Re:What about underweight hackers?!
on
Hacker's Diet
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· Score: 1
Former biochemist speaks:
1) It's amino acids 2) All the amino acids we can't synthesize from scratch are also found in plants, so you don't actually need to get them from animals. 3) You need to eat certain combinations of plant-based foods (e.g. grains and legumes) to ensure you're getting enough of the vital amino acids.
I'm not vegetarian, but I typically don't eat meat more than once or twice a week, so I watch what I eat to make sure I get enough of the right amino acids.
As I see it, the advantage of Linux over Windows isn't that it's less expensive. It's that Linux is a better operating system. China may prove to be a valuable test: if price isn't a consideration, what would people rather use?
Internationalization becomes a major selling point here. It may be that Micros~1, recognizing that it won't actually sell much software in China on account of rampant piracy, may not bother investing much in making Windows friendly to a Chinese audience. If that's the case, Linux may win by default.
Most of my techie friends from college are still single. I've met some married techie guys since, but I think my friends from college are a better sample. I think most men I know who got married would made career sacrifices in doing so. It's easier to pursue a career if nobody has veto power over the moves you make.
Recognizing when women are interested is next to impossible for me. I've been hanging out with friends who have said, "That woman who just walked by was interested in you." I've never noticed any such thing. After having gotten plenty of negative feedback, I'm becoming resigned to the fact that women in general aren't interested in me. If heterosexual women are attracted to men, I must not be male.
BTW, I'm not the AC who's been posting in this thread; I'm a different bitter guy.
The other thing about large urban areas: men get sent to prison at higher rates than women. In large urban areas, where young men are disproportionately likely to be sent to prison, this can skew the population a great deal. Since this is true of all large urban areas in the US, it explains much of the shortage of men in urban areas.
Fine, your lawyer says so, that's nice. Hope you have a lot of money to give your lawyer to support that argument. If your pockets are sufficiently deep, the law can support you. If not, you're effectively out of luck.
Granted, some of this is bitterness over my own situation. I decided against a CS major when I was in college, since it seemed that to declare a CS major would effectively be to take an oath of celibacy. However, I ended up scarcely dating in college or since (I think women could see through my biochem major to my underlying geekiness), and so I've thrown in the towel. I'm now looking at CS grad school.
Minor modification of my previous characterization: many women (not all, as Monica and her geeky guy can attest) avoid fields dominated by male geeks. It's not the shortage of hunky guys, but the overabundance of geeky men. Most women seem as averse to being asked out by geek guys as Idaho rednecks are to being asked out by other men. Hence, most women avoid geek turf.
The low social prestige associated with computer science probably also contributes. Medicine and law were long male-dominated fields, but they are also socially prestigious fields. There have long been prime time TV shows about doctors and lawyers and their active social lives (ER, LA Law, etc.). These fields are placed on pedestals. Notice how there's no real shortage of women in law or medicine. The depiction of programmers in mass media most often resembles that in Jurassic Park (fat, slimy, treacherous), and I've never even heard of a sysadmin being depicted on television. Even with all the jokes that people tell about lawyers, most women would far rather date a lawyer than a programmer. Of course, lawyers are much more skilled at flattery and lies, so they have an advantage.;-)
Enough women are attracted to big, hunky guys who spend all their time playing with a ball and no time reading to leave a shortage of women who are chiefly interested in intelligence. Also, some women (especially those who have dated jocks) see a sort of symmetry in big, powerful, dumb men and small, delicate, intelligent women. It all sort of balances out in the long run.:-P Intelligent men disrupt that symmetry and are considered undesireable. Thankfully, some women ignore this model.
I once heard a linguist complain that their weren't enough single men in her field. Maybe we need to start recruiting linguists, get them into compilers and AI...
My general opinion on the reason for the shortage of women in CS is that women avoid CS due to various cultural pressures that men feel free to ignore. It's worth noting that men who go into CS are considered social pariahs, but lots of men do it anyways. Not quite so many women are willing to make that sacrifice. Also, various misguided feminists are convincing women that they are biologically inferior in mathematics. I've heard many women say that women are inherently inferior at mathematics; I've never heard it from a man, and I don't believe it myself.
