You never really answered my question, though. What keeps women out? I've already pointed out that women enter into every other area of science with no particular difficulty; even mathematics, which is about as anti-social as you get in the sciences.
Here's an interesting thing: papers with womens' names on them tend to be judged more harshly. They've done studies and found that the same paper will be criticized more harshly BY THE SAME REVIEWER if a woman's name is at the top. Interestingly, even women are guilty of this bizarre discrimination. This does happen across all fields.
But given that, you don't think you can see the undertone of sexism in a strongly male dominated field like computing? Schools are trying hard to recruit women into these programs, but it's not working. Why is that? Rightly or wrongly, this field has an image problem. The part where we've failed is that we haven't fixed the image. We haven't worked hard enough to disabuse women --or the population in general -- that we're inclusive, harmless, and happy to work with women; that we know that they can do the job, and we're not spending all our time staring at their tits.
This is either because we're lazy -- which is possible -- or it's not true, and we AREN'T happy to work with women, and we DO spend all our time staring at their tits.
Either way, programs like this remove that from the equation for a while and let women work in an environment where they can enjoy the field on its own merits, and to hell with the slimy assholes that make it unpleasant for everyone. I know a lot of programmers that are poorly socialized and cope extremely poorly with the few female programmers at our company.
Listen, if you don't see the problem, I'm unlikely to convince you that there is one. Things don't happen for no reason. If women aren't becoming interested in computers, something is doing it, and it's unlikely to be sunspots.
I believe that it's us. We do it. And we need to UNDO it.
While I can appreciate this position, I still don't buy into it. Sure, everyone wants women on the same bus, so to speak, but right now, we can't even get them to think that the bus is a good idea at all.
Giving them an opportunity to ride the bus without someone catcalling to them might get them more interested, so when they finally get on the same bus as the rest of us, they can tell the catcaller to jam a sock in it, and sit wherever they like.
I've more or less run that analogy as far as it'll go, but I think it gets my point across.:)
At least you recognize the problem. A significant number of the people in this thread think that everything is just fine, and women just don't like computers for some reason.
Incidentally, that 'sweetie' comment is kind of what's being talked about here. If I were female, that would probably sort of offensive; you're obviously using it as a diminutive, pejorative term. Since I'm not female, it just seems sort of weird, but your patronizing tone is clear. I understand why women don't necessarily want to work in this field. Sometimes *I* don't like working in this field, and I only have to put up with people that are jerks. I can't imagine also having to put up with SEXIST jerks all the time.
And like I responded to someone else, why don't they choose to? Something in the water? A prophecy? Plague and Doom o'er the land? What?
It's a perfectly reasonable analogy. Someone in a wheelchair can drag themselves up the stairs. It's a hard climb, but physically possible. THEY JUST CHOOSE NOT TO.
And why should they have to? Similarly, why should women have to put up with the crap of this male-dominated field? They don't feel welcome, so they don't put themselves through the strain of breaking through the crap -- dragging themselves up the stairs -- and go do something else. The really determined ones come in and make it anyway, just like a really determined person in a wheelchair would drag themselves up those stairs. The handicap isn't physical for women, we've just put the barrier up. It's up to us, the men, the people in control, to take the barrier down.
And the Supreme Court of your country almost certainly agrees with me. Indentical treatment and Equal treatment don't mean the same thing, but it doesn't mean that they never intersect. A public school is an example of both identical and equal treatment at the same time. A ramp for a handicapped person is equal treatment by not treating two people identically. The person in a wheelchair is specifically taken into consideration in a different light than I am, since I can walk up stairs with no problem. This is equal, not identical.
Yes, and this lack of interest is caused by what? Sunspots?
I'm not claiming there's any particular discrimination; my 'reverse discrimination' example was in response to someone claiming that setting these groups up at all is a form of discrimination. I hardly think so. Giving someone a leg up so they can be included isn't discrimination. It's actually why my example is particularly apt. If the barrier to entry for programming was that you could get into the building, people in a wheelchair would be able to do it, technically, by dragging themselves across the ground to get to the job. It doesn't really feel very inclusive, but they could do it. The barrier to entry for women here is the bad attitude that men have towards them, for whatever reason. They can still do the job -- and many do -- but that psychological barrier is a big one. I dare say it's nearly as intimidating as a building with no ramp.
Back in the day...waaaaay back, women were involved in Computing at a relatively equal ratio. The first programmer was a woman.
