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Advice for Computer Science College Students
by Joel Spolsky Sunday, January 02, 2005 Despite the fact that it was only a year or two ago that I was blubbering about how rich Windows GUI clients were the wave of the future, college students nonetheless do occasionally email me asking for career advice, and since it's recruiting season, I thought I'd write up my standard advice which they can read, laugh at, and ignore. Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now." I, too, have no idea what I'm talking about when I give advice to college students. So you'd be better off ignoring what I'm saying here and instead building some kind of online software thing that lets other students find people to go out on dates with. Nevertheless. Next:
64 Things Every Geek Should Know - laptoplogic.com
The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field. A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject. A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. 1. USB – Universal Serial Bus GPU – Graphics Processing Unit CPU – Central Processing Unit SATA – Serial ATA HTML – Hyper-text Markup Language HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol FTP – File Transfer Protocol P2P – Person to Person data sharing 2. 3. Here’s what one looks like: 4.
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Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution - O'Reilly Media
by Tim O'Reilly12/11/2002 The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. Let me start with book publishing. Sites like Amazon that create a virtual storefront for all the books in print cast a ray of light into the gloom of those warehouses, and so books that would otherwise have no outlet at all can be discovered and bought. Many works linger in deserved obscurity, but so many more suffer simply from the vast differential between supply and demand. I don't know the exact size of the entire CD catalog, but I imagine that it is similar in scope. There are fewer films, to be sure, because of the cost of film making, but even there, obscurity is a constant enemy. Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
