Anything can break down unexpectedly. For an older car, it's an issue of how well you maintain it(Aside from the regular stuff, pay attention to things like unusual noises or feelings while you're driving it and track them down. Then they won't strand you if you catch it before the point of failure). For instance, my dad's old 84 dodge only ever let me down once, and because of a modification we made to the vehicle to try something. One of the fusable links blew, not the vehicle's fault. Aside from that, it was never less reliable than a brand spanking new 2015 truck.
Also consider the simpler a system is, the fewer things there are that can go wrong. Cars become more complex with each passing year with new technology and failure points to consider. For instance, I used to work at an automotive parts manufacturer for electronic power steering gears. The gears have a 3-phase electric motor, a belt, ball screw, and a complicated electronic control unit which also depends on communication with other vehicular modules in order to work. Think of all the resistors, inductors, capacitors, DSPs, EEPROMs, MOSFETS and crap that's built into that thing. That's a lot of points of failure vs a hydraulic system, or if you really want to go back in time, a full manual steering gear.
OK, so if I want to decrease my C++ vulnerability per MB of code metric, all I need to do is, depending on your definition of code, write a C++ program to produce large statically allocated arrays of garbage, or write a c++ program that... OH YES... FUNROLL LOOPS ON NOP INSTRUCTION..... I'm sure gcc will comply if I make that the only optimization, right?! Just increase the loop iterations to increase security! GENIUS!
This reasoning also extends, IMO, to new programming languages as well. A lot of my friends hop on the bandwagon every time something like C#, or Scala, or Node(Ok, it's not technically a language is it?), or Go pops out.. "OMG a new language, so much better than C++, so much more productive I'll be!".. I don't honestly believe in most cases that the language is what's going to make you productive, but your ability to think and just do the work. And obviously C++ has some things that are pretty WTF-y but usually when I watch Scott Meyers' videos on it, they tend have a reason for why it is the way it is.
I had 8GB in my desktop and was occasionally running out of memory due to either Chrome or Firefox(I didn't have swap activated). I upgraded to 16GB to alleviate this problem, which it didn't. I run out of memory just as frequently thanks to shitty browsers. Aside from that, yeah 16GB would be plenty for me. I just recently activated 2GB of swap to give me a little bit of time to kill Chrome myself before OOMkiller took over and froze my machine for an indefinite amount of time.
Wait! Moving a head and just slightly bumping the car ahead would lower the acceleration (and thus whiplash) posed by the rear ending by effectively increasing the mass of the driverless car! A brilliant idea? F=MA?;)
One might be puzzled by my response, but I say no because technically anything can be fixed, the only question is how.
I've been struggling with this issue lately myself as my own laptop (which is not underpowered by any means) has been experiencing incredibly slow login times for the Windows 7 install I have on my HDD. I also have an install on my SDD, but aside from bootup the performance difference is negligible for me(I also use it a lot less so it doesn't have all my software installed). The hard drive in this case is a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint M9T at 5400 RPM. Slower RPM, but it's a super dense 2.5" laptop drive.
I've made some progress in speeding it up, especially the login time which was atrocious... Removed an update that caused some Windows crap to be re-verified or something all the time, removed several things from startup and switched non-essential services to automatic. Eventually I did get the logon process to not be too bad and Windows would become responsive after maybe 40 seconds instead of 5-10 minutes. It's still not as fast as I'd like, but it's much improved.
But the problem with this is that I'm shooting in the dark and have to rely on trying pretty much every suggestion on the web there is. And here is the difference between my Windows installs and my Linux installs. GNU/Linux is open source, virtually everything you use in it is. The system is also designed to be tinkered with and the bootup processes are all opened up for any level of configuration that you desire. You can screw with your init system, the kernel itself, your bootloader, anything... So with the sources to all these pieces, I think figuring out what's wrong is relatively easy.
Come Windows, everything is closed source. The problem can be fixed, but you're stuck with decompiling and trying to debug perhaps even the kernel itself if you want to solve any problems. How are you going to profile bootup or login times? Can you easily find a sink for disk or CPU usage in certain functions in the Windows source code? Probably not. It's really challenging to figure out what's going wrong in this case. The best I can hope for is to look to people who have gotten a lucky guess or someone who is so absolutely hardcore that they've debugged a closed source operating system.
