The first thing I thought of when I read Wagner was the popular brand of jeans.
There was/are gender predictors out there that will look through your search history and try to predict what gender you are. They were mildly successful (though dead wrong in my case). I think I prefer Google's more invasive yet more accurate method of paying attention to which results I click on and giving me more of the same without regard to gender or age. I DO like getting local results though.
As far as women vs woman goes... tsk! just think, "would I use man or men here?", and then add a wo onto the front of it, its not that hard.
funny, all three dell laptops I've bought (from the outlet) with ubuntu have come partitioned for windows, but blanked out without any OS at all. Since they were netbooks, there wasn't even a disk drive to put the two-year-old ubuntu in the thing.
I got them for an unbeatable price, and it's no trouble for me to install another OS on it, but I have to wonder what a non-tech would have done. Probably returned it.
yes... which puts the menus UNDERNEATH the back arrows and the address bar. wow, it looks like crap, and is annoying to use.
Then, they added the shortcut buttons (home, page, tools, RSS, etc) to the right of where the tabs go. What's the use of adding tab support if you're going to cut the tab space in half?
And, one more thing while I'm ranting - what's up with the "call home" connecting that IE 7 and 8 do when they start up? I expect to be able to use my browser as soon as it opens, not be locked out while it looks for updates or loads extensions or whatever else it might be doing.
I sort of agree, I can't stand the new interfaces for 7 or 8... but I also can't use IE6 since it's not secure... enter Firefox and Chrome. You can get a Firefox theme that makes it look like IE6 if that's really what floats your boat.
I had a funny moment yesterday - while teaching an 86 year old lady how to use a computer, she accidentally clicked on the search icon in windows explorer. The little search-pup appeared, and she looked at it quizzically... When I showed her how to close the search panel, she said:
"oh, thank you. Good riddance."
Microsoft (and all the other OS companies) really need to determine their target demographic. It seems like everyone is shifting toward designing for the computer illiterate - removing "confusing" features, and replacing all the text with pictures.
I've been teaching Word processing to a whole slew of new computer users - and there is a certain sector who always push the new file icon rather than the file menu, when I tell them to click the file menu. These are the people who inspired the "office bubble" rather than a real menu.
This is one of the problems with America these days, people just want sound bites and could care less about facts surrounding a situation.
sure - but it's unlikely that you'll get relevant facts out of your average newspaper. -- which is why I hardly ever click to read the actual article - most newspaper journalists either can't write, or don't know what they are talking about. I only click one out of every 10 slashdot stories... that's only 10% - and I actually care about the topics.
Ignoring the fact that they've come along way in both securing the browser and supporting standards shows nothing they do would make you happy.
Yes, they have come a long way, but they're really just at the starting line, and about 3 years behind. It has nothing to do with Open Source or not. Chrome, Safari and Opera are all great browsers compared to IE8. Yay! they have CSS2 support.... oh, so has everyone else, and they're already working through CSS3. It makes IE8 look simplistic. Add to that the annoying UI for XP users -- if you turn on the file menus, you can't move them above the address line / back and forward buttons - WTH? There's no reason for that. AND it's slow staring up for some reason - I feel like it's dialing home every time I start it up. It should do that discreetly (or not at all) when I am waiting for something else to load, rather than forcing me to wait before I can start my browsing. I can start up IE8, then start up Firefox AND Chrome and get them to do a web search before IE8 is ready to go. Bleh. This has nothing to do with being a fan of linux or open source, it has do do with wanting a browser that works.
If I remember right, (some) Editors (the human kind that edit manuscripts) prefer monospaced fonts for exactly the same reason - they can catch errors much easier.
I typically use the font 'Monospace' although I'm not particularly attached to it.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers
Was that before or after they bought a Kindle? I'll bet you the type of people who would buy an ebook reader in the first place were already much more likely to buy books than other customers.
There are really two questions being discussed here, the question of format and the question of ownership. Cory Doctrow is only talking about the question of ownership, but I think both questions are interesting.