Computing had no prestige back then. Nobody cared if women were in it because nobody really cared about it at all. Obviously it's not too hard or beyond their scope, and I don't think it's a 'social career' thing, either. Enrollment in Engineering and Mathematics is basically equal for men and women, and I wouldn't call either of those particularly 'social'. In fact, enrollment in nearly all sciences (at least at the University of Alberta, and I've heard from people looking into this sort of thing that the trend seems to hold most other places) shows nearly equal enrollment for the genders.
Don't bring up these weak arguments. Jobs that have a small social element can be compensated for with a social life. I know female biologists, physicists and scientists of nearly every stripe. More importantly, I'm significantly more likely to hear about a woman making a significant scientific breakthrough in nearly every other field of science, but even meeting a female programmer is cause for excitement and amazement.
These programs are necessary to show women that not all the men in this field are arrogant cocks, and we're not as badly socialized as the sweaty, loud, prototypical programmer that gets all the press would lead them to believe. I think there should be similar programs for men to encourage them into more 'feminine' jobs, like nursing. I haven't met a nurse yet that isn't excited about a male nurse in their class or on their ward. It's a hard, important job, with an unreasonably feminine image (and frankly, you've got better job security and higher pay being a nurse right out of school than being a programmer right out of school).
Don't try and tell me that 'reverse discrimination' doesn't help the problem. Is it 'reverse discrimination' to put ramps in front of buildings because a portion of our population are confined to wheelchairs? There's a difference between equal treatment and identical treatment. Please try to understand the difference.
I just quit WoW a few days ago for the same reasons. Everything in the game is the worst kind of grind. Now I'm trying out Eve online, 'cause even though everything there is a grind too, I don't need to be intensely on top of it for hours and hours; I can set my ship to go somewhere, and come back later to do things that require my attention, then leave it again. I'm starting to appreciate the slow pace and the fact that a lot of the conflict in the game (that is, most of the conflict) is generated by the crazy things that players do.
For instance: A few months ago, a contingent of players from Russia decided to take over a bit of deep space. They went off, and nobody heard from them for months and months. When they finally DID hear from them, it was in the form of an invasion. Nobody was prepared for this onslaught of players from out of nowhere, coming through the systems and crushing everything in their paths. That's the sort of thing that's hard for game designers to do on their own. The universe feels more mutable.
That had nothing to do with WoW, but I thought I'd mention it. It's the sort of thing everyone wishes they could be a part of, whereas finishing a raid dungeon is kind of a mediocre experience and story by comparison.
Depending on what you're serving, a Mac does the job well too. A recent power cock-up on my part killed my primary harddrive on my FreeBSD mailserver. I went out and bought the base level Mac mini, a $20 Postfix configuration tool, and downloaded a VNC server. Now I have the mini hooked up to the TV and serving my email. I can drag and drop files across the network to it, I can watch my movies and DVDs on it, and I can serve the few pictures and light-use webpages that I occasionally need. It has an external firewire drive hooked up to it so I can actually back-up and store things on it, and it takes up almost no space and draws basically zero power compared to most of the machines I've used as servers.
Servers can be lightweight, usable boxes too. This machine is orders of magnitude more powerful than what I've historically used to serve files and web pages and mail, just as about secure, and fills more uses than any of those other machines did with less time wasted. I've decided that my time is worth more than certain bits of ideology or even the money that I spent on the box in comparison to a free Linux job built out of spare parts and my constant swearing.
I've read the article of one of those new switchers, and all of his arguments are complete non-starters. Apple doesn't force you to use DRM (you can rip your own CDs and play them in iTunes; nobody forces you to buy the music off the store), their 'closed and proprietary' file formats aren't any more recoverable in the case of a weird error than an open format is and require no more and no less backing up, and the library files can be exported to straight XML anyway.
There are lots of reasons to switch to Linux, but I don't think he wrote about a single good one.
It may be convenient, but in the vast majority of cases I've found that I can navigate from the main page if I know what I'm looking for. You can do basically everything from paypal.com without following the link that takes you directly to a specific page.
The first programmer ever was a woman. How far we've come.
Computing Science wasn't very popular back in the day; it wasn't a 'serious' subject. That meant it was okay for women to participate. As soon as it started to get more prestigious, fewer women were involved. Hmm. Fortunately, I think that particular reason has worn off over the years; popularity isn't the barrier that it used to be.