While I agree with another comment that I think this is more likely to hinder the industry, there is a simple answer to your question.
The FAA and FCC are regulatory groups. They're just bureaucracies that pretend to know enough about a subject to set sensible rules for it (and often I question whether that is actually true).
NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They've always been involved in actually researching new aerospace related technologies, that's what they're supposed to do. The FAA and FCC are not research/design organizations.
There was a discussion on a particular image site the other day about Bill Nye complaining that creationism is anti-intellectual. What I find ironic is that most people here, and 'scientists' including Nye seem to understand what science is or how it works.
This is science: You perform experiments to confirm or deny that some theory is likely to be generally true, to come up with some level of prediction of how things will play out. It is always possible that it won't play out in a well tested way, but with every successful experiment the chance grows smaller, but never to zero. This is the key, you can't prove that things "are not" or "do not." You can observe, and show that something is, any number of times but not infinity. That, realistically to anyone who can admit the limits of their own knowledge and methodology, is science.
Instead, everyone talking about science believes creationism is wrong because God hasn't been scientifically observed, falsely concluding that this disproves his existence rather than fails to demonstrate it experimentally. Or somehow the fact that some people can come up with the idea of evolution that it must therefore be true if we can argue there's some infinitesimally small chance that it is actually capable of producing the results it has. Nobody here has been standing around for billions of years to observe that.
One last thing... Did the billions of galaxies out there fail to exist 1000 or 2000 years ago because we didn't have the technology or know-how to observe them? Because that is what Nye and this article imply. The unobserved does not exist. Except when it does in the case of evolution or the big bang, because that's the side they've chosen and it's convenient for their argument.
Found it. It was a show called "Dark Matters: Twisted But True", the neurosurgeon's name who performed these operations was apparently Robert Joseph White.
Or something like that. There was one of those creepy "you won't believe dis shizit" shows on history channel or Discovery or one of those others a few years ago that I downloaded... It had a warning about disturbing content before each episode. In one of the episodes, it talked about a doctor several decades ago who tried head transplants on monkeys. Of course, they died a day later at the most as well, and the situation was described as being terrifying for the apes or monkeys because they'd be paralyzed and whatnot.
It's been done. The question is, is the technology we have now enough to provide a full or nearly full recovery afterwards?
I was just trying to be facetious with that comment, but then I thought of asking "How ready is C++ to succeed C?" or other silly things. As someone who programs in C++, I see little reason to use pure C, yet people do. When using Python, I use Python 3 and see little reason to use python 2.7, yet people do. People just don't like change, and they often won't do it unless absolutely forced to. Others here have already made this point, but the whole world isn't going to switch to pure IPv6 without some incentive, to practically force them to do it, it seems.
Recap: It's not a question of how ready IPv6 is to succeed IPv4, it's a question of how ready people are to adopt IPv6, at the ISP and consumer level. Services will follow when there's a demand, as someone else also noted.
Perhaps normal people and businesses in general just want to get shit done... But it seems like the hipsters always end up running the show. Somehow companies like Microsoft see that as innovation. After all, trying to enforce Metro on 8 was pretty much a hipster move. Not very good for usability or familiarity in my experience. Then masses of people trying to get shit done had to inform the hipsters at Microsoft that this was a really dumb idea. It's different so it must be good!!!!!!!
Honestly I don't care much about the icons though. Metro was much more annoying. My problem is I don't really know of a good way to change to a different theme for windows. I prefer the colors and contrast of Windows 7 and the previous versions. Instead, Windows 10 TP comes default with funky colors. I don't want a purple desktop. I'm not a 12-year old girl. Reminds me of the Windows XP Fisher Price interface, except that was less annoying, AND you could change it back to windows classic. I'm aware you can change colors, but I've not had good success finding a clean set of colors that have good contrast without hurting the eyes. I don't want to have to spend time coming up with a theme that doesn't look stupid. And maybe I don't care for flat-mode.
I thought this was true for all genders and species. I'm constantly pushing myself to be more logical and have more control over my emotions, but I'm nowhere near completely there. And some of that might also aid in social awkwardness.