I am a total bibliophile, I have shelves lining all the available space in my tiny apartment. The feel of a physical book.. the pages under my fingers... it's all part of the experience. But, when it comes right down to it, it is the story, and the content that is the most important. I have an even larger number of books on my computer as.txt or.pdf files. I own these books, and they are 'physical' just as much as a regular book is. I can pass these down to my children, I can lend them out, I can give them away... I can also make an unhindered number of copies if I want to. And, in fact many of the electronic books I own have been downloaded from some site or another and are illegal to own.
Eventually, they will make ebook readers that are bound in leather, and are an artifact in and of themselves, rather than feeling like a stiff piece of plastic. I own a Kindle, and for the most part I'm pretty happy. It lets me read my electronic books in a more convenient way. Plus, free wireless:-)
Now, the other question, that of book ownership, is a huge deal. The first question is a matter of preference, and no one cares which way you like to read your books (well, they might care, but it's not really their business). Adding DRM to a book is to deny you complete ownership. If I buy a copy of a physical book, I can photocopy it, and then bind it up to make it into another copy. I just have to pay for the paper. There are devices that will let you do this very quickly and efficiently. Creating duplicate digital copies is much easier, but it is the same principle. Before this, book publishers just banked on the majority of their readers to be too lazy to go to all that trouble, and they would only loose a small percentage of sales. But, now that it is so easy anyone can do it in seconds, they are afraid that the percentage of people who won't go and buy a copy will skyrocket.
To solve this problem, they have tried to limit that facet of ownership, but in doing so they have also limited a large number of other ownership rights, for example the right to lend an item to another person, the right to pass down a copy to a relative, and the right to not have to worry that it will disappear if the company who sold it to you goes out of business. Some of these problems have been addressed, but the idea remains that you do not actually own the book that you purchased (or game, or movie, or song, or operating system, or whatever).
If this did go though, it would introduce all of the NPR folks to a concept they may never had considered before... 'Free' use of computers.
But, I think anyone who has heard both Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman both speak knows that Stallman is the heart behind the movement, and Linus is the one who constantly does that last bit and makes sure it actually works.
Really, they both deserve to get a peace prize, since neither of them would be where they are today without the other. I would suggest that it be given to Stallman/Linus as an entity, rather than to either of them individually. Then, Linus can drop Stallman's name off of his medal.
Okay, seriously. What is the big deal when MS gains 2% over what they had a couple of months ago? 10% to 80% should not be called "significant market share".
For fun, let's compare last year's market share for October to this year's stats:
Either way, there is little difference between this year's share and last year's. Nothing to even talk about.
Besides all of this, every web developer knows (or should know) that the market share is very different from site to site. On a few of the sites I run, Google's share varies from 80% to 90% (not tech sites, fyi, small town businesses)
I'm calling Troll on this whole article. And, looking up at all the fan boys, it's worked.
In modern English, there are about one million words. In JAVA, there are at most around a thousand. It's possible to have learned to spell all the words used in JAVA and yet still not be able to spell *very well* in English.
I will admit that there are some people who can't spell for crap, and they have the same problem with their code - I wasn't inferring that the bad spelling coder who screws up his code doesn't exist! Just that it isn't always the same thing *points to myself*
I agree that a programmer must be anal about details, as one missing character can break your entire program. But, how you write your code matters, how you spell, does not.
If you think of your programing language as just that, another language, it doesn't matter how poorly you understand your native tongue, as long as you can 'spell' with the language you are programing with.
Looking at the tone of the comments is 100% different than looking at their grammar and spelling. It's possible to have disturbing comments in prose... But all that just gives you an idea that there might be something wrong.
I teach computer classes to seniors and other people who have (usually) never turned one on before. When I cover the security section, I try to use analogies to help them understand the threat level and some ways to avoid most of it.
For virus protection, I equate it to a body guard - If you're in a small town, or walking around downtown, you're fine, and the body guard probably won't even be needed. If something did come up, you'd be fine since it would probably be a mugger or a rabid dog, and the body guard would be able to take care of that. Now, if you start wandering around in a mine field, or in the middle of a battle (analogous to visiting warez sites or downloading and running a file someone you didn't know sent you, etc.) no amount of body guards will keep you from dying.
