professional users need a company that provides a more tailored user experience than you're going to get from a professional GNU/Linux distribution.
& when we're talking on that level, does it really mean so much what the kernel or underlying OS layers really are? The word "Linux" shouldn't even come up when talking about this sort of product.
In any case, Dell has made it clear for quite a while that they aren't interested in being that company.
(Not to mention the fact that installation of many Linux distributions have been dead-easy for anyone who knows how to turn on a computer for...what...5...10 years?)
I have to agree that, while protecting their hardware business is the most important reason for Apple to try to prevent the Mac OS from running on non-Apple hardware, ensuring a smooth customer experience is nearly as important a reason.
A large percentage of the trouble I've had with PCs while running Microsoft's OSes stem from Microsoft having only vague ideas of what my hardware might be.
Even moreso, probably 80% or more of the troubles I've had with PCs while running Linux stem from the developers having only vague ideas of what my hardware might be.
I'm perfectly happy with that situation under Linux, though. Linux is a power tool; a bread-box; &c. But my Macs are as close to appliances as I've seen a general purpose PC come. That's exactly what I want from my Macs for my wife, my children, & even myself.
Now, personally, I might rather see Apple take an approach that encouraged people to use Apple hardware but allowed those who knowingly choose a worse user experience to use any hardware. Make the installer say, "Hey, this ain't our hardware, so we're making no promises. Go buy our hardware if you want the best-of-breed user experience we've been working hard to give you."
This is the beauty of Linux. Anyone can do anything they want with it, except distribute your changes without source or forcing your changes on everyone.
Just do it. If you do it well & it solves real problems, others will adopt it & even help you make it better. Some of us, however, will be happy to not use it, & that's just fine.
Most people who will bother looking at it will end up treating it that way, & who wants to waste time or hire lawyers to waste time looking for violations.
A license is just a lot of legal jargon that most people won't bother reading & that, if ever tested, will end up meaning something different that what you thought you meant when you wrote/chose it.
You'll get everything you'd get from a "creative commons" without the hassle.
The GPL or LGPL or even the BSD license perhaps become worthwhile when a project reaches some critical size, but they don't make sense for the vast majority of software written by one person & given away gratis.
A RDBMS query language needs to be structured around relational variables & relational operations. Such a language makes it easy to do things that SQL's limited syntax make much too difficult.
Now, if we could just have RDBMSs that actually did the M part for you. Or at least one that isolated the management so only the DBA saw it & presented a clean, normalized view to the outside world.
I'm happy to see artists revisit & revise their works. Artists should use whatever method works to express what they need to express.
What I wouldn't want to see is an artist trying to suppress an earlier version of his work. The earlier version is just a valid expression of what he was trying to say then as the newer version is a valid expression of what he is trying to say now.
In your situation, I'd suggest starting with a scripting language. Perl, Ruby, or Python probably. Perhaps AppleScript if you're a Mac person. Guile or scsh could work as well.
JavaScript in HTML is a slightly different paradigm, but might be a good choice for you.
Then start trying to write short scripts to automate things you do a lot. The choice of language isn't as important as having programs to write & using a language that makes it easy to write those sort of programs. Small scripting tasks that improve you daily work are a good way to get some instant gratification.
All languages have their disadvantages, but the majority of what you learn is applicable to most other languages. If you want to learn ABOUT programming, you'll naturally play around with different languages as time goes by. So, it doesn't really matter so much where you start. In fact, after you've written a stable of a dozen or so scripts that you regularly use, it can be educational to pick another scripting language & try to translate them all to the new language.
& while it JavaScript can be a good command-line scripting language & Ruby can be a good embedding-in-HTML scripting language, I wouldn't suggest you try starting that way. If you're just starting & want to do command-line scripts, choose Ruby over JavaScript.
Eventually, I'd suggest learning C & Scheme. Then if you're still interested, check out C++, Smalltalk, & Prolog. At some point, you'll probably just find yourself going to lists of programming languages & playing with any one you don't recognize.
If you think the response of "fix it yourself" is like being shown the kitchen in a restraunt, then you've come to the wrong place. There are plenty of conventional encyclopedias available if that's what you want.
