Toy? Mac OSX is arguably more ready for the corporate world than linux, and it's not that I don't think linux is ready.
OSX has M$ Office, for the pointy-haired types that insist on it. It has a better browser (Safari) and a decent enough email client (though I believe outlook is also available). It is as solid as a rock. Working with literally hundreds of OSX machines, I've only ever seen crashes that were the result of bad hardware. Even the software glitches turned out (99.8% of the time) to be HD's dying an early death.
OSX is the most polished (more than explorer, or anything else) desktop software, has all the important software, and even games, for crying out loud. I don't think I even dare reading this stupid thing, lest I barf on the desk here.
10% isn't statistically meaningful, I would think. Show me it dropped from 43% to 7% over that period of time. Or explain to me why this job sector should be so static, when every other in the modern world is so turbulent. I make no assumptions, certainly not that 50/50 ratio is desirable, achievable, or sustainable. I don't assume that this is some kind of trend that we'll work hard to reverse... what if we do nothing at all, and it bounces back to 60% over the next 2 decades? That's not so implausible, is it? Hell, every talking head that says anything at all about IT says that it will be a bigger percentage of jobs in total in the future... that being the case, there will be less non-IT jobs for women to gravitate towards.
But I have an idea. Why not lobby our politicians to spend 3 billion of our tax money over the next 10 years, to right this horrid social injustice that you see everywhere? After all, we have so much money to be wasting on all sorts of important things like this.
Me, assuming? You've not even given anecdotal evidence that these women are being denied opportunities. For all I know, they have the options right now, no real reason to believe otherwise. You've simply got it in your head that roughly 50/50 population means every single job sector needs exactly 50/50 (+- a fair 0.25%). I'm not assuming that to be the case at all.
True that it's drying up, but I tend to do more rollouts. Which is exactly as hard as unboxing something, and plugging it into the wall. Some have been better, I was the guy chosen to do data migration on about 3500 laptops, mostly because I realized that when we could dump data over the network, you could pull the 2.5" out of a powerbook, and put it in the secondary HD bay of a IBM T20... all you needed was a HFS driver. The supposedly smart coworkers (who went on to more jobs at that place) were like "wait, macintosh and PC hard drives are the same?". I felt like slapping them.
BTW, Offtopic: for those of you that care (who knows, this might show up in a google search), to get 105W with a primestar dish, you must adjust the skew on the LNB itself. Loosen the 4 bolts, and twist it... + is counterclockwise, - is clockwise. Easy to miss, with the plastic cover the things have on them... now to restream my 2700, and tune in Nimiq1! Shame I only have the one linear... or I'd start working on my DirecPC modem. If you could sniff it, wait for someone to download an iso, it would be almost like spare bandwidth.
Unemployment and bad credit both = no chance in hell of college. Wish I knew what I wanted to do out of highschool, my SAT score pretty much guaranteed some kind of aid. Stupid guidance counselor pushed me towards nursing, lasted a little over a year.
Well, does it mean anything that I'm trying to point an old Primestar satellite dish at 105W? Just discovered that the LNB has radial markings, think I'm supposed to adjust it for skew.
Or how about that I have about 90 TR ports here at home? I've got a few old Nubus/PDS Macs hooked up to it, haven't had the time to try and get my Sparcstation 2 to see it yet (can't find drivers for the card). Strangely, the PCMCIA token ring card on this linux laptop seems to work nicely, but the PCI card in my linux server barfs if it sees any network activity. But that same server has an ATM155 card, arcnet, localtalk, and a quad port ethernet. Still looking for a HIPPI card for it...
I can name the major components of an ethernet card, heck, just about any electronic component is recognizable to me (guys, ever wonder why ethernet always has a 20mhz osc/crystal but token ring will have 16/48/64mhz?). Take it all the way to the other end, at software... past few months I've been tinkering with adding some sort of rudimentary VINES support to linux, but since all I have is a copy of Banyan 6.0, might take awhile.
I'm designing my own transport protocol (just hope IANA doesn't steal 199 from me) and the routing protocol that it was meant for.
