On Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:33:17 +0000, Invisible wrote:

>>>> When's the last time you looked at a map, young'un?
>>>
>>> Of the Middle East? Never.
>>
>> Maybe that's part of the reason why you have little sense of how the
>> world actually is.  Just a thought.
> 
> Forget Iraq - I don't even know where Cumbria is. And *that* is
> something I might plausibly need to actually know at some point. :-P

Well, then look that up.

>>> I'm the guy who thought that Brazil was in Europe, remember? Geography
>>> was never my strong point. (Or history, actually.)
>>
>> That's correctable, but you have to correct it.  Both of these things
>> are quite important.
> 
> Notice how this sentence is in the past tense? :-P

Yes, but my point was to a larger point of not being aware of some fairly 
basic information about the world.

>>>> Because you're in technology and keeping up on technology trends is
>>>> important to furthering a career in technology
>>>
>>> Really? In what sense?
>>
>> If you don't know what technology is out there, how do you expect to
>> know when a proposed solution is good or not?
> 
> By researching it, obviously.
> 
> I'm not saying it's unnecessary to know anything about technology. I'm
> saying it seems unnecessary to know about technology we're not actually
> using. (Whether it would help my job prospects is another matter... but
> you have to find jobs to apply for first.)

It's easier to find jobs to apply to when you have a broader awareness of 
the world than just what's relevant to you right now.

Remember I got laid off last May?  I'm actually still looking for full 
time work, but I've been doing contract work.  My current contract is 
with the engineering department of the company I got laid off from (it 
ends tomorrow, unfortunately - it's been a really fun project).  The work 
I'm doing is with a cloud technology product.

Now, if I had stuck my head in the sand when cloud technology came along, 
I wouldn't have been able to qualify for this contract very well.  But I 
knew about the product (even though I hadn't used it) and knew what the 
capabilities are and what customers might actually want from it.

And the engineering department has been impressed with my ability to 
learn their specific technology very quickly.  I like to think they'd be 
willing to hire me if there was an open position (indeed, that's 
something I'm hoping to talk with them about before the end of the day 
tomorrow).

I'm not a software engineer.  But I have skills that they've seen benefit 
them greatly.  I can write, I can pick up a product very quickly, and I 
can run into a problem and try to fix it myself (indeed on Monday, I was 
working with a component that needs to be in the release coming up later 
this year, but the engineer assigned to it has taken it over from one who 
left and knows very little about the implementation details.  I logged 10 
bugs against it, and was only able to because I'd hit one, figure out how 
to work around it, and continue with the installation until I hit the 
next point).

Today and tomorrow, I'm hoping to actually patch the scripts involved to 
make the actual fixes quicker for them to implement.

>>>> and those are two places
>>>> where LOTS of news about technology are posted or linked from?
>>>
>>> Well, that's news to me.
>>
>> <boggle>
> 
> I got the impression that Slashdot was more a forum for idle gossip and
> bored people starting flamewars. I wasn't aware any useful information
> existed there.

It is, but the articles are good pointers to what's important.  I rarely 
read the comments (unless I'm bored).  But I have an RSS feed set up from 
the stories page so I can see what's 'hot', read the story, and follow 
the link to the source story so I can learn more.

> I also got the impression that The Register was a satire site. Hell, it
> even subtitles itself "biting the hand that feeds IT". I'm not making
> this up. The few times I've read it, it was amusing, but contained no
> real-world data.

It has elements of satire, but it actually reports on real stuff.  They 
do hardware reviews and talk about software and technology companies in a 
real and non-satirical way.

For example:

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/25/
amazon_cloud_enterprise_storage/

(That's in today's feed)

>>> PS. What is Netflix? And does it only operate in America?
>>
>> It's a streaming movie service, and if you'd been reading Slashdot or
>> The Register, you'd know they've just started operating in Europe as
>> well. :)
> 
> I still don't comprehend what "streaming" actually means in this
> context...

2 seconds with Google yielded this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media

Jim

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