I examined the dearth of female CS students at my University and talked to one of my professors. She had been keeping track of the numbers for years, and it turned out that while ALL sciences had seen increased enrolment -- including pure mathematics -- CS enrolment for women was down every year. It's not too hard or too technical or too 'science-y', so what's doing it? (I still don't know, incidentally -- I think it has something to do with the image of all CS majors as sweaty nerds with no lives and bad hygiene.)
Lastly, it's worth noting that even in Nursing, things tend to favour the men. Based on Canada's census info (so this isn't a random sample, this is literally reporting for every working adult in Canada), men in nursing tend to make more money, even though it's a female dominated field. A good friend of mine is finishing off her Nursing degree, and she says that it's common to push men through into management positions as quickly as possible because, in part, patients are less comfortable around male nurses. Interesting that even when men are discriminated against, they come out on top.:P
In the end, this isn't a competition. I concern myself with this stuff because I have a mother, a sister and a wife, and my best friend is a woman; I'd like to see them get ahead in the world. I hope to have daughters one day; it's my job to make sure that they get a fair shake when they go out into the world. The minor amounts of bias that we're seeing being built into the system (trying to get 3 women into an internship, or trying to guarantee that at least 10% of enrolled students are female) rarely actually impact any men in any significant way. We need to start somewhere. If you have a good idea or think you can do better, I honestly urge you to please try. Women have come a long way, but I'd really love to never have to read any more stories like this. 180 entries and no women? How sad is that?
It IS true. It was true with the Gamecube, too, but that was harder to see since it was a little more in line with the Xbox and PS2 specs-wise.
Nintendo doesn't compete in the same space as Nintendo and Sony. They're trying to DO something with their games to make them fun; they don't just throw graphics at you and hope something sticks. They rely on good franchises, and they publish easy to play, fun games. Everyone can play Mario Party or Mario Cart, even if they can't play Halo. This isn't a difference between 'kid' games and 'adult' games, this is a difference between 'fun' games and games that just try to shock you or impress you with more flash. This isn't to say that there aren't some games that do it all for people, but Nintendo concentrates on the availability and playability first, and the graphics second. If the game needs a certain visual style, that's the direction they go.
Nintendo's been playing a different game (excuse the pun) for years now, and it shows when you look at the balance sheet. They make money at their business because they know what their business is and how to do it right.
It's obvious that they've had problems population balancing, and it's believable that they have NONE of the servers working properly because, as I said, they miscalculated. They're now in the position of having badly overloaded servers -- which is why there are queues and server transfers. They can't implement the queues at the level that they probably should since that pisses off players possibly even more than the game performing poorly.
In the end, I think they have optimization issues that don't manifest until they start pushing the population limits beyond what they originally expected. My server, Doomhammer, is (or was recently) the single most populated server in the world. When the server was moved to new hardware, a lot of problems disappeared.
So yes, the servers ARE overloaded. For a long time, there weren't proper checks put in place to make sure that people couldn't create more characters than the server could handle. I wouldn't say that Blizzard themselves are deliberately overloading the server, they're simply not restricting server populations enough.
The scale of WoW is much bigger than every other MMO that's ever been released. Their problem is that they didn't adequately prepare for popularity.
I can build a solution for a single person, and I can scale it up to work for 10 or maybe 100 people. After that, I have to start looking at reworking my initial architecture. Blizzard probably prepared for, seriously, an order of magnitude fewer players than they have right now; based on past trends in this marketspace, that would have been reasonable.
At a certain point a system that large that's modified so often needs to be re-architected, but that's expensive, dangerous and time consuming. I'm a game programmer myself, and while I haven't worked on an MMO, I still feel that I know what they're going through. It's easy to fix a bug and create two new ones in large system.
I have a bunch of apps on my Mac that I find essential, but there aren't good analogues on the Windows platform, so when I'm at work, I'm often hitting keys that get me nowhere.
For instance,Adium is, in my opinion, a far superior multi-protocol chat client to Trillian.
I use Quicksilver almost constantly at home. I've got nothing like that at work.
There still isn't a good Exposé solution for Windows. I've tried the knock-offs and they're all pretty pathetic attempts.
There's nothing like Growl that I know of. Each application has to implement its own alert system. This would be great for letting me know when a source control sync or a compile is finished.
