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Barbie and Hotwheels PCs for Kids
Teflon writes "Patriot Computer Corp has just launched two styled/themed PCs (for kids) -- The Hotwheels PC and the Barbie PC. These two PCs seem to be targeted at kids. I'd have liked to have had the Hotwheels PC as a 10-year-old." A Hot Wheels PC is surely better for a kid than hotwiring a kiddie car, but I find the sexulal differentiation a little depressing, even though I know that's how toys are sold - and that there are strong sexual differentiations in toy preferences. (sigh) I suppose this was inevitable.
Do these things have any sort of expansion slots for a network card? It seems to me that a PC like this would be a lot better sharing an internet connection rather than requiring it's own ISP and maybe phone line.
I'm really getting disgusted of where the industy is going. Barbie/Hotwheel computers for kids? Young kids are going to treat this as a toy just to play racing games. Spend XXX$ just for an over-hyped game machine? I hope these same kids don't grow up thinking that computers are toys.
Same thing with all of these new machines: iToaster, iMac, iBook, etc., computers need to be used as TOOLS, damnit!
This new trend makes computers just overpowered calculators with flashy designs. Computers need to be used the way they should: a device which can accomplish anything (providing that it has enough power) that can be programmed. We should be teaching kids to treat computers as expensive tools, not some hotwheels car to roll across the floor.
Flame away.
Linux: Long live the source code.
Well, naturally speaking, we're predators too. Perhaps we need better rituals to blood the children. Or maybe reason should prevail over instinct in rational beings?
I really don't see how you can consider males' attraction to cars intrinsic. I mean, there weren't a lot of cars around when we were evolving, you know. Nor many mechanical devices of any kind. It is just as bad to program little boys to love cars as it is to program little girls to be homemakers or fashion accessories. This is done by thousands of little signals of approval or disapproval by adults and peers that children are extremely sensitive to -- and which influence their choice of toys and careers.
Do we need computers for different races and gays too? Then what's so special about the differences between boys and girls?
The truth is that parents buy these computers, and that is where the gender bias is present and well formed. There was a study about Christmas toys about 10 years back that was quite interesting. They put a group of children in a room with several boxes containing all the greatest toys that year. After a few hours all the children, boys and girls, were having a blast with the boxes the toys came in and ignoring the toys completely. So much for the children's choice.
Great, wonder if I can get my boss to let me replace our current server with one of these babies. :-)
Hopefully someone will release a kiddie puter with a Mr. Potato-head theme so the ankle-biters can learn how to connect their hardware.
Just watch out for the kids who tend to make a picasso of the normal Mr. Potato-head: "No billy, the coax doesn't connect directly to the main power output..."
And the not so good ideas:
For ports, they list 4 USBs and a serial, but no parallel. When they take you to the printer order page, the specs on the printer say it comes with a parallel printer cable. Anyone else see the problem?
Not necessarily nature. In fact, this mostly depends on the intellect and environment.
When I was a young child, had my parents bought me the Barbie PC, I'd probably have wanted the Hot Wheels one instead, although the Barbie one is intended for my gender.
Why? I HATED dolls! They bored me to no end. (In fact, in my early teen years, the few Barbies that I did own became target practice...but that's another story for another day...) I would have rather played with Micro Machines with my brother. (The system of my youth was a plain, small beige box with 64k of memory and a BASIC cartridge, so pink or blue wouldn't be an object anyway.)
Anyway, my point is, when a child is allowed to choose whether they want to play with toys labeled "for girls" or "for boys", it doesn't make them homosexual. It develops minds.
Thirty years from now, the girl who plays with Lego Technic sets or the boy who plays with a toy kitchen may just be more suited to doing more tasks of everday life than the children forced into the cookie-cutter mold of pink and blue.
I say get the kid the computer they want. Let 'em look at specs of other computers, help them understand what they mean, and maybe get them something better than Win98 crawling along on 32MB of RAM...
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
And when I was five, I was programming silly little things in BASIC on my C64. Big whoop.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Sex != gender, gender != role in life. Toy ads sicken me; they'll always show bunches of boys playing with cars that you can crash and destroy, then they'll show bunches of girls wearing nail polish and helping Barbie make clothes. Among the kids I grew up with, few of them had any natural inclination for either, andthe only ones who fell into their cliche toy groups were boys. I didn't know a single girl who liked dolls, and most of the girls I knew were heavily into video games. Most of my friends when I was young were girls, too.
*sigh* I guess it's been too long since the last pointless sex/gender argument on Slashdot, no?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
There's a big difference between *can* not and *will* not. Clearly, *can not* is bogus, and Patriot isn't really saying that. What they are betting is that some (parents, presumably -- hopefully *not*, say, day-care operators) people will buy these in the bizarre hopes of enticing kids.
Targetting clearly often *does* work. IIRC, a CBS report lately focused on a schmuck who deliberately constructs bands specifically targetted at female [pre-]teeny-boppers, the sort that tends to coalesce in front rows at concerts and shriek their heads off, and (far more importantly) spend money to do so. That's capitalism.
If their bet is right, they profit; otherwise, they lose. {shrug}
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
{shrug} It's largely cultural, rather than biological methinks. After all, there have been matriarchal societies that were just as vicious as the more belligerent patriarchal ones...
