Interviews Come Back -- With Cringely's Answers

Yes, it's been a long, hot (and rainy) summer, but it's over now. Things are finally getting back to normal, including Slashdot Interviews, which return with answers to 10 chosen readers' questions from often-slashodotted PBS Pundit Robert X. Cringely.

How will software be sold?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by bfree

Greg:

In your discussions with the various entities of the computing industry, how do you expect to see software distributed in 5-10 years time? Should we expect to see a greater take-up of free speach || open source || free beer || restrictive licensing on the low and high level (drivers and word processors), low and high end (MS Paint and Adobe Photoshop) software? Do the current players believe that they should all be looking log-term into securing their positions through licensing agreements or that they should be selling a service? In particular have you heard any noises of hardware companies who are looking into OpenSourcing all their drivers (i.e. Windows) so as to achieve the maximum penetration of their products?

Cringely:

This question has changed so much over the years. At one time it was retail versus shareware. Then added to this argument was floppy versus CD and later downloading versus shrinkwrap. I think downloading is the long-term winner because everyone will soon be networked and the cost structure works well for buyer and seller alike.

Something else that has changed a lot is how software is written. OOP has paid off more than we even know, so there are a lot of chances to make businesses out of selling cogs that fit into other people's machines. Your driver question, for example, wouldn't have even made sense a decade ago.

But the real answer to your question is "yes." I'm not trying to be a smart-ass here, but there simply won't be a single winning method of selling (or being compensated for) software. Open source is nice, but it isn't a way to make a living unless you are getting a reward in some indirect path. That's why college professors write books (to get tenure) and open source programmers write code (to get laid). Just kidding. But look at the reward structure, because there has to be a reward or it won't work.

My gut tells me that system software will be mainly OEM'd and that applications will go the service route. But what's still missing is a payment structure for these services. That's the challenge still not being either faced or overcome. So I'd appreciate it if you would do something about it.

gender and technology
(Score:5, Interesting)
by techmuse

Robert, In a study that was announced a day or two ago, it was shown that the number of women who are pursuing degrees in computer science related fields is dropping substantially. I'm wondering what you think can be done to improve the appeal of careers in computer science to women, and how the domination of the field by males affects the cultures and product directions of the companies in the field.

Cringely:

What bothers me about this is that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that men are inherently any better at this computer stuff than are women. But on the flipside, is there any compelling argument why there ought to be more women in the industry? Is it discrimination that is denying these women the chance to work 100 hour weeks?

There is some free will here, you know. Yes, I agree that we probably don't do enough to encourage women students, but I will bet that if we could somehow control for all those other outside variables that more men than women would still choose to walk the digital trail. This is, I believe, is because it is such a crappy lifestyle. Sure there is money (eventually) and success (sometimes) but at what cost? I don't blame the girls for choosing another path. But if we want to help encourage women to enter this field, I think we have to do it through the simple acceptance that coeducation is at fault. I remember years ago writing a story about Mills College in Oakland, an all-women institution. The thing that blew me away at the time was that the Mills computer installation was entirely home built. The women built their own PCs, they built and wired the network, they even built their own routers, mainly to save money. There is no doubt they can do it.

Men are pigs (I know I am) so the expedient answer is single-sex education for any women who want it.

Hrmmm
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

According to this article:

The host of the three-hour documentary, "Triumph of the Nerds," is really Mark C. Stephens, one of several authors of a popular gossip column in InfoWorld magazine written under the Cringely pseudonym. Mr. Stephens, 43 years old, penned the column between 1987 and last December, when InfoWorld cut him loose. But in a case with enough twists to give anybody an identity crisis, the magazine and its parent, International Data Group Inc., sued Mr. Stephens in March for trademark infringement to block his continued use of the Cringely name.

So, Robert, are you still Mr. Stephens, or are you someone else now?

Cringely:

"Cut him loose?" That's an interesting way to put it. InfoWorld fired me. I was by far their top-rated columnist and had been for eight years. Why would a publication fire their top draw? It certainly makes no business sense. The best I can figure AND THIS IS ONLY MY OPINION is that I was fired to please the ego of Stewart Alsop. My column was always more popular than his -- a LOT more popular. Of course it had to be because of my placement on the back page, so Stewart (then editor-in-chief) had his column moved to the back page, too. But his survey numbers didn't change. At this time the price of newsprint was skyrocketing so InfoWorld several times changed its trim size -- the actual size of the page. As the page got smaller and smaller, Stewart's column remained the same size and mine dropped from over 1000 words to around 600 words over two years. Still, Stewart's survey numbers didn't change. Several times as many people were reading my column than his even though both were on the same page. Having to face the prospect that maybe mine was a better column than his, it was easier on Stewart's ego IN MY OPINION to fire me than to accept reality. So they fired me, sued me, lost, paid me off, and here we are today. What happened to Stewart? They cut him loose.

I think we are both better off this way, Stewart and I. I know my life is better post-InfoWorld and he is now a successful VC. I wish Stewart well.

Software and Computers
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Darkstorm

I'm a developer and I am curious as to how you think the software will change in the future.

I know from looking at many contracted software packages that quality is something usually forgotten in the windows world. Badly written hard to use and usually very buggy. Do you feel at some point that companies will finally stand up for themselves and demand good software?

As for hardware, with the standards being modified so quickly will we end up back at a proprietary level again? I ask because of the splitting between AMD and Intel on the type of interface on the motherboard for the processor (not to mention the memory style variations happening) Will programmers end up writing towards a proprietary box/cpu do you think?

Cringely:

I used to test software and the first thing I would do is bang on the keyboard with my fists. "Don't do that!" the developer would yell as the system crashed. "Why did you do that? No user would ever do that."