For the record, in regards to the post, I didn't learn how to use Linux extensively through playing around with Gentoo or learn to program C and whatnot because my parents encouraged it. Having said that, my mother bought me an HTML book when I was young, and only after seeing that I was starting to make my own websites. Now I'm studying electrical engineering at school, and my parents never told me or suggested what I should do. It was entirely my choice driven by what I found to be my own interests. So having said that, why must we assume that women don't participate in STEM as much due to outside influences?
Anyway, someone said something about Feminist Friday... It's been what, 3 days?
I'm starting to feel like Slashdot is a religious website pushing for converts, what with all the posts about needing more women in engineering and CS and also saying that elementary and high schools need to focus more on programming. I guess that would classify this as a universalizing religion.
In my experience, even people who choose engineering and the like as a career path often aren't that intelligent. Schooling doesn't necessarily make you a good programmer or anything else. One might consider that a lack of talent, and perhaps it is. Maybe what they need to become truly great in these areas can be taught, but adding CS programs to schools isn't going to help that, and I think you'll find a general lack of interest and incompetence.
Without fail, every week or two there's an article posted here on Slashdot about how there need to be more female engineers, or female programmers, or female SETI students or whatever and we need to coerce them to join typically male dominated fields. All of this in spite of the fact that there's nothing really stopping them from doing any of this.
Are the engineering schools going to deny you when you score well on all your math and science tests? Are mommy and daddy going to stop paying for the education if their daughter decides to go the route of an EE or something?
Now someone will come along an argue that society is just preventing women from tapping into science related interests, and that they all really want to do it. Except that now you're encouraging a specific career path for them instead of being open minded to simply letting them explore all possibilities available to them and deciding their own interests.
Is it not also possible that they've evaluated these paths and decided they were not interested in them? My dad never tried to teach me how to work on cars or anything in spite of being a professional A&P. Not until I straight up said to him, "I want to learn how to work on cars." And since he always worked on our fleet of vehicles, I got to join in and learn that. I also messed around with sewing on my own initiative. My mother and sisters know how to sew, I gave it a shot. It did not interest me all that much. Now I'm an EE student because I discovered programming at the age of 11, and realized it's a relatively easy 'science' field and that I would learn much more going into EE, which I already have.
Being able to maintain your own care can help a lot if you aren't financially well off. I have an '03 VW Jetta TDI Wagon that I bought with 239,000 miles on it, and I've been able to fix every problem it had (and to be honest there haven't been many) all by myself. I diagnosed changed my own thermostat when mine failed, which would've probably cost me a pretty penny instead of 30 or 40 bucks in OEM parts. I had to replace the glass in one of my mirrors once. It took me about 15 seconds to connect the heat wires and snap it into place. The dealership quoted me $50 to do what was quite literally 15 seconds worth of work.
I'm also not convinced that auto makers can't do things do make cars more easily repairable by amateurs, and this idea of a car that's too complex for someone with the ability to fix is not an economically viable one from my standpoint. As a college student, I can't afford to spend $300 to have some dolt in a dealership replace my alternator and do it wrong when I can do it myself at the cost of a little time and have it done correctly.
As a final note, I've worked in the automotive industry among design and RMA engineers, and a lot of them aren't half as smart as they think they are, and even the OEMs get confused at how to work on their own crap, and I know having seen mechanics reports in a return material analysis lab that the people doing the repair work don't always know that much about the vehicles they're working on anyway, even with dealership and OEM support. We've had electronic power steering gears returned with the dealership claiming there was a power steering fluid leak. Seriously.
That seems to be the premise behind every single "There aren't enough female programmers, engineers, etc.." post that pops up here on Slashdot every couple of weeks.
As others have said, none of that is really true anymore. Going on what someone else said, I would point out that in my university (where I am pursuing a degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering as a male) the only EE related clubs are those focused around women. Having said that, EE classes at a small university are a sausage fest. Larger universities in my experience at least have a few, and none of us students discourage the women from participating.
I think it's time we face it, women just don't give as much of a shit about the same things men do. We have different interests as a general rule. And for the record, if you're being discouraged from pursuing something that truly interests you, that's a problem for anyone, not just women.
This article would explain my situation, however, while I was working as a co-op at an engineering company. I worked with 3 different female EE degrees that were all part of my department. Knowing through experience how few women there are in EE classes, I never understood why they made up nearly half of our team.