The one great app that I've found for Windows is Slickedit, which has pretty decent Emacs emulation, but does the whole intellisense thing better than I've been able to get Emacs to do (yes, I've tried Semantic and ECB).
Since the only game I play these days is WoW, my Mac is fantastic on its own. Bootcamp holds no pull for me. If I want more games, I'll buy a console. For the work that I do, there's nothing that I can do on a Windows PC that my Mac can't do better. (I'm not saying that this is true for everyone, just me.)
So if someone can point me in the direction of apps that are as good as the ones that I mentioned for Windows, I'd actually appreciate that. I'm sick of trying to hit Command-Space and not getting Quicksilver.
Games are STUPID expensive now. The PS3 has a predicted retail price of something like $600, doesn't it? Who can afford to be a gamer anymore?
There's a line between what you spend on entertainment and what you spend on trying to see some girl's boobs. I know that when I was a teenager, boobs were way more important to me than games. You spend money on what's important to you.
I don't know if girl gamers are spending less time on games; I didn't read the story. Girl gamers seem to be more level-headed about the whole thing to start with anyway, though.
Any of the Mario Party series is ideal, since a lot of the games just rely on bashing on the buttons or doing something that dosen't necessarily take the hand-eye coordination of an experienced gamer. And if you find that you're kicking the crap out of her anyway, you can play it co-op.
WarioWare is also good, because the games are so random that even an experienced gamer doesn't have a huge advantage.
...is to become a snob. Because you can't permit yourself to drink the brown water that they serve in the lunchroom, or the over-roasted, over-heated stuff at Starbuck's, you're forced to find a nice small espresso shop, or buy a machine for home.
Drink less of the crap and more of the good stuff, and not only will your intake drop as you savour your shot of espresso or your well-made cappucino (BTW, if it comes in something the size of a bowl, it's wrong. A good cappucino is smaller than a regular cup of coffee) but you'll feel good about drinking less.
Besides, part of being a geek is analysing things to death and a streak of rampant snobbery. It's why I used to run Linux, and why I run OS X now. I drink my coffee black, and Tim Horton's can pour their drek down the sink!
Even if you're right, this 'war' is one in which the enemy is poorly defined, and for which there is no 'win' condition. The American Administration has admitted that this isn't a war that can be 'won', per se.
If THAT'S true, when will everything 'snap back'?
It's one thing to be fighting a fixed enemy that has a location and people to negotiate with, and another thing entirely to be fighting people that refuse to negotiate and are happy for you to kill them; it just adds fuel to the fire. More than ever, the only way to win this game is to not play at all.
It depends on what you mean by 'nobody'. World-wide, their sales put them in second place behind the PS2. In North America, the reception was somewhat more lacklustre, but they still made a few dollars off of every console and every game. Sure, the Xbox was purchased more in NA, but it lost money all over the place. I'd rather have Nintendo's kind of limited success.
Perhaps so, but the size of Nintendo's library is also not exactly what I'm getting at. Of the games that exist, the Cube plays them very well.
However, your point is well taken: the Cube may play its library very well, but perhaps it's worth making some concessions to your focus if it means more sales and fans.
On the other hand, Nintendo still turns a profit on each console and every game, which is probably a bigger consideration to them than widespread adoption. In North America, the XBox was a clear second-place finisher, but it lost a lot of money during its lifetime.
It's moot because it's not the actual point that I was trying to make. I knew that if I just said that it's meant to play games well, people would come along and say, "Nintendo gamez r teh suk! It dusn't play gamez well! lolz!"
The fact of the matter is that it DOES play games well -- you put the game in and it plays. The controller works, the cube works, it displays the game on the screen; it's a game console that does its singular task very well.
Whether or not you feel (personally) that the games are worth playing is irrelevant. I happen to like the games on the cube, but others that might not may have found that a (erroneous) point of contention. That's all.
Mod parent up. The single most important thing to remember about the Earth, and geology and climatology in general is that things happen very slowly. Certainly, there are fast, catastrophic events like Volcanos erupting and Earthquakes changing the landscape, but even those take enormous amounts of time to set up.
Generally speaking, 500 years is an extremely short time frame for major change to happen on the planet. To see climate change in under 100 years is distressingly fast.
Slashdot Mirror
You never really answered my question, though. What keeps women out? I've already pointed out that women enter into every other area of science with no particular difficulty; even mathematics, which is about as anti-social as you get in the sciences.
