Everywhere you look, companies are hawking products geared for searching internal documents. Google is making a good move; enter an expanding market as an established leader in searching.
I graduated college in 1995 with a degree in International Environmental Studies. IES prepares you for a career as a... nobody. Even though the courses were interesting, I had almost no marketable skill coming out of college. Through a rigorous summer training course, I was able to get a health inspector's license, and ended up working for a local health dept. in NJ.
Now it is 1998, and I have no real future in the health inspection game; very little chance for promotion, and a crappy 30k/year salary. This is when a friend of mine rekindled an interest in computers and programming, and hooked me up with a job doing web dev at a local consulting company. A few years and countless hours of studying and toiling later, I have a successful career as a server-side developer at a e-commerce company.
With major's, I think it is important to think far ahead and not just about your current interests; I will forever be held back in an upper-level corporate IT environment without a more technical degree.
Working as a team in college was always the best and the worst of times. Sure, you meet new people and get exposed to new ways of doing things, and that's great. But you are limited by the underachievers and slackers in your class (if your school is like mine was, that is a lot of people). Kind of think of it like the limiting reactant in a chemical equation; that reactant determines the time to complete the reaction.
That being said, it might be the most important skill you learn. Dealing with confilicting opinions and slackers are an everyday struggle of mine (web developer). It is good to pick up these skills early.
I actually had a very forward-thinking poly-sci professor in college that made group projects the focus of all his classes; his reasoning was that the experience of forced teamwork was more important than any specific knowledge
As a newbie to the Linux-open source scene, I would really like to see a movie about the "Revolution" It can't be worse than that smoldering pile of sh*t "Antitrust"
I currently work in a Windows NT env, and we set up a RedHat 6.2 box in the corner; we (semi-smart guys with mostly windows exp) run over to it every once in a while, but usually are too frustrated to do anything worthwhile. We always bitch that all of the instructions are from a newbie or Unix-god perspective, not from anything in-between. A guide or tutorial with phrases like "doing x in linux is like doing y in Windows", etc.
I agree with some of the generalizations made here; I think the most important reaction to sharing mp3s, movies, etc, is how it is showing up in the business world. File sharing across the web via apps like Groove, etc, will become prevalent and make working with in groups over long distances easier. Maybe then I could finally work from home!
Slashdot Mirror
Everywhere you look, companies are hawking products geared for searching internal documents. Google is making a good move; enter an expanding market as an established leader in searching.
I graduated college in 1995 with a degree in International Environmental Studies. IES prepares you for a career as a ... nobody. Even though the courses were interesting, I had almost no marketable skill coming out of college. Through a rigorous summer training course, I was able to get a health inspector's license, and ended up working for a local health dept. in NJ.
Now it is 1998, and I have no real future in the health inspection game; very little chance for promotion, and a crappy 30k/year salary. This is when a friend of mine rekindled an interest in computers and programming, and hooked me up with a job doing web dev at a local consulting company. A few years and countless hours of studying and toiling later, I have a successful career as a server-side developer at a e-commerce company.
With major's, I think it is important to think far ahead and not just about your current interests; I will forever be held back in an upper-level corporate IT environment without a more technical degree.
Working as a team in college was always the best and the worst of times. Sure, you meet new people and get exposed to new ways of doing things, and that's great. But you are limited by the underachievers and slackers in your class (if your school is like mine was, that is a lot of people). Kind of think of it like the limiting reactant in a chemical equation; that reactant determines the time to complete the reaction.
That being said, it might be the most important skill you learn. Dealing with confilicting opinions and slackers are an everyday struggle of mine (web developer). It is good to pick up these skills early.
I actually had a very forward-thinking poly-sci professor in college that made group projects the focus of all his classes; his reasoning was that the experience of forced teamwork was more important than any specific knowledge
As a newbie to the Linux-open source scene, I would really like to see a movie about the "Revolution" It can't be worse than that smoldering pile of sh*t "Antitrust"
I currently work in a Windows NT env, and we set up a RedHat 6.2 box in the corner; we (semi-smart guys with mostly windows exp) run over to it every once in a while, but usually are too frustrated to do anything worthwhile. We always bitch that all of the instructions are from a newbie or Unix-god perspective, not from anything in-between. A guide or tutorial with phrases like "doing x in linux is like doing y in Windows", etc.
I agree with some of the generalizations made here; I think the most important reaction to sharing mp3s, movies, etc, is how it is showing up in the business world. File sharing across the web via apps like Groove, etc, will become prevalent and make working with in groups over long distances easier. Maybe then I could finally work from home!