The bigger factor (in my bitter and cynical opinion) is that most women want to avoid a field of study that is dominated by geeky men, since most women find geeky men unattractive. The last thing most women want is to be stuck in a classroom with a large number of men who can't get dates to save their lives. If there aren't any studly men in CS, and all the men in CS wear clip-on ties and pocket protectors, most women will avoid CS. Maybe we need to get more jocks in CS in order for women to consider the field more (physically) attractive. Not that it will help the social lives of the rest of us any.:-P
From a software engineering standpoint, open source is much more akin to the free market. Open source is described in terms of the "bazaar model". Monolithic corporate software, driven by marketroids and lawyers, is much more akin to the economic model of the Soviet Union. The Central Committee of Redmond decides that, for legal reasons, they need to integrate the browser into the OS as much as possible. While this is a highly dubious decision from a practical standpoint, Chairman Bill has decided, and so it is done.
Free software follows a certain communitarian ideal, but it follows the ideal of "free speech", as distinguished from "free beer".
Open source and free software are based on the free market and free speech. Closed source software is often based on monopoly and central planning that runs contrary to the needs of the user. Metcalfe has it completely backwards.
OK, we know that he's the character who brought the defamation suit against Demon, and he claims to be a scientist of some sort (physics? computer science?) and a lecturer in London. I've done a number of searches for him, wondering what he might have published, where he might work, where he might have gone to school, etc., and I can't find any reference to his academic work, publications, etc. As far as the Internet is concerned, his sole claim to fame appears to have been filing lawsuits after having been flamed. I find it surprising that a serious academic, especially in computer science, would not be mentioned on the web for some professional activity. Is there any evidence to suggest that he's actually some lofty personage with a reputation to defame rather than some bum who wants to become rich over having been flamed? If he actually did have a professional reputation, I should think he would have blown it with this money-grubbing lawsuit (not the only one he brought, either). He doesn't need anyone to defame his character; he does a thoroughly sufficient job by himself.
This shouldn't be too scary. It's my understanding that Perl was created for system administration, and it proved to be a sufficiently general tool that it came to be used for a greater variety of purposes. I've heard it said that Perl is the only thing that makes WinNT administration possible, since those pretty GUI tools don't scale well. I think it's used in NT for user administration, extracting data from log files, etc., the same sort of stuff it's been used for in Unix. Practical extraction & reporting language (or pathologically eclectic rubbish lister. TIMTOWTDI).
According to my dictionary, it is "orig. echoic of unintelligible cries", with the implication from later meanings that the geek had some mental disability. We use enough technical jargon that we're still unintelligible to many, so perhaps that's appropriate!;-) Regardless, before it got to English, it came to have a meaning more akin to "fool", with a certain vulgar theatrical connotation. Since in English it came to describe a vocation, it seems appropriate to us. The negative connotation mostly has to do with the low social status of geeks, and despite Bill Joy's Ferrari, that hasn't changed much; we're still pariahs as far as mainstream society is concerned.
"Geek" is a title I have embraced firmly. Notice that Copyleft has "geek" t-shirts. (I own one, but I'm currently wearing a GNU shirt). As more and more people embrace the term, it comes to describe someone who is technically knowledgeable and skilled. I think we're taking back the term, and I don't take it as an insult. "Nerd" doesn't yet imply any sort of technical skill, so I haven't embraced it as fully. If "geek" remains in some ways perjorative, it's because mainstream society does not sufficiently appreciate those with technical skills.
I also consider myself a hacker, but I don't use the term among people who don't know me well. Even then, I tend to qualify myself: "I'm going to go home and do some Perl hacking", or "I'm going to hack together a program to...". I don't put "hacker" on my tax forms as my occupation. I particularly expect the government to misunderstand. Then again, most crackers describe themselves as hackers, which is the real root of the problem. The media can only be condemned for failing to get independent confirmation of this. ("He's no hacker! He's just a script kiddie!")
