Why are you paying money for a "spam solution" when you use gmail, which apparently has a better spam filter?
Oh you bought into their advetisments? These people are no better than "Stop Sign" security, which sounds great but turns out to be something completely retarded. I wouldn't be surprised that the russians who run "Blue Security" are part of the mob that is responsible for much of the spam themselves.
No, you Anonymous Turd, Gmail filters my spam into a spam folder so I don't have to look directly at it, but it does not prevent the spam from reaching my (and your) mailbox. The only way to prevent spam from being delivered in the first place is to make it unprofitable to send. Since convincing the unwashed masses that they shouldn't buy C1AALL1$$ from random emails is impossible, the way to make it unprofitable is to make the process of sending spam increasingly inconvenient and costly. Responding services like BlueSecurity do that.
For free.
I have wondered what good BlueSecurity has done me, as the amount of spam I've been receiving hasn't decreased (though the sources do appear to have changed; I'm getting a lot of spam in Chinese and Hebrew now). This pissy little spammer lashing out clearly demonstrates that BlueSecurity works to make spam delivery unprofitable.
My Linux boxes are free in the sense that I can hire anyone I want to help me with them, or I can get a book from O'Reilly Media, and do it myself.
I think you may be making the article's point right there. You can't hire anyone you want to help you with them - you have to find someone who has experience in doing so. There are a whole helluva lot more of those people in the market, at varying levels of experience, supporting Microsoft products. Why is that? Because Microsoft products are well documented, well versioned, and widely (usually well) taught.
I've commented elsewhere about the unfortunate lack of documentation for Linux distributions and applications. My point then as now is that coding is the fun part; documentation is tedious. Who's going to do the tedious work for no compensation?
Below is an email that I received, which pretty much confirms that they have been hacked.
No, it absolutely does not confirm that they've been hacked. See my previous comment about how it's likely that the spammer simply confirmed BlueSecurity registration for addresses he already has, but is unable to get new addresses out of the BlueSecurity database.
Comments on BlueSecurity forums last night demonstrate that users with multiple protected addresses are getting these attack spams to some, but not all, of the protected addresses.
What's lkely happening: Spammer has a mailing list. Spammer uses BlueSecurity's "cleanlist" tool to clean registered addresses from his mailing list. Compare original list to cleaned list - email addresses that are in the first but not the second are BlueSecurity registered.
By this logic, email addresses that the spammer does not already have are not made available to the spammer in any way via BlueSecurity's own list. Delivery patterns of the attack spams support this observation.
I'll also note that Gmail's own spam filters are already capturing all of these attack spams; I only got two in my mailbox this morning, about 50 more were filtered.
This is the first time I'm aware of that a spam prevention service has worked so well that it's got a spammer pissed off enough to lash out. BlueSecurity++
Perhaps they intend to make torrents a legitimate method of delivery of purchased iTunes songs. So, you purchase an iTunes song, seed it as an 'iTunes torrent.' Then you get some amount of credit for more iTunes songs. Someone else who buys the first song you bought downloads it as a torrent from you (and others).
It's a way for Apple to expand their ability to deliver content without having to drastically upgrade their own network infrastructure. You get a little iTunes store credit for being part of the delivery system.
1) As commented many other places, you get what you pay for. If you're going to pay $7/hr US, or less for offshoring, you're going to get tech support on par with the kind of service you get when ordering fast food.
2) On the other side of that coin, if you are an employee of any kind, you should be doing your job to the best of your ability, not being an elitist prick to make up for what you see as an imbalance in compensation. Doing a crappy job for $7/hr isn't going to qualify you to get a job making $10 or $15. Besides which, you knew the deal going into it. You'd make $n/hr and be required to perform certain tasks (certainly including "don't be an elitist prick to customers").
Because I use cans and a string to talk to people across long distances, and I use pen and paper or playing cards to play games. For music, I sing, and for moving pictures I draw flipbooks!
This seems to have more to do with delivery of information and advertising to personal electronic devices than being cashless. I'm already cashless, using debit/credit cards for all purchases except those I wish to hide from my wife. She would ask what my $100 purchase at the computer store was about, but be less likely to question my need for a new video card (a need that she wouldn't understand if it were explained anyway).