I'm sure you're just being facetious, but I feel the need to point out that many self-checkouts in the nation use Windows... XP Embedded. In fact, I heard one play the Windows XP Startup theme like 2 days ago. That was a blast from the past.
Reminds me of Dr. Bashir.... But would our society be more willing to embrace genetically enhanced people than in the Star Trek universe? If I recall correctly, it was outlawed in the federation.
I'm going to sit here and speculate on why. First of all, I taught myself C at 11 years old, and I'm 25 now. In the past 14 years, I've obtained a pretty good idea of what programming is, and of course spent plenty of time messing around with and administrating my own systems. I'm sure this isn't an unusual story to hear on slashdot, I'm sure many of you made a similar journey. But here's the problem, after talking with friends who had taught themselves how to program and do it well, and had gone through schooling for that subject, I realized there weren't heaps of new things to learn. Almost all of the schooling would be rehashing things I already knew.
So where am I going with that? Programming is a relatively easy subject to pick up on your own. You can just start messing around and get immediate results. You don't need a huge buildup of theory before you can start applying the stuff, either. If I can start coding in C at 11, it isn't that hard. And I'm definitely not one of those people who had a PhD by the time he was 14 either. So this doesn't really surprise me at all, the degree has very little practical value to someone who is already confident in their abilities with these kinds of things.
It was actually because of this that I chose my major to be Electronic Engineering instead(still working on it). The material is more challenging to me, and most of it isn't stuff that I've done already. It's not as easy to learn on my own (though it could be done. I even made a list of textbooks used in the 4-year school I want to attend in case I decided I wanted to go that route). I'm not sure how everyone else here feels about it, but I think programming is easy shit. Using computers is relatively easy shit. Just because you don't have to spend as much time making that foundation, I think it's a lot easier to get away without getting a degree in it. Maybe this is due entirely to the fact that it's easier to self-teach, rather than it being an easy subject in and of itself. I know many of you wouldn't agree with the latter statement. Once you know it, why have someone try to reteach you?
Slashdot Mirror
Anything can break down unexpectedly. For an older car, it's an issue of how well you maintain it(Aside from the regular stuff, pay attention to things like unusual noises or feelings while you're driving it and track them down. Then they won't strand you if you catch it before the point of failure). For instance, my dad's old 84 dodge only ever let me down once, and because of a modification we made to the vehicle to try something. One of the fusable links blew, not the vehicle's fault. Aside from that, it was never less reliable than a brand spanking new 2015 truck. Also consider the simpler a system is, the fewer things there are that can go wrong. Cars become more complex with each passing year with new technology and failure points to consider. For instance, I used to work at an automotive parts manufacturer for electronic power steering gears. The gears have a 3-phase electric motor, a belt, ball screw, and a complicated electronic control unit which also depends on communication with other vehicular modules in order to work. Think of all the resistors, inductors, capacitors, DSPs, EEPROMs, MOSFETS and crap that's built into that thing. That's a lot of points of failure vs a hydraulic system, or if you really want to go back in time, a full manual steering gear.
What if I type using the tab key, but VIM inserts spaces for me instead?
OK, so if I want to decrease my C++ vulnerability per MB of code metric, all I need to do is, depending on your definition of code, write a C++ program to produce large statically allocated arrays of garbage, or write a c++ program that... OH YES... FUNROLL LOOPS ON NOP INSTRUCTION..... I'm sure gcc will comply if I make that the only optimization, right?! Just increase the loop iterations to increase security! GENIUS!
This reasoning also extends, IMO, to new programming languages as well. A lot of my friends hop on the bandwagon every time something like C#, or Scala, or Node(Ok, it's not technically a language is it?), or Go pops out.. "OMG a new language, so much better than C++, so much more productive I'll be!".. I don't honestly believe in most cases that the language is what's going to make you productive, but your ability to think and just do the work. And obviously C++ has some things that are pretty WTF-y but usually when I watch Scott Meyers' videos on it, they tend have a reason for why it is the way it is.
I had 8GB in my desktop and was occasionally running out of memory due to either Chrome or Firefox(I didn't have swap activated). I upgraded to 16GB to alleviate this problem, which it didn't. I run out of memory just as frequently thanks to shitty browsers. Aside from that, yeah 16GB would be plenty for me. I just recently activated 2GB of swap to give me a little bit of time to kill Chrome myself before OOMkiller took over and froze my machine for an indefinite amount of time.