Lets not mix 'geek' and 'outcast' even those terms are considered similar in conventional wisdom. In 1 generation, every kid will be using the internet, programming, etc., and it will be quite common. Instead of working at GM you work at Microsoft or whatever, so the internet and computers are not the issue here.
I have to disagree. The emphasis on sports over academics, the concrete over the abstract, is too deeply entrenched. Internet use may a different story, but programming is the antithesis of cool. As long as US culture maintains this pathological obsession with sports, programmers will never rise to the top of the social ladder.
I'm inclined to think that the best solution to the social hell of high school is the elimination of school-sponsored sports. Schools should emphasize academics. If kids want to participate in recreational sports, they can do that outside the context of the schools. Also, the schools wouldn't have to hire so many coaches with dubious teaching ability.
My situation wasn't nearly so bad, but it had its similarities. I started school in a blue-collar part of town, and my kindergarten teacher refused to believe that I could read when I started kindergarten. I was instead branded a pathological liar and sent off to the shrink.
It hadn't helped that my first assigned task in kindergarten was to retrieve my nametag from the bulletin board. Someone had screwed up and not put my nametag on the board, so I returned an error message, which suggested to the teacher that I was unable to recognize my own name.
In my case, I remained a pariah throughout elementary school largely because I had almost no peer group. There just weren't enough geeks at my elementary school, so I was singled out and had few allies. Once I got to high school, I at least had other geeks to keep me company. That made high school better than elementary school.
I put together a document at work for the benefit of my co-workers, showing them pictures and thumbnail biographies of my role models, Alan Cox included. Except for Linus & Don Knuth, they all have facial hair. It did a lot to explain the magnitude of my beard to my co-workers.
The earlier comment stated that the US has only fought one MAJOR war on its own soil. This is true. The American Revolution was a series of skirmishes compared to major European wars. The weak government of the US at the time of the American Revolution prevented the US from fielding a larger army, and logistics of an overseas war kept the British forces small. The War of 1812 was mostly a naval war (excluding, most notably, the burning of Washington and the Battle of New Orleans), again with neither nation fielding large armies, for the same reasons as stated earlier, plus the need on the part of the British to concentrate their resources against Napoleon. The Spanish-American war was not fought in the US, but in Spanish colonies (Cuba and the Philippines). Westward expansion did less to foster cooperation than it did to idealize "rugged individualism", and those still weren't major wars.
Contrast these with the Napoleanic wars, World War I, and World War II. Look at the death tolls, especially among the civilian population. The US Civil War is in the same league, but nothing else fought on US soil comes close.
That being said, I'm not convinced that Europe's wars provide any supporting evidence for cooperation.
I have an almost entirely functional port of POV-Ray 3.1 to Linux on my web page, and I should have the rest of the functionality up within a few hours. Feel free to look at the source code; it required very little modification.
FWIW, I would just as soon see POV-Ray GPL'ed, though I'm not going to rant and rave about it. As I see it, there are two reasons that POV-Ray 3.1, which was officially released for a variety of other platforms several months ago, still doesn't have an official Unix version:
The POV-Ray team has historically hung out on CompuServe. When the previous Unix guru bowed out, it was difficult to find qualified Unix hackers hanging out on CompuServe.
POV-Ray has been following a rather closed development model, in which there are public beta tests for which the source is not publically available. The rationale is to reduce the burden of supporting users with outdated, buggy versions (the beta executables are timed to expire). In practice, it meant that the Unix users weren't able to start porting the POV-Ray 3.1 code to Unix until POV-Ray 3.1 was officially released for other platforms. This meant that Unix users didn't get to participate in the beta testing. It also meant that users were unable to find bugs in the source until after it was already released and the developers were on vacation. Based on my experience, this is a flawed model. Users have found bugs in my version, users have found fixes for bugs in my version, and the amount of work I have had to do is minimal as a result. Still, following the POV-Ray development model, POV-Ray 3.1 for Unix still isn't out, and I have no idea when it will be. I can only hope that the POV-Ray team takes a look at the code on my web site.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to upload my latest bug fixes. In case anyone is interested, I'm told that it works fine on SunOS with only minor (and obvious) modifications to the makefile.
