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Have Geeks Gone Mainstream?
An anonymous reader asks: "Recently, I've been seeing more and more news stories about how 'geek' has gone mainstream. There have been a slew of articles with titles like Geek Pride and Geek Chic, which discuss how movies like 'The 40-Year Old Virgin' and 'Napoleon Dynamite', as well as television shows like 'Beauty and the Geek' have made it cool to be a geek. Two pinup calendars of geeks have been released this year, taking advantage of the new mainstream interest in all things geeky. These include the Geek Gorgeous Calendar, which features women who work in the hi-tech industry, and the Girls of Geekdom Calendar, which includes geeks like 'Art Geek' and 'Movie Geek'. So if being a geek has really become cool, why has interest in CS as a major dropped among incoming freshmen and women are still a minority in computer and engineering fields? Is it cooler to pretend to be a geek (wear 'Save Pedro' shirts, etc.) than to really be one?"
This kinda bugs me. Why is CS ``IT?'' Computer Science is not ``IT'' - it's much closer to Mathematics, albeit in it's code-monkey incarnation it is purely applied rather than theoretical. Sysadmin/Netadmin is IT. Software Engineering is not IT. Algorithm design is not IT. Knuth is not IT. DJB is not IT. Djiksta is not IT. Steve Jobs is not IT. Eurgh.
IT is just silly buzzword used by PHBs to collectively group anyone who can do more than play Sollitaire on a computer. Ja, und?