I'm able to do this with a $10 sim card from a 7-11 convenience store in Bangkok betweek cellular 3G and their distributed wifi network. Works great....

We've followed similar career arcs. When I figured out, like you, that this wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I started studying money. It's essentially a new language, with variable, types, modules, classes etc. Once you understand the basic premises, it's no more difficult to make it than to write a significant application.

The cool thing about working towards a good chunk of cash is that it gives you the ability to take a step back and look around. Maybe software development IS what you want to do for the rest of your life, but you don't want to be tied to the company you're at, or to a paycheck at all. Maybe you want to do like This guy.

I'm not much for the self help genre, but try these two books. Even if they don't solve your problems, at least you'll be happier where you are.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Hate to break it to you (and contradict my last post), but while it's one of the most depressing series I"ve ever read, it's also one of the most exhilarating... you soldier on through the worst apocolyptic nightmares produced by pen, then...

BAM

One of the protagonists comes out of nowhere and just absolutely stomps the shit out of everything in his / her path, scoring 1M internets for the home team.

Admit it, ChrisKnight, you never finished the series :)

What do you get when youo combine manic depression, schizophrenia, bigotry, and leprosy, then add in a little literal and figurative rape?

In the end, a pretty good series, but more than anything else I"ve read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has the darkest, most depressing prose I've ever read.

There are KAJILLIONS of good-natured, smart, talented, hard-working men and women that are more than capable.

Please introduce me to just a few of these KAJILLION people. I haven't heard of the tribe, but in my experience, finding good-natured, smart, talented, hard working people (at any price), while by no means impossible, is the result of hard work in and of itself. I'd really just rather hire people from this KAJILLION place.

I think it's disingenuous in the extreme not to consider racial bias towards as well as against Obama in a study like this. In areas such as Atlanta, GA, where African Americans comprise more than 50% of the population, poliiticians are almost exclusively black .

In Thailand, the Bangkok Post recently ran an article entitled Is Farang an F-word?.

This implies bias based on racial characteristics, not only for caucasians, but for all ethnic groups. I think a study that tried to explain to what degree racial bias offset's itself would be more interesting.

Lord of Light. Quite possibly his most famous book outside of the Amber Chronicles (there were five more centered around Corwin's son).

Can't see how these can be considered forgotten... Donaldson's still writing the Last Chronicles. If manic depression could be learned, this would be the textbook. Chapters and chapters of spectacularly described depression, angst, and ennui interspersed with horror, then a right hook out of nowhere with displays of beauty or realization or power. Hits like a McDonalds cheeseburger in the guts.

As a storage admin for a decent size (1000+ employee) company, I get this argument from management every day. We can go out and buy a terabyte for $50! How hard is it to justify 10TB for project X?

Answer: Your USB drive (or internal SATA drive, or cheap single desktop RAID solution) has neither the performance, reliability, or feature set required by a modern datacenter.

A standard (7200rpm) USB drive can get around 320 IOPS. A single application in an enterprise environment, serving multiple users, can easily require 20,000+ IOPS at the database level. An environment like the SSA could easily have dozens of apps serving the same number of users (employees, not even counting customers). How many USB drives do you plan on connecting? How are you going to maintain, monitor, and expand your 1000's of daisy chained USB drives? How many millions are you going to spend designing, implementing, and maintaining an interface to control them? How much to train people to use it?

Enterprise storage solutions from EMC, NetApp, 3Par etc. help control the issues above, but they don't come cheap. A terabyte of space for a NetApp filer, if you count licensing, training, power, cooling, disaster recovery etc., will run you easily $10,000 / TB. EMC storage can be double that.

I can't guess how much data they need to store, but knowing that they have 106,000 employees, and knowing that my company has around a thousand, even if they needed only a tenth as much storage as us, they're looking at 10 petabytes, or $100,000,000 in storage. If you budget roughly the same amount for network and server hardware, then about as much as both combined for application development, support, transition, and staff, then throw in a final $100,000,000 for government waste and bureaucracy, you're pretty much right on target.

WebMin is a web based GUI system admin tool great for people who are at your level; specifically, you have some build experience, a smattering of Linux knowledge, and a clear understanding of your goals.

Hope the following helps with your issues: Client / Server: Each of the workstations can be set up to "phone home". Select the "Webmin Servers Index" option

- View client computer status: "System and Server Status"

- On/off, sleeping etc.

- Deny internet access, not LAN, just the web: "Webmin Users", can schedule time

- Block access w/Squid

- Remote virus scanning of client machines, or scheduled task;

Unnecessary if you'll put a basic Linux distro on the clients

- Some kind of hardware monitor, high temp / fan speed low etc "Hardware"

- Email alerts for various log files / alarms. "Monitoring"

Hope that helps. It's not even a steep learning curve, and you get to ignore the viruses and adware they were going to pick up anyway.

It's highly unlikely that you'll get one.

What most of the people posting here don't understand is the loyalty that Thais have towards their king. Note that this is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the monarchy in general.

King Bhumibol has brought incredible change to Thailand during his reign, including improvements from irrigation to public restrooms (my personal favorite). In the recent ousting of the Thai prime minister, supporters of the PM wore pink to support the king. The opposition wore yellow to support the king. Notice a pattern here? Good luck with your translator. Let me know how that works out for you :-)