Slashdot Mirror
Former biochemist speaks:
1) It's amino acids
2) All the amino acids we can't synthesize from scratch are also found in plants, so you don't actually need to get them from animals.
3) You need to eat certain combinations of plant-based foods (e.g. grains and legumes) to ensure you're getting enough of the vital amino acids.
I'm not vegetarian, but I typically don't eat meat more than once or twice a week, so I watch what I eat to make sure I get enough of the right amino acids.
As I see it, the advantage of Linux over Windows isn't that it's less expensive. It's that Linux is a better operating system. China may prove to be a valuable test: if price isn't a consideration, what would people rather use?
Internationalization becomes a major selling point here. It may be that Micros~1, recognizing that it won't actually sell much software in China on account of rampant piracy, may not bother investing much in making Windows friendly to a Chinese audience. If that's the case, Linux may win by default.
Thus the old joke:
Twelve people who were unable to get out of jury duty are not my peers!
Most of my techie friends from college are still single. I've met some married techie guys since, but I think my friends from college are a better sample. I think most men I know who got married would made career sacrifices in doing so. It's easier to pursue a career if nobody has veto power over the moves you make.
Recognizing when women are interested is next to impossible for me. I've been hanging out with friends who have said, "That woman who just walked by was interested in you." I've never noticed any such thing. After having gotten plenty of negative feedback, I'm becoming resigned to the fact that women in general aren't interested in me. If heterosexual women are attracted to men, I must not be male.
BTW, I'm not the AC who's been posting in this thread; I'm a different bitter guy.
The other thing about large urban areas: men get sent to prison at higher rates than women. In large urban areas, where young men are disproportionately likely to be sent to prison, this can skew the population a great deal. Since this is true of all large urban areas in the US, it explains much of the shortage of men in urban areas.
Fine, your lawyer says so, that's nice. Hope you have a lot of money to give your lawyer to support that argument. If your pockets are sufficiently deep, the law can support you. If not, you're effectively out of luck.
Granted, some of this is bitterness over my own situation. I decided against a CS major when I was in college, since it seemed that to declare a CS major would effectively be to take an oath of celibacy. However, I ended up scarcely dating in college or since (I think women could see through my biochem major to my underlying geekiness), and so I've thrown in the towel. I'm now looking at CS grad school.
;-)
:-P Intelligent men disrupt that symmetry and are considered undesireable. Thankfully, some women ignore this model.
Minor modification of my previous characterization: many women (not all, as Monica and her geeky guy can attest) avoid fields dominated by male geeks. It's not the shortage of hunky guys, but the overabundance of geeky men. Most women seem as averse to being asked out by geek guys as Idaho rednecks are to being asked out by other men. Hence, most women avoid geek turf.
The low social prestige associated with computer science probably also contributes. Medicine and law were long male-dominated fields, but they are also socially prestigious fields. There have long been prime time TV shows about doctors and lawyers and their active social lives (ER, LA Law, etc.). These fields are placed on pedestals. Notice how there's no real shortage of women in law or medicine. The depiction of programmers in mass media most often resembles that in Jurassic Park (fat, slimy, treacherous), and I've never even heard of a sysadmin being depicted on television. Even with all the jokes that people tell about lawyers, most women would far rather date a lawyer than a programmer. Of course, lawyers are much more skilled at flattery and lies, so they have an advantage.
Enough women are attracted to big, hunky guys who spend all their time playing with a ball and no time reading to leave a shortage of women who are chiefly interested in intelligence. Also, some women (especially those who have dated jocks) see a sort of symmetry in big, powerful, dumb men and small, delicate, intelligent women. It all sort of balances out in the long run.
I once heard a linguist complain that their weren't enough single men in her field. Maybe we need to start recruiting linguists, get them into compilers and AI...
My general opinion on the reason for the shortage of women in CS is that women avoid CS due to various cultural pressures that men feel free to ignore. It's worth noting that men who go into CS are considered social pariahs, but lots of men do it anyways. Not quite so many women are willing to make that sacrifice. Also, various misguided feminists are convincing women that they are biologically inferior in mathematics. I've heard many women say that women are inherently inferior at mathematics; I've never heard it from a man, and I don't believe it myself.
