College doesn't give you a career. Instead, college gives you the tools necessary to build a career in a specific field.
You don't know everything. Nobody does. An education gives you grounding in many disciplines, but not mastery. Believe it or not, any undergraduate degree is a survey degree. It isn't specialized.
My boss has a PhD in SQL. He teaches classes at universities. His students taught him how to better use different types of queries. They didn't teach him because he's dumb, but because nobody out there know everything, nor does anyone out there know all the tricks, nor does get all the possible implications of every technology all the time. Quite simply, there's a mindboggling mountain of information out there and you can't know it all.
I know perl. Well, I know a slice of perl. It's a very useful slice. I use regular expressions to text mash and save myself huge slices of time converting documents. I don't nearly know everything about regular expressions. I also know some basic HTML, but I'm nowhere near being an expert. I know mediawiki format, but I'm not expert in everything that it can do. However, I have learned each well enough to custom convert HTML documents into mediawiki format and auto-tag most recurring vocabulary that needs tagging. Note that I don't know how to build an interpreted languages and I don't know how to set up mediawiki templates. I depend on others to know these things.
That example above is the real world. I could choose any one of them, spend a year studying them, and still not know them in full detail.
So, like folks say, pick a place and start. You will know some of what you need, but you will need to learn many new things, too. That's normal.
I think that he is wrong about the corporate market. There is too much momentum there. The corporate market needs experts when they ask questions like, "I'm running a 400 server farm, fiber switched,..." As long as Redhat provides that expertise to corporate users, they will keep selling. Where Ubuntu will gain share is in the small office and growing organization markets, where choices have not yet been made, are made by newer system admins, or are strapped for cash.
I do user support for a living. Take some time and talk to good user support people. These people must explain computers stuff every day to the layman. The good ones are very good at it. Take the opinion of the more technical end of computers with a grain of salt: their career is not about explaining things to people every day, and so many of their ideas are just plain wrong. (I don't do C++ every day. I expect that I know less that you do. I explain computers to laymen every day. I expect you to know less that I do. No offense.)
The key to a good explaination is a good analogy. If you can find that, your task is far easier.
"Your hard drive is a mix between a record player and a tape player. It has an arm that moves around the record, but all the tracks are magnetic rather than little grooves in the record."
Second, a pictures is worth a thousand words. Showing the insides of a hard drive is far more effective than explaining it.
Third, keep your topics short and clear. Harried users had long, dense text. They get frustrated and stop reading. That's bad. Treat your book as software. Test it against users as you write it. Find out what works and what doesn't. Your touchstone is EFFECTIVENESS. Everything that you do in this project must be about end-user effectiveness.
I just finished reading the judgement handed down on this case.
The judge slammed the school board for this. He concluded that this action violated both the Federal and Pennsylvania consitutions. They school board frequently did not follow its own procedures. Of those who voted for this, the majority did not actually know what ID meant. Several school board members who left the school board cited the aggressively religious tones of the other board members. The school board consulted no scientific expertise in establishing this new policy. The school system's science teachers refused to act on this policy, citing professional conduct. This all lead up to the Dover school board lining up the perfect test case for ID to be shot down like a dead duck on a string.
Don't sabotage anything for any reason. If you are working for a government contractor, any malicious act that you do could be considered a felony or an act of terrorism as it impacts the governments data/information/processes.
Think twice. Act once.
You just wrote this up. That's a good first step.
Next, go to your boss, and say, "I've been thinking about our IT needs and I want to chat about them." Don't talk about you. Lay out the challenges that you see before you. Lay out your limitations of your time. Demonstrate that hiring more employees will add value to the IT infrastructure. Work at it. Take his input. Get his support. Make him an ally. Prioritize. Focus on the changes that you can make and can do, and get payoff for your work. Learn the other people you need support from.
Your job, as the information person, is to demonstrate, in business terms, the worth of your proposals.
If you can't take this to your boss straight off, try taking this to another business savy person who can help you to translate your tech speak into busness speak, and help you learn the human processes necessary to make these changes.
After thinking about this for a day, I'd like to chime in a day late and dollar short.:P
Which interface you use is all a matter of payback, rather than intelligence. In this discussion, three interfaces are mentioned: Gnome, KDE, and shells. The one that you choose depends on the payback that you get. Your needs depend on which distinctive job that you do. An administrator is completely different from a developer and completely different from an autocad guru.
Most system administrators spend most of their time configuring computers and making them more efficient. That's their passion. That's their payback. They spend all their time using the tools that the interface can give them. Their least-common-denominator is the shell. Naturally, the richness of the interface matters to them. Given that interfaces change over the years, and that programming and text provide the most consistant and powerful features to an admin, admins gravitate towards a shell interface. This gives them a good payback. The shell is their stock and trade.