I do lots of things, that always look awkward on a resume, and I sound even more awkward trying to explain them to an HR droid. I mean, really. DO they care or think that it's relevant that I just posted a "wanted: 10ft Cband dish" on freecycle.org?
I'm resigned to the fact that I'll never be more than a lowly little PC technician. It just sucks that everyone makes it so damn hard to find even those jobs.
Oh, and for those of you who have done this repair, can anyone beat my 10m53s motherboard replacement on an iBook? This is without pinching any of the cables, or causing any damage...
Oh, but you never stoop to personal attacks. Haha. Believe my claims? Did I ever prefix a sentence with "You should believe this" ? No. You're supposed to read them, and maybe reconsider your own opinions, think about it, and decide whether they are plausible or not. Only preachers expect people to "believe" what they say.
As for whether it's IBM vs M$ (it won't be), or linux vs. M$... lots of people seem to be confused. Bunch of ijits "IBM will save us, they're our hero!". Something is stinky here though, and they won't be around forever, or they'll give up on the defense. Wait and see.
It's in MS Word because other than the ijits who want text in a html webform, all the others want MS word. Sending them a PDF is a bad idea, generally.
My resume doesn't do the skills/tools list, I'm convinced that tends to look tacky. Former jobs, then education, then certifications last.
Not a graphic designer, but not an asic engineer eiher. I generally do PC tech work, helpdesk, all lower rung stuff. Which means there are 500 asshats who are claiming they can do it also, can't, but will probably get away with it anyway, since this kind of work is only one step up from mouth breathing. The closest I get to designing ASICs is at home, when I play with a Xilinx CPLD.
Maybe I should lie though... just that I suck at it so bad. Maybe I wouldn't have spent 5 years doing this kind of shit work.
PS No Verilog, no ABEL? I guess the big stuff needs better tools.
It is msword, I'm ashamed to say. I've got a few bullets, its 2 column, non-standard layout. No animated gif's or anything, only graphics on it at all are 2 gray bezier lines in the background, as a border. Pretty restrained, or so I tell myself.. it's not HTML blink tags or anything. But at least it's better than the template resumes you see everywhere.
Certainly, the reaction of those HR droids that have seen it isn't negative. While I'm sure it might be tossed in the garbage can quite often, it's the general "let's throw away 950 of our 1000 responses" stuff.
As for content, there was a time when I had less than I liked, not so much the case today. Even now though, my "content" would hardly stand out... how can it, I have little choice where I work, most of the time. I could be one of hundreds or thousands easily... and a slightly pretty resume was one of the few things I could do to stand out. I'd toss up a link to it, to show you how it's not this garrish "hey I just learned about html and colored fonts" freakshow, but it has my personal info in it.
In conclusion, if your "content" is so godlike in its impressiveness, more power to you.
Yeh, and have you checked out the job websites lately? There are more job websites today, than there are actual open jobs. As far as listings, let's see, we have:
1) The Beta Tech/ITT covert spam. You have to read it twice, to understand that after paying them $4500 for a 3 month course, they'll help with job placement. 2) Work at Home! Christ, this scam has to be 40 years old now, haven't they already used up all the idiots? 3) The staffing agency mining for leads. Even I get fooled by these. Recruiter calls me, asks me if I know the names and numbers of all the managers involved in the last 6 big projects I've been in for Fortune 100s. He needs them as references, and no, my coworkers won't do. And yes, as soon as I can get those references, he has a job for me. Haha. 4) The "we have to post this publically, before we can use our H1-B". Usually identifiable by the cryptic description, even by the standards of the buzzword elite. 5) The "must have security clearance". Ok, maybe these are legitimate, but if they all insist on pre-existing clearance, aren't they all chasing after the same 20 people who actually have it and are in this line of work? And if they're so damn rare, how about offering more than $15-17 an hour? 6) The "let's look like a big company" PR blitz. 30 listings at once, all of them paid up extra so that the posting date rolls forward (can't even tell if they're stale or not, as if that matters). Sure, they might hire 2 of those people, but they post the rest knowing full well they'll never hire them. 7) The "let's see if we can get a $90,000 a year expert for $35,000" job listing. My personal favorite. Not that I'm the $90,000 a year expert, just that they probably aren't successful often. Some comfort there. 8) Outright spam. The "apply now" link will take you to viagra, porn, or every once in awhile a MLM scheme. They show up even on Monster, though to its credit, they get nailed within a few hours, near as I can tell. Seeing a disturbing number of these types of listings though. 9) The "let's make you jump through 30 hoops to email your resume" listing. Usually climaxes with them insisting I take my resume that I've carefully crafted and formatted over the years, and strip it down to plaintext and then upload it in a webform textarea. Thanks. Not like you'll read it anyway? 10) The impossible experience listing. 20 years of linux, 7 years of.NET. Always a favorite of the job search critic, somewhat more uncommon than traditionally believed. I have a few good ones saved, maybe we should have a contest (would need a way to weed out forgeries)?
