The lack of market pressure is one of the strengths of open source. I've felt for a while that the commercialization of open source isn't a 100% good thing.
I"m not sure it is okay to let people overwork themselves because they expect it. I assume these people might want to start families someday (however much trouble they, as computer people may have with such an activity). However, I don't think they're going to think about this when going for that uber-cool high stress high hours job. While you could argue that they could find a new job once they have a family, I argue that they'll have a hard time having any sort of relationship or social life in the first place (and even in the short term, that's not really that healthy).
That said, I agree with another poster that legislation is not the way to fix things (not that you mentioned it). I leave a viable solution as a problem for the reader.
Can they boost rates or deny insurance to people who have other occupational risks? Lots of occupations increase chances of various risk. For example, lots of jobs make people more prone to back problems. I don't know if they can/do raise insurance in those cases, but I think that the situation is similar.
They claim the school I went to (Harvey Mudd) doesn't provide web pages (I assume student web pages), but students do have space where they could put a web page. I'm not sure why this doesn't count...
What about people who know about it, but don't use the acronym regularly enough to be familiar with it? The full name then conveys more meaning than the acronym.
I have studied media and politics, and what I seem to remember is that people on the left see the media as right leaning and people on the right see the media as left leaning. Furthermore, I seem to remember (this was a couple years ago), that the same often went for a single story. People like to believe the world is against them.
I went to a school where CS majors did year long projects with companies their senior year, and one group was given the task of trying to write software that could do speech to text conversion on a PDA. One of the most interesting things they found out was that PDAs just don't have the processing power to do that yet.
That said, having limited speech regonition for use with applications would be really cool and much more feasible.
What would be really interesting would be if a company could write some sort of API so that developers could add more commands for the applications they develop. Of course, then what do you do when one person decides that "next" is better than "forward" for their application? (I love brainstorming, you don't have to be feasible!)
As I understand it, the market HP is going after isn't the market for people looking for iPods. Those people are still going to buy from Apple. I think the market they are going for is the people who are buying HP computers. HP will be able to offer them an iPod when they buy the computer. This isn't necessarily a bad strategy. About half the people I know who bought iPods bought them because they were buying a Apple laptop anyway. The market they are going for are the people who figure I'm already spending $N already, may as well spend a few hundred more on an iPod, not the people who were going to buy one anyway.
Many of these posts make it sound like "quota people" are abysmally worse at the job they were hired for than the hypothetical white male candidate they disloged. Now, while this may be true in some cases, it shows an inherent assumption that the white male is significantly better than the person where !(M = white && N = male). Now, this seems silly on two counts. If companies were being forced into hiring dramatically less qualified people, something would have been done about it by now. Businesses have money, and money talks.
Secondly, suppose there is a small delta between the skills of hypothetical white male and the hired candidate. In the long run, is a small difference in skill really that big of deal? It seems like the difference between getting 94/100 and 95/100 on an exam, i.e., unimportant.
I understand why people feel upset over this. I don't like quota systems because they make people think others were hired just because of their race or gender. However, the ridiculous inflation of the differences between candidates seems like nothing more than a case of sour grapes to me.
When you say that women should "put up with the insults and the criticism that men receive" you assume that men and women receive equal amounts of insults. They don't. How many jokes do you hear insulting men? Compare that to the number of jokes you hear insulting women. That alone makes women feel inferior.
It is the things that are taken for granted (e.g., calling someone a bitch is not a comment on gender) that are the most harmful. A person can insult men and women in the same way, but that does not make the insult gender neutral. You have to consider why something is an insult. Calling someone a bitch is an insult because it implies a certain kind of female. Thus, it is still sexist.
When women only have to deal with the insults and criticism men have to deal with, your point will be valid, until then, it is irrelevant.
I think the idea is that the what "geek" means to a teenage girl (and probably to a teenage boy) is scary and smelly and unable to interact with people. What else would you expect of teenages? Of course, the ideal would be to change the image of what it means to be a geek, but that is a much harder problem. It is easier to try to convince girls that CS can be fun and cool and hope that they will realize later what being a geek really means.
Women might want men to make sexual advances towards them, but not when they are trying to be taken seriously in the workplace. Trying to make sexual advances at the company picnic or a party is one thing. Trying to make them during a conversation about the company's product or something of that sort is another. The world of computer science should follow the rules of business or academia, not the rules of a social event.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect respect. Not respect of the speaker's ideas, but respect of the speaker as a person. If you or someone else does not even listen to what someone says, how can you judge whether or not what they say deserves respect? If you really don't find what someone says interesting, tell them that (in a respectful manner) instead of rudely ignoring them.
