Intel calls this a "copy protection" technology. It's clear their motives aren't to prevent other people from spying on you, but to prevent you from gaining unauthorized access to copyrighted bits.
I would say that many male hackers really don't have a problem with women in their field; in fact they encourage it. The fact that a story about women in CS is posted to Slashdot is quiet testament to this. I think that this and a lot of other technical fields is actually more friendly to women than a lot of other career fields out there (the usual smattering of numbskulls notwithstanding:)). By the same token, however, the caveats that apply to women in CS were best illustrated by Stephen Hawking, in reference to disabled people becoming physicists: "You have to be good at it." One female student I know rather well believed up until her sophomore year that C++ compilers were implemented in special chips in the machine; she had grave concerns about being able to compile program code on her laptop. Nice lady, smart overall, but I had to tell her that the compiler was just another piece of software. It makes me curious as to how many women are getting into the field, who don't have the skills but are granted special concessions because they ARE women. The kinds of special concessions that pointy-haireds make in the name of "equal opportunity" simply do not fly amongst your techie colleagues, and women have to display the same kind of interest and competence that men do in order to earn their respect. If a woman makes academic or career advances the guys are naturally going to wonder if she did it on her own merits or because of these special concessions, unless they're acquainted with her. Until more women get into the field and prove their competency that's the way it's going to be.:(
Oh, and people like "Killcreek" aren't helping matters either. The last thing female techies need is a spokesmodel.
Computer scientist? She plays Quake. That's the least of the valuable skills a good CSer has. She's about as much of a serious computer professional as Britney Spears is a serious singer. She may have beaten John Romero but we all know that he came away with the trophy...
I thought "elite" came from the video game "Elite", which was apparently pretty popular amongst C64 users and the like. The word "hacker" originally connoted an ability to synthesize art and science in a problem-solving context; in the domain of computers this meant looking at a problem, being able to quickly determine what you'll need to solve it, and then fine-tuning it until you have a quality piece of code that does the job. Yes, there is "good hacking" and "bad hacking". An example of good hacking would be Linux. An example of bad hacking would be the fabled Great Worm (which basically worked by downloading and recompiling itself on each new machine it encountered... talk about hack value!) or Microsoft Windows 2000. Crackers, or l33t h4x0r d00dz if you will, have a substantially different and somewhat smaller skillset. They look for vulnerabilities in a system and exploit them. That's it. Script kiddies download text files and follow the instructions, and think they're l33t and have s|1llz when they haven't learned anything beyond following simple procedures just like Microsoft Word tutorials. Some forms of the art require deeper knowledge of things like encryption and hardware/software systems and the like. As a result, you don't need to be a hacker to be halfway decent at cracking. Depending on your purposes, cracking can also be "good" or "bad". An example of the good kind would be DeCSS. ESR wasn't trying to illustrate that one was good and one was bad; he was trying to illustrate that what the media calls a "hacker" is something entirely different from the classical definition of a hacker.
BakaNet? This is where all of the idiots who really shouldn't be using the internet belong (and there are way too many of them). Many AOLers fit in here, as well as script kiddies who think they're l33t h4x0rs, anyone who's ever begged for a ROM on an emulation message board, spammers, trolling AC's (/me uses item "Soft" on Natalie Portman and ends the madness!) and Jeff K.
How does one measure the progress of a program? Lines of code written? Hackers tend to use a more heuristic approach, giving estimates of what fraction of the original goals set forth in the spec are achieved. This is very unsettling to the kind of suits who like to see exactitudes, but 3 lines of code that do the Right Thing can be far more effective than 3000 lines of code that do not, and this effectiveness is much harder to measure than tolerances on the dimensions of a bearing or camshaft or bolt.
Slashdot Mirror
"If I had boobs like that I wouldn't leave the house. I'd just stand in front of the mirror all day and look at my boobs." --Butt-head
Intel calls this a "copy protection" technology. It's clear their motives aren't to prevent other people from spying on you, but to prevent you from gaining unauthorized access to copyrighted bits.
Oh, and people like "Killcreek" aren't helping matters either. The last thing female techies need is a spokesmodel.
Computer scientist? She plays Quake. That's the least of the valuable skills a good CSer has. She's about as much of a serious computer professional as Britney Spears is a serious singer. She may have beaten John Romero but we all know that he came away with the trophy...
I thought "elite" came from the video game "Elite", which was apparently pretty popular amongst C64 users and the like. The word "hacker" originally connoted an ability to synthesize art and science in a problem-solving context; in the domain of computers this meant looking at a problem, being able to quickly determine what you'll need to solve it, and then fine-tuning it until you have a quality piece of code that does the job. Yes, there is "good hacking" and "bad hacking". An example of good hacking would be Linux. An example of bad hacking would be the fabled Great Worm (which basically worked by downloading and recompiling itself on each new machine it encountered... talk about hack value!) or Microsoft Windows 2000. Crackers, or l33t h4x0r d00dz if you will, have a substantially different and somewhat smaller skillset. They look for vulnerabilities in a system and exploit them. That's it. Script kiddies download text files and follow the instructions, and think they're l33t and have s|1llz when they haven't learned anything beyond following simple procedures just like Microsoft Word tutorials. Some forms of the art require deeper knowledge of things like encryption and hardware/software systems and the like. As a result, you don't need to be a hacker to be halfway decent at cracking. Depending on your purposes, cracking can also be "good" or "bad". An example of the good kind would be DeCSS. ESR wasn't trying to illustrate that one was good and one was bad; he was trying to illustrate that what the media calls a "hacker" is something entirely different from the classical definition of a hacker.
BakaNet? This is where all of the idiots who really shouldn't be using the internet belong (and there are way too many of them). Many AOLers fit in here, as well as script kiddies who think they're l33t h4x0rs, anyone who's ever begged for a ROM on an emulation message board, spammers, trolling AC's (/me uses item "Soft" on Natalie Portman and ends the madness!) and Jeff K.
How does one measure the progress of a program? Lines of code written? Hackers tend to use a more heuristic approach, giving estimates of what fraction of the original goals set forth in the spec are achieved. This is very unsettling to the kind of suits who like to see exactitudes, but 3 lines of code that do the Right Thing can be far more effective than 3000 lines of code that do not, and this effectiveness is much harder to measure than tolerances on the dimensions of a bearing or camshaft or bolt.