But never worry, with so many job listings, the economy is surely picking up.
Ah, but master, how can the fish learn that it swims not in water as simple sense would dictate, but in a thick morass of syrupy make-work whose properties change as quickly the fashions of MBAspeak?
You speak in riddles, master. The fish does not learn this, rather it believes lies. All the tish in the ocean have to also believe these lies for their system of stupidity to work, dysfunctionally though it may. This is why market wonkery cannot be learned, it can only be believed.
First off, I'm not a professional researcher. So no, I didn't cite any sources. I spend more time than I should on slashdot anyway, and spending 6 hours citing everything, doing it all proper... well, that isn't going to happen. If I did though, would it get me anything like your agreement? Probably not. You'd find fault with my methodology or something. So, wasting even more of my life here, just so you have one less way to attack me doesn't seem like much of a bargain.
Second, I apologize for suggesting that you read things yourself. Obviously, since you'd only be doing so with all your witless pre-concieved notions, it could only prove what you've decided to be true anyway, so there is no reason for you to waste your time either.
Remember this though. Despite some people's suggestions, I am not a M$ astroturfer. I dislike them, maybe even hate isn't too strong a term. If they win, it will only be with the most devious methods, and nothing like a fair fight. I do not want them to win. I will howl and moan each and every time they pull a dirty trick, I'm not even an apologist for them when they might borderline deserve that (though, come to think of it, I don't even know if there ever was such a situation). All that I've said, rightly or wrongly, is only a warning that it may not be a given that Linux will win quickly, easily, or even at all.
That is exactly what you advocate, unless you come up with something more than a vague hypothesis about how this is due to some hidden environmental factor that you can't even point a finger at you.
You're at the "Gee, I wonder if there are any causes to this, or if it's just natural" level, and wanting to act as if it's the "OMFG, our little girls are being indoctrinated to be subordinate to men!" level. First, show me what it is we're doing that's screwing this up. I can't even think of a way to identify this, to be honest. It's alot like the pseudoscientist crackpots that rant and rave about the alien "N waves" that emanate from the center of the earth. Tell me, should I try to detect those too? At what point will I see an effect that can't be explained by the standard theory which is:
"Little boys and little girls are different, in more than just their genitals, and young women have less interest in computer science."
Shouldn't we see women dropping out of this course in college more so than would be expected?
Shouldn't there be horror stories about how the few that do get compsci degrees are harassed more so than can be expected in general?
Shouldn't we have the age-old lament stories "If I had only become a computer scientist, but I felt that it was a closed club to me, the young woman." ?
Seriously, statistics (if anyone bothers to count this) would show that 99.9% of the people who pee standing up are men. Now THAT'S discrimination. We need to spend millions of taxpayer dollars encouraging men to pee sitting down, and women to pee standing up, until we come closer to something like a nice 50/50 ratio. That's not much more absurd than what you suggest.
Anyone with more than 3 computers. Anyone that wants true security. It never ceases to amaze me that after suffering through non-switched ethernet for years (decades?) people are ready to go back to a medium which is broadcast. When you use wireless (as I am, even now) you're using a single "cable" for everyone. One 100mps switched cable exceeds wireless by a factor of 9.... but the second switched 100mps cable does that again!