For most programmers, the ability to customize their environment to their working style gives them the most payback. The ability to work efficiently, and effectively, is important. They bend the interface to their own working style, so that no matter where they go, they don't have to relearn their whole interface multiple times. Each new computer that they go to, they just drop in their defaults and keep working with maximum familiarity.
For the average user, they get their greatest payback from the apps that they use. Most gravitate towards email and web, or whatever program that they use as their stock and trade. For them to not have full functionality from Gnome or the shell doesn't matter much. What they need is photoshop, or four monitors to read DICOM images, or a familiar email program. They put their efforts into mastering these tools rather than mastering the OS, or bending it to their will.
Once you look at it this way, you can see that everyone is actually acting very smart.
I very much disagree with your smart-vs-dumb conclusion. It's about payoff, not intelligence. People interact interfaces based on their needs. They are only motivated to change things when they have a definite payoff. For most casual users, who spend 90% of their time in mail and a web browser, the settings of these programs matters far more than the settings of their desktop. In my experience of 15 years in users support (working with secretaties to multi-PhD's in physics), the web browser gets 90% of all customization, regardless of intelligence. They don't ask me "how do I remap keys", they do ask me "How do I get the Google toolbar?"
Google search is a popular modification. This lets people leverage their familiarity with Google to help them find files. This is worth their time, and they get payoff.
In all my time doing user support, almost no-one has asked me "how do I remap a key?" or "how do I change X default behavior?" This tells me that most people just aren't interested in the topic of configurability. Thus, Gnome is smart to focus on this sector of the market. Thus, they are also smart for letting KDE be the configurable interface, and we get two different interfaces matching two different needs in the community, rather than two interfaces both trying to do the same thing, and be all things to all people.
I have observed for years that our massively written culture finds English majors useless.
The geek world falls down on communication. You see this in many place. For example, Linux proponents go on-and-on about how great the technology is, but fall down when considering usability and documentation. Meanwhile, Linux hackers need documentation for new hardware, but can't get it. Thus, poor communication has a profound impact on the development and usability of our favorite operating system. (Hell, there's a PhD thesis for you.)
The one thing that I keep learning more and more is: good communication is hard. The better I get at writing and communication, the harder that it gets. Communication is a disciplin that's easy to underestimate and illusury in its master. I can not tell you how often I have been humbled by this.
Writing clearly and by "the rules" is all part of communication. We are taught to "express" ourselves in writing. That's what most of us do. However, "expression" is not "communication." Each idea actually leads in a distinct direction. "Expression" is about me. "Communication" is about you. That focus leads to the poor English that we see.
We also see this in our Linux leadership. Those who "express themselves" about Linux are easily cheered, but also alienate. They communicate what THEY find valuable about Linux, but if you don't share their values, you are left left. Those who "communicate" about linux don't leave us cheering, but they do broaden the circle because they couch Linux in a way that the HEARER will understand and find valuable.
When you write, the first thing that you learn is "don't lose the reader's attention." You do this through poor grammer, bad spelling, poor formatting, etc. The reader looks at it, sees the ugliness, and stops reading. Before they even see your points, you have lost them. Good writing requires the lowering of all possible barriers and a presentation that is well expected. (Thus, we have style manuals.) Only with distractions out of the way can we get to the process of good writing, which is the process of explaining an idea in a way that the listener can understand, and thus acquire the meme for himself. If you do not transfer the meme, communication has not happened.
I used to be a technical writer. I really come at code form a documenter's point of view. I found that comments do more to CLEAN UP my code than anything else. Commenting really forces me to consider what I am looking at and what's I'm doing. Comments are great.
Good code will never be self-documenting. There's more to good code than variable names. I use comments to describe intent. I use comments to point out idiosynchrasies, and why those are in the code. I use comments to explain the overall logic of the code, and the logic at specific points.
All that helps me to find and fix problems faster. That helps me to know where in the code to add new code. That helps me to compare my intent with my execution. And more importantly, this helps the next person greatly.
This technology is nice, but they forget one thing: what about the uploaders/downloaders. If I were to download something that isn't real, I'd delete it. Oh my, that was easy. This simple verification is all that it takes to stop this idea.
Secondly, and more importantly, there are far more files out there than people are willing to fake. This idea may work for the most popular tunes, but for everything else, not much will change. I don't see there being a mass poisoning of "Freebird."
Calling yourself a "geek" is very self-limiting and calling others "normal" is very divisive. When it come down to it, if you listen to other people. EVERYONE thinks that they themselves are weird and that everyone is normal.
Normal is quirky, and all those normals out there are quirky, and you, too, are normal because you are quirky.
Read "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Really. It's a great book written back in the 30's.
EVERY personality type can be a good manager. The trick of being a good manager is recognizing the personalities of those who work for you, and learning how to get the best from those personalities.
In other words, we aren't talking about what works for you, we're talking about what works, period.