Wikipedia is what the founders & the participants (who bought into the founders' vision) want it to be. There's nothing wrong with that.
This is simple. Go to your boss & explain that the someone is putting pressure on you to choose different priorities than he has set for you. Be specific about the people & the issues. Ask him what you should do.
If he tells you to ignore the others, make it clear to him that you expect him to let the others know the priorities he has set for you & that any concerns should be addressed to him. (A good manager will have already told you that he's going straight to discuss them matter with the third party/parties.)
Let anyone who tries to set different expectations for you know what expectations your direct supervisor has set for you. Tell them that, if they have a problem with that, they either need to talk to your direct supervisor or change whom you directly report to.
If that doesn't make things better, let them know you aren't happy & start shopping for a new job.
I am using expanded character sets. I've been using "≠" and friends in AppleScript for years. In Scheme, I use "λ" instead of typing "lambda". I use the native2ascii program that comes with the JDK to use Kanji or Esperanto characters in identifiers. I wrote a similar preprocessor to expand "≠" & friends in C source.
I can't tell you why it hasn't caught on, but there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it today.
(Although, it seems Slashdot doesn't like those characters...)
One of the secrets of the master programmers
on
Arrays vs Pointers in C?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Master programmers know that it doesn't matter. We:
1. Write the code in the form that is clearest. (So that the maintainer--even if it is ourself--can figure out what it is doing quickly when debugging it later.)
2. If AND ONLY IF performance is a concern and if AND ONLY IF this code has been shown to be a bottleneck, do we consider optimizing. We then try several different implementations and then profile them to choose the winner.
Whether the obnoxious behavior is an ad or a "design feature" of the site doesn't matter to me. What matters is preventing web sites from causing my browser to do obnoxious things.
Any ads that don't behave obnoxiously won't get blocked. I have no problem with those.
This doesn't sound like a problem for a single, monolithic solution to me.
The "free" accounts--for one--should be a separate system.
Each team should have its own email system. Each team should have the option of having one of their own manage their email instead of IT. IT should define standards to use for interoperability.
Webmail should probably be a generic web IMAP interface with the requirement that each team's email system have IMAP turned on so it'll interop with the webmail.
This is the kind of setup that I've seen work best. But YMMV.
I have a lot of data from a very early version of Microsoft Word for Mac.
Now, to be fair, everytime I've come across someone complaining about MS Office not opening old MS Office files, it was simply that they didn't realize you had to specifically tell the installer to include the legacy filters. Pop the install CD in & pretty soon you're reading your old files.
The problem I have is that I no longer own (& have no desire to own) ANY version of MS Word.
Likewise, I have a bunch of data in ClarisWorks format & for a long time I didn't have a Mac, much less ClarisWorks.
I have a Mac again, but I don't know whether AppleWorks or NeoOffice could open my old Word & ClarisWorks documents. You see, I no longer have any way to read 800K Mac floppies.
(OK, not entirely true. Most of the ClarisWork stuff is probably on 1.44M floppies, so I *could* try to get AppleWorks or NeoOffice to open them. I just haven't had the need to try yet.)
How do employers, employees and management feel about them? No one in my department at any of the companies I've worked for considered a certification worth anything. With the possible exception of Cisco certifications, but even then it was mostly that a network guy working for us wanted them. I can't remember if the company paid for his or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of what you are teaching them is not application specific. People are constantly having to learn new, different, or upgraded applications. This can be a painful period of adjustment, but it is not starting from scratch. Once they're comfortable with the new app, they begin leveraging all the bulk of their prior experience acquired from previous apps to getting actual work done in the new app.
If you see what I mean.
For that matter, in practice, most of us keep a selection of apps and choose the best one for the task at hand rather than insisting on trying to do everything with a single app.
So, while the choice of app may have some importance, it isn't hugely important.
That said, I agree with the advice to use multiple apps. It ensures you cover more ground (rather than missing features/techniques that a specific app doesn't support), and it teaches your students how to deal with switching apps.
It could also be interesting to assign different groups of students different apps for the same project. Then have them compare their experiences.
There's no double standard here. Organizations are praised for moving towards more openness. Opening a little is movement in the right direction. Closing a little is movement in the wrong direction.
