@LAH3385 That was the short version

Per-processor OS licensing has been based on the total number of physical chips in use, more than what is in each physical chip.

But the operating system sees the total number of logical processors that are available. This number is based on the number of physical chips, but also on the number of CPUs in each chip, the number of cores in each CPU, and the number of thread handlers in each core.

The board, socket, physical chip, die, CPU, and cores have separate definitions that can sometimes be confused by marketing.

Multithreading can offer benefits by moving specific responsibilities from the OS to the processor, but only for specific uses that can take advantage of that. In the past, operating systems generally weren't designed to take full advantage of multithreading.

I'm not sure that shorter version will leave you any better off, though.. I imagine it'd be hard to continue learning a language through reading about IT, too. If you can work through the definitions and examples @scottalanmiller laid out, each section follows straight from the explanation before it.

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I've seen a consensus here that Network+ and maybe Security+ offer some value as a base, and afterward certifications quickly start to depend on the direction you want to be taking.

It'd be cool to hear opinions about others that can be valuable down different tracks.

Off the top of my head I'm interested in thoughts about the LPIC and Red Hat, Cisco, different security certifications, and maybe some less technical ones, for example project management.

Opinions about any you've found to be a waste of time would be interesting too.

So would any correlation you perceive with any of them, through hiring or people you've worked with.

Hey everybody, I started looking through SMB IT Journal and found my way over to start looking around here too.

I'm pretty new to learning about IT. I started a little while back, focusing on networking and CCNA study material. I like it but have also gotten distracted and taken a number of tangents off into other areas.

Do you all have any books or resources you'd recommend toward getting some basics down cold in any area? I'd like to work toward solid understanding and try to avoid learning in ways where I might end up drifting down any of these paths mentioned here..

I'm open to learning about any area. Networking, Linux and system administration have been some of the most interesting to me so far, and I keep sensing I'll be needing to start a base in programming too.

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@Lakshmana
You'd want a soldering station that can hold the iron in a set position as you work.

Otherwise, before long you'd probably end up wishing you had a third hand, trying to hold the iron and the pieces you're soldering in place.

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Thanks @scottalanmiller. I don't have much experience to contribute to a lot of topics here, but think I'll keep an eye out and jump in where I can.

I appreciate this type of stuff @scottalanmiller, and I've been continuing to gradually work my way through some of your archives on StorageCraft, Datamation and your SMB IT Journal along with keeping an eye out here when I can.

I can report some off and on Bluetooth issues on a Thinkpad from the Lenovo outlet. No wifi issues for me, but after resuming from hibernate I often have to uninstall the monitor to be able to adjust the brightness at all.

The price was pretty right. But yeah that was before Superfish etc. too. I put in more memory and an ssd, reinstalled Windows fresh and we'll see if anything catastrophic keeps it from holding me over for a while.

The display isn't too hot though, and makes me want one of those 1080 Toshiba Chromebooks for some browsing (and playing with Crouton).

@travisdh1's thread title made me think of these photos I saw today: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/04/san-francisco-then-and-now-super-bowl-50

They put together shots from SF from the last 160+ years, then went and took new pictures from the same locations.

I've heard you mention that as you started out, you were on top of a sense of the best books and resources for all these different topics that evolved as new editions and entries came out, and that this eventually became harder to maintain.

I wasn't sure whether you were referring to a lot of learning starting to move toward Googling and boards, or any change in what's available in books, or maybe if your experience just got to a point where that wasn't as necessary.

A board thread might not be the best format for organizing this, but I'd be really interested in some comprehensive recommended reading too, maybe split into areas. As much as the lab is better for learning in a lot of ways, sometimes I wonder if I miss a lot at times that way too.

There are a lot of great threads here that go back and break different things down really well. I'm just really bent on making sure I have the basics of basics down, so everything can continue to build from there with hopefully fewer rude lessons down the road. Recently I've been soaking up parts of different things from languages to admin stuff to networking fundamentals to beginner security.

I believe the work will pay off, and if there are some consensus books that have been valuable and pretty bulletproof, I'd like to chew on a couple to start with. I think it'd be good to start to feel like I'm getting a lot deeper within a thing or two compared to more superficial across more different areas.

Thank you, and everyone here too, for all your contributions. I believe I was searching a little while back for reading on RAID and file systems, when I first came across something you'd written.