Think of it this way, with only a little cable-pulling effort in your home (an investment) you are adding oodles of bandwidth. And if you need more, pull more cable. But you're only (generally) going to get 1 virtual 11mps "cable". Once you use that all up, its gone. So, when your wireless MP3 stereo component, and the 2 tivos, 2 game consoles, your computer, your wife's computer, your children's computer are all on wireless, not to mention the laptop and the ipaq, and you newly installed VoIP phones are all one wireless... you'll be wondering why you ever thought it so great.
My own rule of thumb: Use wireless sparingly, like the limited resource it is.
Wage slave that works as little as possible, putting off things to the last possible moment: Slacker.
Corporation that uses just in time logistics, so that it doesn't have to lease warehouse space, corporation that produces just enough to meet demand: A winner that everyone, shareholders and pundits, raves about.
You haven't been in a elementary classroom in awhile, have you. I'm glad that I don't have any children, because if they were boys, they'd be all but neglected. Maybe you're right though, in 20 years when the current generation of children are adults, maybe things will be different.
How do we know that it's not inherently biological? We've just passed through a period of time where the ratio of men was kept artificially high. Now that those barriers are broken, maybe women are gravitating to specialties that they feel some fundamental affinity for.
As for controlling environmental factors, I think it is insane and unhealthy that even though you can't identify anything wrong with the environment society provides for young women (as pertains to CS at least), you still want to screw with it so that you can twiddle some statistics that don't seem to matter to anyone, least of all women. I mean really, when's the last time you heard a woman say "My life's dream was to be a code monkey, but there seemed to be this invisible force pushing me away from the field!" ?
If women do have some insight, that compsci is missing, it means that they're becoming bridge architects, and our nation's bridges are safer... or just about any other example you can think of. The only possible argument against this, is some study *proving* that compsci is as important and deserves an equal mix.
If there is no gender "benefit" to being male, then I suppose there is none to being female in compsci either? In which case it doesn't really matter what the mix is.
If we want the best computer programs, we want as many women and men in the field as possible.
I puzzled over this last one for a bit. Are you suggesting that 95% of our workforce be shifted to computer science, or something absurd like that?
But why is it necessary to go to the effort and expense to "attract" them to compsci? I mean, some government bureaucrat comes up with magical numbers, that true or not, shows a 10% decline over the last couple decades, and now the old saggy feminists are in a tizzy or something? For all I know, those 10% of women decided there was more money in MBA's and they're all our bosses now. How could you possibly hope to persuade them (or their daughters, more accurately) back to compsci?
Excepting any kind of discrimination that keeps them from pursuring careers in this field, why is this a problem?
A local nutjob, voted the most likely to smell in his highschool graduating class, went from worthless ugly man to tool of the powers that be. The story begins with Moore harassing a single business entity that while amoral, is no different than any of the 50,000 others in this country... with one striking difference. This company hurt *him*. Now, being a little selfish when you're being hurt by someone else isn't the worst thing in the world. And maybe it was the juvenile sarcasm, or the inane but benign "style" of his documentary (if one can call it style) that caught the attention of nameless, faceless people who really run the world. They saw it, and decided to buy it "This young prole here has something that could be useful to us in our puppet show for tha masses, the one that makes them believe there are actually 2 political parties."
You too, could become a tool of the Republocratic agenda! Just be a local nutjob *against* one side or the other... remember folks, being a nutjob for a third party candidate isn't useful to them, they won't elevate you to the status of wealthy fool. Instead, just vote for the 3rd party candidate... I don't even care which! Write one in for god's sake. Sure, even if everyone voted for Nader, he doesn't have a chance of being inaugurated (can you say ballot irregularities?). We can at least make them sweat it though.
No, it's not better. Just "less bad" as you put it. A meaningless distinction for some, I'm sure, but when we're all talking lesser of two evils and such, I figure it's important to be precise.
Slashdot Mirror
Toy? Mac OSX is arguably more ready for the corporate world than linux, and it's not that I don't think linux is ready.
OSX has M$ Office, for the pointy-haired types that insist on it. It has a better browser (Safari) and a decent enough email client (though I believe outlook is also available). It is as solid as a rock. Working with literally hundreds of OSX machines, I've only ever seen crashes that were the result of bad hardware. Even the software glitches turned out (99.8% of the time) to be HD's dying an early death.
