You have hit the nail on the head. They are looking for someone with a degree or some other qualification. Go back to school, get a degree. This will get you past 98% of the useless HR filtering.

I recently gained some insight into the hiring practices where I work. They scan resumes for key words. "Ohhh.. no BSc... DELETED!"

You would be amazed at the number of candidates I have to sift through with degrees from unaccredited universities and colleges simply because HR saw those three magic letters that met the criteria to be forwarded to the next stage of the process.

If you think for a second that this is going to get better, you're dead wrong. Look at LinkedIn[1]. You can specify what level of education your ads are targeted for. Only want post-grads to see an advertisement on Facebook? Easy.

If you want to play this game, you need to work within their rules or find weaknesses in their rules (such as unaccredited universities). (Incidentally, this is now something that I check for - have I at least *heard* of their university?)

If you really have a wealth of experience, it will be trivial for you to challenge a bunch of courses at your local university. Screw paying full tuition. Show up, pay a quarter of the cost, write the exams, get the grade, eventually get the degree. This can be done part time so that you can keep whatever job you currently have.

If you start taking classes as a mature student, you will understand classroom politics and processes *FAR* better than someone who arrived fresh out of high school. Do what I did when I went back after a decade for my masters. Sit in the front row. Ask questions. Shape the class to YOUR needs - hell, you're the one paying for it, not mom and dad. Get your money's worth.

In the end this is your career and your education. You might find some insight on the Internet, but it's generally a horrible place to go for advice. Nobody online will ever care about your circumstances as much as you do. Put a plan together. Ask for feedback from your peers and mentors. Make a decision. Act on it.

Good luck.

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/company/linkedin/linkedin-talent-finder-3437/product

Has anyone suggested the "cleanmx" service from dragonfli.ca? I have a few small/medium-business clients I do IT support for and it's worked amazing as an anti-spam solution.

From what I understand, you point your domains' MX records to their "cleanmx" box, it does all the spam filtering, then forwards the mail on to your real MX server. They offer several behaviors like "just mark the spam" VS "delete the spam", and at the end of the month they let you know how many emails it processed for each domain, and how many spam messages it found.

They advertise no false positives and 96% efficiency on false negatives.

A joke actually that's supposed to poke fun at people like yourself who always seem to pop up in these threads claiming to work for [fill-in-the-blank].

A pox on this you-can't-post-right-after-you've-posted thing.

Back when I first bought a CD burner, I did it to archive. Back then, a "big" consumer harddrive was around 1.2G and a CD held about half of that. Not bad for the time.

These days a "big" consumer harddrive is around 250G to 300G, and this "great new technology" (yet to be released) will allow for about one fifth of that.

That's simply not enough for me to justify using it as a method of data archiving or backup. To backup a single 250G volume I'd need 5+ blanks.

On the consumer side of the equation, I can't see people moving from DVD to this unless there is some justification better than "you'll have to swap discs one third as often".

Now, on the topic of size, since most optical media is recorded radially, why not make the physical size of the discs bigger? Not as big as LDs, because those were a little unmanageable, but another inch or two in diameter would GREATLY increase the capacity of even a DVD-R. Some will point out that it would no longer fit in a 5.25" bay, but who cares. This is why we have firewire and USB2.

Thoughts comments?

Also, i dont quite realize how important floating point ops are in a data-warehousing application. They just pile up tons of (faxes/emails/phone recording).

It has been a while but as I recall Digital Signal Processing is very floating-point intensive. It really is a specialized application so as far as I know whenever posible a DSP is used instead of a general CPU. I seem to recall that DSPs have special shift register capabilities (like 1024 bits) for example. Maybe someone else here can elaborate.

Also search google for info on FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). As I recal the idea is any sound wave can be represented by a sum of different sine waves and a Fourier transform is applied to the input sound to get a set of sine functions which produce the sound. (I think that's what happens but again maybe someone else can explain things a bit more clearly.)