What method(s) do you like for organizing info and maintaining references?

I like a lot about Office, until it's the only method used and everything's spread across dozens of documents. Being inflexible across mobile and Linux counts against it too, especially for OneNote.

I haven't really tried any mobile apps for that second reason either. And with some of the privacy concerns about apps like Evernote, I haven't been interested and never looked at them very closely, along with anything else that offers to suck everything into its cloud for me.

I tend to keep a handful of txt files and Office documents to keep track of a few different things, but without any other software to recommend, I guess that leaves wikis as probably my favorite overall.

Collabedit.com has been really handy a few times.

I think you're already starting with some great methods here. A huge part is just getting the time resources from the right people, in a situation where you can justify working on this, over other stuff that your experience qualifies you for.

Then you also have the scenario where it can be easy for educators to lose the leading edge, with how hard it is to continue diving into everything going on with evolution of best practices, while also finding the time to synthesize and teach what you're exposed to.

You gave a great example of how impossible it is to avoid every last gap. With respect to your experience, the breadth of your experience after contracting in dozens or hundreds of types of projects, and your dedication to learning, how could anyone ever avoid feeling like a "half-assed" pro at least once, even if they didn't have a family, or any other interests in life?

I guess one way to address that is adding more, qualified people to contribute to the cause.

Really though, what you're describing is so ambitious, it's no wonder other business priorities tend to take precedence.

@Joel

Everyone's pretty much covered that your IP ranges won't really have any effect for security or anything. But I guess to try to answer a little more of what you're asking, I'd say subnetting is really for situations where you'd walk in to set up a network given guidelines like "We need 20 subnets, with up to 600 addresses on each subnet", or "We need 5 subnets, with however many addresses on each".

Subnetting's pretty much just the math that lets you take those guidelines and make sure you'll have them covered. Like others mentioned, it's based on binary.

For example, it ends up on a basic level not really mattering whether you need 600 addresses or 700 per subnet, because everything is based on the pattern 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024...

Once you need more than 512 addresses per subnet (actually 510 for other reasons), your subnetting results won't change up until the point where you'd need over 1024 (really 1022).

Solving to make sure you have the number of subnets you need is also based on using that same number pattern to split up the addresses you have to work with.

Other sites can explain binary counting a lot better than I could try to, but 8 bits of data can work together to represent values from 0 through 255 like we see in those network addresses (256 values total since we started at 0).

Any address like 10.2.208.144 doesn't tell us much by itself about what's going on around it, but if you know what the mask is from /8 to /31 or so, it'll be enough to figure out the usable range of how many other addresses might be in its network, what the subnet's broadcast address is, where the next subnet starts, and how many other subnets you have to work with.

I watched Jeremy Cioara's CBT Nuggets and thought he was great. He talked about how much trouble people can have with subnetting and its math, but to me he taught it really clearly. He joked being facetious once about starting to use 10.x.x.x ranges instead of 192 ranges because they're cooler and "more professional", but really there's not any hidden benefit before your guidelines require you to have more of a plan for your subnets, for reasons others have mentioned.

In the past, the range of addresses was split up into different ranges or classes, but they don't really come into play any more. About right after I learned about the classes, I learned they come up more on certification tests than in other environments.

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I can't speak to the 6s series with the force touch, but spent a short time around a repair shop and they didn't carry home buttons for the 5s/6/6+ with Touch ID because the buttons were paired to the boards like @Nic said. Tearing a home button flex cable would have meant buying a replacement phone. Not sure if the newest models have more limits than that.

Screen repairs mostly didn't have any other effect like this, but they would warn people of a chance that the Touch ID might not work after a screen repair. "We've personally read about it happening but never seen one," and continued with that line even after I saw one had happened there myself.

I may have missed someone already saying this as I skimmed through: believe I saw a headline that the upgrade was moving from the Recommended to the Important category.

If I didn't dream that, everyone who lets it install the important updates automatically would probably get it around the same time.

@scottalanmiller This is only partly related, but adding in Python modules beyond the built-ins can be kind of a pain without using pip to reach out over the network, if they end up having other dependencies when you start dragging folders into /Lib.

@scottalanmiller It took me a minute to realize again where you were seeing that haha, I switched that tag out