Ever had a three year-old user? They do that.

Windows software quality sucks for a lot of reasons, but then so does the quality of most software, including packages you think are great. That's because you are so good at working around the bugs you've forgotten they are there.

Part of this is because it is not in the interest of many companies to demand better software. That's because the very person who would be demanding can trace his/her power in the organization directly back to the bugginess of the software. IT managers want bigger budgets and more people and that comes from either using crappy software or pushing their company into using immature software.

This is not going to change.

Now to hardware. Remember how Gary Kildall came up with the ROM-BIOS? He got tired of porting CP/M to every new hardware platform so he wrote a middleware layer so the OS could be standardized. Then the hardware manufacturer could be made responsible for writing the drivers to that middleware -- the ROM BIOS. This was back when 10,000 computers was a big production run. So AMD and Intel are diverging a bit. Well now we are talking about production runs in the millions. Who cares if you have to write two versions? Picky, picky, picky.

Given prior history, who do you think will win
(Score:4, Interesting)
by WillAffleck

Given that we've had umpteen OS wars, like unto the crusades in both their bloodiness and the invective used, can you discern any patterns in what determines the survivors of such conflicts?

For example, is it really the games that determines the winner, the "killer app", the ease of use, the cost, the marketing, or is it the media attention. If it is one of these, what are the most important elements, IYO, in determining the winner.

And, given the /. bias, what would you change in how Linux and BSD is progressing to maximize its survivability. Or is this all 20th Century thinking, and is the OS truly becoming irrelevant?

Cringely:

To my Mom, the OS is already irrelevant, which says a lot about how we look at the market. To most of us, the OS is probably more relevant than it deserves to be. FreeBSD-versus-Linux feels exactly like Ford-versus-Chevy when I was in high school.

Who will win? That depends on your definition of "win." Microsoft defines winning as getting all the money, so over time they will bend their product offerings toward wherever the money seems to be. Linux doesn't work that way, since it doesn't really cost money. Apple is a software company that sells its products inside $1800 boxes, so its motivation is different again. I see market segmentation going like this: Enterprise backend -- small to medium servers -- business desktops -- professional desktops -- gamers -- home computers -- thin clients. Microsoft wants to dominate each of these and will fail in most. Linux targets only 2-3 of these niches and so can't hope to win overall. Same for Apple. But there is room for many winners here. Microsoft makes an average of $200 PROFIT from every Macintosh sold, so Apple's success is also Microsoft's. Linux may hurt Microsoft a bit, but not as much as it inspires Microsoft to be better. So Linix is good for Microsoft. Eventually, though, the market will zig when Microsoft zags and a new leader will emerge. Here's what I can tell you about that new leader: it hasn't yet been founded.

Dotcoms
(Score:5, Interesting)
by wrenling

Being in and around Silicon Valley, and also having seen so much change over the face of the computing industry in the last 20 years, what mistakes do you see that are causing so many dotcoms to fail? What steps could they take/could have taken to prevent this from happening? Conversely, what do you think separates the ones that have made it from the ones that are floating belly up?

Cringely:

In the early 1980s, following the amazing success of Seagate, more than a hundred hard disk companies were found AND FUNDED, each one saying in their business plan that two years out they would have 15 percent market share. Why didn't the VCs see that? Well VCs aren't very original and they also aren't very smart.

Now the same thing has happened with dot-coms and the VCs aren't any smarter than they used to be. But what you have to remember is that they EXPECT a 95% mortality rate and still make a 40% compounded return at that. And failed companies are the ore from which new companies are refined.

Now to the rules for success. I started out to do five of these and ended up with eight. They apply not just to Internet companies but to any high tech startup. They are simple: 1) Fill a need that actually exists, not one you wish existed; 2) Don't count on customers to tell you what that need is (they don't know what they need until you invent it and they see it); 3) Don't push the technological edge because you'll nearly always starve to death; 4) Be very quick to recognize the greatness of others and copy it (in other words, let someone else be responsible for rule 2, above) because the second entrant wins more often that does the originator; 5) Success comes from selling things, so hire a better head of sales and marketing than you think you can afford and hire him/her earlier than you think you should; 6) Every startup has a change of course, a moment when it becomes clear that the original idea just won't work, so be willing to change course when you have to; 7) Know when to call it a day -- most startups fail and nearly every successful startup is run and staffed by people who have already failed, and; 8) Hire a mix of old and young including some people near the top who have already tasted startup success.

Competitive Practices
(Score:5, Interesting)
by rockwall

Do you feel that the computer industry is less innovative today than when you started out? More specifically, do you feel anticompetitive practices by certain companies actively restrict new technologies, or are these current titans just one great idea away from becoming also-rans?

Cringely:

There is always a tendency to glamorize the Good Old Days. I have been in this computer industry for 23 years and four months and as far as I can tell THESE are the Good Old Days. When I started we were inventing an industry and serving a customer base of a few thousand hobbyists. Every application was a horizontal application because the market had no vertical component. Well today the market is enormous and is so vertical you can get a nose bleed, which means that if I have an idea for solid state accelerometers, there is a customer waiting for my product. That is good.

Microsoft is a bully, sure, but understand this: the step after ubiquity is invisibility. Microsoft is too big to economically enter any but the largest new markets, which means there is that much more opportunity for the rest of us. In fact, Microsoft NEEDS the rest of us to show it where to steal. I think we should stop complaining, enjoy the cheap hardware, and get rich.

Commercialization of the net
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Dan Hayes

What do you think that the increasing commercialisation of the net is going to lead to? In particular do you think that the work the various standards bodies do is becoming increasingly ignored when it comes to what actually gets used on the net?