:-P
The bigger factor (in my bitter and cynical opinion) is that most women want to avoid a field of study that is dominated by geeky men, since most women find geeky men unattractive. The last thing most women want is to be stuck in a classroom with a large number of men who can't get dates to save their lives. If there aren't any studly men in CS, and all the men in CS wear clip-on ties and pocket protectors, most women will avoid CS. Maybe we need to get more jocks in CS in order for women to consider the field more (physically) attractive. Not that it will help the social lives of the rest of us any.
From a software engineering standpoint, open source is much more akin to the free market. Open source is described in terms of the "bazaar model". Monolithic corporate software, driven by marketroids and lawyers, is much more akin to the economic model of the Soviet Union. The Central Committee of Redmond decides that, for legal reasons, they need to integrate the browser into the OS as much as possible. While this is a highly dubious decision from a practical standpoint, Chairman Bill has decided, and so it is done.
Free software follows a certain communitarian ideal, but it follows the ideal of "free speech", as distinguished from "free beer".
Open source and free software are based on the free market and free speech. Closed source software is often based on monopoly and central planning that runs contrary to the needs of the user. Metcalfe has it completely backwards.
OK, we know that he's the character who brought the defamation suit against Demon, and he claims to be a scientist of some sort (physics? computer science?) and a lecturer in London. I've done a number of searches for him, wondering what he might have published, where he might work, where he might have gone to school, etc., and I can't find any reference to his academic work, publications, etc. As far as the Internet is concerned, his sole claim to fame appears to have been filing lawsuits after having been flamed. I find it surprising that a serious academic, especially in computer science, would not be mentioned on the web for some professional activity. Is there any evidence to suggest that he's actually some lofty personage with a reputation to defame rather than some bum who wants to become rich over having been flamed? If he actually did have a professional reputation, I should think he would have blown it with this money-grubbing lawsuit (not the only one he brought, either). He doesn't need anyone to defame his character; he does a thoroughly sufficient job by himself.
This shouldn't be too scary. It's my understanding that Perl was created for system administration, and it proved to be a sufficiently general tool that it came to be used for a greater variety of purposes. I've heard it said that Perl is the only thing that makes WinNT administration possible, since those pretty GUI tools don't scale well. I think it's used in NT for user administration, extracting data from log files, etc., the same sort of stuff it's been used for in Unix. Practical extraction & reporting language (or pathologically eclectic rubbish lister. TIMTOWTDI).
That's ironic; my great-grandfather was a pacifist.
-Mark Gordon
German, close to equivalent in literal meaning (hewer). Anyone in Germany care to comment?
;-)
(I may be biased; my grandmother was a Hauer)
Otherwise, I'm content with geek.
According to my dictionary, it is "orig. echoic of unintelligible cries", with the implication from later meanings that the geek had some mental disability. We use enough technical jargon that we're still unintelligible to many, so perhaps that's appropriate! ;-) Regardless, before it got to English, it came to have a meaning more akin to "fool", with a certain vulgar theatrical connotation. Since in English it came to describe a vocation, it seems appropriate to us. The negative connotation mostly has to do with the low social status of geeks, and despite Bill Joy's Ferrari, that hasn't changed much; we're still pariahs as far as mainstream society is concerned.
"Geek" is a title I have embraced firmly. Notice that Copyleft has "geek" t-shirts. (I own one, but I'm currently wearing a GNU shirt). As more and more people embrace the term, it comes to describe someone who is technically knowledgeable and skilled. I think we're taking back the term, and I don't take it as an insult. "Nerd" doesn't yet imply any sort of technical skill, so I haven't embraced it as fully. If "geek" remains in some ways perjorative, it's because mainstream society does not sufficiently appreciate those with technical skills.
