Friday 4 January 2013

Real Ingenious Computer Science: Where It Has Been and Where It Can Go Sdn Bhd


The first computers were punch card affairs that took up houses designed to crack the Enigma Code. The cracking of that code is one of the great victories of World War II, and enable the victories that followed. Since then computers have slimmed down tremendously as Miller's Law took effect; memory has shrunk consistency since then, as computers both use more memory and the size has shrunk. You could measure the first computers in kilobytes; now we look at memory in terms of the size of the Library of Congress. Suffice to say that this has major effects on computer science.



When computers were first invented, it took a general engineering degree to understand them, much less build them. Since then computer engineering has split off into its own field and computer information science has split from that; one looks at the physical aspects and the other looks at the programming itself. Although there is still a lot of overlap, they are becoming their own fields more and more each year, and programmers and engineers are starting to find that computers are not as simple as they would have thought, especially when a serious look at is taken at its potential, and its fictional counterpart is beginning to be found wanting.

Computer science is beginning to take turns only the most visionary programmers dreamed of. A bachelor degree can now include the basics of psychology, graphic design, and engineering, as those skills help later on; it helps to understand how people think when you are designing something to think on its own, you need to understand graphics when you are designing interfaces, and how it works will always help. The bachelor degree is also a good indicator of whether or not you really want to pursue a career in computer science, especially given the intellectual problems one can encounter even in the first few years.

Ultimately you will make of the bachelor degree what you will of it. Not everyone will have the same job; there are more than enough facets to ensure that no two people will have quite the same take on things. Some people will go after interface design as a way to combine hard logic with the beauty of aesthetics, just as others will define their art by the strings of code they put together for specific results. Others will delve into the mind of the machine looking for a fellow soul. The only limitation is what you make of it; finding new worlds or just another aspect of the one you know is up to you.

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