Cringely:

Increasingly ignored? I think it has always been ignored, with the only exception being the IETF. Back in the 80's everyone anticipated the rise of the International Standards Organization. Everything then was TCP/IP and SNMP and SMTP and we knew it couldn't last. The Europeans and their committees were going to come through and kick our asses with X.25 and CMIP and CMOT (remember those acronyms?). But it didn't happen. So too with Token Ring and even Asynchronous Transfer Mode. What a load of crap is ATM! It guarantees Quality of Service by crushing packets that under gigabit Ethernet would have gone right through. Does that make sense? No, it doesn't, and that's the point.

The beauty of the Internet and the IETF lies in a simple idea -- that the only standards under consideration are those already in use on the Net. Ready, fire, aim! It looks sloppy and it is, but with this system change is accelerated, crap is revealed as crap that much quicker, and we end up with systems that actually have a hope of both operating and interoperating. Now I know your question had to do with commercialization, but commercialization is good and committees are bad. Windows, for all I complain about it, has put a computer on 200 million desks. There is no Windows committee. for that matter there really isn't a Linux committee, either. Thank God.

Missed Opportunities
(Score:5, Interesting)
by maggard

From your privilaged position what technologies do you think should-have-made-it but didn't? What technologies do you think were ahead-of-their time but might resurface? Finally, what companies that suprised you by not making a go of it when they seemed like sure-things?

Cringely:

This is a great question hampered by my aging brain. I have written about so many companies and technologies over so many years that I'm sure I'll miss the really important points, but here goes.

It's not so much about technologies and companies as it is about timing and markets. Why did bubble memory fail and flash memory succeed? It's the price, stupid. Same for the Lisa, a great computer five years (and $5000) ahead of its time.

What if Amiga had been bought by another company than Commodore? Now THERE was an opportunity lost.

Had Apple been better managed by Sculley would it today have market dominance?

Pen computing was an obvious non-starter, but everyone had watched the success of Windows and wanted, through hope alone, to make the next wave come that much quicker.

And here's the lesson we learn over and over again: we overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. That's why the first entrant into a new category almost always loses. Bought any Altairs lately? Even Apple was probably the 30th little PC company to be started in Silicon Valley, giving it a shot at success.

The technology that keeps being reborn is Unix. The first PC Unix I used was Cromix -- Unix for Cromemco computers running 4 MHz Z-80A processors. Now we're all hot for Linux, but what is it but Cromix reborn and supported by a bunch of enthusiasts? And the secret to a particular platform's success always comes down to the killer application. For Linux I see as yet only Apache and Sendmail as killer apps, which means it won't penetrate the desktop much further no matter how much we want it to.

Want to help Linux? Write apps!

Tell us about the early days
(Score:5, Interesting)
by anticypher

The early days are shrouded in confusion, myth, lies, half-truths, and blazing egos. For years nothing was very clear about the origins of RXC.

We'd like to know about the early days when R.X. Cringeley was used as a pseudonym for a gaggle of writers. Were you involved with the 'nym from the beginning, or did you join later? Who else wrote parts of those articles? Where did the source material come from? Any fun anecdotes?

Could you tell us about the early days without putting the 'nym spin on the facts? I would love to hear a single side to this story once and for all, and I consider you to be the only one who can give us the truth.

Cringely:

Cringely came to be as a guy on the masthead who could be blamed for fuck-ups. The idea was he'd be fired from time to time then reinstated when the advertiser (it was always an advertiser) had cooled down. He could never come to the phone because he was the Field Editor -- always out in the field.

The Cringely column Notes From the Field came into existence when John Dvorak quit. Dvorak was the gossip columnist and then suddenly he wasn't. Editorial management suddenly realized that all the effort they thought they had put into promoting the column had gone out the door with Dvorak. So they decided to replace him with a generic gossip columnist under the Cringely name. That way the value would remain even if the writer left. At least that was the idea.

The biggest myth is that there was a "gaggle of writers." The first Cringely was Rory O'Connor, who wrote the column for about nine months starting in 1986. The second Cringely was Laurie Flynn, who wrote the column for about another nine months ending in August, 1987. I started writing the column in the first week of September, 1987, and wrote every column until the second week of December, 1995 when they fired me.

That was eight years and about 420 columns, which hardly makes it a gaggle of writers. To be clear, items for the column were submitted by reporters. Or, more correctly, items were dragged from the clutches of reporters. But no reporters "wrote" for the column and typically 75% of the material had to be generated by Cringely him (or her) self. Often weeks would go by without any outside material.

I can't say what's happened since. Maybe they do use a gaggle of writers. I don't read that column.

As for anecdotes, two come to mind. I once received a spreadsheet containing Apple's detailed product plans for the coming two years! I got a lot of mileage out of that. And I found out about the Apple/IBM partnerships (Taligent and Kaleida) within hours of their happening, but had to wait months before writing about it to protect a source. What was wonderfully satisfying about that is when I finally did write about it IBM went ballistic, beating up Apple for leaking the story. My source was from IBM.

Has not having a PhD affected your work?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

Back in 1998 you falsely claimed that you had a PhD and was a professor of journalism at Stanford. Of course the truth came out. How has the truth affected you and your work. Have you suffered any consequences by your lie? And why did you lie in the first place?

