I agree with you to a certain extent. I would say more specifically that women don't have the patience to put up with all the crap that an IT job requires. Most women (and a fair amount of men) don't like to be locked inside a cubicle, staring at a computer screen, pounding away at code with little or no human interaction for 8+ hours a day.
My company has 3 women with Comp Sci degrees. None of them currently program. Our last female programmer (with a masters degree) just left to study counseling after only two years on the job.
Actually, Sirius has three satellites that move across the sky. XM has two (called "Rock" and "Roll") in geosynchronous orbit. They also have ground based repeaters in the cities.
However, it is not the ultimate solution to all of the computer world's problems. It still does not have the software base Windows does, unless you buy an emulator.
Linux, on the other hand does not have "the basics" for average users yet and is a nightmare to configure correctly. I don't have a day to get my soundcard working or, god forbid, the wireless card.
My mother-in-law has a dual PowerMac G4 with a midi keyboard.
Her experiences with the hardware and software on MacOS 10.2 were as follows:
1) Printer (HP Photosmart 1000 USB) has been flaky. 2) Scanner (Epson USB - not sure of model) - paperweight. 3) USB Mac Floppy drive - paperweight in OSX. 4) Midi - not only did she have to buy a new interface, (old mac serial was obsolete), but midi support in 10.2 was quite primitive. 5) Finale 2002 - A Classic MacOS program that could not access the hardware it needed in MacOS X.
Desktop: Windows XP Home + SP2 Laptop: Windows 2000 Pro + SP4 Server: Fedora Core 3
Both Windows machines are stable, virus, spyware and hacker free. Windows 2000 has given me no trouble at all. Windows XP has had a few issues caused by third party drivers. Windows update keeps everything current.
FC3 is a great system, but it's a Windows world. There is a fair amount I simply can't do because I don't have DirectX, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, or one of many other Windows only (or non-Linux) applications.
The only time I was ever hacked was on Linux (an unprotected Red Hat 6.2 box back in 2000)
Classic MacOS is as (un)stable as Windows 98. MacOS X is quite nice, but my experience is that the hardware and software support still isn't there.
A $20 router/firewall is all you need to protect you long enough to get Windows patched. The bots are fairly dumb and easily stopped. Ad-aware and AVG free edition protect from spyware and viruses. Using Firefox over Internet Exploiter eliminates the browser hijacks.
The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft gave a very powerful OS to Joe Servicepack who has NO CLUE how to get it stable and keep it stable.
My wife is an excellent musician, yet she HATES math.
I tutored her in her college math classes and found that she had a good amount of mathematical ability, she just hated math so much that she wouldn't use it. She'd get frustrated and complain instead of thinking about the problem and completing it.
Does the way we teach math cause women to, on average, do worse than men? Does it cause some men to do better than others? For example, men who struggle through algebra in a classroom have been known to master trig based calculations in shop class. Are we missing the real problem due to gender politics and ideology?
So who can explain why Elementary Education is overwhelmingly female and Electrical Engineering is overwhelmingly male?
Why are we asking why women don't do well in math? Why not ask why men don't have anywhere near the verbal skills of women?
Why do men do better on the SAT and similar tests, yet the college population is about 56% female?
There are more male CEO's than female CEO's. There are also more men than women in maximum security prisons. There are more male geniuses and more men are profoundly retarded. Why is this?
In 1997, Clemson University spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a state of the art network of SGI-O2's and a very expensive 8 processor server.
By 2001, my PIII/500+Voodoo 4+RH 7.3 was smoking the O2's. People with new Athlon+(GeForce||Radeon) systems were putting mine to shame. The new cheap-ass Dell workstations in the computer labs would have been better than the O2's at that point.
Spending that much money on hardware that is obsolete in less than 5 years is not a good investment.
The next year they switched to a Linux/MacOS X setup.
Schools buy textbooks with eye candy and bulk discounts that make the adminstrators happy.
No one gives a damn what the math teachers think.
In our local school district, the math teachers on the district textbook committee overwhelmingly recommended Saxon textbooks. The district bought Addison-Wesley books. These books had lots of pretty pictures, but were totally useless for any sort of teaching.
If humans are not causing global climate change, or are an insignificant contribution to such change, then we need to focus our energy into adapting to the change instead of trying to reverse it.