Here's an interesting thing: papers with womens' names on them tend to be judged more harshly. They've done studies and found that the same paper will be criticized more harshly BY THE SAME REVIEWER if a woman's name is at the top. Interestingly, even women are guilty of this bizarre discrimination. This does happen across all fields.
But given that, you don't think you can see the undertone of sexism in a strongly male dominated field like computing? Schools are trying hard to recruit women into these programs, but it's not working. Why is that? Rightly or wrongly, this field has an image problem. The part where we've failed is that we haven't fixed the image. We haven't worked hard enough to disabuse women --or the population in general -- that we're inclusive, harmless, and happy to work with women; that we know that they can do the job, and we're not spending all our time staring at their tits.
This is either because we're lazy -- which is possible -- or it's not true, and we AREN'T happy to work with women, and we DO spend all our time staring at their tits.
Either way, programs like this remove that from the equation for a while and let women work in an environment where they can enjoy the field on its own merits, and to hell with the slimy assholes that make it unpleasant for everyone. I know a lot of programmers that are poorly socialized and cope extremely poorly with the few female programmers at our company.
Listen, if you don't see the problem, I'm unlikely to convince you that there is one. Things don't happen for no reason. If women aren't becoming interested in computers, something is doing it, and it's unlikely to be sunspots.
I believe that it's us. We do it. And we need to UNDO it.
While I can appreciate this position, I still don't buy into it. Sure, everyone wants women on the same bus, so to speak, but right now, we can't even get them to think that the bus is a good idea at all.
:)
Giving them an opportunity to ride the bus without someone catcalling to them might get them more interested, so when they finally get on the same bus as the rest of us, they can tell the catcaller to jam a sock in it, and sit wherever they like.
I've more or less run that analogy as far as it'll go, but I think it gets my point across.
At least you recognize the problem. A significant number of the people in this thread think that everything is just fine, and women just don't like computers for some reason.
Incidentally, that 'sweetie' comment is kind of what's being talked about here. If I were female, that would probably sort of offensive; you're obviously using it as a diminutive, pejorative term. Since I'm not female, it just seems sort of weird, but your patronizing tone is clear. I understand why women don't necessarily want to work in this field. Sometimes *I* don't like working in this field, and I only have to put up with people that are jerks. I can't imagine also having to put up with SEXIST jerks all the time.
And like I responded to someone else, why don't they choose to? Something in the water? A prophecy? Plague and Doom o'er the land? What?
It's a perfectly reasonable analogy. Someone in a wheelchair can drag themselves up the stairs. It's a hard climb, but physically possible. THEY JUST CHOOSE NOT TO.
And why should they have to? Similarly, why should women have to put up with the crap of this male-dominated field? They don't feel welcome, so they don't put themselves through the strain of breaking through the crap -- dragging themselves up the stairs -- and go do something else. The really determined ones come in and make it anyway, just like a really determined person in a wheelchair would drag themselves up those stairs. The handicap isn't physical for women, we've just put the barrier up. It's up to us, the men, the people in control, to take the barrier down.
And the Supreme Court of your country almost certainly agrees with me. Indentical treatment and Equal treatment don't mean the same thing, but it doesn't mean that they never intersect. A public school is an example of both identical and equal treatment at the same time. A ramp for a handicapped person is equal treatment by not treating two people identically. The person in a wheelchair is specifically taken into consideration in a different light than I am, since I can walk up stairs with no problem. This is equal, not identical.
Yes, and this lack of interest is caused by what? Sunspots?
I'm not claiming there's any particular discrimination; my 'reverse discrimination' example was in response to someone claiming that setting these groups up at all is a form of discrimination. I hardly think so. Giving someone a leg up so they can be included isn't discrimination. It's actually why my example is particularly apt. If the barrier to entry for programming was that you could get into the building, people in a wheelchair would be able to do it, technically, by dragging themselves across the ground to get to the job. It doesn't really feel very inclusive, but they could do it. The barrier to entry for women here is the bad attitude that men have towards them, for whatever reason. They can still do the job -- and many do -- but that psychological barrier is a big one. I dare say it's nearly as intimidating as a building with no ramp.
Back in the day...waaaaay back, women were involved in Computing at a relatively equal ratio. The first programmer was a woman.