You say women get all the breaks, but you are only considering hiring. Women in technical fields (and other fields I believe, but I'm not in those, so no comment) have a much harder time rising after they are hired. Although we cannot take the numbers literally, you would be amazed at how much the phrase "work twice as hard to get half as far" resonates with most women in the tech field.
As the Graham article posted yesterday pointed out, the best hackers aren't interested in doing something for free unless they have some other source of money (which generally means they have a fortune stored up or another job). If they are a normal person and want to hack on something as a full time job, they won't (can't, really) volunteer to do it for free.
The tradeoff is speed. The random methods do fail to hit a real machine a lot of the time, but generating a random IP is really fast. More complex methods are slower. Thus, you may very well have the same number of successes in the same amount of time even if your hit rate is much lower.
Just because people are intelligent doesn't mean that they have experienced everything. For example, I consider myself an intelligent person, but science is just wacky enough that, as far as I know, a shift in the magnetic field may affect those things or other things that seem equally "silly" to someone who knows about those things. Some people don't know about the affects of a magnetic field flip, some people don't know about computers, some people don't know about the influence of medieval literature on modern government (I certainly don't, but it sounded amusing).
Equally valid and more likely to get high quality results would be to have people who have worked extensively on other open source projects but not the kernel recode the offending portions. Depending on how pervasive the offending code is, it may even work to have people who have worked on other parts of the kernel redo the code.
I think that the idea of getting these set up in regions where not everyone has a bank account or credit card is a key one. There was a segment on Morning Edition (NPR) this morning which talked about how many people in Mexico do not have bank accounts (and because of this have a hard time saving money). If I remember correctly, they said that only 23% of the people in Mexico have any kind of bank account. Bank accounts and credit cards are far from ubiquitous globally.
Of course, there is still the question of whether or not people in these regions have the money to make online purchases, but the possibility of bringing infrastructure is still important.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of market pressure is one of the strengths of open source. I've felt for a while that the commercialization of open source isn't a 100% good thing.
I"m not sure it is okay to let people overwork themselves because they expect it. I assume these people might want to start families someday (however much trouble they, as computer people may have with such an activity). However, I don't think they're going to think about this when going for that uber-cool high stress high hours job. While you could argue that they could find a new job once they have a family, I argue that they'll have a hard time having any sort of relationship or social life in the first place (and even in the short term, that's not really that healthy).
That said, I agree with another poster that legislation is not the way to fix things (not that you mentioned it). I leave a viable solution as a problem for the reader.
Can they boost rates or deny insurance to people who have other occupational risks? Lots of occupations increase chances of various risk. For example, lots of jobs make people more prone to back problems. I don't know if they can/do raise insurance in those cases, but I think that the situation is similar.
They claim the school I went to (Harvey Mudd) doesn't provide web pages (I assume student web pages), but students do have space where they could put a web page. I'm not sure why this doesn't count...
What about people who know about it, but don't use the acronym regularly enough to be familiar with it? The full name then conveys more meaning than the acronym.
An acronym is not appropriate to use instead of the full text until the majority of all people likely to be reading know what it means.
I have studied media and politics, and what I seem to remember is that people on the left see the media as right leaning and people on the right see the media as left leaning. Furthermore, I seem to remember (this was a couple years ago), that the same often went for a single story. People like to believe the world is against them.
I went to a school where CS majors did year long projects with companies their senior year, and one group was given the task of trying to write software that could do speech to text conversion on a PDA. One of the most interesting things they found out was that PDAs just don't have the processing power to do that yet.
That said, having limited speech regonition for use with applications would be really cool and much more feasible.
What would be really interesting would be if a company could write some sort of API so that developers could add more commands for the applications they develop. Of course, then what do you do when one person decides that "next" is better than "forward" for their application? (I love brainstorming, you don't have to be feasible!)
As I understand it, the market HP is going after isn't the market for people looking for iPods. Those people are still going to buy from Apple. I think the market they are going for is the people who are buying HP computers. HP will be able to offer them an iPod when they buy the computer. This isn't necessarily a bad strategy. About half the people I know who bought iPods bought them because they were buying a Apple laptop anyway. The market they are going for are the people who figure I'm already spending $N already, may as well spend a few hundred more on an iPod, not the people who were going to buy one anyway.