I dislike pollution as well. Unfortunately, global climate change has distracted people from good old fashioned environmental topics like pollution, environmental degredation, protection of natural areas, etc.
Sea level has constantly fluctuated in the geological past: its highest recorded level was in the Cretaceous Period, some 80 million years ago, when CO2 levels were considerably higher than at present, and ice-caps were virtually absent from the earth. Then, sea level stood at least 200 metres higher than today, with most of the UK being submerged.
If global warming is truly human caused, how could sea levels have been highest during the Cretaceous Period, millions of years before mankind?
Couldn't this be part of a natural cycle? If so, I doubt that humans can do much of anything either way about global climate change.
Don't get me wrong, P2 systems still have plenty of uses, but I would never buy a P2 chip.
The P3-500 is a better, cooler, chip for only a few dollars more and is a drop-in replacement for a P2. Celerons are cheap and plentiful. You can get a much better chip for about the same price.
This is why 5x86's (actually just pimped-out 486's) are still being made, but the PII is on it's way out.
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I prefer being loud myself. Loud with a deep voice. Even your bullshit sounds authoritative.
Since I am only 5'9" (175 cm), tallness is not an option.
I agree with you to a certain extent. I would say more specifically that women don't have the patience to put up with all the crap that an IT job requires. Most women (and a fair amount of men) don't like to be locked inside a cubicle, staring at a computer screen, pounding away at code with little or no human interaction for 8+ hours a day.
My company has 3 women with Comp Sci degrees. None of them currently program. Our last female programmer (with a masters degree) just left to study counseling after only two years on the job.
I don't think that being the "Anti-Phish Candidate" would win too many votes in Vermont.
Besides, Trey Anastasio is way cooler than Pat Leahy anyday.
Also WinRAR is completely compatible with .zip archives.
The biggest difference I have noticed as far as "ease of use" is that WinZip has nicer icons. (Oooh, shiny. Me want eye candy.)
Treaty was DOA in the Senate. It would have gone down in a 0-99 vote.
Actually, Sirius has three satellites that move across the sky. XM has two (called "Rock" and "Roll") in geosynchronous orbit. They also have ground based repeaters in the cities.
So would the worse-case scenerio in a meltdown in China be called "The America Syndrome"?
OSX is not a bad system.
However, it is not the ultimate solution to all of the computer world's problems. It still does not have the software base Windows does, unless you buy an emulator.
Linux, on the other hand does not have "the basics" for average users yet and is a nightmare to configure correctly. I don't have a day to get my soundcard working or, god forbid, the wireless card.
My mother-in-law has a dual PowerMac G4 with a midi keyboard.
Her experiences with the hardware and software on MacOS 10.2 were as follows:
1) Printer (HP Photosmart 1000 USB) has been flaky.
2) Scanner (Epson USB - not sure of model) - paperweight.
3) USB Mac Floppy drive - paperweight in OSX.
4) Midi - not only did she have to buy a new interface, (old mac serial was obsolete), but midi support in 10.2 was quite primitive.
5) Finale 2002 - A Classic MacOS program that could not access the hardware it needed in MacOS X.
Needless to say, they were quite disappointed.
I am well aware that Apple makes quicktime.
.mov movies I make with my digital camera in Linux.
But I don't want to beat my head agaist the wall trying to get mplayer to play the
Nor do I want to beat my head against the wall trying to get Linux to recognize what to do with a site that requires a Windows Media Player plugin.
I have three systems at home:
Desktop: Windows XP Home + SP2
Laptop: Windows 2000 Pro + SP4
Server: Fedora Core 3
Both Windows machines are stable, virus, spyware and hacker free. Windows 2000 has given me no trouble at all. Windows XP has had a few issues caused by third party drivers. Windows update keeps everything current.
FC3 is a great system, but it's a Windows world. There is a fair amount I simply can't do because I don't have DirectX, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, or one of many other Windows only (or non-Linux) applications.
The only time I was ever hacked was on Linux (an unprotected Red Hat 6.2 box back in 2000)
Classic MacOS is as (un)stable as Windows 98. MacOS X is quite nice, but my experience is that the hardware and software support still isn't there.