This has really helped impress in my student's minds that it's really still up to them to not do anything stupid, and their anti-virus can't always keep them safe - especially if they are doing something dangerous on purpose.
When the waitress says "If you need anything else, my name is Betty" Joe Random grunts and takes a bite of his meal. Programmer dude wonders what her name is if he doesn't need any thing else.
Only if the programmer dude is:
1) So introverted he never goes to restaurants
2) Has never taken a linguistics course
You're not describing programmers, you're describing shut-ins.
Only true if the Programmer actually believes that. There is a big difference in thinking something and believing it.
The problem presented is similar to the signs you see up at small restaurants advertising what they sell:
Burgers Tuna Shakes
You can read it as "Burgers, Tuna Fish, and Shakes" or you can read it as "Burgers, and Tuna Shakes"
Now, OBVIOUSLY, the sign-writer didn't mean the second one (I hope!). You know this by the context, and that if they DID sell tuna shakes, they wouldn't advertise it. You can figure out what they meant by the context. Now, some signs are actually written incorrectly, so that they can ONLY be read the second, incorrect way. You still KNOW what they meant, even though they got it wrong.
Now, apply this to a normal conversation, where people aren't very careful about what they say, add one super-analytical person, and they will feel compelled to answer the question asked. Depending on the rest of their personality, they will then answer the question as they see it, even though they know this was not what was meant, and they know that the person who asked it was unaware of the incorrect question, OR they could point it out, etc, or they could convert the question in their mind, and then answer it.
Here's a good example of a similar problem.
Person one asks person two: Do you know what time it is? Person two merely answers yes, as person one didn't ask person two to tell them the time. It's just an overly literal interpretation of what they asked. You could answer the question (as above), or you could re-interpret the question and tell them the time. the OP, being an analytical person, used to take the first route, and as a compromise, now tells them, you meant to ask me what time it is, the time is x. It's a first step, and the OP did say that 'he' hoped to someday move to just answering the question as intended by the asker.
Where this really gets ME in trouble is when I feel compelled to produce the "wrong" answer in a test. On one hand, I feel like I should answer the question exactly as it was written, on the other hand, I know full well that they didn't mean to ask the question in an ambiguous way, and I will be marked wrong, even though I was technically correct. Both parts of my psyche fight it out, and depending on how much I care about the test, one of them will win.
I don't know, but I would expect if a crowd was made mostly of women, they would too make sexist jokes, just feminist ones.
yeah... except that we don't. (not the ladies I hang with anyway)
Anyway, it's not SO much the original comments that make *me* angry, it's the idiots that come out of the woodwork denying the fact that there ever could be a problem.
Does anyone know where the 1.5% of FOSS devs are women number comes from? I guess GNU makes people sign papers, so you can't really hide behind a persona, which is what i would do if I were to seriously contribute.
I don't think so - I think they would be happier if the configuration options were 1) easy to find, 2) actually worked 100% of the time, 3) easy to understand what they are for.
From my experience, people like to change things (that's one of the first thing people ask me about when I'm showing them around a computer for the first time), and they like things to make sense. If they want to do something that seems obvious, and they can't, or they are told to use a command line or gconf-editor, OR they change it in the settings, and it doesn't actually change because of a conflict... they get a bit miffed, and rightly so.
There's the fact that you can't edit your screen saver preferences anymore, which really sucks on an older machine where you want the cool screen saver, but need to tone it down so that it doesn't kill your CPU (Flocks, for example).
I'm partial to XFCE, actually - I don't care for KDE all that much.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing I thought of when I read Wagner was the popular brand of jeans.
There was/are gender predictors out there that will look through your search history and try to predict what gender you are. They were mildly successful (though dead wrong in my case). I think I prefer Google's more invasive yet more accurate method of paying attention to which results I click on and giving me more of the same without regard to gender or age. I DO like getting local results though.
