I graduated with a degree in the German Language. I finished my degree while on Active duty in the US Navy as an Electronics Technician. I am currently in my 15th year as a System Admin, working with RHEL. (go figure, right?) All this because I had lots of German classes in High School, spent some time in Germany, then decided I could go after what I really liked, and ended up working in Electronics/Computers (which I discovered I liked more than what I thought I liked.) thanks to a class required by the field I was going into (thanks, CS 150 at USU). I guess I got lucky by dropping out of college and joining the Navy who trained me at what I really wanted to do. And did it while paying me to learn. That might be the key, finding a way to support yourself while receiving the training you really want.

I installed W10 on an old fliptop that had windows 8 RC1 on it. my 16yo teenager exclaimed: "you mean it won't boot on me every couple hours? sweet!" I haven't seen the fliptop nor my son for more than a few minutes since...

much as I like the english to german translation, I think Norm Schwartzkopf called it better during the first gulf war. Bovine Scatology.

my seventeen year old daughter scored a 5 on the AP Calculus AB exam. she intends on teaching High School Math. ( why she wants to go back to high school, I have yet to understand.) so in my mind, girls get to choose what they want to do just like guys do. dunno why girls don't choose geekage as much as guys do... could be the tan line possibilities.... (or not)

"it Depends on who is judging" cuz I can think of tons of things that are productive to me that aren't productive to my wife or my boss....

second the motion. I enjoyed learning to code and learning to troubleshoot code and logic at the same time.

Since I have a security angle to my job, I wanted to ask: if you are practicing your coding at home is your home system secure? will your home coded app be put into the production system 'as is'? (creating a back door if your system is already compromised.) maybe it's a dumb question and a moot point, but seeing how a home brewed app (read developed in-house) used by a major commercial entity just gave up 400K credit cards, it leaves me to wonder what the process was all the way thru the development process, which we may never fully know. on the other hand, my hobbies tend away from system administration so I have pretty good separation, or I would be typing this in from the loonie bin.

I don't want head phones, or ear buds. How can I eavesdrop on all the fun conversations going on around me, and make my snide comments if I cannot hear what others are saying? And, once the pun war starts, how would I ever keep up...

that was the first thing that jumped out at me. 'looks like a couple other news sites I've seen...' I actually like /. the way it is currently. It took me quite a while to get over the most recent change. but I'm used to the way the stories are presented and I don't need pics with the stories on the font page, if I want pics, I'll click thru to the story! I really like the distinctive look Slashdot.org owns in this current iteration. please keep it the way it is. thanks!

I have a daughter attending Utah Valley University (blatant plug) in web development. (I tried to discourage her being a system admin and all...) And she's been involved in projects dealing with reformatting for tablets and smart phones, html5 and so on. So I think you should check out the schools available to you and their curriculum to achieve your goals. I know when I went to college, there wasn't a web without a spider and computer science was learning programming languages and defining OSs and nitty gritty stuff like that. (yeah, dinosaurus irrelivantus and i did take a cobol class right after pascal and fortran) Of course, as stated above, get an account and put up a site. show the world what you've got, but try to keep it from the hackers who love to fix your site for you...

Seems to me one could spend 80-100 hours a week trying to instigate culture change...

how this comment section has become a testimonial for DBAN.

Derek's boot and nuke. cleans up everything. the other thing that you shouldn't really ever do is store debit/credit card numbers in browser cache. it's almost like giving away your money. good luck!

we should shoot a water cannon at that crater and store some frozen water for later use!