I've also seen how "encouraging" people to go cashless acts as a regressive tax on the poor, with the proceeds going to profit business, not the public interest. Examples:
Illinois changed their tollway system such that you pay double if you're using cash instead of the I-Pass automatic collection device. The device costs $10, and the minimum amount you can add to it is $40; adding money to your account requires either a credit card or bank account. For many people, having enough money to have a bank account and let $40 sit on a tollway account at the same time is impossible, so they end up getting "nickel-and-dimed" over time.
We're all aware of the fees associated with ATM withdrawals, often times from both the customer's bank and the ATM's bank. So taking out $20 can easily cost $4 in fees. For people who have plenty of money to spare, these fees are negligible, but for most, they rack up to a substantial sum in short order. The same goes for any kind of flat fee - the less money you have/earn, the more valuable the amount of that fee is.
Creating a truly cashless society, where even person-to-person exchanges are handled electronically, shifts the overall tax base to the poor, who often do work off the books (side jobs and tips). Yes, you're supposed to declare income earned from those kinds of side jobs, but most don't. This acts as a tax shelter for the non-rich, who don't have enough liquid assets to be able to afford legal tax shelters, and it's this kind of sheltered income that allows many people to survive from week to week.
There are underground economies everywhere, and cashlessness would force those economies above board to some degree. I don't see how that would be beneficial to the majority of people. Unfortunately, the majority of people don't have a voice in whether cashlessness will happen or not - because they don't have enough money to make themselves heard. Total catch 22.
I must respectfully disagree. Problem solving is something that can and must be taught. School is least valuable when it's about memorizing minutia, and most valuable when it's about learning how to think about new concepts and situations in constructive and creative ways.
Well, for the former[boots computer and runs commands], there's always Knoppix.
Yes yes, I am wholly aware of live CDs, and they're also pretty great. And yet, they are also not "WebOS," being that they're local media - just like a BIOS chip or a floppy or a USB key or a hard drive or whatever.
On the second part, that's exactly what I was thinking. PXE boot to a local hardware device (like a SOHO router that almost everyone with broadband has). The SOHO router would keep a boot image file which would allow the PXE computer to get enough info to connect to the internet and download a more complete OS, then run from that. The hardware device would be able to check in with its internet counterpart for updated boot images with or without user intervention.
Now, broadband in the US is still generally 10Mb, so I wonder if the downloaded OS could start running while it was still downloading other parts. Applications, perhaps, wouldn't automatically be downloaded, but rather downloaded "on demand." Then those apps would be tied to your "WebOS" user account, so that they would donwload right away (before you demanded them), a kind of self-tailoring experience.
As observed already, "WebOS" is a complete misnomer. Last time I checked, I was not able to boot my computer with a blank hard drive using a "WebOS." An operating system allows your computer to boot and run commands, regardless of whether it's connected to a network or not.
What would be super-cool is an BIOS-embedded OS that booted from the NIC from a server available over the internet. But what these "WebOS" people are actually providing is a "WebOffice" suite. Still a useful commodity, but not an operating system.
Images of bombs and other suspicious devices that are hard to detect are put up on the X-ray machine...
So what qualifies as "bomb-shaped" anyway? In any event, I'm sure that terrorists are too stupid to make their bombs shaped like cute harmless puppy dogs, which would certainly be rushed right into the cockpit.
From the getgo, I absolutely agree that there are leeches running rampant in the world who just want you to tell them every single button to press to make their system do what they want it to, regardless of what system that is. I've seen plenty of questions that go, "How do I set up Active Directory?"
I have some limited experience with Linux recently (I've set up Fedora Core 4, Knoppix, DSL, Debian, Kubuntu - not very extensively, just to get my feet wet), and extensive experience with Microsoft products (many years supporting MS machines and the domains they live in).
When I need to find out (for example) how to migrate NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Windows Server 2003 SBS, Microsoft has all sorts of easily discoverable resources for me to read, and they're 95% accurate for my needs. When I need to find out (for example) how to configure a WLAN card in DSL, I have to wander around user forums until I find a little reference to something that's kind of what I need, I think, and fool around with it until it magically works and I'm not exactly sure why.
I've pulled out the most distinct examples here. Maybe DSL isn't the distribution with the best documentation. Maybe my greater experience with MS makes it easier for me to find the MS resources I need. Maybe with some more experience using Linux I'll get used to how finding configuration information is different, and be able to find what I need easier.