As far as women vs woman goes ... tsk! just think, "would I use man or men here?", and then add a wo onto the front of it, its not that hard.
ha! ... if only I had mod points
funny, all three dell laptops I've bought (from the outlet) with ubuntu have come partitioned for windows, but blanked out without any OS at all. Since they were netbooks, there wasn't even a disk drive to put the two-year-old ubuntu in the thing.
I got them for an unbeatable price, and it's no trouble for me to install another OS on it, but I have to wonder what a non-tech would have done. Probably returned it.
Actually - a scythe works surprisingly well for cutting grass.
yes ... which puts the menus UNDERNEATH the back arrows and the address bar. wow, it looks like crap, and is annoying to use.
Then, they added the shortcut buttons (home, page, tools, RSS, etc) to the right of where the tabs go. What's the use of adding tab support if you're going to cut the tab space in half?
And, one more thing while I'm ranting - what's up with the "call home" connecting that IE 7 and 8 do when they start up? I expect to be able to use my browser as soon as it opens, not be locked out while it looks for updates or loads extensions or whatever else it might be doing.
I sort of agree, I can't stand the new interfaces for 7 or 8 ... but I also can't use IE6 since it's not secure... enter Firefox and Chrome. You can get a Firefox theme that makes it look like IE6 if that's really what floats your boat.
I had a funny moment yesterday - while teaching an 86 year old lady how to use a computer, she accidentally clicked on the search icon in windows explorer. The little search-pup appeared, and she looked at it quizzically ... When I showed her how to close the search panel, she said:
"oh, thank you. Good riddance."
Microsoft (and all the other OS companies) really need to determine their target demographic. It seems like everyone is shifting toward designing for the computer illiterate - removing "confusing" features, and replacing all the text with pictures.
I've been teaching Word processing to a whole slew of new computer users - and there is a certain sector who always push the new file icon rather than the file menu, when I tell them to click the file menu. These are the people who inspired the "office bubble" rather than a real menu.
This is one of the problems with America these days, people just want sound bites and could care less about facts surrounding a situation.
sure - but it's unlikely that you'll get relevant facts out of your average newspaper. -- which is why I hardly ever click to read the actual article - most newspaper journalists either can't write, or don't know what they are talking about. I only click one out of every 10 slashdot stories ... that's only 10% - and I actually care about the topics.
Ignoring the fact that they've come along way in both securing the browser and supporting standards shows nothing they do would make you happy.
Yes, they have come a long way, but they're really just at the starting line, and about 3 years behind. It has nothing to do with Open Source or not. Chrome, Safari and Opera are all great browsers compared to IE8. Yay! they have CSS2 support .... oh, so has everyone else, and they're already working through CSS3. It makes IE8 look simplistic. Add to that the annoying UI for XP users -- if you turn on the file menus, you can't move them above the address line / back and forward buttons - WTH? There's no reason for that. AND it's slow staring up for some reason - I feel like it's dialing home every time I start it up. It should do that discreetly (or not at all) when I am waiting for something else to load, rather than forcing me to wait before I can start my browsing. I can start up IE8, then start up Firefox AND Chrome and get them to do a web search before IE8 is ready to go. Bleh. This has nothing to do with being a fan of linux or open source, it has do do with wanting a browser that works.
If I remember right, (some) Editors (the human kind that edit manuscripts) prefer monospaced fonts for exactly the same reason - they can catch errors much easier.
I typically use the font 'Monospace' although I'm not particularly attached to it.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers
Was that before or after they bought a Kindle? I'll bet you the type of people who would buy an ebook reader in the first place were already much more likely to buy books than other customers.
There are really two questions being discussed here, the question of format and the question of ownership. Cory Doctrow is only talking about the question of ownership, but I think both questions are interesting.
I am a total bibliophile, I have shelves lining all the available space in my tiny apartment. The feel of a physical book .. the pages under my fingers ... it's all part of the experience. But, when it comes right down to it, it is the story, and the content that is the most important. I have an even larger number of books on my computer as .txt or .pdf files. I own these books, and they are 'physical' just as much as a regular book is. I can pass these down to my children, I can lend them out, I can give them away ... I can also make an unhindered number of copies if I want to. And, in fact many of the electronic books I own have been downloaded from some site or another and are illegal to own.