Bah. There was a student in my high school, slightly older than me, who completed, with flying colors, the full high school mathematics curriculum (i.e. including calc, at the BC level) before most students finish pre-algebra. Her parents contributed a LOT to her motivation, methinks, and presumably did not raise her to think math was hard...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
...has anybody designed a machine that's *completely* black? Not only black paint everywhere, but...
* black keycaps with ridges instead of paint
* almost-black LEDs (or, perhaps, a sufficiently evil-looking red glow might be permissible)
* the big thing, and perhaps impossible:
a monitor that looks completely jet black (even when on) unless one uses, say, a special pair of goggles.
Might make for a fun showpiece; best placed in a completely black work station, for maximum omninousness.
:)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Why is integrated stuff bad for the consumer?
Is an AIWA stereo system with CD player, FM tuner, 4 speakers, and equalizer bad for the consumer?
Or is another issue that I'm missing?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
You do know that the physical description you gave is almost an iMac?
5 fruity gender neutral flavors/colors
Integrated speakers, CD-ROM, and monitor. Unless you meant that video and sound should be integrated? Your statement was confusing. Did you intentionally mean a double negative? Non-integrated parts but not the speakers, CD-ROM, floppy, and monitor?
Apple may actually have most of that planned in the iMacII, right?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
just noticed that, pretty soon i bet we'll be seeing the barbie decal maker, and the make your own clothes for barbie printer, and the..well, you know what i mean. i guess the real profit in this is the additions that people who have it will just *have* to buy. maybe it isn't such a bad idea after all.
*shrug* only time will tell
-rob
No amount of targeted marketing is going to stop me buying a Barbie PC. It is what people would expect of me anyway...
Or maybe I should confound everyone by buying the product that is actually intended for my gender? Nah.
Heck with that...just make a regular laptop a little more rugged (keeping in mind that nothing is kid-proof). I think my daughter would prefer racing stripes, or a black widow, painted on hers...we'll paint it together.
Fuck Slashdot
I agree that colors and flowers *shouldn't* have sexual connotations, but in fact in our culture they do. If you did a study asking which of the two pages was more masculine and which more feminine I think you'd get close to a unanimous response.
Marketing people know what they're doing when it comes to things like that, and using such stereotypes strengthens them. Women are now comfortable wearing pants, but Dvorak still has insecurities about carrying a laptop that might be mistaken for a purse. Men are more afraid of sexual stereotypes than women. I can easily imagine a young girl with a "Hot Wheels" computer, I have a hard time imagining a young boy with a "Barbie" computer. This issue should be important to both sexes.
Perhaps more worrying is the difference in descriptions. The "Hot Wheels" computer will enable a boy to "go to the head of his class". The "Barbie" computer will help a girl "learn new things." There's a small but significant distinction between those. If you look at the software titles pre-installed on each you can also see a subtle bias, two math packages for the boys, one for the girls, etc.
Worst, IMO, is yet another victory of form over content. The color of a computer, and the decals on it's case are terrible reasons to select a computer for purchase. But that is obviously what this company expects will differentiate them from other boxes.
I've been watching the progress of these for sometime now. You should have seen my 10-year old daughter's eyes light up when I showed her the Barbie PC on the website. Heck, *I* want one of those Hot Wheels models :-). I have two kids, and there's a good chance I'll end up one each of these boxes.
That having been said, I'm a bit dissapointed that I can't get my son a camera to match his PC, and my daughter a steering wheel to match hers. "Uh, here son. Here's a hot-wheels PC, and Daddy bought you this Barbie camera to go with it."
Jonatahn
Nature?
Is it nature that cause little girls to play with toy kitchen while little boys play with toy cars and toy guns? I would like an evidence of that.
You can excomunicate me because it is 'political corectness' but my opinion is it is culture rather than nature.
I think destroying the myth that you need testicles in order to understand how a computer works is good for society as a whole. Technology is good when you can master it, and keeping 53% of the population with lower technological skills won't help.
Laurent
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Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
Sell well? That's the whole point! If you have two kids, say a boy and a girl, buy toys, it would be an advantage to the toy market if you bought into toys that were incompatible between sexes. In other words, when you bought a masculine pc, you had to buy a feminine pc too, for your daughter. You would feel proud of your children's sexual identity and they would feel proud of the profits. To them, its marketing at work. To me, its more junk in the house.
I like the idea of a server and a few terminals for the kids to play with. But no, the industry wants a boy/girl computer, one blue, one pink, of every conceivable spinoff of every movie and cartoon to pile up on the living room floor. I'm up to my neck in crap and need to have a yard sale. Help. Free stuff. Get a good deal. Today only. Trash man comes tomorrow.
Both come with Cyberpatrol software installed, to keep your poor child safe from all the horrible terrophiles on the net.
I wonder if they want to make a freethinkerpc.com for those of us who wish to teach the next generations the true values of freedom.
And to think: they probably only need one version of such a computer...
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I've been wondering exactly that.
I wonder if there's some kind of biological / neurological / whatever cause.
Did you perchance notice that there's a "Hot Wheels" computer too?
I'd say the adults, the marketing people, and the parents would be operating the patriarchal / matriarchal gender formatting process here...
I liked my Commodore 64, I liked my XT, but I had to get my 386 with a black case. Why? It looked *cool*! Kids are very smart, they'll get what they like. If they think the Barbie or Hot Wheels PC is cool, they can have it. If they look at the specs and want a different computer, that's fine too. If they want to paint the case...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.