I use index cards to store information. Yes, there are problems with index cards, but you can't hack into them, and the thieves will be more interested in stealing my credit cards and electronic goods than pieces of paper.
I see people blasting the system for apathy. OK. I can deal with that. But no one blames the students for apathy. The current student culture not only wants to avoid learning, but holds as a religious mantra that school is a waste of time and completely useless. The students hold just as much blame as everyone else as the government or the teachers or the school administration. How different would school be if the students *valued* their education and then acted on that belief?
Personally, unless you are headed for academics, I do not think that high school is useful to most people. For the non-college crowd, school should focus on developing leadership skills, political awareness, and the complex task of running a democracy.
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College doesn't give you a career. Instead, college gives you the tools necessary to build a career in a specific field.
You don't know everything. Nobody does. An education gives you grounding in many disciplines, but not mastery. Believe it or not, any undergraduate degree is a survey degree. It isn't specialized.
My boss has a PhD in SQL. He teaches classes at universities. His students taught him how to better use different types of queries. They didn't teach him because he's dumb, but because nobody out there know everything, nor does anyone out there know all the tricks, nor does get all the possible implications of every technology all the time. Quite simply, there's a mindboggling mountain of information out there and you can't know it all.
I know perl. Well, I know a slice of perl. It's a very useful slice. I use regular expressions to text mash and save myself huge slices of time converting documents. I don't nearly know everything about regular expressions. I also know some basic HTML, but I'm nowhere near being an expert. I know mediawiki format, but I'm not expert in everything that it can do. However, I have learned each well enough to custom convert HTML documents into mediawiki format and auto-tag most recurring vocabulary that needs tagging. Note that I don't know how to build an interpreted languages and I don't know how to set up mediawiki templates. I depend on others to know these things.
That example above is the real world. I could choose any one of them, spend a year studying them, and still not know them in full detail.
So, like folks say, pick a place and start. You will know some of what you need, but you will need to learn many new things, too. That's normal.
I think that he is wrong about the corporate market. There is too much momentum there. The corporate market needs experts when they ask questions like, "I'm running a 400 server farm, fiber switched, ..." As long as Redhat provides that expertise to corporate users, they will keep selling. Where Ubuntu will gain share is in the small office and growing organization markets, where choices have not yet been made, are made by newer system admins, or are strapped for cash.
"Your hard drive is a mix between a record player and a tape player. It has an arm that moves around the record, but all the tracks are magnetic rather than little grooves in the record."
Second, a pictures is worth a thousand words. Showing the insides of a hard drive is far more effective than explaining it.
Third, keep your topics short and clear. Harried users had long, dense text. They get frustrated and stop reading. That's bad. Treat your book as software. Test it against users as you write it. Find out what works and what doesn't. Your touchstone is EFFECTIVENESS. Everything that you do in this project must be about end-user effectiveness.
The judge slammed the school board for this. He concluded that this action violated both the Federal and Pennsylvania consitutions. They school board frequently did not follow its own procedures. Of those who voted for this, the majority did not actually know what ID meant. Several school board members who left the school board cited the aggressively religious tones of the other board members. The school board consulted no scientific expertise in establishing this new policy. The school system's science teachers refused to act on this policy, citing professional conduct. This all lead up to the Dover school board lining up the perfect test case for ID to be shot down like a dead duck on a string.
Don't sabotage anything for any reason. If you are working for a government contractor, any malicious act that you do could be considered a felony or an act of terrorism as it impacts the governments data/information/processes. Think twice. Act once.
Your job, as the information person, is to demonstrate, in business terms, the worth of your proposals.
If you can't take this to your boss straight off, try taking this to another business savy person who can help you to translate your tech speak into busness speak, and help you learn the human processes necessary to make these changes.
Most system administrators spend most of their time configuring computers and making them more efficient. That's their passion. That's their payback. They spend all their time using the tools that the interface can give them. Their least-common-denominator is the shell. Naturally, the richness of the interface matters to them. Given that interfaces change over the years, and that programming and text provide the most consistant and powerful features to an admin, admins gravitate towards a shell interface. This gives them a good payback. The shell is their stock and trade.
For most programmers, the ability to customize their environment to their working style gives them the most payback. The ability to work efficiently, and effectively, is important. They bend the interface to their own working style, so that no matter where they go, they don't have to relearn their whole interface multiple times. Each new computer that they go to, they just drop in their defaults and keep working with maximum familiarity.
For the average user, they get their greatest payback from the apps that they use. Most gravitate towards email and web, or whatever program that they use as their stock and trade. For them to not have full functionality from Gnome or the shell doesn't matter much. What they need is photoshop, or four monitors to read DICOM images, or a familiar email program. They put their efforts into mastering these tools rather than mastering the OS, or bending it to their will.
Once you look at it this way, you can see that everyone is actually acting very smart.