That said, the sense that I get now is that "RTFM" with Linux is easier said than done. You have to FindTFM first. I know that at some point I'm going to need someone with greater experience than I have to point me in the right direction, not having found what I need via Google. Many Linux n00bs, present company included, don't need handholding through configuration. We just want to know where TFM is so we can R it.
Actually, it might be safe to assume that person has children who are well-behaved instead of your little monsters. Mannered children do exist you know.
Sorry, Anonymous Coward (if that's your real name) --
The most well behaved two year old in the world will still get hurt doing what two year olds do: explore everything with their hands, and often their mouths.
For those of you keeping score at home: another way to tell when someone doesn't have kids is when they think that kids who aren't silent and motionless are "little monsters."
You're mostly right, but behavior control can be what tracking is for, too. If you craft the rules as "We know where you are, and if you don't answer your phone when we call it, there'll be hell to pay," then your kid has an incentive to be cool just knowing you could look up where they are at any moment, and might call.
Should you, the parent, depend on a GPS phone as your only tether to your child when they're not within your range of view? No. Is a GPS phone an omniscient presence? No. Nothing wrong with letting your kids think it is, though.
Other weird stuff started to happen, too, like one FM station dropping all their classical music programs in favor of news and talk--and the other FM station dropping their drive-time classical music programming in order to broadcast the identical news programming at the same time as the other station.
It sounds like you've been paying close attention, so what I'm about to say may not be the case.
In the Chicago area, a couple of affiliates (WBEZ and WNIU) have purchased multiple frequencies in multiple cities, broadcasting identical content from all. On the one hand, this does make public radio somewhat less local and somewhat more regional. On the other hand, it allows a great station (WBEZ) and a good station (WNIU) to expand their listener bases and stay afloat while the stations that used to live on their dupe frequencies had to close up shop.
Oh, and when I have to drive to Iowa and back, I can listen to NPR the whole time. Which is so sweet, you guys.
That reminded me - remember when ADM was all in the news for price gouging? I noticed how NPR didn't pull a single punch in its coverage, even while ADM continued to sponsor them. I distinctly remember hearing extended pieces on how ADM got completely busted and in really big trouble, then the five-second spot for "ADM, Supermarket of the world." Loved it.
1. Tell parents that they'll be over at Billy's house for a while.
2. Kid proceeds to go to the overpass to drop rocks on cars.
No system at all is more easily defeatable than a simple system.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say you don't have children. When parents want to use a tool to enhance the safety of their children, it's not because they can't be bothered to raise them; it's because they love them more than anything, and will try every avenue to make sure their kids are okay. Parents who can't be bothered to raise their children don't care whether the kids are dropping rocks off of overpasses or not.
For those of you keeping score at home, another way to tell when someone doesn't have kids - when the server at the restaurant puts the silverware, full adult-sized water glass and piping hot plate of food immediately in front of the two year old in the booster seat; it's safe to assume that person doesn't have children.
Re:Hacking is a lot like life...
on
Hacker Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
I'm about to start repaying about $30k in student loans for what I feel was a sub-par education
Well... let me piss you off just a tad more. I went to college on a lark, and after one year was asked very firmly not to return. I just closed on a Big-Ass(tm) house in the suburbs.
There are places that will hire for experience, just not as many. And if you're going to get your foot in the door ahead of people who have a bunch of certifications on their resumes, you have to speak and write engagingly, be agreeable in person, and do a little schmoozing. I hate that last part.
Why focus energy on learning what you already know?
There's a school of thought that says just the opposite (although I think it applies to adults whose ability to learn may have become reduced for various reasons). That being, you're more likely to gain ability in what you're already good at than at what you're not so good at. If you have a choice of working on X (something you're good with) or Y (something you're not), you'd have a higher "percentage" increase in your ability if you worked on X than on Y.
I know I'm not explaining it very well, but even more generally, it does seem like it would be easier and more valuable to become an eXtreme eXpert in one area than a so-so jack-of-all-trades. (Well, at least it seems that way to me right now. I'll change my mind about that later, I'm sure.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you paying money for a "spam solution" when you use gmail, which apparently has a better spam filter?
Oh you bought into their advetisments? These people are no better than "Stop Sign" security, which sounds great but turns out to be something completely retarded. I wouldn't be surprised that the russians who run "Blue Security" are part of the mob that is responsible for much of the spam themselves.