OSX is the most polished (more than explorer, or anything else) desktop software, has all the important software, and even games, for crying out loud. I don't think I even dare reading this stupid thing, lest I barf on the desk here.
Ignoring the few privilege elevation exploits we've seen over the years, why in the world would anyone install an untrustworthy program as root?
Seriously, of all the ways my modest little linux server has been nailed over the years, it's never been the installation of software itself.
Some heavy-duty software insists on root installation, but this is only ever well-known stuff for which md5s are available.
I agree, what a dumbass.
10% isn't statistically meaningful, I would think. Show me it dropped from 43% to 7% over that period of time. Or explain to me why this job sector should be so static, when every other in the modern world is so turbulent. I make no assumptions, certainly not that 50/50 ratio is desirable, achievable, or sustainable. I don't assume that this is some kind of trend that we'll work hard to reverse... what if we do nothing at all, and it bounces back to 60% over the next 2 decades? That's not so implausible, is it? Hell, every talking head that says anything at all about IT says that it will be a bigger percentage of jobs in total in the future... that being the case, there will be less non-IT jobs for women to gravitate towards.
But I have an idea. Why not lobby our politicians to spend 3 billion of our tax money over the next 10 years, to right this horrid social injustice that you see everywhere? After all, we have so much money to be wasting on all sorts of important things like this.
Me, assuming? You've not even given anecdotal evidence that these women are being denied opportunities. For all I know, they have the options right now, no real reason to believe otherwise. You've simply got it in your head that roughly 50/50 population means every single job sector needs exactly 50/50 (+- a fair 0.25%). I'm not assuming that to be the case at all.
True that it's drying up, but I tend to do more rollouts. Which is exactly as hard as unboxing something, and plugging it into the wall. Some have been better, I was the guy chosen to do data migration on about 3500 laptops, mostly because I realized that when we could dump data over the network, you could pull the 2.5" out of a powerbook, and put it in the secondary HD bay of a IBM T20... all you needed was a HFS driver. The supposedly smart coworkers (who went on to more jobs at that place) were like "wait, macintosh and PC hard drives are the same?". I felt like slapping them.
BTW, Offtopic: for those of you that care (who knows, this might show up in a google search), to get 105W with a primestar dish, you must adjust the skew on the LNB itself. Loosen the 4 bolts, and twist it... + is counterclockwise, - is clockwise. Easy to miss, with the plastic cover the things have on them... now to restream my 2700, and tune in Nimiq1! Shame I only have the one linear... or I'd start working on my DirecPC modem. If you could sniff it, wait for someone to download an iso, it would be almost like spare bandwidth.
Unemployment and bad credit both = no chance in hell of college. Wish I knew what I wanted to do out of highschool, my SAT score pretty much guaranteed some kind of aid. Stupid guidance counselor pushed me towards nursing, lasted a little over a year.
Well, does it mean anything that I'm trying to point an old Primestar satellite dish at 105W? Just discovered that the LNB has radial markings, think I'm supposed to adjust it for skew.
Or how about that I have about 90 TR ports here at home? I've got a few old Nubus/PDS Macs hooked up to it, haven't had the time to try and get my Sparcstation 2 to see it yet (can't find drivers for the card). Strangely, the PCMCIA token ring card on this linux laptop seems to work nicely, but the PCI card in my linux server barfs if it sees any network activity. But that same server has an ATM155 card, arcnet, localtalk, and a quad port ethernet. Still looking for a HIPPI card for it...
I can name the major components of an ethernet card, heck, just about any electronic component is recognizable to me (guys, ever wonder why ethernet always has a 20mhz osc/crystal but token ring will have 16/48/64mhz?). Take it all the way to the other end, at software... past few months I've been tinkering with adding some sort of rudimentary VINES support to linux, but since all I have is a copy of Banyan 6.0, might take awhile.
I'm designing my own transport protocol (just hope IANA doesn't steal 199 from me) and the routing protocol that it was meant for.
