Oh my goodness school

[yamikonumber7]

I suppose I should follow suit and put up a schedule for peoples:

MONDAY:
Work (Campus Operator): 9-Noon
Writing For Technology: Noon-2
Choir: 4-6
Thesis Class: 6-10

TUESDAY:
Internship: 8-5
Randomizer: Sometime in the PM

WEDNESDAY:
Choir: Noon-2
Work (Writing Center): 2-5:30
Work (Campus Operator): 6-Midnight

THURSDAY:Work (Campus Operator): 9

Comments

[sbcpanuru]

If the subject is what everybody should know:

* Search engines. It may seem like spending 15 minutes on opening the car door in driver's ed. But people who are completely new to the internet--maybe from places where there aren't cables laid down and you can't get a satellite signal--are going to need to learn this. Google is the best and for good reason. Bing is crap with a sexy marketing scheme. Yahoo used to be okay (they used Google's engine for a long time), but they've signed on with Microsoft to use Bing under the hood.

* Twitter and FB are huge.

* Blogs and alternative news sites. Everybody needs to know why newspapers are dying and TV is struggling.

* How about aggregators like Reddit and Digg that are the major sources for five-minute memes?

* P2P is pretty important--Bittorrent, Napster, Limewire and so forth. Distinguishing between services that use distributed hash tables versus central coordinating servers is probably too much to ask. But understanding RIAA v Napster helps explain why music companies seem eager to chase their customers while waving tire irons in a threatening manner.

* Instant messaging services. (They use TCP-IP just as much as anything you get over a browser.) AIM, MSN and IRC are the ones I know of. Historical trivia: IRC was the primary source for U.S. intel on the attempted Soviet coup d'etat back in '91. Kind of foreshadowed what Twitter did for us during the recent Iranian elections.

* The history and conflicts between the Big Three--Microsoft, Apple and Google. This may not be interesting for recreational internet users, but having a line on what social networking technologies are being developed could be important for business types.

* How Java and Flash work. There are huge safety issues here, but at bare minimum people should be able to answer the question of "Hey, I just reinstalled my operating system, how come Youtube videos won't play?"

[sbcpanuru]

Oh, and Craigslist.

Monster.com and probably a couple of other jobhunting sites I can't remember at the moment are probably good to cover too.

[ghettopeach]

*feels terribly ignorant*

*or mostly like she lived in the wrong time*

[sbcpanuru]

Anything in particular you want to know about? This stuff is to CS majors what Chaucer and Shakespeare are to English majors, and I sometimes forget what people who spent time doing other things for four years would actually have picked up.

I just found out that Yahoo has an instant messaging client too. How bout that.

[ghettopeach]

Well, how *do* Flash and Java work?

I guess I mostly know about these things, but just don't feel comfortable in that environment? The Internet is not really my social milieu. I'm not "into" it enough to be well-versed in these things, but I'm young and hip enough to know what they *are,* at least. But just barely.

Hopelessly outdated at 27.

[sbcpanuru]

Java and Flash, once you have them installed, serve effectively as a local troupe of actors to put on plays using the stage and lighting of your local computer. This saves a lot of time and effort on the part of the servers that host webpages. Instead of putting on the whole play themselves, which they always did back when CGI (Common Gateway Interface) was the only thing around, now remote servers just get to send over the script and say "I don't care how you do this, but do this." The servers don't get overloaded, and people are rarely using all the free CPU cycles of their own computer, so everyone's happy.

The security concerns crop up because you don't want to have your own computer running arbitrary scripts, like "Overwrite the boot sector" or "Look for credit card numbers and send them to this remote server." That would be like having a play where the protagonist shoots half the audience in the face in Act II. The job of Sun and Macromedia (developers of Java and Flash, respectively) is to say things like "Okay, but you only get styrofoam guns as props." This is almost always enough to keep you safe. The exceptions are usually things pretending to be Java or Flash that really aren't--for instance, clicking on a video that gives you a dialog, "Do you want to run [program name]?" Which is like inviting a troupe of actors to perform Hamlet who are all wearing ski masks and carrying assault rifles.

From a development standpoint, the real innovation is having Java and Flash plug in (hence the term "plugin") to browsers, which means they only have to communicate with a tiny range of other programs, instead of having several versions for each operating system. Much easier to maintain. So the answer to the question--"Why won't YouTube play right after an OS reinstall?"--is that you only have your browser up and running. You need to reinstall your plugins, too.