When digital comic strips started becoming big, what jumped out at me was what a change it made in the talents required to draw a cartoon. I've always wanted to do cartooning, and I can come up with punch lines and situations with little effort, but my problem was being able to draw consistently between frames. And since each frame has to be drawn separately, it could easily take four or more hours to do a single strip. It was difficult to put forth that much effort in order to bring a throwaway joke to life. I'd rather have made a wisecrack at a meeting.
But now, with cut-and-paste cartooning, it's easy to pump out the strips. The drawing aspect and time consuming portion have been removed. And it's fun! I laughed at the Red Meat strips with dialog from Star Wars pasted in verbatim. The average strip at TheBench.org is lightly funny in about the same way as most strips I've read, at least as funny as most things printed in the Sunday paper. I suspect that if Dilbert or Mutts or other popular recent strips (though Dilbert is over ten years old now) had construction kits, the average person could be about as funny as Scott Adams. In general, this makes me wonder at the value of most Internet strips. I could pump out a User Friendly strip in fifteen minutes, and it would probably be funnier than the originals. Is that worth a book deal or merchandising? Basically, all the jokes tossed out over breakfast at the dorm cafeteria or amusing things you think of saying but never do can be pasted into a strip and be funny. This is much different than having to spend a year or three writing a novel. Is doing this for a living respectable any more? (Okay, you could take the angle of putting yourself in a strip and wearing short skirts and boots so geeks will drool over you:)
Many large companies, like the one I work for, have usability departments with Intranet pages linked to Jacob's pages - and yet the company's pages still have way too many images all in the name of marketing.
This is a classic problem. At every company that has a project massively behind schedule, you'll find copies of _The Mythical Man Month_ and _Understanding the Software Development Process_. Heck, Microsoft Press publishes some of the most respected books about software development, and look at the messes their parent company produces.
It's easy to chalk this up to the "That doesn't apply to me" syndrome, but I think it's simpler than that: people know what all the experts say, and might even quote them in interviews, but they don't really believe it deep down inside. Someone wanting to start up a news site, for example, may read all the books about site design, but goes with a graphic-laden site because (1) that's what other sites do, and (2) he or she wants to look as good as the pros and not so homemade. We *know* that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but then we still want the fancy packaging. I've known people who have bitterly complained about software packages that come in jewel cases or have black and white manuals. They'll just shove the case in the closet and never read the manual, but they want all the useless frills anyway.
One time I used 100% recycled paper for a customer mailing. I thought using recycled paper was a good thing, and I was glad to support the maker of the paper. But in the end I think that people looked at the gray paper as cheap and very unpolished and would have preferred something on bleached white, virgin paper. If you asked all those people if they supported recycling, though, they all would have said yes.
The bottom line is that it's easy to convince people that usability and simplicity are more important to web site design than gobs of professionally done graphics, but that doesn't mean they'll listen. Because they won't.
The advantage here is that realistic amounts of memory--128MB or more--can be put on chip with the processor. In effect, all memory is cache. This would be fantastic both in terms of speed and low cost.
Ah, this is great. Chip manufacturers are increasing power consumption in exchange for no notcible benefit. Could we please get back on track and work on something that computer users really want, like:
* Dirt cheap price (i.e. a fast CPU for $20). * Negligible power consumption. * Much smaller, less clunky systems (of which a low power, cheap CPU is an important part). * Zero boot time.
There are companies working on such things, but other than Transmeta you never hear about them. iTV has been working on a CPU that costs $2, with the goal of manufacturing network-aware devices for under $50. And there are others.
Open Source has nothing to do with the platform. There are plenty of Windows programs that have the source code available, but they tend to be low-key things like lcc and such, and not the big moneymakers behind Windows' popularity (Word, Quicken, Delphi, most games). Then again, Linux doesn't have programs that that fit into that class at the moment.
This is possibly the best book yet on the subject of game development, but it greatly saddens me. This isn't a book about the magic of game design and creation, it's a book about navigating the passageways of the game industry. Even that we have to call it an "industry" now is depressing. If you want to start a game company that yammers on about innovation and cutting edge technology, and then goes on to create Yet Another Realtime Strategy Game That Wishes It Were Starcraft and such, then go ahead. But otherwise this is on par with a book about getting into the consulting business. Bleah.
The race to 1GHz is at the expense of things that really matter to people who use computers. I stopped being able to tell the difference in processor speed after about 200MHz or so. After that point, resources would have been better spent on getting a processor that uses very little power and costs $10. In some ways we're not advancing at all. I could boot up a circa 1984 PC into WordStar--from diskette--faster than I can boot a Linux machine and get into Emacs.
Katz's oft-repeated claim is that "geeks are in love with pop culture."