Cringely:

Of course this is a long story, but the compressed version is that I did every bit of my PhD including the paper and the defense. Coming out of the defense, my committee, chaired by Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, asked for some changes to the paper. All I had to do was make those changes and I'd be finished! Well it was a busy time in my life. I was writing my first book, soon to be followed by a job or two and, before I knew it, I had missed the five-year deadline. I was stupid, of course, not only for wasting all that time but especially for not asking for an official leave-of-absence, which would have frozen the clock. How the lie got started was that first book called me a PhD on the jacket. Of course we all expected the jacket to be correct given how little extra work was required. And that jacket copy followed me everywhere. So frankly it was a lot easier to just accept what Random House had decreed than to go to the trouble of explaining all this. Sure, I blew it, but let me make this point: I have all the qualifications to get a university teaching job TODAY. I turn down at least one offer per year. Like Popeye said, "I yam what I yam."

Comments

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[cduffy]

One last quibble with your reasoning--when you're already stuck in the real world at a low-paying 40-hour-a-week job, it's hard to save up the money and find the time to become a developer. Then she also would have to overcome the stereotype that women don't make good programmers, which isn't as easy as you think.

As a programmer, I make enough money to support a second person. If my gf asked me to help her get (an equivalent to) my job, I'd pay her living expenses and provide training. I realize that you may not be able to make that kind of offer, but my point is that if she has enough drive then (either or her own or with assistance from others) she should be able to learn.

As for the women-don't-make-good-programmers stereotype, any company that would turn someone down on that isn't a good place to work for anyhow. My company has several female programmers, and a highly clued (and largely female) management; I can't think of it being an issue there.

Re: (there is no) sexism in computer jobs

[Sienne]

Hrm. I took the usage of "girls" to be referring to school-aged girls getting ready to choose a college/career path, and "women" to be referring to college-aged and up women.

We all have the opportunity to train for whatever we want to train for. There are a lot of reasons to train for business administration, and a lot of reasons not to train for CS - but it doesn't vary from gender to gender, it varies from person to person. If faced with the options of business college vs. a four-year CS degree and I choose business college, its not because anyone made me do it, its because I thought that a) computers are uninteresting, b) computers are arcane, or c) a CS degree will take too much time to acheive and I need a job now.

I was a bookkeeper for years before I got into computers. I came to computers late in life, not for lack of opporunity but rather for lack of interest. I was in my 20s before I had a pc at home - today I'm an engineer. However I had exactly the same educational opportunities as my male schoolmates. No school that I've ever heard of has any policy keeping girls (and here I'm talking about teenaged girls,) from enrolling in a computer class. Nor have I ever heard any teacher actively encouraging the boys to enroll in one. Nor have I ever felt any societal pressures to become one thing or another. I was a teenager in the 80s, which was only a marginally less enlightened time - but I was never given any reason to believe that I couldn't pursue whatever career I chose. I think we exited the dark ages of imposed gender career roles in the 70s. Roughly a third of the programmers in my workplace are female, and they weren't interviewed any differently than the men were.

Cringely makes what I think is an excellent point - computing is not a job, its a life-style. Its not a life-style that I, as a girl, was interested in. Its reclusive and it requires a great deal of time, focus and commitment. Bookkeeping was much easier - add, subtract, carry the one... go out for happy hour at five with my coworkers. I've had to go back to college and pursue a new degree - so what? I've had to test, interview, study, go to conferences, read, participate in discussion boards - so what? The only limitation I have is my willingness to do what's required to succeed in my field of choice.

I love the tech life-style today. I love living it, I love talking about it, I love the cons and boards and hell I even love reading RFCs. I do actively encourage my daughter to get familiar with the computer. She's in elementary school at this point, so she's got a while before she has to make any life-style or career decisions. She loves math, which I think is a good sign - who knows what she'll decide to do? She may end up being a secretary. If she does choose that path, I'll support her in it - there's absolutely nothing wrong with it! - but that will be her decision, not one imposed on her from any source aside from her own desires, ambitions, and willingness.

Re:Women like programming, but not the culture

[MrEfficient]

I think you hint at why there are more men in computer science than women. Men like gadgets, for some reason its part of our nature. I can imagine it having something to do with a survival skill harking back to the caveman days. I'm not saying women don't like gadgets, I'm just saying that they have less interest in them than men do.

I don't believe that men are any better than women in the field of computer science, I think it just interests us more. We get more satisfaction from it so we spend more time and effort on it. Though, the culture aspect may be a reinforcing factor in keeping more women from entering the field.

Re:Cringley's Opinion Doesn't Matter, Your Does.

[zorgon]

... Shere coincidence? Is that like Shere Khan, the tiger in the Jungle Book? Ok, sorry. ;)

Seriously, you have a good point, I'd say insightful even, had I any mod points. OTOH, I wouldn't lump all talking heads together. Cringe is better than most, compare to (shudder) Dvorak or that guy Berst. On the gripping hand, I'd say it would be proper to define pundit as someone who makes outrageous statements in print to get people to look at the advertising ...

WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?

Re:As an actual female programmer...

[extrasolar]

As a women, which do you prefer: Coke or Pepsi?

The relevence of this...little. But it is one of them questions that keep springing up from time to time and there really isn't any answer that people will listen to anyway that will thwart their preconcieved notions of the universe.

Dangnabit people! Women are hurt by enviroment, Mankind was created by Evolution, the Big Bang started the Universe, Coke will always be inferior as long as it is in a red can, and there is nothing you can say about it!

Well...now that I think about it, that previous paragraph was rather silly. But I am tired of going in circles with this debate...I am growing dizzy. Why did I read this thread then? To thwart the natural order of continuity of this hyperspatial temporal direction, contrary to elements of temporal entropy.

Re:Huh?

[Roblimo]

We get extra summer this year because the company made some new Web sites (like NewsForge), plus LWCE and other events roused us grudgingly from our well-deserved stupor.

