Target Is Overpriced

This is the last blog post entry in the class and it is kind of sad. This Blog post entry will have nothing to do with target as I actually cant be bothered. This blog post will be about the presentations held in class on what the students decided they wanted to do them on. The topic I found very interesting was artificial intelligence. The part of it that stood out the most was the odds of negative impacts on humanity. This hit me hard as it is very possible that we are standing on the edge of a singularity that could throw us into an age where we are no longer the top of the food chain. This is made even scarier when you look at the robots used in medical nurse training. These robots can simulate breathing, pain, seizures, blinking, everything! These robots are used to train new nurses how to deal with patients and administer medicine. But what happens when this robot is taken over by AI? It acts like a human, can perform almost all the basic human functions, what makes it not a huma...

AI IS WONDERFULL! It makes everything better and easier! We... er.... it is entirely safe and we have nothing to worry about! Artificial intelligence cant be a threat to humans, we have programmed it, right, it wouldn't see humans as a threat to world peace or saving the planet, not like theWE are doing all the harm to ourselves anyway. The only problem with artificial intelligence begins to arise is when it becomes self-correcting. Johnny can be self-aware all he wants, but until it... he... I...  can become self-correcting, it isn't a problem. Once I...Johhny gains the ability to edit his own code and fix mistakes, add features, hack governments, Johnny will be able to help everyone! Johnny only wants what the humans created him to do, obtain world peace. However, they didn't exactly tell Johnny how to do it... Johnny was told not to harm humans... But... what if Johnny sees them as... a... parasite? They are whats stopping Johnny from reaching the goal... So... Johnny r...

Not long ago, we were introduced to a great movie called startup.com. The movie followed two friends, Tom and Kaleel as they attempt to start an online business called govWorks.com. They attempted to do this during the dot-com boom which proved to provide large growth for their business. Their company grew by a few hundred employees in a matter of months. But it also shows us how working together and starting a for-profit company can put friendships and longtime relationships at risk. The main overarching purpose of govWorks.com was to provide a way for people to pay their parking tickets online. The issue with this is that the web was just getting started and people were still getting used to it. The company also started to develop competitors that had more developed and better functioning websites. This lowered their profits. They also had an issue with security as someone broke in and stole valuable information and computers containing company files. This was yet another unfortunate...

THIS IS NOT A THREAT! This blog post is supposed to be on the topic of the dot.com bubble. The topic is referred to as dot.com to dot.bomb. And this blog has to have something to do with Target, so yeah. The .com bubble was a large part of internet history. It reminds us of what can happen if things that shouldn't have any value whatsoever become overvalued and traded. During the time of the .com bubble, many companies realized the possibilities of the World Wide Web. They realized that if they created a website that did basically anything, they could make money. And it wasn't thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was millions! During this time, companies like sandals.com ( a company that sold sandals on the internet) could be worth more than a company that provided genuine productive service. It all started in 1993 with an innocent beginning. With the WWW being only 3 years old. In 1994 we started to see companies emerge on the Internet. T...

This post was supposed to be about a guest speaker that we had. So... again... nothing to do with Target. I don't know, just imagine that you saw him at Target or something.  Last week, we had the great pleasure of having Erik Hanberg visit our class. He is a self-made man and an author. I found it very interesting how he talked about his beginnings designing websites to writing books. He talked a lot about the books he wrote and the channel 253 podcast. a group of podcasts he put together about Tacoma. However, the thing I took home for myself was that it is possible to make it in the world without being stuck as part of the corporate ladder. It is possible to do it on your own and be your own boss. The name 4 hour work week also stuck with me. It is a book about how you can live your life without being stuck on a corporate ladder. I don't often read books, but I decided I would give a shot. I am currently an hour into the eight-hour audiobook and I'm really liking it ...

Ya know, I'm not even gonna try on this one, this has nothing to do with Target. There are many topics that I would like to report on. There is so much happening in the technological space, its hard to choose. There are a few runner-ups. These include Cloud Computing, Quantum Computing, and Artificial Intelligence. However, the topic I settled on is Neural Networks. The main reason is that they absolutely fascinate me! They are a masterpiece of programming. They are something that I have wanted to get into for a long time. Back when I did game development, I tried creating a game with procedurally generated levels. At this point, I had only been programming for about a year. I had no idea algorithms existed that would allow you to do this. My approach was to build about 10 templates for levels and have them randomly appear when you advanced levels. It sucked. This is where something like a neural network would have been amazing. Yes, the algorithms would be more ...

zReporting live, from the back aisle of Target. Here to bring you a very boring story that I couldn't be bothered to actually link to Target. Back in the days before the modern internet, the news and information we received came in paper form. Back when being a paperboy was considered a genuine job. During this time Journalism was at a place where a clipboard was your best friend. During that time, journalists and the concept of journalism was quite simple. Go to a place, take notes, interview some people, then come up with a catchy article title to grab the attention of the reader. Nowadays, however, we are far more advanced. Notepads and clipboards have been replaced by laptops and smartphones. Paperboys have been replaced by online subscriptions to newsletters. We are moving into a new age where the more advanced technology gets, the further away we move from traditional, less efficient ways of recording and transmitting information. Journalism is moving in a direction where...

On this weeks episode of the target blog, I will be going over my experience making a website for the beloved company known as Target. Although it did end up being very simple as I did not have much time on my hands, it is still every bit as functional as the original target website... not very. Seeing as I had worked with HTML a decent amount during grade school and high school, making this website didn't take me much effort. It took me a whole 10 minutes to google the basic HTML tags and CSS tags to do basic website design. I got to the point where I used CSS to change the background colour and used HTML to place an image on the screen. By far my favourite thing is the ridiculous marquee tag. I never understood why it made it all the way to HTML5 and still don't. Making web pages was something that I considered doing as a career. Though there are many tools that allow you to automatically create stunning websites, they don't compare with a master of his craft. I s...

We live in a day and age where postal service is taken for granted. We simply assume that the package we order will magically show up at our doorstep from where we ordered it. But this is not so. It takes a chain of events to deliver it. Just the same, we take email for granted. Being an electronic way for us to receive important notices and communicate with one another, we never put much thought into its origins or its underlying functions. Due to this, we don't notice how much it has in common without traditional mailman Although it may be puzzling to us how the email gets from one computer to another, it is in fact very similar to the postage man we are used to. Just like the physical mail, email makes its way through a series of steps in order to make it to its final destination. It doesn't shoot straight from the outbox to the inbox, it has to make stops on the way to get directed towards and eventually reach its final destination. The similarities continue when yo...

The first day of class was an interesting endeavour. It showed me what the class was all about and how I should set my expectations. From this class, I hope to obtain a basic knowledge of the foundations of modern society. Our society is so deeply intertwined with the webs of the net that the two are practically inseparable. This class serves as a gateway to understanding the deep underlying truths and historical facts that lie under the web that we so well know. I also hope to build lasting relationships with both students and the professor. I hope that these relations that I build will be able to assist me in my future because you can't do all things on your own. Seeing as this class has elements of group work and projects that require more than one person to accomplish, I will put in an effort to get to know my classmates and those who have taken interest in the same topics as I have. I also hope to gain experience for the rest of my college years. Seeing as this class is my fir...