Many of these posts make it sound like "quota people" are abysmally worse at the job they were hired for than the hypothetical white male candidate they disloged. Now, while this may be true in some cases, it shows an inherent assumption that the white male is significantly better than the person where !(M = white && N = male). Now, this seems silly on two counts. If companies were being forced into hiring dramatically less qualified people, something would have been done about it by now. Businesses have money, and money talks.
Secondly, suppose there is a small delta between the skills of hypothetical white male and the hired candidate. In the long run, is a small difference in skill really that big of deal? It seems like the difference between getting 94/100 and 95/100 on an exam, i.e., unimportant.
I understand why people feel upset over this. I don't like quota systems because they make people think others were hired just because of their race or gender. However, the ridiculous inflation of the differences between candidates seems like nothing more than a case of sour grapes to me.
When you say that women should "put up with the insults and the criticism that men receive" you assume that men and women receive equal amounts of insults. They don't. How many jokes do you hear insulting men? Compare that to the number of jokes you hear insulting women. That alone makes women feel inferior.
It is the things that are taken for granted (e.g., calling someone a bitch is not a comment on gender) that are the most harmful. A person can insult men and women in the same way, but that does not make the insult gender neutral. You have to consider why something is an insult. Calling someone a bitch is an insult because it implies a certain kind of female. Thus, it is still sexist.
When women only have to deal with the insults and criticism men have to deal with, your point will be valid, until then, it is irrelevant.
I think the idea is that the what "geek" means to a teenage girl (and probably to a teenage boy) is scary and smelly and unable to interact with people. What else would you expect of teenages? Of course, the ideal would be to change the image of what it means to be a geek, but that is a much harder problem. It is easier to try to convince girls that CS can be fun and cool and hope that they will realize later what being a geek really means.
Women might want men to make sexual advances towards them, but not when they are trying to be taken seriously in the workplace. Trying to make sexual advances at the company picnic or a party is one thing. Trying to make them during a conversation about the company's product or something of that sort is another. The world of computer science should follow the rules of business or academia, not the rules of a social event.
Most people who are sexist or racist do not think they are.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect respect. Not respect of the speaker's ideas, but respect of the speaker as a person. If you or someone else does not even listen to what someone says, how can you judge whether or not what they say deserves respect? If you really don't find what someone says interesting, tell them that (in a respectful manner) instead of rudely ignoring them.
You say women get all the breaks, but you are only considering hiring. Women in technical fields (and other fields I believe, but I'm not in those, so no comment) have a much harder time rising after they are hired. Although we cannot take the numbers literally, you would be amazed at how much the phrase "work twice as hard to get half as far" resonates with most women in the tech field.
As the Graham article posted yesterday pointed out, the best hackers aren't interested in doing something for free unless they have some other source of money (which generally means they have a fortune stored up or another job). If they are a normal person and want to hack on something as a full time job, they won't (can't, really) volunteer to do it for free.
You get the normal scheme if you put something that is not a real color scheme also (like apples.slashdot.org)
It's a chicken and egg problem though. Until 3D input devices catch on, 3D desktop environments will be no more than a novelty.
But the music degrades far more than converting it to mp3 when most people sing it.
The tradeoff is speed. The random methods do fail to hit a real machine a lot of the time, but generating a random IP is really fast. More complex methods are slower. Thus, you may very well have the same number of successes in the same amount of time even if your hit rate is much lower.
Just because people are intelligent doesn't mean that they have experienced everything. For example, I consider myself an intelligent person, but science is just wacky enough that, as far as I know, a shift in the magnetic field may affect those things or other things that seem equally "silly" to someone who knows about those things. Some people don't know about the affects of a magnetic field flip, some people don't know about computers, some people don't know about the influence of medieval literature on modern government (I certainly don't, but it sounded amusing).
I would guess that PCs are a fairly large percent of the desktop market since many people use computers at home and at work.
Equally valid and more likely to get high quality results would be to have people who have worked extensively on other open source projects but not the kernel recode the offending portions. Depending on how pervasive the offending code is, it may even work to have people who have worked on other parts of the kernel redo the code.
I think that the idea of getting these set up in regions where not everyone has a bank account or credit card is a key one. There was a segment on Morning Edition (NPR) this morning which talked about how many people in Mexico do not have bank accounts (and because of this have a hard time saving money). If I remember correctly, they said that only 23% of the people in Mexico have any kind of bank account. Bank accounts and credit cards are far from ubiquitous globally.
Of course, there is still the question of whether or not people in these regions have the money to make online purchases, but the possibility of bringing infrastructure is still important.