Think of how schools in snow country sometimes tack on extra class days at the end of the school year if they've had more winter snow days than expected. Same thing. :)

Back to my stupor now...

- Robin

Well Said

[suitcase]

"Want to help Linux? Write apps!"

I can't think of a more simple or correct statement on this subject.

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[photozz]

"There's no way my girlfriend would choose her low paying secretarial job over a high-paying programming job if she'd felt she had the opportunity to train for the latter
And just how has she been denied this? There are book stores everywhere with extensive libraries of training materials, Schools with classes. Our INTERNS get paid more than a lot of the "administrative assistants" around here and are learning the trade. People are triping over oportunities and picking stuff up through osmosis, Yet your girlfriend has been "denied" this? come on....

Re:Disappointed.

[Black Parrot]

> The man has valuable experience in the field, experience even those with a terminal degree (which is what a Ph. D. is) might learn from.

>Don't belittle life experience.

Actually, I have very high regard for those who are self-taught and do well all the same. (I can't afford not to feel that way, since that's how I got my start in my profession.)

But the fact that life experience is so well regarded in so many circles makes RXC's original lies and current maintenance of the claim that he "almost" qualifies all the more puzzling. If I were in his shoes, I'd be saying "Fuck Stanford and all their paperwork. I'm a world-renowned expert!"

Contrary to what most of the respondents in this thread seem to think, I'm not dissing him for not having a Ph.D., and not really even for lying in the first place (like I never have!), but for continuing his lame attempts to excuse it even after being called out on it. "It's the publisher's fault, and I almost qualify anyway."

It all smacks too much of the Bill {Clinton, Gates} style of simultaneous (denial ^ lame_excuses). If he would fess up and take responsibility for his own behavior I would let it be a bygone and start respecting him for what he actually does. At least BC fessed up once he got caught; RXC won't even go that far. We're talking about really low standards here.

--

Re:No apps?

[Duxup]

I don't think he meant to say those weren't good apps, but I think he was looking for apps that are so much clearly better than what many people already use (and use them for) that they would switch. Apache fits that definition. It is dominant because it is clearly better than it's competition so that people moved to it, and new people started with it.

As for the uptime that's just a red herring. Sure Windows doesn't stay up long but that's not the point. People complain about Windows stability but then again my Windows PC at work, at home, my mom's PC can afford to go down from time to time. Those PCs aren't used in the manner that uptime is that big of a deal. Heck my mom shuts hers off when she's done, she hardly ever uses it long enough to complain about it's poor resource management in the first place. I can have Linux PC stay up forever, it still doesn't have that apps that are astoundingly better than windows aps that makes most people move to Linux.

As Cringely said "To my Mom, the OS is already irrelevant,". His mom doesn't use her computer to the point where she cares about uptime it's the apps she cares about and that's what makes the difference. For just all the apps you list Windows has the same basic functionality and nothing that makes large numbers of people go "Woah, I gotta have that!"

This is not to say Linux is "bad". I have tons of fun with it (Deb) at home because somewhere in my PC enthusiast career I said:

"Hey, I can't do that in Windows, I gotta have that! I gotta have me an OS where I have more control, and I can play with it, write (well my apps suck) some apps for it, and be a part of a community building something cool."

anti-girl riot guards block CS dept. entrance

[Greg@RageNet]

Yes it's the mythical 'them' keeping your girlfriend down. Standing in front of every community colledge CS program and computer book store with tazers to zap any female who dare attempt to enter.

Perhaps Al Gore will create a government program with a billion dollar budget to get your girlfriend off her ass to get a computer education.
</sarcasm>

People's problems do not come from society. There is no law preventing your girlfriend from becoming a programmer. It is only herself standing in the way of that goal (which I suspect she has no true interest in persuing). Every person out there on a minimum wage effort either has the ability to get more education (public libraries are still free) or have made their own choices in life that hold them back (i.e. having 4 kids before turning 20). One's station in life is much more due to the choices one made then to anything society has done.

This covers the touted income/pay 'gender gap'. Individuals make choices as to what jobs they wish to persue; some people like crunching numbers and staring at facts and figures all day and some don't. Its possible for very real genetic and biological differences (a 3 year old can tell you there's differences between boys and girls!) that more members of one sex would like doing this than members of the other sex. This is probably the reason more males get into business/ investing/ technology; and that is where the big money is, hence the 'gender gap'. No quota or government program is going to make someone who wants to be a teacher enjoy being a portfolio manager.

I _like_ what I do, computer networking. I certainly would not want someone to determine there are not enough male nurses and tell me that now I have to stop doing networking and go take care of sick folks.

Creating programs/quotas to 'encourage' more of one subset of people to do something they may not have a desire to do just removes choices rather than fix problems.

-- Greg

Re:No Evidence?

[underwhelm]

the factor of being raised apart nulls out the nurturing aspect.

Unless the two children's sex were disguised from the parents (I would suggest that's an impossible task), there is no way to remove the nurture variable from your "separated at birth" experiment.

Imagine separating them at birth, and then treating one of them as the opposite gender until they are old enough to work it out on their own. I bet you'd have one distorted personality. You may not end up with a boy that doesn't know he's a boy, but he would probably exhibit feminine personality traits despite himself.

I also find it hard to believe that anybody is born with a personality, much less a M-B result.

Gender is mostly a societal construct, and with it comes elements of your personality. You aren't born with your gender, you discover it after everyone spends time treating you like a [boy/girl] and your hormones concur. If we were all born with our gender, we'd all act just as masculine/feminine as each other.