No, you Anonymous Turd, Gmail filters my spam into a spam folder so I don't have to look directly at it, but it does not prevent the spam from reaching my (and your) mailbox. The only way to prevent spam from being delivered in the first place is to make it unprofitable to send. Since convincing the unwashed masses that they shouldn't buy C1AALL1$$ from random emails is impossible, the way to make it unprofitable is to make the process of sending spam increasingly inconvenient and costly. Responding services like BlueSecurity do that.
For free.
I have wondered what good BlueSecurity has done me, as the amount of spam I've been receiving hasn't decreased (though the sources do appear to have changed; I'm getting a lot of spam in Chinese and Hebrew now). This pissy little spammer lashing out clearly demonstrates that BlueSecurity works to make spam delivery unprofitable.
Now, commence with the STFU already.
My Linux boxes are free in the sense that I can hire anyone I want to help me with them, or I can get a book from O'Reilly Media, and do it myself.
I think you may be making the article's point right there. You can't hire anyone you want to help you with them - you have to find someone who has experience in doing so. There are a whole helluva lot more of those people in the market, at varying levels of experience, supporting Microsoft products. Why is that? Because Microsoft products are well documented, well versioned, and widely (usually well) taught.
I've commented elsewhere about the unfortunate lack of documentation for Linux distributions and applications. My point then as now is that coding is the fun part; documentation is tedious. Who's going to do the tedious work for no compensation?
Below is an email that I received, which pretty much confirms that they have been hacked.
= 15245875
No, it absolutely does not confirm that they've been hacked. See my previous comment about how it's likely that the spammer simply confirmed BlueSecurity registration for addresses he already has, but is unable to get new addresses out of the BlueSecurity database.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184656&cid
Comments on BlueSecurity forums last night demonstrate that users with multiple protected addresses are getting these attack spams to some, but not all, of the protected addresses.
What's lkely happening: Spammer has a mailing list. Spammer uses BlueSecurity's "cleanlist" tool to clean registered addresses from his mailing list. Compare original list to cleaned list - email addresses that are in the first but not the second are BlueSecurity registered.
By this logic, email addresses that the spammer does not already have are not made available to the spammer in any way via BlueSecurity's own list. Delivery patterns of the attack spams support this observation.
I'll also note that Gmail's own spam filters are already capturing all of these attack spams; I only got two in my mailbox this morning, about 50 more were filtered.
This is the first time I'm aware of that a spam prevention service has worked so well that it's got a spammer pissed off enough to lash out. BlueSecurity++
Perhaps they intend to make torrents a legitimate method of delivery of purchased iTunes songs. So, you purchase an iTunes song, seed it as an 'iTunes torrent.' Then you get some amount of credit for more iTunes songs. Someone else who buys the first song you bought downloads it as a torrent from you (and others).
It's a way for Apple to expand their ability to deliver content without having to drastically upgrade their own network infrastructure. You get a little iTunes store credit for being part of the delivery system.
1) As commented many other places, you get what you pay for. If you're going to pay $7/hr US, or less for offshoring, you're going to get tech support on par with the kind of service you get when ordering fast food.
2) On the other side of that coin, if you are an employee of any kind, you should be doing your job to the best of your ability, not being an elitist prick to make up for what you see as an imbalance in compensation. Doing a crappy job for $7/hr isn't going to qualify you to get a job making $10 or $15. Besides which, you knew the deal going into it. You'd make $n/hr and be required to perform certain tasks (certainly including "don't be an elitist prick to customers").
Yeah, and then I have to yell "ZERO! ZERO! ONE! ZERO! ..." into one of the cans-on-a-string. I think it's like 5/8 baud.
1990 called and wants their "$YEAR called and wants their $ITEM/CONCEPT back" meme back.
2005 called and wants their "programmatic variables used as inferences to repetitiveness" back.
Sorry, I had to bandwagon jump.
This is the first thing I've read on /. that actually made me laugh instead of just smirking wryly.
Because I use cans and a string to talk to people across long distances, and I use pen and paper or playing cards to play games. For music, I sing, and for moving pictures I draw flipbooks!
This seems to have more to do with delivery of information and advertising to personal electronic devices than being cashless. I'm already cashless, using debit/credit cards for all purchases except those I wish to hide from my wife. She would ask what my $100 purchase at the computer store was about, but be less likely to question my need for a new video card (a need that she wouldn't understand if it were explained anyway).