Wait! Moving a head and just slightly bumping the car ahead would lower the acceleration (and thus whiplash) posed by the rear ending by effectively increasing the mass of the driverless car! A brilliant idea? F=MA? ;)
One might be puzzled by my response, but I say no because technically anything can be fixed, the only question is how.
I've been struggling with this issue lately myself as my own laptop (which is not underpowered by any means) has been experiencing incredibly slow login times for the Windows 7 install I have on my HDD. I also have an install on my SDD, but aside from bootup the performance difference is negligible for me(I also use it a lot less so it doesn't have all my software installed). The hard drive in this case is a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint M9T at 5400 RPM. Slower RPM, but it's a super dense 2.5" laptop drive.
I've made some progress in speeding it up, especially the login time which was atrocious... Removed an update that caused some Windows crap to be re-verified or something all the time, removed several things from startup and switched non-essential services to automatic. Eventually I did get the logon process to not be too bad and Windows would become responsive after maybe 40 seconds instead of 5-10 minutes. It's still not as fast as I'd like, but it's much improved.
But the problem with this is that I'm shooting in the dark and have to rely on trying pretty much every suggestion on the web there is. And here is the difference between my Windows installs and my Linux installs. GNU/Linux is open source, virtually everything you use in it is. The system is also designed to be tinkered with and the bootup processes are all opened up for any level of configuration that you desire. You can screw with your init system, the kernel itself, your bootloader, anything... So with the sources to all these pieces, I think figuring out what's wrong is relatively easy.
Come Windows, everything is closed source. The problem can be fixed, but you're stuck with decompiling and trying to debug perhaps even the kernel itself if you want to solve any problems. How are you going to profile bootup or login times? Can you easily find a sink for disk or CPU usage in certain functions in the Windows source code? Probably not. It's really challenging to figure out what's going wrong in this case. The best I can hope for is to look to people who have gotten a lucky guess or someone who is so absolutely hardcore that they've debugged a closed source operating system.
Just my 2 cents.
While I agree with another comment that I think this is more likely to hinder the industry, there is a simple answer to your question.
The FAA and FCC are regulatory groups. They're just bureaucracies that pretend to know enough about a subject to set sensible rules for it (and often I question whether that is actually true).
NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They've always been involved in actually researching new aerospace related technologies, that's what they're supposed to do. The FAA and FCC are not research/design organizations.
There was a discussion on a particular image site the other day about Bill Nye complaining that creationism is anti-intellectual. What I find ironic is that most people here, and 'scientists' including Nye seem to understand what science is or how it works.
This is science: You perform experiments to confirm or deny that some theory is likely to be generally true, to come up with some level of prediction of how things will play out. It is always possible that it won't play out in a well tested way, but with every successful experiment the chance grows smaller, but never to zero. This is the key, you can't prove that things "are not" or "do not." You can observe, and show that something is, any number of times but not infinity. That, realistically to anyone who can admit the limits of their own knowledge and methodology, is science.
Instead, everyone talking about science believes creationism is wrong because God hasn't been scientifically observed, falsely concluding that this disproves his existence rather than fails to demonstrate it experimentally. Or somehow the fact that some people can come up with the idea of evolution that it must therefore be true if we can argue there's some infinitesimally small chance that it is actually capable of producing the results it has. Nobody here has been standing around for billions of years to observe that.
One last thing... Did the billions of galaxies out there fail to exist 1000 or 2000 years ago because we didn't have the technology or know-how to observe them? Because that is what Nye and this article imply. The unobserved does not exist. Except when it does in the case of evolution or the big bang, because that's the side they've chosen and it's convenient for their argument.
Found it. It was a show called "Dark Matters: Twisted But True", the neurosurgeon's name who performed these operations was apparently Robert Joseph White.
Or something like that. There was one of those creepy "you won't believe dis shizit" shows on history channel or Discovery or one of those others a few years ago that I downloaded... It had a warning about disturbing content before each episode. In one of the episodes, it talked about a doctor several decades ago who tried head transplants on monkeys. Of course, they died a day later at the most as well, and the situation was described as being terrifying for the apes or monkeys because they'd be paralyzed and whatnot.