Computing had no prestige back then. Nobody cared if women were in it because nobody really cared about it at all. Obviously it's not too hard or beyond their scope, and I don't think it's a 'social career' thing, either. Enrollment in Engineering and Mathematics is basically equal for men and women, and I wouldn't call either of those particularly 'social'. In fact, enrollment in nearly all sciences (at least at the University of Alberta, and I've heard from people looking into this sort of thing that the trend seems to hold most other places) shows nearly equal enrollment for the genders.
Don't bring up these weak arguments. Jobs that have a small social element can be compensated for with a social life. I know female biologists, physicists and scientists of nearly every stripe. More importantly, I'm significantly more likely to hear about a woman making a significant scientific breakthrough in nearly every other field of science, but even meeting a female programmer is cause for excitement and amazement.
These programs are necessary to show women that not all the men in this field are arrogant cocks, and we're not as badly socialized as the sweaty, loud, prototypical programmer that gets all the press would lead them to believe. I think there should be similar programs for men to encourage them into more 'feminine' jobs, like nursing. I haven't met a nurse yet that isn't excited about a male nurse in their class or on their ward. It's a hard, important job, with an unreasonably feminine image (and frankly, you've got better job security and higher pay being a nurse right out of school than being a programmer right out of school).
Don't try and tell me that 'reverse discrimination' doesn't help the problem. Is it 'reverse discrimination' to put ramps in front of buildings because a portion of our population are confined to wheelchairs? There's a difference between equal treatment and identical treatment. Please try to understand the difference.
I just quit WoW a few days ago for the same reasons. Everything in the game is the worst kind of grind. Now I'm trying out Eve online, 'cause even though everything there is a grind too, I don't need to be intensely on top of it for hours and hours; I can set my ship to go somewhere, and come back later to do things that require my attention, then leave it again. I'm starting to appreciate the slow pace and the fact that a lot of the conflict in the game (that is, most of the conflict) is generated by the crazy things that players do.
For instance: A few months ago, a contingent of players from Russia decided to take over a bit of deep space. They went off, and nobody heard from them for months and months. When they finally DID hear from them, it was in the form of an invasion. Nobody was prepared for this onslaught of players from out of nowhere, coming through the systems and crushing everything in their paths. That's the sort of thing that's hard for game designers to do on their own. The universe feels more mutable.
That had nothing to do with WoW, but I thought I'd mention it. It's the sort of thing everyone wishes they could be a part of, whereas finishing a raid dungeon is kind of a mediocre experience and story by comparison.
Depending on what you're serving, a Mac does the job well too. A recent power cock-up on my part killed my primary harddrive on my FreeBSD mailserver. I went out and bought the base level Mac mini, a $20 Postfix configuration tool, and downloaded a VNC server. Now I have the mini hooked up to the TV and serving my email. I can drag and drop files across the network to it, I can watch my movies and DVDs on it, and I can serve the few pictures and light-use webpages that I occasionally need. It has an external firewire drive hooked up to it so I can actually back-up and store things on it, and it takes up almost no space and draws basically zero power compared to most of the machines I've used as servers.
Servers can be lightweight, usable boxes too. This machine is orders of magnitude more powerful than what I've historically used to serve files and web pages and mail, just as about secure, and fills more uses than any of those other machines did with less time wasted. I've decided that my time is worth more than certain bits of ideology or even the money that I spent on the box in comparison to a free Linux job built out of spare parts and my constant swearing.
I've read the article of one of those new switchers, and all of his arguments are complete non-starters. Apple doesn't force you to use DRM (you can rip your own CDs and play them in iTunes; nobody forces you to buy the music off the store), their 'closed and proprietary' file formats aren't any more recoverable in the case of a weird error than an open format is and require no more and no less backing up, and the library files can be exported to straight XML anyway.
There are lots of reasons to switch to Linux, but I don't think he wrote about a single good one.
Look, up in the sky!!!!
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
No! It's the joke!
Yes, I meant to copy and paste that. It applies very well to you.
Never follow a link in an email.
It may be convenient, but in the vast majority of cases I've found that I can navigate from the main page if I know what I'm looking for. You can do basically everything from paypal.com without following the link that takes you directly to a specific page.
lrn2lol
That post was obviously made in jest as a poke at all the people that say downloading music is/isn't stealing.
The first programmer ever was a woman. How far we've come.
:P
Computing Science wasn't very popular back in the day; it wasn't a 'serious' subject. That meant it was okay for women to participate. As soon as it started to get more prestigious, fewer women were involved. Hmm. Fortunately, I think that particular reason has worn off over the years; popularity isn't the barrier that it used to be.