I also consider myself a hacker, but I don't use the term among people who don't know me well. Even then, I tend to qualify myself: "I'm going to go home and do some Perl hacking", or "I'm going to hack together a program to...". I don't put "hacker" on my tax forms as my occupation. I particularly expect the government to misunderstand. Then again, most crackers describe themselves as hackers, which is the real root of the problem. The media can only be condemned for failing to get independent confirmation of this. ("He's no hacker! He's just a script kiddie!")
I have to disagree. The emphasis on sports over academics, the concrete over the abstract, is too deeply entrenched. Internet use may a different story, but programming is the antithesis of cool. As long as US culture maintains this pathological obsession with sports, programmers will never rise to the top of the social ladder.
I'm inclined to think that the best solution to the social hell of high school is the elimination of school-sponsored sports. Schools should emphasize academics. If kids want to participate in recreational sports, they can do that outside the context of the schools. Also, the schools wouldn't have to hire so many coaches with dubious teaching ability.
My situation wasn't nearly so bad, but it had its similarities. I started school in a blue-collar part of town, and my kindergarten teacher refused to believe that I could read when I started kindergarten. I was instead branded a pathological liar and sent off to the shrink.
It hadn't helped that my first assigned task in kindergarten was to retrieve my nametag from the bulletin board. Someone had screwed up and not put my nametag on the board, so I returned an error message, which suggested to the teacher that I was unable to recognize my own name.
In my case, I remained a pariah throughout elementary school largely because I had almost no peer group. There just weren't enough geeks at my elementary school, so I was singled out and had few allies. Once I got to high school, I at least had other geeks to keep me company. That made high school better than elementary school.
If it's only open to Fermilab employees and their families... ;-)
-Mark Gordon
I put together a document at work for the benefit of my co-workers, showing them pictures and thumbnail biographies of my role models, Alan Cox included. Except for Linus & Don Knuth, they all have facial hair. It did a lot to explain the magnitude of my beard to my co-workers.
The earlier comment stated that the US has only fought one MAJOR war on its own soil. This is true. The American Revolution was a series of skirmishes compared to major European wars. The weak government of the US at the time of the American Revolution prevented the US from fielding a larger army, and logistics of an overseas war kept the British forces small. The War of 1812 was mostly a naval war (excluding, most notably, the burning of Washington and the Battle of New Orleans), again with neither nation fielding large armies, for the same reasons as stated earlier, plus the need on the part of the British to concentrate their resources against Napoleon. The Spanish-American war was not fought in the US, but in Spanish colonies (Cuba and the Philippines). Westward expansion did less to foster cooperation than it did to idealize "rugged individualism", and those still weren't major wars.
Contrast these with the Napoleanic wars, World War I, and World War II. Look at the death tolls, especially among the civilian population. The US Civil War is in the same league, but nothing else fought on US soil comes close.
That being said, I'm not convinced that Europe's wars provide any supporting evidence for cooperation.
FWIW, I would just as soon see POV-Ray GPL'ed, though I'm not going to rant and rave about it. As I see it, there are two reasons that POV-Ray 3.1, which was officially released for a variety of other platforms several months ago, still doesn't have an official Unix version:
- The POV-Ray team has historically hung out on CompuServe. When the previous Unix guru bowed out, it was difficult to find qualified Unix hackers hanging out on CompuServe.
- POV-Ray has been following a rather closed development model, in which there are public beta tests for which the source is not publically available. The rationale is to reduce the burden of supporting users with outdated, buggy versions (the beta executables are timed to expire). In practice, it meant that the Unix users weren't able to start porting the POV-Ray 3.1 code to Unix until POV-Ray 3.1 was officially released for other platforms. This meant that Unix users didn't get to participate in the beta testing. It also meant that users were unable to find bugs in the source until after it was already released and the developers were on vacation. Based on my experience, this is a flawed model. Users have found bugs in my version, users have found fixes for bugs in my version, and the amount of work I have had to do is minimal as a result. Still, following the POV-Ray development model, POV-Ray 3.1 for Unix still isn't out, and I have no idea when it will be. I can only hope that the POV-Ray team takes a look at the code on my web site.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to upload my latest bug fixes. In case anyone is interested, I'm told that it works fine on SunOS with only minor (and obvious) modifications to the makefile.-Mark Gordon