His point is that nobody is inherently a hacker. That's a gift that's given to you by your environment, and the environment is not giving that gift to women (because, while society is great at screwing us all up, it's certainly unfair to women).

You're misuse of science to attack "political correctness" comes off as misinformed propaganda.

Re:Moderators

[Enoch Root]

I'll give you points for being patronizing, but none for accuracy. If Slashdot were a bus, then the trolls would be that guy who sodomizes your grandmother while pouring sugar in the gas tank.*

* Yeah, it's a Clerks reference.

Re:Women like programming, but not the culture

[Junks Jerzey]

I'm pretty surprised to see this comment moderated down by two. It's becoming fairly obvious that so-called "geek culture" is doing more harm than good. Well, maybe I don't mean it like that. It's more that geek-culture has become a lifestyle that seems to prevent its followers from being productive outside of that lifestyle. For example, there are fearsome programmers out there: Zawinski, Pike, Norvig, Bentley, Abrash, Graham, etc. But they tend to be more the object of geek obsession rather than wrapped up in the culture themselves. The "culture" tends to be more of a "technology twiddling as an end unto itself" thing than just being someone with extreme knowledge about a particular area. So Pike does research into operating systems, and thousands of other people try to split license hairs, argue about Napster, upgrade their kernels, proclaim AMD and NVidia the saviors of computing, and so on. I tend to think that female programmers would operate outside this circle, which would give them a huge advantage over people on the inside.

Re:even with twins

[hawk]

I knew I was in trouble with my oldest at somehting like 18 monthws (2 years? it was early for that much speech). She pronounced both beer and beard as beerd. After I took a drink of my oatmeal stout--one of the stiffer heads you'll ever meets; puts Guinness to shame--she pointed at the foam left behind and giggled, "beard on your beard."

Just swell. not even two (three?) and already cracking puns . . .

They also have negative population growth

[ch-chuck]

as depicted here. Maybe females DONT go into computers so that they WILL get laid!

While people are flexible enough to learn about any type of personality (like drag queens and diesel dykes) - maybe males can better relate to a big competitive crowd all rushing toward a common goal where only one survives. :))

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[gughunter]

> First of all, using the words "girls" and "women" interchangeably is a bad idea.
[...]
> There's no way my girlfriend would choose her low paying secretarial job over a high-paying programming job if she'd felt she had the opportunity to train for the latter.

Are you sure you don't mean "womanfriend"?

Re:Sex ratios

[alexjohns]

I'm not sure where you're going with this. In Germany and Italy you can have a life but in the others, not? I heard that France had a mandatory 36 hour work week - MAX. I believe you have to have all kinds of justification to work overtime. That may have changed but I'm pretty sure I read about that in the past year or two.

I don't know what it's like in the other countries you mentioned, but if Germany and Italy are better than France, I have to really question why the fu** I'm still living in the US. :)

As a programmer, I know I could make more money if I decided to work long hours at some other company. I have a two year old son. Nothing in my life is more important than him (a concept no one convinced me of, until the moment he was born.) I work 9-5 (about) and I get to see my wife and son every night. I don't live in a mansion, just a comfortable house in a middle-class neighborhood. I fell in love with computers at age 16 when a buddy down the street got himself an Apple ][, so I'm not in it for the money. I love computing. I'd do it even if it paid minimum wage.

So to all you aspiring women geeks: you can have a life and be a geek. You just have to decide what's important to you. People who choose money are generally uninteresting (IME). Choose life. I enjoy every day. Sappy, but true.

--
'...let the rabbits wear glasses...'
Y2038 consulting

while you're at it . . .

[hawk]

"gals" has largely fallen out of use--I can't come up with a half-dozen people other than myself that use it as all. It has been replaced in common used by "girl," leaving "girl" used in the same sense as both "boy" and "guy"--but I've *never" heard it used where "man" would have been used for an adult female where the corresponding male reference would have been "man," only where "guy" would have beenused.

even with twins

[hawk]

I have two-year old identical twins, and *they* showed different personalities even in the first couple of minutes of life.

ANd it's certainly not difference in nurture that has sustained those, we need to look closely much of the time to figure out which is which (at times, I have to hold them at arm's length, as I can't tell in my arms.)

True "pound on keyboard" story

[Russ Nelson]

My daughter found a bug in my text editor when she was less than 1 year old. This was a stable program which people had been using for years. She went bang, bang, and bang, the program crashed. I knew roughly where she had been hitting, and saw what was on the screen. Sure enough, the search/replace algorithm didn't work if both search and replace strings were null. Oops. No adult had ever discovered that.
-russ

Re:No Evidence?

[NaughtyEddie]

Evidence meaning this Myers-Brigg nonsense? What are you, a psych major?

Re:Putting up with bugs

[Stephen Samuel]

Cars that break down a lot more just MIGHT sell more if they were sold by the Mechanics that got paid to fix them, were much cheaper up front, and people were used to donkey carts. (i.e. even the bad model was a vast improvement on what people were used to).

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[Parity]

No, girls is equivalent to boys, guys is equivalent to gals.

It does, however, sound somewhat archaic (or at least retro, very 'fifties') to talk about 'the boys' going out to do something and boy in the singular is almost never used except in a derogatory manner or by gays.

An-yway, 'girls' is falling out of common usage the same as 'boys' already did and it wasn't what Cringely meant anyway.

--Parity

Re:No Evidence?

[Snocone]

I also find it hard to believe that anybody is born with a personality, much less a M-B result.

Hmmmm, I dunno. My friend Andrea has 20-month old twins, I don't know if they're actually identical but they're close enough that I can't tell any difference, and the two of them have VERY distinctively different personalities. despite her treating them absolutely identically as far as I can tell...

