Obviously, people should fine-tune their resume to the job they are applying for, but I've often had "shotgun" resumes floating around that essentially list my strengths. Is it possible that the 45+ year old in question might not have thought they had a realistic shot at a position, so used a shotgun resume in the hopes that one of their strengths might actually be something you had a need for?

I decided I could safely retire early right after the residue of the dot-.bomb finished hitting the ground, but one of the reasons for that was the changing face of the industry; in 1997 I could walk into a interview with a glowing recommendation and obvious skills in the general area of what the business was doing, and get the job; and I was only a little older than you; by 2002, the 2nd rush of generally-bright-but-not-techies-and-just-after-the-money hit with the economic downturn in full force, and usually one moment after they saw my age I was out the door.

What bothers me is the older people who can't get any job; they're not shooting for a salary that would match their skills and experience, but want anything at all. I've got friends who are genuine rockstar programmers who can't get a job *anywhere*, because of their age.

I'm only 49, and I'm still freaked out by what people allow to happen. I remember watergate; I remember Iran-Contra. it seems to me that we hit the toppling point about 1995 or so?

The Best of both worlds.
You don't get a big performance loss, it's rock stead, and it recognizes some pretty damn obscure hardware. Adding apps is a breeze, and it makes recovery operations on win32 machines damned easy.
The only problem I have with Knoppix is that they really reduced the apps that come on the CD version after v6 or so... I run into quite a few systems that won't boot from DVD, and a few that won't do a thumbdrive boot, so I usually end up using a v5 era Knoppix CD.

Its hands down more useful as a general tool than any other distro.

Not quite right.
Dave came up with the fantasy aspect, some of the basics of the magic system, and about half the overall idea; Gary came up with the combat, concept of mapping, and about 40% of the original idea. after the pamphlets, he just wasn't involved that much. Gary never denied he came up with half of the original idea. He did get a little disgruntled when people discounted the fact that he took it from a garage business to a multimillion dollar empire essentially by himself.

But AD&D and everything after about '76, he simply wasn't involved.

That is pretty cool.

Plus, all the cons & stuff leaving the Lake Geneva area, and Hasbro making money was done *after* Gary was forced out; not his fault.

Excellent idea. It really should have a dungeon, but I would settle for a library with a big section on games theory.

there were a lot of dead ends, paths that were not pursued.
I would be pretty surprised, for instance, if anyone has figured out a emulator for the sound blaster AWE cards full range of functionality.

sounds like there is an existing network, it is possible that there might not be any big expenditures needed.

Not necessarily. 100 machines isn't really that many, and there might not be a whole lot of complexity involved... I could see a company deciding to just have someone put on a 2nd hat.
My General Advice: 1st heavily define the current network, find everything, map it to death. 2nd set up a test network to play and practice on. 3rd make your purchases based on what your network needs, not what would be perfect. 4th re-purposing works.
someday, somebody who knows what they are doing will look at what you did (possibly you).

But vmware CAN run inside of Virtual PC.

Ditto. They showed 3 possible connections for my house, Charter, Verizon & Beasley Wireless, a little local WISP that I tried to get to work for over 2 years, until I got tired of only having internet between 11pm and 4am. and charter doesn't come within 2 miles of my place.

If nothing else, this article led me to the Wikipedia page that provided the information that Alone in the Dark was remade in 2008, and that Atari is suing pretty much everyone that has anything to do with it.

It was REALLY exciting, until I realized that no North American courts are involved... A sane decision concerning copyright infringement by a U.S. Court would be really fantastic.

Do you hear the word "Snide" a lot, out of curiosity?

What is the purpose of Windows? to manage hardware resources, and provide common services for the efficient execution of applications.

If a User only used a word processor, then the ultimate OS for that person would be an OS that booted the system directly into that application. But we don't have a lot of people with just one application; I've got about 100 +/-, so i want my OS to:

A) not get in the way of running my applications, making it easy to locate the program and then initiate it. With just a few applications, one obvious way to do this would be to have icons on the screen corresponding to the applications (or even better, programmable keys on a keyboard). With more than a few you really can't do that, so you bring up the problem of locating the applications. The Traditional ways: 1) memorize the file names, then type them in the "RUN" bar/box/whatever. Works great, and has for decades, but there is no framework to help you remember, and you have to have a working memory. of course, operating systems have always included some method to search for the stuff on the system, but, once again, you have to have SOME memory for this to work. 2) have a menu that lists the applications, perhaps grouping them by type of application; this has been established as the most useful method by long practice, and is The Industry Standard.

B) Use a minimum of system resources, and pass along as many of those resources as possible to the direct control of the applications. This would mean that anything done to beautify the operating system is counterproductive, and that is really the whole point; if the OS wastes a clock cycle or a byte of resources on ANYTHING besides running the applications that the user wants to run, it is not efficient.

OK, back to the real world. we like hi res backgrounds, and fading transparent resource screens. The companies that make operating systems have their own agenda, so they build in backdoors, DRM schemes, and planned obsolescence.

Also, all users are different. one user wants an icon on his desktop for each application, and if there isn't enough space, they increase the res and use smaller icons. another wants to type in the name of the apps and launch them that way, and may never look at a menu. Another might have Voice Command integration, and go through the hassle of training her computer to recognize her voice so that she can literally ask for the application that she wants.

The majority of users are going to want what they have always had, which is a Start menu, with icons representing applications, usually organized into categories by type. the girl with voice command will find this boring, the guy who wants to type in applications will find this old fashioned, and the guy working on the direct neural interface will find all this hopelessly obsolescent.

I would be running Windows 2000 if there were drivers to support my motherboard available, because it uses the least system resources. Since thee are no drivers, I use XP, because it uses less resources than other available Windows operating systems, and provides a simple interface to launch my applications, meeting the criteria for being the Most Efficient Operating System for my purposes.

If someone wants to run another Operating System, fine. But singing the praises of DRM, or justifying resource bloat, or bragging about the way your desktop transitions between screens, or criticizing people for using a menu system, etc, is just...annoying? yeah, I think that is the best word.

a lot of the weirder compounds do require a little bit of help, but I wouldn't qualify them as "High Explosives".
for instance, some of the stuff you can eventually make if you have urine, a car battery, and some simple equipment works a lot better with a electric trigger.

as for Duty Free.... Huh. Compression?

Darn good thing I don't fly.

The first thing I thought about was cheap motion capture / do-it-yourself BVH file generation; I'm a semi-pro animator & cgi guy, and this is sort of a holy grail for the basement computer graphics community.

I'm pretty sure all a person would need is 2 or more Kinects and some relatively simple code to make something that could compete with systems that cost around $5000. I waste a LOT of money on various software packages, but 5k is pretty much out of the question; an additional Xbox 360 and 2 Kinects, though... There would be a LOT more amateur and low dollar animations made.

But, after that, yeah, the level of monitoring people would be potentially opening themselves to is pretty amazing, also.