It's been done. The question is, is the technology we have now enough to provide a full or nearly full recovery afterwards?
How ready is Perl 6 to succeed Perl 5?
I was just trying to be facetious with that comment, but then I thought of asking "How ready is C++ to succeed C?" or other silly things. As someone who programs in C++, I see little reason to use pure C, yet people do. When using Python, I use Python 3 and see little reason to use python 2.7, yet people do. People just don't like change, and they often won't do it unless absolutely forced to. Others here have already made this point, but the whole world isn't going to switch to pure IPv6 without some incentive, to practically force them to do it, it seems.
Recap: It's not a question of how ready IPv6 is to succeed IPv4, it's a question of how ready people are to adopt IPv6, at the ISP and consumer level. Services will follow when there's a demand, as someone else also noted.
Don't worry, folks! It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Perhaps normal people and businesses in general just want to get shit done... But it seems like the hipsters always end up running the show. Somehow companies like Microsoft see that as innovation. After all, trying to enforce Metro on 8 was pretty much a hipster move. Not very good for usability or familiarity in my experience. Then masses of people trying to get shit done had to inform the hipsters at Microsoft that this was a really dumb idea. It's different so it must be good!!!!!!!
Honestly I don't care much about the icons though. Metro was much more annoying. My problem is I don't really know of a good way to change to a different theme for windows. I prefer the colors and contrast of Windows 7 and the previous versions. Instead, Windows 10 TP comes default with funky colors. I don't want a purple desktop. I'm not a 12-year old girl. Reminds me of the Windows XP Fisher Price interface, except that was less annoying, AND you could change it back to windows classic. I'm aware you can change colors, but I've not had good success finding a clean set of colors that have good contrast without hurting the eyes. I don't want to have to spend time coming up with a theme that doesn't look stupid. And maybe I don't care for flat-mode.
I thought this was true for all genders and species. I'm constantly pushing myself to be more logical and have more control over my emotions, but I'm nowhere near completely there. And some of that might also aid in social awkwardness.
For the record, in regards to the post, I didn't learn how to use Linux extensively through playing around with Gentoo or learn to program C and whatnot because my parents encouraged it. Having said that, my mother bought me an HTML book when I was young, and only after seeing that I was starting to make my own websites. Now I'm studying electrical engineering at school, and my parents never told me or suggested what I should do. It was entirely my choice driven by what I found to be my own interests. So having said that, why must we assume that women don't participate in STEM as much due to outside influences?
Anyway, someone said something about Feminist Friday... It's been what, 3 days?
I'm starting to feel like Slashdot is a religious website pushing for converts, what with all the posts about needing more women in engineering and CS and also saying that elementary and high schools need to focus more on programming. I guess that would classify this as a universalizing religion.
In my experience, even people who choose engineering and the like as a career path often aren't that intelligent. Schooling doesn't necessarily make you a good programmer or anything else. One might consider that a lack of talent, and perhaps it is. Maybe what they need to become truly great in these areas can be taught, but adding CS programs to schools isn't going to help that, and I think you'll find a general lack of interest and incompetence.
Without fail, every week or two there's an article posted here on Slashdot about how there need to be more female engineers, or female programmers, or female SETI students or whatever and we need to coerce them to join typically male dominated fields. All of this in spite of the fact that there's nothing really stopping them from doing any of this.
Are the engineering schools going to deny you when you score well on all your math and science tests? Are mommy and daddy going to stop paying for the education if their daughter decides to go the route of an EE or something?
Now someone will come along an argue that society is just preventing women from tapping into science related interests, and that they all really want to do it. Except that now you're encouraging a specific career path for them instead of being open minded to simply letting them explore all possibilities available to them and deciding their own interests.
Is it not also possible that they've evaluated these paths and decided they were not interested in them? My dad never tried to teach me how to work on cars or anything in spite of being a professional A&P. Not until I straight up said to him, "I want to learn how to work on cars." And since he always worked on our fleet of vehicles, I got to join in and learn that. I also messed around with sewing on my own initiative. My mother and sisters know how to sew, I gave it a shot. It did not interest me all that much. Now I'm an EE student because I discovered programming at the age of 11, and realized it's a relatively easy 'science' field and that I would learn much more going into EE, which I already have.
Here we come!
