> I was a math major, and my introduction to UNIX was when my boss at my
> first IT job (I love this guy!) decided some of us should be more than
> call center agents and gave us a half-morning UNIX 101 course. Later
> that day, those of us who had a clue were logging into servers and
> poking around. That was pretty much my formal training, other than
> eventually taking a course on performance tuning, and UNIX is more or
> less what I do for a living now. (Note: I'm talking sysadmin and
> application level stuff--I'm not a deep systems guy, much to my regret
> as I think I'd be good at it.)
I was a math major too, long ago, but I don't see that being relevant to learning UNIX. You were fortunate enough to have an opportunity to get paid learning the stuff on the job. As a self-employed translator, I only use a computer to do the work; the more time I can concentrate on the actual work and the less time I need to "get under the hood" and mess around with the workings of the machine, the more money I can make. Fooling around under the hood is strictly spare-time stuff for me, and I assume that is true of 98% of personal computer users. At the rate I am going, I expect it will take a couple more years for me to learn enough to figure out how to use this open software stuff, and by that time a lot of it, like OO, will probably be ported to OS X and I won't need to know it. So what is the benefit of open software to me and other rank-and-file computer users, left-wing or not?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax