There is a huge gap between claiming you have evidence that hormones affect motivations and claiming that you have evidence that there is an endocrinological difference between males and females that has a measurable affect on whether they will be motivated to enter a computer science program.
It is akin to claiming that the discovery of a new species of tiny shrew deep in the wilds of Nambia shows that there are Bigfoots roaming the forests of Washington.
If you are just making the claim that women are motivated differently than men without regard to the REASON for their motivation, then why did you respond to my post in the first place, since such a claim is not contradictory to anything I wrote?
I do not want to misrepresent your viewpoint or to have a discussion where we are talking around eachother, so please clarify:
1) Do you believe there is conclusive evidence that artificial factors (e.g. cultural, social, economic, et cetera) engender the differences in measured motivations to enter computer science, at least in part?
2) Do you believe there is conclusive evidence that natural factors (i.e. congenital, morphological differences between men and women) must be responsible in whole or in part for differences in motivation in entering computer science?
If your answer to the first question is "yes" and the second question is "no", then we do not disagree.
If your answers differ, then please identify exactly what positive claim you are making in contradiction to the above questions and what your evidence is for it.
1. The rules for debit cards are pretty similar for credit cards. The difference is, since the debit card is linked to your checking account, the money is usually gone (and sometimes the entire checking account is frozen) until the dispute is resolved.
2. I would be surprised if BoA let you dispute a check transaction without charging your account during the resolution process. Usually, banks refuse to put the disputed amount back into your checking account until the dispute process is resolved. If someone fraudulently withdraws $10,000 from your checking account, it is rare for the bank to say, "okay, we'll put the $10,000 back into your account while we investigate."
None of those studies you cite properly control for social and cultural factors.
I asked you to give me a PROPER CITATION (I'm pretty sure a "real" scientist knows how to do this) to the BEST study showing that women are less NATURALLY capable or interested in science absent CULTURAL, SOCIAL, and ARTIFICIAL factors.
None of the studies you referenced properly controlled for artificial factors.
Surly if there actually existed compelling scientific evidence to support the claim that women are less likely to succeed or enter computer science absent any artificial barriers, you could cite one good study to show this to be true.
So, the data gathered by universities as part of federally-mandated programs to track graduation and enrollment demographics is "subjective", "not science", and "propaganda"?
Did the computer science graduation rate among women decline these last three decades because of social and cultural factors that acted as barriers, or did they decline because women born in 1980s or 1990s are morphologically different than women born in 1960s or 1970s? Because the data tends to show quite clearly that there were artificial barriers, not natural barriers, that increased during these time frames.
Studies showing that, "women are motivated by different things to men [sic]," is not logically equivalent to your claim that, " physiological differences naturally make women less inclined in going into a STEM field." You are moving the goalposts. Are you going to stick to your original statement or are you going to admit that you cannot provide conclusive scientific evidence to support it?
As for the science demonstrating the existence of artificial factors, this very article contains them. Without even going to the peer reviewed analysis, let us look at the raw data. The participation of women in computer science programs has declined precipitously since the mid 1980's. There are only two possible explanations:
1) A change in artificial factors. 2) A change in natural factors.
Now, for there to be a change in natural factors, then women born in 1970 would have to have had significant natural differences to women born in 1950. The same thing would have to be true of women born in 1970 compared to women born in 1990. These natural differences would have to manifest themselves in some kind of physiological change.
So, is there evidence of this physiological difference? Of course not. That alone does not completely disprove the "nature" hypothesis, but it is a pretty good starting point. If the primary factor was natural, then we should also see a decline in participation of women in fields highly similar to computer science: pure and applied mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, et cetera (in fact, these were the departments that typically awareded CS degrees before they had their own degree programs).
So do we see such a decline? Absolutely not. In fact, we see the exact opposite: more participation of women in these fields relative to men.
So we have clear evidence of the existence of an artificial barrier, just by looking at the data and engaging our brains a little. This must lead to the conclusion that artificial barriers for women entering CS do exist, and by Bayesian statistics, if one barrier is proven to exist (the one that has driven women out of CS since 1980), it greatly increases the probability that other barriers exist as well.
On the other hand, we have still seen no compelling evidence of natural barriers to women entering computer science.
Now, if you want a peer reviewed publication, I will give you one, not because it is an excellent study (actually, it is not even an evidential study), but because it cites a number of good papers and studies, so you can use the bibliography as a starting point.
Eric S. Roberts, Marina Kassianidou, and Lilly Irani. 2002. Encouraging women in computer science. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 2 (June 2002), 84-88.
1) Women are naturally less capable of competing against men in the CS field because of physiological differences between men and women. 2) Women are naturally less inclined to enter those fields completely independent of any artificial factor (culture, economics, social) because of physiological differences between men and women.
Controlling for artificial factors is very difficult, which makes it unlikely that any study can actually show a clear, natural, physiological difference. Of course, the apologists will ignore the fact that they cannot produce conclusive data showing women are naturally less inclined or capable, so they will just adopt the logical fallacies of shifting the burden of proof (like you did) or argument from ignorance.
Conversely, there are a number of studies showing clear artificial barriers for women in CS, so the science clearly shows that the gender difference is at least partially due to culture and society.
The article is not about computer programming. It is about Computer Science.
Also, Computer Science degrees are a good predictor for female programmers because, unlike the other routes to get into programming (and it should be noted programming is not the primary focus of most CS degrees and many advanced CS degrees may be granted without having written a line of code), the requirements have been fairly consistent since the 1970s and the demographics of the graduates are well-documented.
1. Ignore the peer revied data that is easily available and quite clearly shows a number of artificial cultural barriers to women in Computer Science because you have not "seen" it (Argument from Personal Incredulity Logical Fallacy).
2. Proceed to base your conclusions on your own anecdotes rather than the copious amounts of scientific research that have actually been done on this subject (hasty generalization logical fallacy)
To the best of my knowledge, the preeminent "feminist" theory is that there are social and economic barriers (i.e. artificial barriers) to women in the field. The peer reviewed data seems to show a number of clear artificial factors that do act as barriers to women entering and succeeding in the field.
To the best of my knowledge, the preeminent misogynist theory is that women are born with physiological differences that make them naturally less inclined toward the field. There is no clear peer reviewed data showing this is true.
The misogynist defense mechanism is either to find some gross beliefs among feminists that is absurd or obviously untrue and use it as a straw man or to make the argument from ignorance fallacy and support nature as the primary causal factor because nobody has disproved it and there exist some number of hypotheses (none of which have clearly been demonstrated true) to support it.
There is a difference between American women being more interested in perusing a field and women in general being "naturally" more interested in a field. For women to be naturally less interested in it would imply that they are born with some kind of physiological difference that makes them less likely to decide to pursue the field.
If I were to say that women are naturally more interested in nursing children than men, I think I could back it up with some pretty good data (mainly the fact that most men cannot naturally lactate). So far, I have not seen any good data showing that women are naturally less inclined toward the computer sciences. I have seen good data showing that there are cultural, economic, and other artificially created barriers.
So the boxes describe reality based on a sample size of eight women you may have known?
I'm thinking by CS you mean Communications Studies because I'm pretty sure most Computer Science degrees require a semester of Calculus-based statistics.
Except for the fact that when you dispute a transaction on a credit card, the worst thing that happens to you is that your card may be frozen or the line of credit may be reduced by the disputed amount.
When you dispute a check or a debit transaction, your money is gone until the dispute is resolved and the bank may freeze all of your accounts during the investigative process, meaning you may essentially have no access to the money in your checking or savings account for a month or more.
Too bad it is such a pain to actually get *NIX software installed and running on OS-X.
You can poke fun at the stability of the Linux desktop all you want, but Linux package management for distro-managed libraries is a breeze. On OS-X it is like pulling teeth from a hungry tiger.
That is a fact too. Linux also works much better as a *NIX development environment and you can run it on pretty much any hardware you already have.
Also, just as a hardware point of comparison, a Mac Mini is almost 200% more expensive than a compatible Intel NUC and about infinite times less upgradable.
Sure, a hammer without a handle can, with enough work, do pretty much any job a proper hammer can do, but it is a pain in the tukis. And, you can always take the time to build a proper handle for the broken hammer, at which point the tool is no longer crippled, but that does not change the fact that you were given the hammer in a crippled state.
OS-X as Unix is a similar situation. Given enough work, you can get tools designed for Unix to run on any system, including Windows. The question is, how much trouble do you want to go through? Compared to Linux, Mac package managers for Unix-like tools are pretty pathetic. They are difficult to install, difficult to use, and even when they do work, they are cumbersome.
Take my experience installing a simple program, the KDE text editor KATE.
KDE provides binary installation packages for Windows. Getting them installed and getting Kate up and running was relatively painless. You did not even need to install a Unix-like environment such as CYGWIN.
On Ubuntu, you can install KATE with a simple "apt-get install" command. All the dependencies are correctly handled and the program just works.
On OS-X, getting FINK running took at least an hour. It took hours to figure out how to properly install KATE (unlike Windows and Linux, the dependencies were not handled automatically). Then, once I finally got everything downloaded, it took hours to build on a 12-core system. After building, it still did not work. After several more hours Googling to figure out why, I just gave up and suggested getting rid of OS-X and installing Linux or Windows.
OS-X is a hammer without a handle. It technically still is Unix, just like a hammer-head technically is a hammer. It is just badly crippled and requires inordinate amounts of research, trial and error, or experience to use as a proper Unix box.
No, it is not a "survey conducted by Gallup." It is an article about a Gallup phone survey whose results you misrepresented.
Your cognitive dissonance is just incredible. Juxtapose one survey of women in one country that shows that 61% of women prefer female bosses or do not prefer bosses of one gender or another with your statement that, "it's quite clear women prefer male bosses." In fact, the survey shows that, among those surveyed, the majority of women did not prefer male bosses.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around the enormity of the chasm between your evidence and your conclusion.
That's one of the most frustrating things about OSX, is that they try to make it as difficult as possible to actually make meaningful modifications to your system.
Microsoft isn't quite as libertine as Linux's, "if you don't like our billion options, then compile your own version of KDE or Gnome," (unless you are the US government or another big contract holder with access to MS source code), but it has always been power-user and system-administrator friendly by giving straightforward tools to micro-manage system settings that were just a step or two behind the "friendly" interface.
We'll see if that changes in Windows 10. I doubt it, but you never know.
Yeah, until I learned that you can just go straight to the traditional control panel interface and skip through the tablet-PC nonsense.
I don't know that the old way is necessarily "better" from a user-interface point of view, but certainly long-time windows power users and system administrators prefer it and it seems very contrary to Microsoft's philosophy of "legacy-forever" to remove it completely.
Ignorance means "lack of knowledge". If you are claiming that my views are based on lack of knowledge about recent builds of Linux desktop, then you are claiming that I am ignorant and that my opinion is based upon ignorance.
Everyone has different sets of knowledge and experience. Rather than actually trying to learn about mine (such as asking, "what experience do you base you opinions upon") you summarily concluded that my opinion must be based upon my ignorance. It is profound superciliousness to believe that the only possible explanation for someone having a different opinion than you is their ignorance, especially when you have not even bothered to explore the basis of their opinion.
As for VMWARE, I think they are one of the few companies that produce VM software which fully supports 3D acceleration. The primary problem I had was related to newer builds of KDE working correctly with VMware's Open-GL drivers (for things such as desktop effects). It also seems to have some trouble in other Linux applications which use 3D acceleration. I don't really think the problem is on the driver end, since VMware provides the proper drivers. The problem is on the open-source community doing quality-assurance testing to ensure the drivers work properly, which is somewhat understandable, because it is not like Microsoft, which has the money to do proper quality-assurance for VMware's drivers and only has a handful of Windows configurations to support. Other visualization environments such as Virtual Box and Microsoft's Hypervisor have limited or only experimental support for full 3D acceleration, so I don't think it would be such an issue since Linux simply won't use 3D acceleration if it is not available in the virtualized environment.
I tend to agree with you about OS-X, but it is widely used in certain fields of science and most of them seem to like it just fine, so even though I prefer a combination of Windows and Linux, I also know that I am in the minority and I understand why most users prefer OS-X, even though there is a steep curve to actually get it set up properly for technical and scientific computing, but once you get it set up, you have a single environment that can run not only open source, but a big chunk of the most popular commercial software (Word, Excel, Outlook, Onenote, Mathematica, Matlab, IDL, Photoshop, and quite a few other major commercial programs).
Yes, the only possible explanation for me having an opinion that differs from you is that I am ignorant.
As a matter of fact, I have extensively used and continue to use Linux. Every time I have tried to setup Linux as a desktop environment, it has been extremely problematic. Kubuntu, for instance, will not even properly initialize the graphics drivers for my laptop, so it is completely unusable. In the past, any desktop installation of Linux I have created suffered from serious driver and stability problems compared to Windows.