A $20 router/firewall is all you need to protect you long enough to get Windows patched. The bots are fairly dumb and easily stopped. Ad-aware and AVG free edition protect from spyware and viruses. Using Firefox over Internet Exploiter eliminates the browser hijacks.
The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft gave a very powerful OS to Joe Servicepack who has NO CLUE how to get it stable and keep it stable.
What if Linus Torvalds had known BSD existed?
Linus admits that he basically re-invented the wheel with linux, BSD had what he wanted, but he didn't know about it or that it was freely available.
And give us free, unlimited, internet streaming from muliple locations.
Since I use the streaming at work (no signal), Sirius was actually a better deal. I still got XM because I preferred XM's content.
On the other hand, $28,000 where he is may actually buy more than twice that in places with high costs of living, like Silicon Valley.
I met someone here on Slashdot who actually makes slightly more than I do, but lives in metro L.A. I live comfortably, he is barely scraping by.
I believe that was DFP, an older standard, but I could be wrong.
My wife is an excellent musician, yet she HATES math.
I tutored her in her college math classes and found that she had a good amount of mathematical ability, she just hated math so much that she wouldn't use it. She'd get frustrated and complain instead of thinking about the problem and completing it.
Does the way we teach math cause women to, on average, do worse than men? Does it cause some men to do better than others? For example, men who struggle through algebra in a classroom have been known to master trig based calculations in shop class. Are we missing the real problem due to gender politics and ideology?
So who can explain why Elementary Education is overwhelmingly female and Electrical Engineering is overwhelmingly male?
Why are we asking why women don't do well in math? Why not ask why men don't have anywhere near the verbal skills of women?
Why do men do better on the SAT and similar tests, yet the college population is about 56% female?
There are more male CEO's than female CEO's. There are also more men than women in maximum security prisons. There are more male geniuses and more men are profoundly retarded. Why is this?
Why can't we ask these questions?
Titanic was rendered on Linux.
Red Hat 4, IIRC.
In 1997, Clemson University spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a state of the art network of SGI-O2's and a very expensive 8 processor server.
By 2001, my PIII/500+Voodoo 4+RH 7.3 was smoking the O2's. People with new Athlon+(GeForce||Radeon) systems were putting mine to shame. The new cheap-ass Dell workstations in the computer labs would have been better than the O2's at that point.
Spending that much money on hardware that is obsolete in less than 5 years is not a good investment.
The next year they switched to a Linux/MacOS X setup.
This is what happens when those responsible for purchasing decisions are too damn stupid to buy more RAM/larger hard drive.
PII-400/128MB RAM/10GB: Badass in 1998, but Win2k Pro is a bit much these days.
"Oh, my the computers are slow! Let's get new ones!"
Never mind that a stick or two of RAM would have solved the problem for a fraction of the cost.
I'm happy as a clam at work with an AMD Athlon 800Mhz + 768MB RAM + Win2k Pro. And I am a developer for a Java based application!
Schools buy textbooks with eye candy and bulk discounts that make the adminstrators happy.
No one gives a damn what the math teachers think.
In our local school district, the math teachers on the district textbook committee overwhelmingly recommended Saxon textbooks. The district bought Addison-Wesley books. These books had lots of pretty pictures, but were totally useless for any sort of teaching.
Probably happened when Al Gore gave his speech on global warming on an extremely cold day in NYC.
By the end of the speech, I think most of the crowd was in favor of any sort of warming.
Bingo. We have a winner.
If humans are not causing global climate change, or are an insignificant contribution to such change, then we need to focus our energy into adapting to the change instead of trying to reverse it.
I dislike pollution as well. Unfortunately, global climate change has distracted people from good old fashioned environmental topics like pollution, environmental degredation, protection of natural areas, etc.
If global warming is truly human caused, how could sea levels have been highest during the Cretaceous Period, millions of years before mankind?
Couldn't this be part of a natural cycle? If so, I doubt that humans can do much of anything either way about global climate change.
Don't get me wrong, P2 systems still have plenty of uses, but I would never buy a P2 chip.
The P3-500 is a better, cooler, chip for only a few dollars more and is a drop-in replacement for a P2. Celerons are cheap and plentiful. You can get a much better chip for about the same price.
This is why 5x86's (actually just pimped-out 486's) are still being made, but the PII is on it's way out.