From my experience, you're dead on for the majority of "staff augmentation" full time contracts that come from tech-related consulting+contracting firms. Most organizations I've been around (East Coast, DC region) charge around $250/hr to big government, and the people they assign make anywhere from $40-$125/hr depending on the specifics of their role.
Amazon WorkSpaces and VMWare Horizon both use the same protocol (Teradici PCoIP), so it's likely Amazon will be able to replicate the VMWare Blast product shortly.
It's just a refresh of VMWare Blast. Citrix has had this for ~a year as well with StoreFront + Receiver for HTML5 for access to datacenter-hosted virtual desktops.
I did this as a Spanish refresher before taking a month-long trip to the Dominican Republic. Worked very well! This especially helped in learning "tech" words, which are rarely taught in formal courses. Came in handy when helping troubleshoot wireless connectivity issues at the hostels where we stayed.
Not to sound "rebellious" to the tech community, but simply going camping one time completely changed my outlook. I realized I felt the most accomplished and satisfied when I was nowhere near my work whatsoever. Good way to really take a complete step back from the tech world to reevaluate everything.
Yep - without wanting to sound all peace & love it doesn't hurt you to completely unplug every so often. Whenever I've taken a decent holiday where there's no net access (yes these places still do exist) it's done me the world of good.
I've used it for small web coding projects and had decent luck.
I always lay out the items which need to be completed with excessive specificity. That's the stage where I've seen a lot of people get let down, disparity in the expectations due to assumptions from each party involved. Never had any issues with payment, either.
If you're very plain and up front things will work out. Make sure you ask any questions so everybody understands what they need and what they're getting prior to any work or payment being completed.
TI graphing calculator in 7th grade, followed by seeing one of my teacher's web pages he made for the course. I decided I could do a better job so I learned the basics of the web and bloomed out from there.