As a result, I do most of my Linux work through SSHing into a Linux server from Windows. When that is insufficient, I have a Linux VM that I use. Luckily, the VM drivers are well-supported by Linux (unlike real hardware), but even still, getting KDE working properly under VMWARE took hours of research and tweaking (and it still is not 100% stable compared to running Windows in a VM).
On my laptop, I installed CYGWIN as an alternative. It has support for most of the basic open source packages that I use out of the box and the more esoteric tools are not usually much harder to install under CYGWIN than they are under Linux (and interestingly enough, the KDE development environment was much easier to install under Windows than OS-X).
Even though Linux is ostensibly easier to get open source software set up on than OSX, when I was in school, most of my professors had switched to OSX (even those that held out for a while using separate Windows and Solaris boxes) for their workstations and laptops, because the overall ease of use of OS-X compared to Linux is worth the pain it takes to get open-source packages set-up properly, plus it can run a large percentage of the most popular commercial scientific and business applications that Windows can.
I'm not an OS-X fan, but I completely understand why it beats Linux so handedly these days as an end-user technical computing environment for academic research (obviously, other than some Windows servers to handle email and whatnot and a handful of institutions that have switched to Windows high performance computing clusters, Linux is gaining grounds as environments for distributed computing or centralized servers).
Um, that is not a "study" you linked to. It is an article about an anonymous survey which shows that 39% of women surveyed prefer male bosses and 61% prefer women or don't care. Your source does not even back-up your conclusion. A minority of women in one anonymous phone survey preferred male bosses.
And there are thousands of nightmare tales about all male workplaces (just ask anyone who has served in the military).
Even if you don't, you should be able to download it and install it as a theme. Windows is pretty customizable. The desktop effects are under advanced computer properties and the theme is under personalization. You can also turn Aero glass off in the power management menu.
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There is a huge gap between claiming you have evidence that hormones affect motivations and claiming that you have evidence that there is an endocrinological difference between males and females that has a measurable affect on whether they will be motivated to enter a computer science program.
It is akin to claiming that the discovery of a new species of tiny shrew deep in the wilds of Nambia shows that there are Bigfoots roaming the forests of Washington.
If you are just making the claim that women are motivated differently than men without regard to the REASON for their motivation, then why did you respond to my post in the first place, since such a claim is not contradictory to anything I wrote?
I do not want to misrepresent your viewpoint or to have a discussion where we are talking around eachother, so please clarify:
1) Do you believe there is conclusive evidence that artificial factors (e.g. cultural, social, economic, et cetera) engender the differences in measured motivations to enter computer science, at least in part?
2) Do you believe there is conclusive evidence that natural factors (i.e. congenital, morphological differences between men and women) must be responsible in whole or in part for differences in motivation in entering computer science?
If your answer to the first question is "yes" and the second question is "no", then we do not disagree.
If your answers differ, then please identify exactly what positive claim you are making in contradiction to the above questions and what your evidence is for it.
1. The rules for debit cards are pretty similar for credit cards. The difference is, since the debit card is linked to your checking account, the money is usually gone (and sometimes the entire checking account is frozen) until the dispute is resolved.
2. I would be surprised if BoA let you dispute a check transaction without charging your account during the resolution process. Usually, banks refuse to put the disputed amount back into your checking account until the dispute process is resolved. If someone fraudulently withdraws $10,000 from your checking account, it is rare for the bank to say, "okay, we'll put the $10,000 back into your account while we investigate."
I had a friend who had, at age five, disproved the existence of black people by growing up in an all-white town in the Ukraine.
None of those studies you cite properly control for social and cultural factors.
I asked you to give me a PROPER CITATION (I'm pretty sure a "real" scientist knows how to do this) to the BEST study showing that women are less NATURALLY capable or interested in science absent CULTURAL, SOCIAL, and ARTIFICIAL factors.
None of the studies you referenced properly controlled for artificial factors.
Surly if there actually existed compelling scientific evidence to support the claim that women are less likely to succeed or enter computer science absent any artificial barriers, you could cite one good study to show this to be true.
So, the data gathered by universities as part of federally-mandated programs to track graduation and enrollment demographics is "subjective", "not science", and "propaganda"?
Did the computer science graduation rate among women decline these last three decades because of social and cultural factors that acted as barriers, or did they decline because women born in 1980s or 1990s are morphologically different than women born in 1960s or 1970s? Because the data tends to show quite clearly that there were artificial barriers, not natural barriers, that increased during these time frames.
Studies showing that, "women are motivated by different things to men [sic]," is not logically equivalent to your claim that, " physiological differences naturally make women less inclined in going into a STEM field." You are moving the goalposts. Are you going to stick to your original statement or are you going to admit that you cannot provide conclusive scientific evidence to support it?
As for the science demonstrating the existence of artificial factors, this very article contains them. Without even going to the peer reviewed analysis, let us look at the raw data. The participation of women in computer science programs has declined precipitously since the mid 1980's. There are only two possible explanations:
1) A change in artificial factors.
2) A change in natural factors.
Now, for there to be a change in natural factors, then women born in 1970 would have to have had significant natural differences to women born in 1950. The same thing would have to be true of women born in 1970 compared to women born in 1990. These natural differences would have to manifest themselves in some kind of physiological change.
So, is there evidence of this physiological difference? Of course not. That alone does not completely disprove the "nature" hypothesis, but it is a pretty good starting point. If the primary factor was natural, then we should also see a decline in participation of women in fields highly similar to computer science: pure and applied mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, et cetera (in fact, these were the departments that typically awareded CS degrees before they had their own degree programs).
So do we see such a decline? Absolutely not. In fact, we see the exact opposite: more participation of women in these fields relative to men.
So we have clear evidence of the existence of an artificial barrier, just by looking at the data and engaging our brains a little. This must lead to the conclusion that artificial barriers for women entering CS do exist, and by Bayesian statistics, if one barrier is proven to exist (the one that has driven women out of CS since 1980), it greatly increases the probability that other barriers exist as well.
On the other hand, we have still seen no compelling evidence of natural barriers to women entering computer science.
Now, if you want a peer reviewed publication, I will give you one, not because it is an excellent study (actually, it is not even an evidential study), but because it cites a number of good papers and studies, so you can use the bibliography as a starting point.
Eric S. Roberts, Marina Kassianidou, and Lilly Irani. 2002. Encouraging women in computer science. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 2 (June 2002), 84-88.
Google is not a peer-reviewed study.
I would ask you to post the best study showing:
1) Women are naturally less capable of competing against men in the CS field because of physiological differences between men and women.
2) Women are naturally less inclined to enter those fields completely independent of any artificial factor (culture, economics, social) because of physiological differences between men and women.
Controlling for artificial factors is very difficult, which makes it unlikely that any study can actually show a clear, natural, physiological difference. Of course, the apologists will ignore the fact that they cannot produce conclusive data showing women are naturally less inclined or capable, so they will just adopt the logical fallacies of shifting the burden of proof (like you did) or argument from ignorance.
Conversely, there are a number of studies showing clear artificial barriers for women in CS, so the science clearly shows that the gender difference is at least partially due to culture and society.
The article is not about computer programming. It is about Computer Science.
Also, Computer Science degrees are a good predictor for female programmers because, unlike the other routes to get into programming (and it should be noted programming is not the primary focus of most CS degrees and many advanced CS degrees may be granted without having written a line of code), the requirements have been fairly consistent since the 1970s and the demographics of the graduates are well-documented.
1. Ignore the peer revied data that is easily available and quite clearly shows a number of artificial cultural barriers to women in Computer Science because you have not "seen" it (Argument from Personal Incredulity Logical Fallacy).
2. Proceed to base your conclusions on your own anecdotes rather than the copious amounts of scientific research that have actually been done on this subject (hasty generalization logical fallacy)
To the best of my knowledge, the preeminent "feminist" theory is that there are social and economic barriers (i.e. artificial barriers) to women in the field. The peer reviewed data seems to show a number of clear artificial factors that do act as barriers to women entering and succeeding in the field.
To the best of my knowledge, the preeminent misogynist theory is that women are born with physiological differences that make them naturally less inclined toward the field. There is no clear peer reviewed data showing this is true.
The misogynist defense mechanism is either to find some gross beliefs among feminists that is absurd or obviously untrue and use it as a straw man or to make the argument from ignorance fallacy and support nature as the primary causal factor because nobody has disproved it and there exist some number of hypotheses (none of which have clearly been demonstrated true) to support it.
