So I got a degree in CS - and spent about 10 years doing "IT" work. From network admin, to unix system administration, to supporting J2EE applications/application servers - and all third part software that runs on the OS.

I am doing R&D and Software Engineering and I guess now I'm "worthy" - but my past experience has me much more effective in my current role than if I had just gone straight software engineering all the way.

Funny thing is, when I saw the subject of the OP, it took reading this thread to finally realize even the point of the posting.

So, I guess the biggest flaw with this career path is that you will not learn the proper way to be snooty to those who work in IT.

He's invited to meet their developers? He should be careful. The blizzard armed guards might confuse him with the ones working in the sweat shop and he won't get to go home.

At *some* Kohl's, you can get a pandigital e-reader that beats many of the low-end $150 android tablets hands down in construction quality (built by foxcon - yea the same folks who make the iphone) - for only 59.99.

Your mileage will vary - as many stores are sold out, but there are still reports of people finding them.

It runs a cut down android out of the box.

There are custom firmware packages you can install that turn the device into a generic android tablet. (Some enable the android market, etc)

The device is nice, but a resistive touch screen and the lack of other features such as gps and camera may turn people off. But hey, for $60 bucks, what do you expect?

See this thread for more details:
http://www.androidtablets.net/forum/pandigital-novel/5149-59-99-white-pandigitals-kohls.html

A patent is not infringed upon unless all claims within the patent are infringed upon. The slashdot submission does not take into account the other claims in the patent.

Of course, that doesn't really matter, because there are numerous prior art implementations of a CLI integrating to SOAP for something like this. For example, IBM WebSphere Portal has an xmlaccess command line utility that does exactly this.

Ack! It's not worth it? All that extra time spent working to update our programs through the night and for no benefit?? And to make matters worse, those of us who spent time updating Java for DST might have been installing broken timezone data. See http://www.javasanity.org/article/7/thanks-for-the -time-sun