I’m taking a course, CPSC430 Computers and Society. I need to keep a journal on the course material, and I thought since this blog is pretty much empty and just space wasting I’ll use it for the course and kill two birds with one stone. The course is offered by the Computer Science department, but unlike all the other courses offered by the department, especially upper level courses does not require copious amounts of programming. In fact, it requires no programming and seems more like an arts course at a glance. I’ve just completed CPSC304, Intro to Relational Databases and the amount of time I spent programming for that was huge – morning till night haha (but it was fun)! Instead of programming, the project for this course seems to be an essay, and lectures seem to consist of discussions and debates. Quite different, but should be interesting. So here goes!
Last lecture, we read an article about the history and controversy surrounding Facebook’s raise to success: The Battle for Facebook. The gist of it is that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook by stepping over and spurning people, including allegedly stealing the idea from another group of Harvard students now running ConnectU, his college roommate, other people giving him help and advice and so on. However it is undeniable that Zuckerberg’s talents, skills and drive were also integral parts of making Facebook a success, despite his questionable morals.