There is a difference between American women being more interested in perusing a field and women in general being "naturally" more interested in a field. For women to be naturally less interested in it would imply that they are born with some kind of physiological difference that makes them less likely to decide to pursue the field.
If I were to say that women are naturally more interested in nursing children than men, I think I could back it up with some pretty good data (mainly the fact that most men cannot naturally lactate). So far, I have not seen any good data showing that women are naturally less inclined toward the computer sciences. I have seen good data showing that there are cultural, economic, and other artificially created barriers.
So the boxes describe reality based on a sample size of eight women you may have known?
I'm thinking by CS you mean Communications Studies because I'm pretty sure most Computer Science degrees require a semester of Calculus-based statistics.
Except for the fact that when you dispute a transaction on a credit card, the worst thing that happens to you is that your card may be frozen or the line of credit may be reduced by the disputed amount.
When you dispute a check or a debit transaction, your money is gone until the dispute is resolved and the bank may freeze all of your accounts during the investigative process, meaning you may essentially have no access to the money in your checking or savings account for a month or more.
Too bad it is such a pain to actually get *NIX software installed and running on OS-X.
You can poke fun at the stability of the Linux desktop all you want, but Linux package management for distro-managed libraries is a breeze. On OS-X it is like pulling teeth from a hungry tiger.
That is a fact too. Linux also works much better as a *NIX development environment and you can run it on pretty much any hardware you already have.
Also, just as a hardware point of comparison, a Mac Mini is almost 200% more expensive than a compatible Intel NUC and about infinite times less upgradable.
Sure, a hammer without a handle can, with enough work, do pretty much any job a proper hammer can do, but it is a pain in the tukis. And, you can always take the time to build a proper handle for the broken hammer, at which point the tool is no longer crippled, but that does not change the fact that you were given the hammer in a crippled state.
OS-X as Unix is a similar situation. Given enough work, you can get tools designed for Unix to run on any system, including Windows. The question is, how much trouble do you want to go through? Compared to Linux, Mac package managers for Unix-like tools are pretty pathetic. They are difficult to install, difficult to use, and even when they do work, they are cumbersome.
Take my experience installing a simple program, the KDE text editor KATE.
KDE provides binary installation packages for Windows. Getting them installed and getting Kate up and running was relatively painless. You did not even need to install a Unix-like environment such as CYGWIN.
On Ubuntu, you can install KATE with a simple "apt-get install" command. All the dependencies are correctly handled and the program just works.
On OS-X, getting FINK running took at least an hour. It took hours to figure out how to properly install KATE (unlike Windows and Linux, the dependencies were not handled automatically). Then, once I finally got everything downloaded, it took hours to build on a 12-core system. After building, it still did not work. After several more hours Googling to figure out why, I just gave up and suggested getting rid of OS-X and installing Linux or Windows.
OS-X is a hammer without a handle. It technically still is Unix, just like a hammer-head technically is a hammer. It is just badly crippled and requires inordinate amounts of research, trial and error, or experience to use as a proper Unix box.
No, it is not a "survey conducted by Gallup." It is an article about a Gallup phone survey whose results you misrepresented.
Your cognitive dissonance is just incredible. Juxtapose one survey of women in one country that shows that 61% of women prefer female bosses or do not prefer bosses of one gender or another with your statement that, "it's quite clear women prefer male bosses." In fact, the survey shows that, among those surveyed, the majority of women did not prefer male bosses.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around the enormity of the chasm between your evidence and your conclusion.
That's one of the most frustrating things about OSX, is that they try to make it as difficult as possible to actually make meaningful modifications to your system.
Microsoft isn't quite as libertine as Linux's, "if you don't like our billion options, then compile your own version of KDE or Gnome," (unless you are the US government or another big contract holder with access to MS source code), but it has always been power-user and system-administrator friendly by giving straightforward tools to micro-manage system settings that were just a step or two behind the "friendly" interface.
We'll see if that changes in Windows 10. I doubt it, but you never know.
Yeah, until I learned that you can just go straight to the traditional control panel interface and skip through the tablet-PC nonsense.
I don't know that the old way is necessarily "better" from a user-interface point of view, but certainly long-time windows power users and system administrators prefer it and it seems very contrary to Microsoft's philosophy of "legacy-forever" to remove it completely.