Eventually, they will make ebook readers that are bound in leather, and are an artifact in and of themselves, rather than feeling like a stiff piece of plastic. I own a Kindle, and for the most part I'm pretty happy. It lets me read my electronic books in a more convenient way. Plus, free wireless :-)
Now, the other question, that of book ownership, is a huge deal. The first question is a matter of preference, and no one cares which way you like to read your books (well, they might care, but it's not really their business). Adding DRM to a book is to deny you complete ownership. If I buy a copy of a physical book, I can photocopy it, and then bind it up to make it into another copy. I just have to pay for the paper. There are devices that will let you do this very quickly and efficiently. Creating duplicate digital copies is much easier, but it is the same principle. Before this, book publishers just banked on the majority of their readers to be too lazy to go to all that trouble, and they would only loose a small percentage of sales. But, now that it is so easy anyone can do it in seconds, they are afraid that the percentage of people who won't go and buy a copy will skyrocket.
To solve this problem, they have tried to limit that facet of ownership, but in doing so they have also limited a large number of other ownership rights, for example the right to lend an item to another person, the right to pass down a copy to a relative, and the right to not have to worry that it will disappear if the company who sold it to you goes out of business. Some of these problems have been addressed, but the idea remains that you do not actually own the book that you purchased (or game, or movie, or song, or operating system, or whatever).
Just give it to STALLMAN/Linus and pretend that they are one thing.
Personally, I respect Stallman's philosophical approach to the whole thing way more than Linus' business approach.
If this did go though, it would introduce all of the NPR folks to a concept they may never had considered before... 'Free' use of computers.
But, I think anyone who has heard both Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman both speak knows that Stallman is the heart behind the movement, and Linus is the one who constantly does that last bit and makes sure it actually works.
Really, they both deserve to get a peace prize, since neither of them would be where they are today without the other. I would suggest that it be given to Stallman/Linus as an entity, rather than to either of them individually. Then, Linus can drop Stallman's name off of his medal.
Okay, seriously. What is the big deal when MS gains 2% over what they had a couple of months ago? 10% to 80% should not be called "significant market share".
For fun, let's compare last year's market share for October to this year's stats:
Search Engine = 2008 / 2009 ( change )
Google = 82% / 78% ( - 4% )
Yahoo = 11% / 11% ( 0 )
Microsoft = 5% / 7% ( +2% )
I gathered the data from enquisite.com, as it's less suspect to tweaking and skewing than Com Score (shown below)
Search Engine = 2008 / 2009 ( change )
Google = 63% / 65% ( +2 )
Yahoo = 20% / 19% ( -1% )
Microsoft = 8% / 9% ( +1% )
Either way, there is little difference between this year's share and last year's. Nothing to even talk about.
Besides all of this, every web developer knows (or should know) that the market share is very different from site to site. On a few of the sites I run, Google's share varies from 80% to 90% (not tech sites, fyi, small town businesses)
I'm calling Troll on this whole article. And, looking up at all the fan boys, it's worked.
In modern English, there are about one million words. In JAVA, there are at most around a thousand. It's possible to have learned to spell all the words used in JAVA and yet still not be able to spell *very well* in English.
I will admit that there are some people who can't spell for crap, and they have the same problem with their code - I wasn't inferring that the bad spelling coder who screws up his code doesn't exist! Just that it isn't always the same thing *points to myself*
I agree that a programmer must be anal about details, as one missing character can break your entire program. But, how you write your code matters, how you spell, does not.
If you think of your programing language as just that, another language, it doesn't matter how poorly you understand your native tongue, as long as you can 'spell' with the language you are programing with.
Looking at the tone of the comments is 100% different than looking at their grammar and spelling. It's possible to have disturbing comments in prose... But all that just gives you an idea that there might be something wrong.
