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"Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" Pulled From Amazon
New submitter clcto writes Back in 2010, Computer Engineer Barbie was released. Now, with the attention brought to the Frozen themed programming game from Disney and Code.org, unwanted attention has been given to the surprisingly real book "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer". So much so, that Mattel has pulled the book from Amazon. The book shows Barbie attempting to write a computer game. However, instead of writing the code, she enlists two boys to write the code as she just does the design. She then proceeds to infect her computer and her sister's computer with a virus and must enlist the boys to fix that for her as well. In the end she takes all the credit, and proclaims "I guess I can be a computer engineer!" A blog post commenting on the book (as well as giving pictures of the book and its text) has been moved to Gizmodo due to high demand.
Who does Mattel have in charge of Barbie these days?
Because whoever it is, has stepped in it so many times it's not even funny.
Are they being punked from inside? Or are people actually thinking this shit is a good idea?
Absolutely mind boggling.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Barbie is a manager. Coding is for suckers.
Perspective.
Need Mercedes parts ?
In the final chapter, Barbie sleeps with several game reviewers to make sure her game gets good reviews and publicity on various gaming websites.
To be fair to that scene, it actually takes a bit of awareness to realize that fucked up 3d UI was a filesystem wrapper.
Like, "Oooooooooooooooh, there's /usr/, I get it now" was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
I know people with young daughters (like, under 5).
Dora tells little girls they can do anything they want to, and grow up to do cool things. Barbie teaches women to be stereotypes, dumb blondes, and how to fake your way through life.
So, for birthday gifts, we give chemistry lab play sets, National Geographic books on space and dinosaurs, and actual educational stuff.
It's fun to see a four year old excited about a book on space.
If Barbie can't be a good role model after 50 years or so, just don't buy it.
There's so many good toys out there for kids that unless the child is asking for Barbie, you can skip it altogether.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Which means she is a Project Manager.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
More like Barbie Business Analyst: "Hey guys, I don't know anything about business or technology, but if I invite 20 business people and programmers to a meeting, then I can type what they say into a horribly formatted Word document (that the programmers will fix for me later) and collect $125/hr".
I found this to be highly offensive to computer engineers. The implication we're marketing...that other people do the real work... that we'd dare stick a USB key with an unknown history into our USB port...
Actually that last one sets sex ed back about 30 years too.
Yes, 3d graphics libraries are on the roadmap for systemd: it will then be called system3d and it will raytrace everything that used to be in inittab.
Waay back in the day when my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by an odd fluke the sysadmins and programmers of the Vax/VMS systems they used for scientific data processing were women. Possibly their inability to grow beards disqualified them from Unix jobs. Anyhow, the nickname for them was "data dollies".
Of course there was a long, long history of women in scientific computing. The mom of one of my high school friends graduated from Wellsley during WW2 and worked programming the Harvard Mark 1 -- which meant (although I didn't realize it at the time) she must have worked with Grace Hopper. And of course there were the female code breakers of Bletchley Park. There were a lot of opportunities for smart women to do innovative things in WW2 while many of their equally brainy male counterparts were being fed into the war effort like scraps into a meatgrinder.
Anyhow, I don't think "data dolly" was meant to be as patronizing it sounds to us today. It was a cultural anachronism, like the drinking and smoking on the TV show Mad Men, which appears to us gauche but strangely fascinating. The common assumption back then was that even an intelligent, highly trained woman would quit her job when she got married to raise some man's children. My generation was the first to view automatically assuming that as patronizing. This new attitude was in its day called "radical feminism" -- which was a not too subtle way of associating us with Communists. But of course insensitivity is a two way street. A lot of older women felt insulted by the implication that they'd thrown their lives away.
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Tell that to Ada Lovelace.
Julia Cameron
Oich ù agus hiùraibh éile