Ethics

Ethics hold our society together, and they are an integral part of business transactions. As I become part of the future workforce, it should be of the utmost importance for me to conduct myself professionally and ethically. While cutting corners may seem like the easy thing to do in the moment, it is unethical. Having and following a personal and professional code of ethics keeps a society safe. Our society runs smoothly because there are many good people doing good things. We much each be responsible businessmen in order to contribute to a happy and fruitful capitalist society.

Adult Content Filtering

Women in CS

The inclusion of women in the process of software design can provide additional insight that improves software. Call me sexist, but women help diversify design ideas. Women simply see things differently than men in many cases. Not only can women help make adjustments to application functionality that can put more females in their target audience (think pintrest), but they can see additional ways to make a program useful and user friendly. Since computer science is primarily male driven field, it is unfortunate that more women aren't there to help change the programming paradigm.

Linux's progress is slow

The lack of monetary incentive keeps Linux moving at a crawl. People build software for Windows because they know they will make money. Linux has made great progress in its lifetime, but until it finds a way to attract a greater audience, software developers will continue to look elsewhere. A sense of community is not enough of an incentive to justify the time required to write truly impressive software. Unless Linux makes some changes toward reaching a more general audience, they will not attract enough dedicated developers to really make an impact on society.

Flexible smartphone screens

Are bendable smartphone screens really that useful? What practical purpose would they really serve? We can't yet reasonably make bendable circuitry or cameras. It also doesn't sound terribly useful for touchscreens either. Even if the curved screen is permanently curved, that just makes me feel like it would be difficult to keep in my pocket. I could see bendable screens possibly being useful in other applications, but not in smartphones. I'm hoping the industry will prove me wrong but, I'm not confident that they can.

#ldsconf

As I followed #ldsconf on twubs, I was surprised at some of the comments. Many were memorable phrases from the speakers. Some were witty stabs at certain beliefs. Others were random comments about the kid who was caught yawning on camera during the musical number. Watching people's comments often helped me think about what was being said from a different perspective. It was a refreshing experience and I do believe I will do it again in the future.

Online Collaboration

Online collaboration in the collection of data is the way of the future, but doesn't always seem fair. It's the social media of information. Whether it be for family history, support forums, Wikipedia, or other data stores, online collaboration is taking hold of society. Sites often find ways of encouraging people to participate and provide ways of recognizing people for their hard work and contributions. More and more, when people spend a few hours finding a solution to a problem, they will find somewhere to post it, and if it is useful enough, relevant searches to that problem eventually work their way to the top of the Google search list. This has created somewhat of a open source approach to information, but in some cases, it is making people a lot of money. Popular information sites put up ads and are making quite a lot of cache off of the hard work of the community.