I do lots of things, that always look awkward on a resume, and I sound even more awkward trying to explain them to an HR droid. I mean, really. DO they care or think that it's relevant that I just posted a "wanted: 10ft Cband dish" on freecycle.org?
I'm resigned to the fact that I'll never be more than a lowly little PC technician. It just sucks that everyone makes it so damn hard to find even those jobs.
Oh, and for those of you who have done this repair, can anyone beat my 10m53s motherboard replacement on an iBook? This is without pinching any of the cables, or causing any damage...
Oh, but you never stoop to personal attacks. Haha. Believe my claims? Did I ever prefix a sentence with "You should believe this" ? No. You're supposed to read them, and maybe reconsider your own opinions, think about it, and decide whether they are plausible or not. Only preachers expect people to "believe" what they say.
As for whether it's IBM vs M$ (it won't be), or linux vs. M$... lots of people seem to be confused. Bunch of ijits "IBM will save us, they're our hero!". Something is stinky here though, and they won't be around forever, or they'll give up on the defense. Wait and see.
It's in MS Word because other than the ijits who want text in a html webform, all the others want MS word. Sending them a PDF is a bad idea, generally.
My resume doesn't do the skills/tools list, I'm convinced that tends to look tacky. Former jobs, then education, then certifications last.
Not a graphic designer, but not an asic engineer eiher. I generally do PC tech work, helpdesk, all lower rung stuff. Which means there are 500 asshats who are claiming they can do it also, can't, but will probably get away with it anyway, since this kind of work is only one step up from mouth breathing. The closest I get to designing ASICs is at home, when I play with a Xilinx CPLD.
Maybe I should lie though... just that I suck at it so bad. Maybe I wouldn't have spent 5 years doing this kind of shit work.
PS No Verilog, no ABEL? I guess the big stuff needs better tools.
It is msword, I'm ashamed to say. I've got a few bullets, its 2 column, non-standard layout. No animated gif's or anything, only graphics on it at all are 2 gray bezier lines in the background, as a border. Pretty restrained, or so I tell myself.. it's not HTML blink tags or anything. But at least it's better than the template resumes you see everywhere.
Certainly, the reaction of those HR droids that have seen it isn't negative. While I'm sure it might be tossed in the garbage can quite often, it's the general "let's throw away 950 of our 1000 responses" stuff.
As for content, there was a time when I had less than I liked, not so much the case today. Even now though, my "content" would hardly stand out... how can it, I have little choice where I work, most of the time. I could be one of hundreds or thousands easily... and a slightly pretty resume was one of the few things I could do to stand out. I'd toss up a link to it, to show you how it's not this garrish "hey I just learned about html and colored fonts" freakshow, but it has my personal info in it.
In conclusion, if your "content" is so godlike in its impressiveness, more power to you.
Yeh, and have you checked out the job websites lately? There are more job websites today, than there are actual open jobs. As far as listings, let's see, we have:
.NET. Always a favorite of the job search critic, somewhat more uncommon than traditionally believed. I have a few good ones saved, maybe we should have a contest (would need a way to weed out forgeries)?
1) The Beta Tech/ITT covert spam. You have to read it twice, to understand that after paying them $4500 for a 3 month course, they'll help with job placement.
2) Work at Home! Christ, this scam has to be 40 years old now, haven't they already used up all the idiots?
3) The staffing agency mining for leads. Even I get fooled by these. Recruiter calls me, asks me if I know the names and numbers of all the managers involved in the last 6 big projects I've been in for Fortune 100s. He needs them as references, and no, my coworkers won't do. And yes, as soon as I can get those references, he has a job for me. Haha.
4) The "we have to post this publically, before we can use our H1-B". Usually identifiable by the cryptic description, even by the standards of the buzzword elite.
5) The "must have security clearance". Ok, maybe these are legitimate, but if they all insist on pre-existing clearance, aren't they all chasing after the same 20 people who actually have it and are in this line of work? And if they're so damn rare, how about offering more than $15-17 an hour?
6) The "let's look like a big company" PR blitz. 30 listings at once, all of them paid up extra so that the posting date rolls forward (can't even tell if they're stale or not, as if that matters). Sure, they might hire 2 of those people, but they post the rest knowing full well they'll never hire them.
