Industry-Specific Forums

[Perry Winkle]

Sign-up for Google Reader or Bloglines, find the best blogs (or whatever) that are related to your particular IT interests. Another decent source are the sub-reddits (I follow the python one some). Hacker News is good for mostly for programmers, infrastructure folks, and people interested in starting tech startups.

I just looked up PACS, and I'm not sure what tools you'd be using. Wikipedia says that you might be using LAN/WLAN, Java, ActiveX (please tell me this isn't so) and .NET. Is that right? Can you be more specific?

What aspects are you interested in? Do you want theory and practice, or mostly one or the other?

The links I gave above aren't going to be the best filter, but if you start with a couple of specialist blogs you can build a core of people that will act as filters to find the stuff that you really care about.

[Perry Winkle]

Also, I don't really contribute much to any site. My interests are broad enough that I can't even keep up with assimilating even 10% of what I want to.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Perry Winkle

I just looked up PACS, and I'm not sure what tools you'd be using.

PACS is a jack-of-all-trades thing. I've got hundreds of different devices by dozens of different vendors all communicating via DICOM to a central "Picture Archiving and Communication System" on which radiologists view images on high-res monitors, and referring physicians access the system via web applications or DICOM discs. To keep the thing running, I've got to know a little bit about everything--which I usually learn on-the-fly as situations arise.

I'm trying to fill in any gaps in my knowledge my studying for a certification in my field; but I'm always interested in persepctives from more specialized IT guys.

Oh, and the reason I started this thread was that I was curious if you guys from other industries all get together and share notes on your own message boards. I can see that a few of you do just that.