No Brain ?

[RGRistroph]

You can't do an identical twin brith-separation study to disprove a sex as an effect on anything.

Identical twins have the same sex.

The "nuturing" and "Myers-Briggs" nonsense that follows is also utterly without meaning.

What you do is start out with the presumption that "the born hacker type is Myers-Briggs INTP". This turns out to be another word for "mostly male". The intervening word exercises are only that.

This whole Myers-Briggs scam is very interesting to me. I love it. You make a bunch of questions to ask people; you encode the answers; then you re-describe the answers to the questions next to each code. People -- I mean smart people, not 700 club members -- fucking fall out of their chairs in amazement that it matches up. Of course it is usually a two hour seminar with an "expert" who does the smoke and mirrors and patter as well as Houdini making you look the other way.

I gotta invent something like this.

But I've been told that the real kings of this whole business are the Scientologists. One day I'm going to go to one of their "free personality test" sucker-traps and check it out. I don't care about the test at all, I just want to watch these guys in action, and carefully watch the faces of the suckers so I can see who is buying it.

Covers the cost of IE!

[SpiceWare]

after all, they have to make up the income lost by dumping the Windows version...

sexism in computer jobs

[hyperizer]

I don't blame the girls for choosing another path.

First of all, using the words "girls" and "women" interchangeably is a bad idea. Second, why not blame society (I'm talking home and school) for pushing men into math and science and discouraged women from pursuing them. There's no way my girlfriend would choose her low paying secretarial job over a high-paying programming job if she'd felt she had the opportunity to train for the latter.

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[bridgette]

Well since you're getting reamed for straying from the Ayn Rand individualistic, self deterministic crap, I'll try and stick up for you - no point in hoarding kama, I'm topped out anyway.

While it's true that determination and aggessive persuit of your goals is needed to make anything happen in life, I find the /. community in denial over the affect exiting social and econonimic structures have on individuals.

When I was in jr. high and highschool I encountered many roadblocks when I'd try to get into the best math and science classes available. And as much as I'd like to believe otherwise, most of the hassle must be attributed to school authority figures having issues with my gender, race and social class. I was very lucky to have been raised to have the self confidence and knowledge needed to fight for what I wanted (being born an incredibly stubborn person helped too). I was also fortunate to have supportive parents who are also clueful and stuborn enough to be an asset in those battles.

(and starting in college i got to deal with ignorant fucks who assume that i got where i am by virtue of being a black woman - joy!)

There are many people who don't know what oppertunities are out there and/ or don't have the self confidence to persue it. And given our racist, sexist and classist society (both past and present) some folks are more suseptible (no, i don't know how to spell - deal!) to these problems than others. Up until the 60's it was common for women to be sent to college to "get engaged". Dorm mothers would get mad if you wanted to miss a dance with an ivy league school to stay home and work on a paper. So is it really so hard to believe that some women got a royal mind-fuck of an upbringing? Is it so hard to understand that people who lived under segregation might not know how to instill in thier children the agression and self confidence needed to compete? Is it hard to see how one's address could be a liability on certian job applications? Well for the very successful /. crowd, apparently that answer is yes.

Yes, almost everyone (except danforth quale and dubyuh) had to work really fucking hard for whatever they achived, and yes, there is no shortage of lazy, clueless and stupid people in the world but that dosn't mean that some folks might not have the cards stacked against them.

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[Greg@RageNet]

Lets see...

Obvously you have a computer that she can use; Or she can pick up an old first-generation pentium very cheaply or buy a new computer on credit..

Linux is free and comes with support for almost every language possible..

I think 40 hours is pretty standard for a work week (low even in the tech industry); why exactly is there no time? Chances are she has two full days a week to learn along with five evenings after work.

What's holding her back?

Most tech businesses are so starved for talent that they'll pay contractors outragous hourly fees or spend lots of time and money to import labor on H1B visas. They would welcome anyone in who were self-taught themselves would work at a discounted salary on the assumtion that she'd learn-while-she-worked. The concept that she would not be hired in the tech industry soley on the premis that she's a girl is a lie.

Of course the heart of the problem is that you feel that someone should just train her to be a developer and at the same time pay her while she's training and not doing any work. Think of how much your girlfriend spends on eating out, or on clothes, or on a car payment. If she really gave a damn about her lowly station in life she'd be spending that money on books or education to improve it.

This whole thing reminds me of the scene in fight club with the convenence store clerk. The sad truth is that most people need a kick in the ass or a gun down their throats to actually persue their goals rather than float through life wishing they had done better and cursing society for not providing them with a fat inheritance or lottery winnings and making up excuses like "society holds me back so I'm glad I never even tried".

I think you should dump her, from what you've said she sounds like a real loser.

-- Greg

Re:sexism in computer jobs

[swb]

Blaming society is a cop-out -- it's the ultimate way of denying repsonsibility for your own choices and actions.

Since your girlfriend doesn't have a commitment to her current career that holds her back, why doesn't she get trained and become a developer RIGHT NOW? From the experiences I've seen first hand, its trivial to get a job as a low-end VB programmer. There are any number of intensive short courses available that turn you into a marketable VB programmer. From there skills can be further refined or higher level education obtained and she can get that high-paying, high-end programming job.

Of course, there's a whole litany of excuses -- "Not enough time", "Not enough money", "Not enough interest" and so on that people will use to keep them from making changes in their path. Of course these actually amount to "I don't have enough drive to accomplish my goals", which is usually the correct way to understand those excuses. Unless she has children to support, a debilitating illness she really has no excuse.

...if she'd felt she had the opportunity to train for the latter.