Being able to maintain your own care can help a lot if you aren't financially well off. I have an '03 VW Jetta TDI Wagon that I bought with 239,000 miles on it, and I've been able to fix every problem it had (and to be honest there haven't been many) all by myself. I diagnosed changed my own thermostat when mine failed, which would've probably cost me a pretty penny instead of 30 or 40 bucks in OEM parts. I had to replace the glass in one of my mirrors once. It took me about 15 seconds to connect the heat wires and snap it into place. The dealership quoted me $50 to do what was quite literally 15 seconds worth of work.
I'm also not convinced that auto makers can't do things do make cars more easily repairable by amateurs, and this idea of a car that's too complex for someone with the ability to fix is not an economically viable one from my standpoint. As a college student, I can't afford to spend $300 to have some dolt in a dealership replace my alternator and do it wrong when I can do it myself at the cost of a little time and have it done correctly.
As a final note, I've worked in the automotive industry among design and RMA engineers, and a lot of them aren't half as smart as they think they are, and even the OEMs get confused at how to work on their own crap, and I know having seen mechanics reports in a return material analysis lab that the people doing the repair work don't always know that much about the vehicles they're working on anyway, even with dealership and OEM support. We've had electronic power steering gears returned with the dealership claiming there was a power steering fluid leak. Seriously.
That seems to be the premise behind every single "There aren't enough female programmers, engineers, etc.." post that pops up here on Slashdot every couple of weeks.
As others have said, none of that is really true anymore. Going on what someone else said, I would point out that in my university (where I am pursuing a degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering as a male) the only EE related clubs are those focused around women. Having said that, EE classes at a small university are a sausage fest. Larger universities in my experience at least have a few, and none of us students discourage the women from participating.
I think it's time we face it, women just don't give as much of a shit about the same things men do. We have different interests as a general rule. And for the record, if you're being discouraged from pursuing something that truly interests you, that's a problem for anyone, not just women.
This article would explain my situation, however, while I was working as a co-op at an engineering company. I worked with 3 different female EE degrees that were all part of my department. Knowing through experience how few women there are in EE classes, I never understood why they made up nearly half of our team.
I'm sure you're just being facetious, but I feel the need to point out that many self-checkouts in the nation use Windows... XP Embedded. In fact, I heard one play the Windows XP Startup theme like 2 days ago. That was a blast from the past.
Reminds me of Dr. Bashir.... But would our society be more willing to embrace genetically enhanced people than in the Star Trek universe? If I recall correctly, it was outlawed in the federation.
Oh, you mean GLaDOS? "So, how are you holding up?... Because I'm a potato..."
I'm going to sit here and speculate on why. First of all, I taught myself C at 11 years old, and I'm 25 now. In the past 14 years, I've obtained a pretty good idea of what programming is, and of course spent plenty of time messing around with and administrating my own systems. I'm sure this isn't an unusual story to hear on slashdot, I'm sure many of you made a similar journey. But here's the problem, after talking with friends who had taught themselves how to program and do it well, and had gone through schooling for that subject, I realized there weren't heaps of new things to learn. Almost all of the schooling would be rehashing things I already knew.
So where am I going with that? Programming is a relatively easy subject to pick up on your own. You can just start messing around and get immediate results. You don't need a huge buildup of theory before you can start applying the stuff, either. If I can start coding in C at 11, it isn't that hard. And I'm definitely not one of those people who had a PhD by the time he was 14 either. So this doesn't really surprise me at all, the degree has very little practical value to someone who is already confident in their abilities with these kinds of things.
It was actually because of this that I chose my major to be Electronic Engineering instead(still working on it). The material is more challenging to me, and most of it isn't stuff that I've done already. It's not as easy to learn on my own (though it could be done. I even made a list of textbooks used in the 4-year school I want to attend in case I decided I wanted to go that route). I'm not sure how everyone else here feels about it, but I think programming is easy shit. Using computers is relatively easy shit. Just because you don't have to spend as much time making that foundation, I think it's a lot easier to get away without getting a degree in it. Maybe this is due entirely to the fact that it's easier to self-teach, rather than it being an easy subject in and of itself. I know many of you wouldn't agree with the latter statement. Once you know it, why have someone try to reteach you?
Well, obviously you're paying for all those extra wheels.