I examined the dearth of female CS students at my University and talked to one of my professors. She had been keeping track of the numbers for years, and it turned out that while ALL sciences had seen increased enrolment -- including pure mathematics -- CS enrolment for women was down every year. It's not too hard or too technical or too 'science-y', so what's doing it? (I still don't know, incidentally -- I think it has something to do with the image of all CS majors as sweaty nerds with no lives and bad hygiene.)
Lastly, it's worth noting that even in Nursing, things tend to favour the men. Based on Canada's census info (so this isn't a random sample, this is literally reporting for every working adult in Canada), men in nursing tend to make more money, even though it's a female dominated field. A good friend of mine is finishing off her Nursing degree, and she says that it's common to push men through into management positions as quickly as possible because, in part, patients are less comfortable around male nurses. Interesting that even when men are discriminated against, they come out on top.
In the end, this isn't a competition. I concern myself with this stuff because I have a mother, a sister and a wife, and my best friend is a woman; I'd like to see them get ahead in the world. I hope to have daughters one day; it's my job to make sure that they get a fair shake when they go out into the world. The minor amounts of bias that we're seeing being built into the system (trying to get 3 women into an internship, or trying to guarantee that at least 10% of enrolled students are female) rarely actually impact any men in any significant way. We need to start somewhere. If you have a good idea or think you can do better, I honestly urge you to please try. Women have come a long way, but I'd really love to never have to read any more stories like this. 180 entries and no women? How sad is that?
It IS true. It was true with the Gamecube, too, but that was harder to see since it was a little more in line with the Xbox and PS2 specs-wise.
Nintendo doesn't compete in the same space as Nintendo and Sony. They're trying to DO something with their games to make them fun; they don't just throw graphics at you and hope something sticks. They rely on good franchises, and they publish easy to play, fun games. Everyone can play Mario Party or Mario Cart, even if they can't play Halo. This isn't a difference between 'kid' games and 'adult' games, this is a difference between 'fun' games and games that just try to shock you or impress you with more flash. This isn't to say that there aren't some games that do it all for people, but Nintendo concentrates on the availability and playability first, and the graphics second. If the game needs a certain visual style, that's the direction they go.
Nintendo's been playing a different game (excuse the pun) for years now, and it shows when you look at the balance sheet. They make money at their business because they know what their business is and how to do it right.
It's obvious that they've had problems population balancing, and it's believable that they have NONE of the servers working properly because, as I said, they miscalculated. They're now in the position of having badly overloaded servers -- which is why there are queues and server transfers. They can't implement the queues at the level that they probably should since that pisses off players possibly even more than the game performing poorly.
In the end, I think they have optimization issues that don't manifest until they start pushing the population limits beyond what they originally expected. My server, Doomhammer, is (or was recently) the single most populated server in the world. When the server was moved to new hardware, a lot of problems disappeared.
So yes, the servers ARE overloaded. For a long time, there weren't proper checks put in place to make sure that people couldn't create more characters than the server could handle. I wouldn't say that Blizzard themselves are deliberately overloading the server, they're simply not restricting server populations enough.
The scale of WoW is much bigger than every other MMO that's ever been released. Their problem is that they didn't adequately prepare for popularity.
I can build a solution for a single person, and I can scale it up to work for 10 or maybe 100 people. After that, I have to start looking at reworking my initial architecture. Blizzard probably prepared for, seriously, an order of magnitude fewer players than they have right now; based on past trends in this marketspace, that would have been reasonable.
At a certain point a system that large that's modified so often needs to be re-architected, but that's expensive, dangerous and time consuming. I'm a game programmer myself, and while I haven't worked on an MMO, I still feel that I know what they're going through. It's easy to fix a bug and create two new ones in large system.
http://www.otakusoftware.com/topdesk/
http://smallwindows.sourceforge.net/
I didn't like either of them. They're much slower and flicker a lot. The second one was still pretty new, but at least it was free.
I use the Wonderful Icon in conjunction with a virtual desktop manager called DeskWin. It's also open source, and it works really well.
For instance,Adium is, in my opinion, a far superior multi-protocol chat client to Trillian.
I use Quicksilver almost constantly at home. I've got nothing like that at work.
There still isn't a good Exposé solution for Windows. I've tried the knock-offs and they're all pretty pathetic attempts.