I've also seen how "encouraging" people to go cashless acts as a regressive tax on the poor, with the proceeds going to profit business, not the public interest. Examples:
Illinois changed their tollway system such that you pay double if you're using cash instead of the I-Pass automatic collection device. The device costs $10, and the minimum amount you can add to it is $40; adding money to your account requires either a credit card or bank account. For many people, having enough money to have a bank account and let $40 sit on a tollway account at the same time is impossible, so they end up getting "nickel-and-dimed" over time.
We're all aware of the fees associated with ATM withdrawals, often times from both the customer's bank and the ATM's bank. So taking out $20 can easily cost $4 in fees. For people who have plenty of money to spare, these fees are negligible, but for most, they rack up to a substantial sum in short order. The same goes for any kind of flat fee - the less money you have/earn, the more valuable the amount of that fee is.
Creating a truly cashless society, where even person-to-person exchanges are handled electronically, shifts the overall tax base to the poor, who often do work off the books (side jobs and tips). Yes, you're supposed to declare income earned from those kinds of side jobs, but most don't. This acts as a tax shelter for the non-rich, who don't have enough liquid assets to be able to afford legal tax shelters, and it's this kind of sheltered income that allows many people to survive from week to week.
There are underground economies everywhere, and cashlessness would force those economies above board to some degree. I don't see how that would be beneficial to the majority of people. Unfortunately, the majority of people don't have a voice in whether cashlessness will happen or not - because they don't have enough money to make themselves heard. Total catch 22.
Now, you can't teach problem solving, ...
I must respectfully disagree. Problem solving is something that can and must be taught. School is least valuable when it's about memorizing minutia, and most valuable when it's about learning how to think about new concepts and situations in constructive and creative ways.
Well, for the former[boots computer and runs commands], there's always Knoppix.
Yes yes, I am wholly aware of live CDs, and they're also pretty great. And yet, they are also not "WebOS," being that they're local media - just like a BIOS chip or a floppy or a USB key or a hard drive or whatever.
On the second part, that's exactly what I was thinking. PXE boot to a local hardware device (like a SOHO router that almost everyone with broadband has). The SOHO router would keep a boot image file which would allow the PXE computer to get enough info to connect to the internet and download a more complete OS, then run from that. The hardware device would be able to check in with its internet counterpart for updated boot images with or without user intervention.
Now, broadband in the US is still generally 10Mb, so I wonder if the downloaded OS could start running while it was still downloading other parts. Applications, perhaps, wouldn't automatically be downloaded, but rather downloaded "on demand." Then those apps would be tied to your "WebOS" user account, so that they would donwload right away (before you demanded them), a kind of self-tailoring experience.
As observed already, "WebOS" is a complete misnomer. Last time I checked, I was not able to boot my computer with a blank hard drive using a "WebOS." An operating system allows your computer to boot and run commands, regardless of whether it's connected to a network or not.
What would be super-cool is an BIOS-embedded OS that booted from the NIC from a server available over the internet. But what these "WebOS" people are actually providing is a "WebOffice" suite. Still a useful commodity, but not an operating system.
From CNN:
...
Images of bombs and other suspicious devices that are hard to detect are put up on the X-ray machine
So what qualifies as "bomb-shaped" anyway? In any event, I'm sure that terrorists are too stupid to make their bombs shaped like cute harmless puppy dogs, which would certainly be rushed right into the cockpit.
And whoever replaces Scott McClellan will head the Ministry of Truth.
Documentation isn't the fun part, it's the tedious part. Everyone who wants to do something tedious without compensation, raise your hands right now.
From the getgo, I absolutely agree that there are leeches running rampant in the world who just want you to tell them every single button to press to make their system do what they want it to, regardless of what system that is. I've seen plenty of questions that go, "How do I set up Active Directory?"
I have some limited experience with Linux recently (I've set up Fedora Core 4, Knoppix, DSL, Debian, Kubuntu - not very extensively, just to get my feet wet), and extensive experience with Microsoft products (many years supporting MS machines and the domains they live in).
When I need to find out (for example) how to migrate NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Windows Server 2003 SBS, Microsoft has all sorts of easily discoverable resources for me to read, and they're 95% accurate for my needs. When I need to find out (for example) how to configure a WLAN card in DSL, I have to wander around user forums until I find a little reference to something that's kind of what I need, I think, and fool around with it until it magically works and I'm not exactly sure why.