I very much disagree with your smart-vs-dumb conclusion. It's about payoff, not intelligence. People interact interfaces based on their needs. They are only motivated to change things when they have a definite payoff. For most casual users, who spend 90% of their time in mail and a web browser, the settings of these programs matters far more than the settings of their desktop. In my experience of 15 years in users support (working with secretaties to multi-PhD's in physics), the web browser gets 90% of all customization, regardless of intelligence. They don't ask me "how do I remap keys", they do ask me "How do I get the Google toolbar?" Google search is a popular modification. This lets people leverage their familiarity with Google to help them find files. This is worth their time, and they get payoff. In all my time doing user support, almost no-one has asked me "how do I remap a key?" or "how do I change X default behavior?" This tells me that most people just aren't interested in the topic of configurability. Thus, Gnome is smart to focus on this sector of the market. Thus, they are also smart for letting KDE be the configurable interface, and we get two different interfaces matching two different needs in the community, rather than two interfaces both trying to do the same thing, and be all things to all people.
I have observed for years that our massively written culture finds English majors useless. The geek world falls down on communication. You see this in many place. For example, Linux proponents go on-and-on about how great the technology is, but fall down when considering usability and documentation. Meanwhile, Linux hackers need documentation for new hardware, but can't get it. Thus, poor communication has a profound impact on the development and usability of our favorite operating system. (Hell, there's a PhD thesis for you.) The one thing that I keep learning more and more is: good communication is hard. The better I get at writing and communication, the harder that it gets. Communication is a disciplin that's easy to underestimate and illusury in its master. I can not tell you how often I have been humbled by this. Writing clearly and by "the rules" is all part of communication. We are taught to "express" ourselves in writing. That's what most of us do. However, "expression" is not "communication." Each idea actually leads in a distinct direction. "Expression" is about me. "Communication" is about you. That focus leads to the poor English that we see. We also see this in our Linux leadership. Those who "express themselves" about Linux are easily cheered, but also alienate. They communicate what THEY find valuable about Linux, but if you don't share their values, you are left left. Those who "communicate" about linux don't leave us cheering, but they do broaden the circle because they couch Linux in a way that the HEARER will understand and find valuable. When you write, the first thing that you learn is "don't lose the reader's attention." You do this through poor grammer, bad spelling, poor formatting, etc. The reader looks at it, sees the ugliness, and stops reading. Before they even see your points, you have lost them. Good writing requires the lowering of all possible barriers and a presentation that is well expected. (Thus, we have style manuals.) Only with distractions out of the way can we get to the process of good writing, which is the process of explaining an idea in a way that the listener can understand, and thus acquire the meme for himself. If you do not transfer the meme, communication has not happened.
I used to be a technical writer. I really come at code form a documenter's point of view. I found that comments do more to CLEAN UP my code than anything else. Commenting really forces me to consider what I am looking at and what's I'm doing. Comments are great. Good code will never be self-documenting. There's more to good code than variable names. I use comments to describe intent. I use comments to point out idiosynchrasies, and why those are in the code. I use comments to explain the overall logic of the code, and the logic at specific points. All that helps me to find and fix problems faster. That helps me to know where in the code to add new code. That helps me to compare my intent with my execution. And more importantly, this helps the next person greatly.
This technology is nice, but they forget one thing: what about the uploaders/downloaders. If I were to download something that isn't real, I'd delete it. Oh my, that was easy. This simple verification is all that it takes to stop this idea. Secondly, and more importantly, there are far more files out there than people are willing to fake. This idea may work for the most popular tunes, but for everything else, not much will change. I don't see there being a mass poisoning of "Freebird."
Calling yourself a "geek" is very self-limiting and calling others "normal" is very divisive. When it come down to it, if you listen to other people. EVERYONE thinks that they themselves are weird and that everyone is normal. Normal is quirky, and all those normals out there are quirky, and you, too, are normal because you are quirky.
Read "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Really. It's a great book written back in the 30's. EVERY personality type can be a good manager. The trick of being a good manager is recognizing the personalities of those who work for you, and learning how to get the best from those personalities. In other words, we aren't talking about what works for you, we're talking about what works, period.
I use index cards to store information. Yes, there are problems with index cards, but you can't hack into them, and the thieves will be more interested in stealing my credit cards and electronic goods than pieces of paper.
I see people blasting the system for apathy. OK. I can deal with that. But no one blames the students for apathy. The current student culture not only wants to avoid learning, but holds as a religious mantra that school is a waste of time and completely useless. The students hold just as much blame as everyone else as the government or the teachers or the school administration. How different would school be if the students *valued* their education and then acted on that belief? Personally, unless you are headed for academics, I do not think that high school is useful to most people. For the non-college crowd, school should focus on developing leadership skills, political awareness, and the complex task of running a democracy.