I skip releases for my Linux boxen & those upgrades are free.
(Well, I might have been paying for the bandwidth I use to d/l them whether I upgrade or not, but they really aren't free: There's still the time & aggrevation that an upgrade costs, usually without enough benefits to compensate.)
In general, I avoid OS upgrades (beyond patches) as long as possible.
Although, some of the parental control features of Tiger have been making me want to upgrade my one Mac that is still running Panther.
Personally, I think everyone should take the time & hard road to really understand computers the way you only can with an open source operating system. I mean, these machines are amazing, but it takes time to understand them & learn how to use them to their fullest. Heck, I figure I'll be doing that the rest of my life.
But, I recognize that I'm weird & that lots of other people--for some reason--don't really want to do that. To them I say, "Don't bother with Linux or FreeBSD." It's not that I don't think they're smart enough or good enough--I think they are. But they've told me they don't want to go down that path.
So, I heartily recommend they get a Mac.
(Unless they have a particular use for a computer that is particularly well suited to something else.)
Plus, the great thing about the modern Mac is its Unix underpinnings. While its user experience is great for my wife & my kids, it also will allow my kids to--should they want to--make meaningful explorations into the deeper realms on the same machine they use for everyday tasks. It's Terminal.app, ssh client, & X server will allow them full access to their account on the Linux boxen at the house, too.
"Alas, it's been taken over by spammers, in Yet Another Example of the Law of Unintended Consequences."
Except that, in this case, it was the Law of Unintended Yet Entirely Foreseeable Consequences.
"Huh? 'Universally hated'?"
1 705106,00.html
Yeah, that's been my experience.
True: Notes is much more than email platform. In fact, it isn't email platform at all. It's just been used to build one.
I've used Notes at three different jobs (& not for email at one), & I have known many people at other companies that have used it. The only person I've actually spoken to who liked it was one CEO.
In my experience, most Notes users--whether usinig it for email or not--never see the features that really make Notes what it is. They just see a (usually) mediocre user experience.
Articles like the following one make be think that my experience is fairly common.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,
Yeah. Although I have two problems with Notes' calendaring.
1. It can't seem to recognize an event that has been forwarded to me instead of email directly to me. I have to manually add the event to my calendar.
2. It doesn't want to inter-operate with anything, so I have to use the Notes client, or I'll miss all my meetings.
Oh...& just the general fact that Notes is all-around annoying. The software that is universally hated by its users but that a few sadistic people get to inflict on everyone in their company.
As I've written before, domain names aren't property, & we should stop treating them as such. It should not be possible to sell a domain name. Your only options should be to keep it or release it. Someone taking money to release a domain should be charged with bribery.
(I'm all for the registrars continuing to charge, as long as they are just being a registrar & not playing the squatting game.)
I'm generally very libertarian & capitalist, but treating domain names as a commodity is just insanity.
Reversing the domain name would be cool. http://org.w3.www/People/Berners-Lee
//org/w3/www/http/People/Berners-Lee
//org/w3/http/People/Berners-Lee
//org/w3/web/People/Berners-Lee
w 3/ftp/pub/doc/README.txt
o w about reversing the DNS part of a non-URL email address? timbl@org.w3
Sticking to only dots or slashes would be cool (though it is nice to distinguish when the URL is switching from DNS naming to something else). http://org/w3/www/People/Berners-Lee
But the protocol is now unacceptibly out of order. We need to move it to its proper place in the heirarchy:
There we go! Finally, switching between http & https won't seem like switching universes to the browsers anymore.
Of course, the "www" & "http" are redundant. A good DNS admin should not have an A record for "www" but a CNAME record. The "www" node name should only be used for http & https. (This is more of a "best practices" thing than a URL change.)
Even though people should avoid dealing with raw URLs as much as possible, it'd still be nice to keep ugliness like "www" or "http" out of them. (Again, really a best practices thing.)
The double-slash...it serves a purpose. It announces that this URL follows the normal "path" conventions. This is nice when you're writing generic code to munge URLs. I suppose ":/" could do that just as easily as "://". Our new URL scheme, though, is so different at this point...