7) The "let's see if we can get a $90,000 a year expert for $35,000" job listing. My personal favorite. Not that I'm the $90,000 a year expert, just that they probably aren't successful often. Some comfort there.
8) Outright spam. The "apply now" link will take you to viagra, porn, or every once in awhile a MLM scheme. They show up even on Monster, though to its credit, they get nailed within a few hours, near as I can tell. Seeing a disturbing number of these types of listings though.
9) The "let's make you jump through 30 hoops to email your resume" listing. Usually climaxes with them insisting I take my resume that I've carefully crafted and formatted over the years, and strip it down to plaintext and then upload it in a webform textarea. Thanks. Not like you'll read it anyway?
10) The impossible experience listing. 20 years of linux, 7 years of
But never worry, with so many job listings, the economy is surely picking up.
What in the hell kind of operation is Schlotsky's House of Bacon running that they have 500 IT employees?
Also, are they hiring? I'd give up stock options for complimetary bacon any day of the week...
Ah, but master, how can the fish learn that it swims not in water as simple sense would dictate, but in a thick morass of syrupy make-work whose properties change as quickly the fashions of MBAspeak?
You speak in riddles, master. The fish does not learn this, rather it believes lies. All the tish in the ocean have to also believe these lies for their system of stupidity to work, dysfunctionally though it may. This is why market wonkery cannot be learned, it can only be believed.
First off, I'm not a professional researcher. So no, I didn't cite any sources. I spend more time than I should on slashdot anyway, and spending 6 hours citing everything, doing it all proper... well, that isn't going to happen. If I did though, would it get me anything like your agreement? Probably not. You'd find fault with my methodology or something. So, wasting even more of my life here, just so you have one less way to attack me doesn't seem like much of a bargain.
Second, I apologize for suggesting that you read things yourself. Obviously, since you'd only be doing so with all your witless pre-concieved notions, it could only prove what you've decided to be true anyway, so there is no reason for you to waste your time either.
Remember this though. Despite some people's suggestions, I am not a M$ astroturfer. I dislike them, maybe even hate isn't too strong a term. If they win, it will only be with the most devious methods, and nothing like a fair fight. I do not want them to win. I will howl and moan each and every time they pull a dirty trick, I'm not even an apologist for them when they might borderline deserve that (though, come to think of it, I don't even know if there ever was such a situation). All that I've said, rightly or wrongly, is only a warning that it may not be a given that Linux will win quickly, easily, or even at all.
Make of that what you will.
Wow, I thought those guys engineered civillians. Duh. ;)
That is exactly what you advocate, unless you come up with something more than a vague hypothesis about how this is due to some hidden environmental factor that you can't even point a finger at you.
You're at the "Gee, I wonder if there are any causes to this, or if it's just natural" level, and wanting to act as if it's the "OMFG, our little girls are being indoctrinated to be subordinate to men!" level. First, show me what it is we're doing that's screwing this up. I can't even think of a way to identify this, to be honest. It's alot like the pseudoscientist crackpots that rant and rave about the alien "N waves" that emanate from the center of the earth. Tell me, should I try to detect those too? At what point will I see an effect that can't be explained by the standard theory which is:
"Little boys and little girls are different, in more than just their genitals, and young women have less interest in computer science."
Shouldn't we see women dropping out of this course in college more so than would be expected?
Shouldn't there be horror stories about how the few that do get compsci degrees are harassed more so than can be expected in general?
Shouldn't we have the age-old lament stories "If I had only become a computer scientist, but I felt that it was a closed club to me, the young woman." ?
Seriously, statistics (if anyone bothers to count this) would show that 99.9% of the people who pee standing up are men. Now THAT'S discrimination. We need to spend millions of taxpayer dollars encouraging men to pee sitting down, and women to pee standing up, until we come closer to something like a nice 50/50 ratio. That's not much more absurd than what you suggest.
Anyone with more than 3 computers. Anyone that wants true security. It never ceases to amaze me that after suffering through non-switched ethernet for years (decades?) people are ready to go back to a medium which is broadcast. When you use wireless (as I am, even now) you're using a single "cable" for everyone. One 100mps switched cable exceeds wireless by a factor of 9.... but the second switched 100mps cable does that again!