I teach computer classes to seniors and other people who have (usually) never turned one on before. When I cover the security section, I try to use analogies to help them understand the threat level and some ways to avoid most of it.
For virus protection, I equate it to a body guard - If you're in a small town, or walking around downtown, you're fine, and the body guard probably won't even be needed. If something did come up, you'd be fine since it would probably be a mugger or a rabid dog, and the body guard would be able to take care of that. Now, if you start wandering around in a mine field, or in the middle of a battle (analogous to visiting warez sites or downloading and running a file someone you didn't know sent you, etc.) no amount of body guards will keep you from dying.
This has really helped impress in my student's minds that it's really still up to them to not do anything stupid, and their anti-virus can't always keep them safe - especially if they are doing something dangerous on purpose.
When the waitress says "If you need anything else, my name is Betty" Joe Random grunts and takes a bite of his meal. Programmer dude wonders what her name is if he doesn't need any thing else.
Only if the programmer dude is: 1) So introverted he never goes to restaurants 2) Has never taken a linguistics course
You're not describing programmers, you're describing shut-ins.
Only true if the Programmer actually believes that. There is a big difference in thinking something and believing it.
The problem presented is similar to the signs you see up at small restaurants advertising what they sell:
Burgers Tuna Shakes
You can read it as "Burgers, Tuna Fish, and Shakes" or you can read it as "Burgers, and Tuna Shakes"
Now, OBVIOUSLY, the sign-writer didn't mean the second one (I hope!). You know this by the context, and that if they DID sell tuna shakes, they wouldn't advertise it. You can figure out what they meant by the context. Now, some signs are actually written incorrectly, so that they can ONLY be read the second, incorrect way. You still KNOW what they meant, even though they got it wrong.
Now, apply this to a normal conversation, where people aren't very careful about what they say, add one super-analytical person, and they will feel compelled to answer the question asked. Depending on the rest of their personality, they will then answer the question as they see it, even though they know this was not what was meant, and they know that the person who asked it was unaware of the incorrect question, OR they could point it out, etc, or they could convert the question in their mind, and then answer it.
Here's a good example of a similar problem.
Person one asks person two: Do you know what time it is? Person two merely answers yes, as person one didn't ask person two to tell them the time. It's just an overly literal interpretation of what they asked. You could answer the question (as above), or you could re-interpret the question and tell them the time. the OP, being an analytical person, used to take the first route, and as a compromise, now tells them, you meant to ask me what time it is, the time is x. It's a first step, and the OP did say that 'he' hoped to someday move to just answering the question as intended by the asker.
Where this really gets ME in trouble is when I feel compelled to produce the "wrong" answer in a test. On one hand, I feel like I should answer the question exactly as it was written, on the other hand, I know full well that they didn't mean to ask the question in an ambiguous way, and I will be marked wrong, even though I was technically correct. Both parts of my psyche fight it out, and depending on how much I care about the test, one of them will win.
I don't know, but I would expect if a crowd was made mostly of women, they would too make sexist jokes, just feminist ones.
yeah ... except that we don't. (not the ladies I hang with anyway)
Anyway, it's not SO much the original comments that make *me* angry, it's the idiots that come out of the woodwork denying the fact that there ever could be a problem.
Does anyone know where the 1.5% of FOSS devs are women number comes from? I guess GNU makes people sign papers, so you can't really hide behind a persona, which is what i would do if I were to seriously contribute.
I don't think so - I think they would be happier if the configuration options were 1) easy to find, 2) actually worked 100% of the time, 3) easy to understand what they are for.
From my experience, people like to change things (that's one of the first thing people ask me about when I'm showing them around a computer for the first time), and they like things to make sense. If they want to do something that seems obvious, and they can't, or they are told to use a command line or gconf-editor, OR they change it in the settings, and it doesn't actually change because of a conflict... they get a bit miffed, and rightly so.
There's the fact that you can't edit your screen saver preferences anymore, which really sucks on an older machine where you want the cool screen saver, but need to tone it down so that it doesn't kill your CPU (Flocks, for example). I'm partial to XFCE, actually - I don't care for KDE all that much.