Ignorance means "lack of knowledge". If you are claiming that my views are based on lack of knowledge about recent builds of Linux desktop, then you are claiming that I am ignorant and that my opinion is based upon ignorance.
Everyone has different sets of knowledge and experience. Rather than actually trying to learn about mine (such as asking, "what experience do you base you opinions upon") you summarily concluded that my opinion must be based upon my ignorance. It is profound superciliousness to believe that the only possible explanation for someone having a different opinion than you is their ignorance, especially when you have not even bothered to explore the basis of their opinion.
As for VMWARE, I think they are one of the few companies that produce VM software which fully supports 3D acceleration. The primary problem I had was related to newer builds of KDE working correctly with VMware's Open-GL drivers (for things such as desktop effects). It also seems to have some trouble in other Linux applications which use 3D acceleration. I don't really think the problem is on the driver end, since VMware provides the proper drivers. The problem is on the open-source community doing quality-assurance testing to ensure the drivers work properly, which is somewhat understandable, because it is not like Microsoft, which has the money to do proper quality-assurance for VMware's drivers and only has a handful of Windows configurations to support. Other visualization environments such as Virtual Box and Microsoft's Hypervisor have limited or only experimental support for full 3D acceleration, so I don't think it would be such an issue since Linux simply won't use 3D acceleration if it is not available in the virtualized environment.
I tend to agree with you about OS-X, but it is widely used in certain fields of science and most of them seem to like it just fine, so even though I prefer a combination of Windows and Linux, I also know that I am in the minority and I understand why most users prefer OS-X, even though there is a steep curve to actually get it set up properly for technical and scientific computing, but once you get it set up, you have a single environment that can run not only open source, but a big chunk of the most popular commercial software (Word, Excel, Outlook, Onenote, Mathematica, Matlab, IDL, Photoshop, and quite a few other major commercial programs).
Yes, the only possible explanation for me having an opinion that differs from you is that I am ignorant.
As a matter of fact, I have extensively used and continue to use Linux. Every time I have tried to setup Linux as a desktop environment, it has been extremely problematic. Kubuntu, for instance, will not even properly initialize the graphics drivers for my laptop, so it is completely unusable. In the past, any desktop installation of Linux I have created suffered from serious driver and stability problems compared to Windows.
As a result, I do most of my Linux work through SSHing into a Linux server from Windows. When that is insufficient, I have a Linux VM that I use. Luckily, the VM drivers are well-supported by Linux (unlike real hardware), but even still, getting KDE working properly under VMWARE took hours of research and tweaking (and it still is not 100% stable compared to running Windows in a VM).
On my laptop, I installed CYGWIN as an alternative. It has support for most of the basic open source packages that I use out of the box and the more esoteric tools are not usually much harder to install under CYGWIN than they are under Linux (and interestingly enough, the KDE development environment was much easier to install under Windows than OS-X).
Even though Linux is ostensibly easier to get open source software set up on than OSX, when I was in school, most of my professors had switched to OSX (even those that held out for a while using separate Windows and Solaris boxes) for their workstations and laptops, because the overall ease of use of OS-X compared to Linux is worth the pain it takes to get open-source packages set-up properly, plus it can run a large percentage of the most popular commercial scientific and business applications that Windows can.
I'm not an OS-X fan, but I completely understand why it beats Linux so handedly these days as an end-user technical computing environment for academic research (obviously, other than some Windows servers to handle email and whatnot and a handful of institutions that have switched to Windows high performance computing clusters, Linux is gaining grounds as environments for distributed computing or centralized servers).
Most of the Linux desktop evangelists have quietly switched to OSX or sewn their lips shut. There are still a few of them around.
The Steambox is coming out next year though, so that's something.
Also, when everything is working correctly, the Linux desktop is actually a pretty pleasant experience these days, so there's always that.
Um, that is not a "study" you linked to. It is an article about an anonymous survey which shows that 39% of women surveyed prefer male bosses and 61% prefer women or don't care. Your source does not even back-up your conclusion. A minority of women in one anonymous phone survey preferred male bosses.
And there are thousands of nightmare tales about all male workplaces (just ask anyone who has served in the military).
Even if you don't, you should be able to download it and install it as a theme. Windows is pretty customizable. The desktop effects are under advanced computer properties and the theme is under personalization. You can also turn Aero glass off in the power management menu.