I'll risk the karma, but I think the problem here is that she felt she didn't have the opportunity. If there is any "social" problem here, its how both women approach organizations and how organizations approach women. Women need to spend less (but not no) time having "feelings" about things. Organizations that have women members need to spend more time understanding that women will approach them to some extent on an emotional level and that they need to tailor their offerings based on this.

Your girlfriend probably had opportunity to train for programming -- like in a HS computer club -- but she got the wrong "feeling" from it because the organization didn't take her feminine perspective into consideration (bunch of dorky guys swearing, playing Castle Wolfenstein on the micros and combat on the mainframe? My club was like this!)

now wait a minute :)

[hawk]

You're being reasonable while people are trying to get picky.

At first I was going to moderate this, but am replyin instead--so someone 3else up it, please :)

One of the reasons--a big one--that I cose this job as a professor is the large number of non-traditional students (defined here as anyone over 24). They're coming from all types of former jobs, ranging from obsolete industries getting federal TRA (trade readjustment acts) assostamce to "displaced housewifes." They're all giving up *something* to come back to school, and it's not easy at 30 or 40 (I've been there and done that myself). These students tend to do very well, as they have the motivation. They're going to leave with degrees, including engineering, regardless of what their former backgrounds are. They're also a very good influence on the rest of the class.

hawk, who remembered to turn in his dissertation revisions

Re:No Evidence?

[Greg@RageNet]

I also find it hard to believe that anybody is born with a personality, much less a M-B result.

Gender is mostly a societal construct ... You aren't born with your gender, you discover it after everyone spends time treating you like a [boy/girl]

Good grief!

Here's a simple example to prove you dead wrong as to the affects of biological gender and it's affects on personality. Examine any member of the animal kingdom which are abandoned by their parents at or before birth (reptiles, fish, etc..). Do the males behave differently then the females? Of course they do. They behave differently regardless of nurture (as they had no nurturing!). Assuming you give some weight to the theory of evolution or can at least recognize the basic similarities of us to those animals (two genders, DNA) then you've gotta admit that gender does affect personality.

while society is great at screwing us all up, it's certainly unfair to women

Nothing in this society (the US) is preventing any woman from getting into computers. See my other post 'anti-girl riot police'.

-- Greg

Women like programming, but not the culture

[Junks Jerzey]

The reason more women aren't in computer science isn't because of the subject matter, but more because of the culture surrouning that field. My wife majored in computer science, as did I, and she's a bang-up programmer. But she's not interesting in dinking around for the heck of it, as many guys seemingly are. I'm referring to dinking around in a "okay, now let get the latest GeForce 2 drivers and grab some new Winamp skins and then recompile the kernel," and not "Hmmm...now that's an interesting logic problem; I wonder how I could solve it?" The peculiar culture of constant upgrading, fixating on operating systems and languages and choice of text editor, and an obsession with the speed and make of hardware...those are things that can ruin a programmer. A programmer who could live outside that culture would be a force to be reckoned with.

Sex ratios

[Chalst]

I don't blame co-ed for the dreadful underrepresentation of women in
the computer industry: the USA, Britain and France have dreadful sex
ratios, but Germany has much better, and Italy better still. I think
it has a lot to do with the fact that in those last two countries, you
can be a programmer and still have a life.

No apps?

[Anonymous_Hero]

No apps! What's all of this
GNOME/Staroffice/Evolution/Mozilla/Nautilus vs. KDE/Koffice/Konqueror stuff all about, then?


I haven't rebooted this machine to Windows in (uptime 12:04pm up) 185 days (, 21:08, 1 user, load average: 0.39, 0.25, 0.19),
but somehow I manage to run simulations, read mail, surf the net, create documents,
spreadsheets, and presentations, and write lots of code -

all from Linux!
(And I run neither Apache nor sendmail, so there)

Last time I had a good sig, honest.

Putting up with bugs

[Stephen Samuel]

One of my explanations as to why DOS outsold Macintosh is consultants. If you went out and got a computer consultant, it was far more likely that they would be a DOS consultant than a Mac consultant. The reason why is that, once people bought a system they were far more likely to need an after-support consultant for DOS programs than for MAC programs. This meant that mac-leaning consultants were simply harder to find.

Back around 1980, I was out pricing systems for a customer. When I asked about a more expensive system, the sales/consultant person chided me about choosing a system based on the size of my finders fee rather than how well the system would work for my customer. I was charging on a time and materials basis, so this wasn't true at all for me. The suggestion, however, disturbed me. It didn't insult me, it just disturbed me because I couldn't wrap my mind around the concept of essentially betraying my client.

I couldn't understand her suggestion (the salesperson was a she) until, months later, I ran across a colleague who was actually doing precisely what that sales person had suggested I was doing. This real-life example kicked the concept across the 'unthinkable' boundary. Once I was able to wrap my mind around the concept, I was disgusted. My solution was resolving to design my future consulting contracts so that I didn't have a conflict of interest between myself and my client.

A side effect of this episode was that I came to understand the concept of "That's unthinkable!" as having literal meaning (if you can say it in the moment, then it's probably not true).

In any event, I think that - for many geeks - the idea of promoting something that isn't the best possible under the circumstances is unthinkable enough that we don't seriously consider the possibility that Cringely proposed -- that bad software survives through kingdom building. Worse yet is the idea the we might be doing it ourselves (albeit unconsciously).

The pirate revealed

[bluestar]

The first Cringely was Rory O'Connor
The second Cringely was Laurie Flynn
I started writing the column in the first week of September, 1987

Aha! Now we know who the Dread Priate Roberts (X. Cringely) were.