/org/w3/web/People/Berners-Lee
/org/
/org/w3/mail/timbl
H
But then the username is out of order: org.w3@timbl
But then, what if your username is your full name? org.w3@tim.berners-lee
Now your name is out of order--unless you're asian. I guess we'll have to mandate that usernames always be surname first.
Or--maybe--we could recognize that these unified namespaces are combinations of individual namespaces & that each individual namespace follows rules that make sense for it & that it is madness to try to get all these disparate namespaces to follow a single set of rules. Maybe.
No, I wouldn't use ad-supported Windows.
But then, I don't use non-ad-supported Windows either.
Although, I suppose if the ads mean I don't have to pay an up-front price, I might put it on Bochs for those rare occasions when I want to view a web site in MSIE or something.
Non-professional users shouldn't be using raw Linux or even the standard GNU/Linux distributions that Slashdot readers use. Non-professional users need a company that provides a more tailored user experience than you're going to get from a professional GNU/Linux distribution.
& when we're talking on that level, does it really mean so much what the kernel or underlying OS layers really are? The word "Linux" shouldn't even come up when talking about this sort of product.
In any case, Dell has made it clear for quite a while that they aren't interested in being that company.
(Not to mention the fact that installation of many Linux distributions have been dead-easy for anyone who knows how to turn on a computer for...what...5...10 years?)
I have to agree that, while protecting their hardware business is the most important reason for Apple to try to prevent the Mac OS from running on non-Apple hardware, ensuring a smooth customer experience is nearly as important a reason.
A large percentage of the trouble I've had with PCs while running Microsoft's OSes stem from Microsoft having only vague ideas of what my hardware might be.
Even moreso, probably 80% or more of the troubles I've had with PCs while running Linux stem from the developers having only vague ideas of what my hardware might be.
I'm perfectly happy with that situation under Linux, though. Linux is a power tool; a bread-box; &c. But my Macs are as close to appliances as I've seen a general purpose PC come. That's exactly what I want from my Macs for my wife, my children, & even myself.
Now, personally, I might rather see Apple take an approach that encouraged people to use Apple hardware but allowed those who knowingly choose a worse user experience to use any hardware. Make the installer say, "Hey, this ain't our hardware, so we're making no promises. Go buy our hardware if you want the best-of-breed user experience we've been working hard to give you."
This is the beauty of Linux. Anyone can do anything they want with it, except distribute your changes without source or forcing your changes on everyone.
Just do it. If you do it well & it solves real problems, others will adopt it & even help you make it better. Some of us, however, will be happy to not use it, & that's just fine.
Consider just making it public domain.
Most people who will bother looking at it will end up treating it that way, & who wants to waste time or hire lawyers to waste time looking for violations.
A license is just a lot of legal jargon that most people won't bother reading & that, if ever tested, will end up meaning something different that what you thought you meant when you wrote/chose it.
You'll get everything you'd get from a "creative commons" without the hassle.
The GPL or LGPL or even the BSD license perhaps become worthwhile when a project reaches some critical size, but they don't make sense for the vast majority of software written by one person & given away gratis.
A RDBMS query language needs to be structured around relational variables & relational operations. Such a language makes it easy to do things that SQL's limited syntax make much too difficult.
Now, if we could just have RDBMSs that actually did the M part for you. Or at least one that isolated the management so only the DBA saw it & presented a clean, normalized view to the outside world.
I'm happy to see artists revisit & revise their works. Artists should use whatever method works to express what they need to express.
What I wouldn't want to see is an artist trying to suppress an earlier version of his work. The earlier version is just a valid expression of what he was trying to say then as the newer version is a valid expression of what he is trying to say now.
In your situation, I'd suggest starting with a scripting language. Perl, Ruby, or Python probably. Perhaps AppleScript if you're a Mac person. Guile or scsh could work as well.
JavaScript in HTML is a slightly different paradigm, but might be a good choice for you.
Then start trying to write short scripts to automate things you do a lot. The choice of language isn't as important as having programs to write & using a language that makes it easy to write those sort of programs. Small scripting tasks that improve you daily work are a good way to get some instant gratification.