There's nothing like Growl that I know of. Each application has to implement its own alert system. This would be great for letting me know when a source control sync or a compile is finished.
The one great app that I've found for Windows is Slickedit, which has pretty decent Emacs emulation, but does the whole intellisense thing better than I've been able to get Emacs to do (yes, I've tried Semantic and ECB).
Since the only game I play these days is WoW, my Mac is fantastic on its own. Bootcamp holds no pull for me. If I want more games, I'll buy a console. For the work that I do, there's nothing that I can do on a Windows PC that my Mac can't do better. (I'm not saying that this is true for everyone, just me.)
So if someone can point me in the direction of apps that are as good as the ones that I mentioned for Windows, I'd actually appreciate that. I'm sick of trying to hit Command-Space and not getting Quicksilver.
Games are STUPID expensive now. The PS3 has a predicted retail price of something like $600, doesn't it? Who can afford to be a gamer anymore?
There's a line between what you spend on entertainment and what you spend on trying to see some girl's boobs. I know that when I was a teenager, boobs were way more important to me than games. You spend money on what's important to you.
I don't know if girl gamers are spending less time on games; I didn't read the story. Girl gamers seem to be more level-headed about the whole thing to start with anyway, though.
Any of the Mario Party series is ideal, since a lot of the games just rely on bashing on the buttons or doing something that dosen't necessarily take the hand-eye coordination of an experienced gamer. And if you find that you're kicking the crap out of her anyway, you can play it co-op.
WarioWare is also good, because the games are so random that even an experienced gamer doesn't have a huge advantage.
...is to become a snob. Because you can't permit yourself to drink the brown water that they serve in the lunchroom, or the over-roasted, over-heated stuff at Starbuck's, you're forced to find a nice small espresso shop, or buy a machine for home.
Drink less of the crap and more of the good stuff, and not only will your intake drop as you savour your shot of espresso or your well-made cappucino (BTW, if it comes in something the size of a bowl, it's wrong. A good cappucino is smaller than a regular cup of coffee) but you'll feel good about drinking less.
Besides, part of being a geek is analysing things to death and a streak of rampant snobbery. It's why I used to run Linux, and why I run OS X now. I drink my coffee black, and Tim Horton's can pour their drek down the sink!
Even if you're right, this 'war' is one in which the enemy is poorly defined, and for which there is no 'win' condition. The American Administration has admitted that this isn't a war that can be 'won', per se.
If THAT'S true, when will everything 'snap back'?
It's one thing to be fighting a fixed enemy that has a location and people to negotiate with, and another thing entirely to be fighting people that refuse to negotiate and are happy for you to kill them; it just adds fuel to the fire. More than ever, the only way to win this game is to not play at all.
It depends on what you mean by 'nobody'. World-wide, their sales put them in second place behind the PS2. In North America, the reception was somewhat more lacklustre, but they still made a few dollars off of every console and every game. Sure, the Xbox was purchased more in NA, but it lost money all over the place. I'd rather have Nintendo's kind of limited success.
Perhaps so, but the size of Nintendo's library is also not exactly what I'm getting at. Of the games that exist, the Cube plays them very well.
However, your point is well taken: the Cube may play its library very well, but perhaps it's worth making some concessions to your focus if it means more sales and fans.
On the other hand, Nintendo still turns a profit on each console and every game, which is probably a bigger consideration to them than widespread adoption. In North America, the XBox was a clear second-place finisher, but it lost a lot of money during its lifetime.
It's moot because it's not the actual point that I was trying to make. I knew that if I just said that it's meant to play games well, people would come along and say, "Nintendo gamez r teh suk! It dusn't play gamez well! lolz!"
The fact of the matter is that it DOES play games well -- you put the game in and it plays. The controller works, the cube works, it displays the game on the screen; it's a game console that does its singular task very well.
Whether or not you feel (personally) that the games are worth playing is irrelevant. I happen to like the games on the cube, but others that might not may have found that a (erroneous) point of contention. That's all.
Mod parent up. The single most important thing to remember about the Earth, and geology and climatology in general is that things happen very slowly. Certainly, there are fast, catastrophic events like Volcanos erupting and Earthquakes changing the landscape, but even those take enormous amounts of time to set up.
Generally speaking, 500 years is an extremely short time frame for major change to happen on the planet. To see climate change in under 100 years is distressingly fast.