Think of it this way, with only a little cable-pulling effort in your home (an investment) you are adding oodles of bandwidth. And if you need more, pull more cable. But you're only (generally) going to get 1 virtual 11mps "cable". Once you use that all up, its gone. So, when your wireless MP3 stereo component, and the 2 tivos, 2 game consoles, your computer, your wife's computer, your children's computer are all on wireless, not to mention the laptop and the ipaq, and you newly installed VoIP phones are all one wireless... you'll be wondering why you ever thought it so great.
My own rule of thumb: Use wireless sparingly, like the limited resource it is.
Wage slave that works as little as possible, putting off things to the last possible moment: Slacker.
Corporation that uses just in time logistics, so that it doesn't have to lease warehouse space, corporation that produces just enough to meet demand: A winner that everyone, shareholders and pundits, raves about.
Conclusion: It sucks to be a wage slave.
You haven't been in a elementary classroom in awhile, have you. I'm glad that I don't have any children, because if they were boys, they'd be all but neglected. Maybe you're right though, in 20 years when the current generation of children are adults, maybe things will be different.
How do we know that it's not inherently biological? We've just passed through a period of time where the ratio of men was kept artificially high. Now that those barriers are broken, maybe women are gravitating to specialties that they feel some fundamental affinity for.
As for controlling environmental factors, I think it is insane and unhealthy that even though you can't identify anything wrong with the environment society provides for young women (as pertains to CS at least), you still want to screw with it so that you can twiddle some statistics that don't seem to matter to anyone, least of all women. I mean really, when's the last time you heard a woman say "My life's dream was to be a code monkey, but there seemed to be this invisible force pushing me away from the field!" ?
That's total bullshit, and here's why.
If women do have some insight, that compsci is missing, it means that they're becoming bridge architects, and our nation's bridges are safer... or just about any other example you can think of. The only possible argument against this, is some study *proving* that compsci is as important and deserves an equal mix.
If there is no gender "benefit" to being male, then I suppose there is none to being female in compsci either? In which case it doesn't really matter what the mix is.
If we want the best computer programs, we want as many women and men in the field as possible.
I puzzled over this last one for a bit. Are you suggesting that 95% of our workforce be shifted to computer science, or something absurd like that?
But why is it necessary to go to the effort and expense to "attract" them to compsci? I mean, some government bureaucrat comes up with magical numbers, that true or not, shows a 10% decline over the last couple decades, and now the old saggy feminists are in a tizzy or something? For all I know, those 10% of women decided there was more money in MBA's and they're all our bosses now. How could you possibly hope to persuade them (or their daughters, more accurately) back to compsci?
Excepting any kind of discrimination that keeps them from pursuring careers in this field, why is this a problem?
A local nutjob, voted the most likely to smell in his highschool graduating class, went from worthless ugly man to tool of the powers that be. The story begins with Moore harassing a single business entity that while amoral, is no different than any of the 50,000 others in this country... with one striking difference. This company hurt *him*. Now, being a little selfish when you're being hurt by someone else isn't the worst thing in the world. And maybe it was the juvenile sarcasm, or the inane but benign "style" of his documentary (if one can call it style) that caught the attention of nameless, faceless people who really run the world. They saw it, and decided to buy it "This young prole here has something that could be useful to us in our puppet show for tha masses, the one that makes them believe there are actually 2 political parties."
You too, could become a tool of the Republocratic agenda! Just be a local nutjob *against* one side or the other... remember folks, being a nutjob for a third party candidate isn't useful to them, they won't elevate you to the status of wealthy fool. Instead, just vote for the 3rd party candidate... I don't even care which! Write one in for god's sake. Sure, even if everyone voted for Nader, he doesn't have a chance of being inaugurated (can you say ballot irregularities?). We can at least make them sweat it though.
Reading way too much into it, dude.
No, it's not better. Just "less bad" as you put it. A meaningless distinction for some, I'm sure, but when we're all talking lesser of two evils and such, I figure it's important to be precise.