All languages have their disadvantages, but the majority of what you learn is applicable to most other languages. If you want to learn ABOUT programming, you'll naturally play around with different languages as time goes by. So, it doesn't really matter so much where you start. In fact, after you've written a stable of a dozen or so scripts that you regularly use, it can be educational to pick another scripting language & try to translate them all to the new language.
& while it JavaScript can be a good command-line scripting language & Ruby can be a good embedding-in-HTML scripting language, I wouldn't suggest you try starting that way. If you're just starting & want to do command-line scripts, choose Ruby over JavaScript.
Eventually, I'd suggest learning C & Scheme. Then if you're still interested, check out C++, Smalltalk, & Prolog. At some point, you'll probably just find yourself going to lists of programming languages & playing with any one you don't recognize.
If you think the response of "fix it yourself" is like being shown the kitchen in a restraunt, then you've come to the wrong place. There are plenty of conventional encyclopedias available if that's what you want.
Wikipedia is what the founders & the participants (who bought into the founders' vision) want it to be. There's nothing wrong with that.
This is simple. Go to your boss & explain that the someone is putting pressure on you to choose different priorities than he has set for you. Be specific about the people & the issues. Ask him what you should do.
If he tells you to ignore the others, make it clear to him that you expect him to let the others know the priorities he has set for you & that any concerns should be addressed to him. (A good manager will have already told you that he's going straight to discuss them matter with the third party/parties.)
Let anyone who tries to set different expectations for you know what expectations your direct supervisor has set for you. Tell them that, if they have a problem with that, they either need to talk to your direct supervisor or change whom you directly report to.
If that doesn't make things better, let them know you aren't happy & start shopping for a new job.
I am using expanded character sets. I've been using "≠" and friends in AppleScript for years. In Scheme, I use "λ" instead of typing "lambda". I use the native2ascii program that comes with the JDK to use Kanji or Esperanto characters in identifiers. I wrote a similar preprocessor to expand "≠" & friends in C source.
I can't tell you why it hasn't caught on, but there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it today.
(Although, it seems Slashdot doesn't like those characters...)
Master programmers know that it doesn't matter. We:
1. Write the code in the form that is clearest. (So that the maintainer--even if it is ourself--can figure out what it is doing quickly when debugging it later.)
2. If AND ONLY IF performance is a concern and if AND ONLY IF this code has been shown to be a bottleneck, do we consider optimizing. We then try several different implementations and then profile them to choose the winner.
I don't block ads--specifically.
I block obnoxious behavior.
Whether the obnoxious behavior is an ad or a "design feature" of the site doesn't matter to me. What matters is preventing web sites from causing my browser to do obnoxious things.
Any ads that don't behave obnoxiously won't get blocked. I have no problem with those.
This doesn't sound like a problem for a single, monolithic solution to me.
The "free" accounts--for one--should be a separate system.
Each team should have its own email system. Each team should have the option of having one of their own manage their email instead of IT. IT should define standards to use for interoperability.
Webmail should probably be a generic web IMAP interface with the requirement that each team's email system have IMAP turned on so it'll interop with the webmail.
This is the kind of setup that I've seen work best. But YMMV.
I have a lot of data from a very early version of Microsoft Word for Mac.
Now, to be fair, everytime I've come across someone complaining about MS Office not opening old MS Office files, it was simply that they didn't realize you had to specifically tell the installer to include the legacy filters. Pop the install CD in & pretty soon you're reading your old files.
The problem I have is that I no longer own (& have no desire to own) ANY version of MS Word.
Likewise, I have a bunch of data in ClarisWorks format & for a long time I didn't have a Mac, much less ClarisWorks.
I have a Mac again, but I don't know whether AppleWorks or NeoOffice could open my old Word & ClarisWorks documents. You see, I no longer have any way to read 800K Mac floppies.
(OK, not entirely true. Most of the ClarisWork stuff is probably on 1.44M floppies, so I *could* try to get AppleWorks or NeoOffice to open them. I just haven't had the need to try yet.)
Do you have certifications? No.
How do employers, employees and management feel about them? No one in my department at any of the companies I've worked for considered a certification worth anything. With the possible exception of Cisco certifications, but even then it was mostly that a network guy working for us wanted them. I can't remember if the company paid for his or not.