I've pulled out the most distinct examples here. Maybe DSL isn't the distribution with the best documentation. Maybe my greater experience with MS makes it easier for me to find the MS resources I need. Maybe with some more experience using Linux I'll get used to how finding configuration information is different, and be able to find what I need easier.
That said, the sense that I get now is that "RTFM" with Linux is easier said than done. You have to FindTFM first. I know that at some point I'm going to need someone with greater experience than I have to point me in the right direction, not having found what I need via Google. Many Linux n00bs, present company included, don't need handholding through configuration. We just want to know where TFM is so we can R it.
Just use social security numbers!
Actually, it might be safe to assume that person has children who are well-behaved instead of your little monsters. Mannered children do exist you know.
Sorry, Anonymous Coward (if that's your real name) --
The most well behaved two year old in the world will still get hurt doing what two year olds do: explore everything with their hands, and often their mouths.
For those of you keeping score at home: another way to tell when someone doesn't have kids is when they think that kids who aren't silent and motionless are "little monsters."
(Go ahead, mod me Troll. I got karma to burn.)
You're mostly right, but behavior control can be what tracking is for, too. If you craft the rules as "We know where you are, and if you don't answer your phone when we call it, there'll be hell to pay," then your kid has an incentive to be cool just knowing you could look up where they are at any moment, and might call.
Should you, the parent, depend on a GPS phone as your only tether to your child when they're not within your range of view? No. Is a GPS phone an omniscient presence? No. Nothing wrong with letting your kids think it is, though.
Other weird stuff started to happen, too, like one FM station dropping all their classical music programs in favor of news and talk--and the other FM station dropping their drive-time classical music programming in order to broadcast the identical news programming at the same time as the other station.
... Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket-of-the-World ...
It sounds like you've been paying close attention, so what I'm about to say may not be the case.
In the Chicago area, a couple of affiliates (WBEZ and WNIU) have purchased multiple frequencies in multiple cities, broadcasting identical content from all. On the one hand, this does make public radio somewhat less local and somewhat more regional. On the other hand, it allows a great station (WBEZ) and a good station (WNIU) to expand their listener bases and stay afloat while the stations that used to live on their dupe frequencies had to close up shop.
Oh, and when I have to drive to Iowa and back, I can listen to NPR the whole time. Which is so sweet, you guys.
That reminded me - remember when ADM was all in the news for price gouging? I noticed how NPR didn't pull a single punch in its coverage, even while ADM continued to sponsor them. I distinctly remember hearing extended pieces on how ADM got completely busted and in really big trouble, then the five-second spot for "ADM, Supermarket of the world." Loved it.
And without a GPS track:
1. Tell parents that they'll be over at Billy's house for a while.
2. Kid proceeds to go to the overpass to drop rocks on cars.
No system at all is more easily defeatable than a simple system.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say you don't have children. When parents want to use a tool to enhance the safety of their children, it's not because they can't be bothered to raise them; it's because they love them more than anything, and will try every avenue to make sure their kids are okay. Parents who can't be bothered to raise their children don't care whether the kids are dropping rocks off of overpasses or not.
For those of you keeping score at home, another way to tell when someone doesn't have kids - when the server at the restaurant puts the silverware, full adult-sized water glass and piping hot plate of food immediately in front of the two year old in the booster seat; it's safe to assume that person doesn't have children.
I'm about to start repaying about $30k in student loans for what I feel was a sub-par education
... let me piss you off just a tad more. I went to college on a lark, and after one year was asked very firmly not to return. I just closed on a Big-Ass(tm) house in the suburbs.
Well
There are places that will hire for experience, just not as many. And if you're going to get your foot in the door ahead of people who have a bunch of certifications on their resumes, you have to speak and write engagingly, be agreeable in person, and do a little schmoozing. I hate that last part.
Why focus energy on learning what you already know?
There's a school of thought that says just the opposite (although I think it applies to adults whose ability to learn may have become reduced for various reasons). That being, you're more likely to gain ability in what you're already good at than at what you're not so good at. If you have a choice of working on X (something you're good with) or Y (something you're not), you'd have a higher "percentage" increase in your ability if you worked on X than on Y.
I know I'm not explaining it very well, but even more generally, it does seem like it would be easier and more valuable to become an eXtreme eXpert in one area than a so-so jack-of-all-trades. (Well, at least it seems that way to me right now. I'll change my mind about that later, I'm sure.)