Exactly. And it's true. The dichotomy is that the stereotypical web geek likes to think that he's underground and subversive, but what TV shows does he like? Buffy, X-Files and The Simpsons. What movies? The Matrix and The Phantom Menace. What books? Pulp fantasy, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson. The Matrix isn't some underground secret; it was one of the most heavily marketed money makers of 1999. Yes, this is a stereotype, but there's a reason that the recent X-Files news item on Slashdot had 500+ comments posted about it.
In general, I'd say that the typical geek is about as trend following and mainstream as anyone else, much to his chagrin.
Since the first of the year, I've seen lots of mail and newsgroup postings with wacky dates, usually far in the future. So apparently this hit many people, though whether or not they realize it is something else altogether.
The Matrix did it, X-Files did it last night, The Thirteenth Floor (avoid this movie), did it too. The Matrix explained it as "the body cannot live without the mind" as I recall.
"Video games are real" was a tired old plot back in the mid 1980s. You can find editorials in writing magazines about this being a science fiction plot to avoid at all costs. Not too surprising that poppy mass media TV shows and movies are falling back on corny old plots, now is it?
I've never understood how people can be such rabid devotees of particular consoles. It's even more amazing that someone can read a few sparse press releases and become a disciple of a console that he's never seen, doesn't really know anything about, and that isn't supposed to be available for 18 months. Bizarre.
Well, YES, it IS, for many people, Linux has made computing _fun_ again, which for a long time it wasn't. Sure you can use linux to do real work, but the main point for me and for a lot of people out there coding for free is that Linux is fun. If it weren't fun, they wouldn't be writing all that code.
"Fun to code for" and "slick and easy to use" are not mutually exclusive. You're envisioning some sort of Barbie user interface where you there giant buttons on the screen reading "SEND MAIL," "DOWNLOAD PICTURES OF RICKY MARTIN," and "WRITE BOOK REPORT."
At one time the NeXT interface was both slick and fun. Now BeOS seems to have that niche, but MacOS X might be the new king. Meanwhile, over in Linux land, we're still dealing with byzantine combinations of poorly designed UIs tacked onto clunky windowing systems that would have still been clunky in 1985. We justify this by saying "We are elite! We have choice!" But in the end we look like some crazed old coots yelling "Down with CDs! Vinyl has much better sound quality!"
All of that is true. Human interface designers won't hesitate to show all the serious problems with the Windows interface (see the UI Hall of Shame for many, many examples).
We don't want the Windows interface. We want something that's rock solid, consistent, well-designed, less cluttered, and infinitely usable. And we also want to be able to hit a couple of keys and pop up a nifty terminal window at any time (though many people never will use it or care that it exists). So we don't need to have every esoteric bit of system administration turned into a control panel (a la KDE).
Almost every Linux user uses Xwindows with the WM of their choice. So if this window manager could be something that's not stuck in the 1970s, something that's slick and usable, and something that's not Windows, then what's the problem if non-techies can also use it? Absolutely nothing. Nobody would prefer one of the current half-baked destop environments over something with some thought behind it other than "Look at me! I'm copying Microsoft!"
Many of the responses to this article tend to go like this:
"Who needs a fancy schmancy interface? Raw Xwindows is great!" "We don't want to make Linux easier to use!"
Look, Linux started out as a private hack that went public and has grown into a very stable operating system kernel. But the long line of open source development and bleeding edge kernels is not the means, not an end. The goal is not for Linux to be the OS of the 3/_33t who like recompiling kernels and hacking X windows config files. If you want to be able to graduate and not have to use Windows on the job, then Linux has to progress beyond the embryonic stage.
Quite frankly, we need the expertise of people like those at Eazel. I recently tried out OS X for the Mac (which runs on a Mach kernel), and it's far from perfect but it's so far above and beyond anything for X, including MacOS-like themes, that you can't make valid comparisons.
Part of the solution is to avoid knee-jerk changes in format. For example, the Word file format gets changed every few years, but to what end? ASCII may eventually go out of date (as did EBCDIC), but at least a text file tends to be more future proof than a proprietary binary format. In terms of the web, there's already been a lot of nonsense caused by some people using Flash and other people using style sheets and other people using Microsoft or Netscape extensions to HTML. Is it really worth it? Or would it be better to stick to the least common denominator of pure HTML? I say yes, but apparently a significant number of web page creators disagree.
You have to admit that there are big mysteries to being a woman, at least from a guy's point of view. The opposite isn't nearly as true; "the guy experience" tends to be a small subset of "the girl experience." Consider:
1. In the average deparment store, womens' clothing takes up an entire floor, where mens' clothing is maybe 1/8 of that. 2. Anything a guy wears a woman can wear, but there's a long list of things that are only for women: dresses, skirts, hose, lots of types of shoes, formal wear other than tuxedos, much greater variety of colors and materials, etc. 3. If a female college student suddely took her shirt off in the middle of campus, there would be catcalls and hollering and lots of attention. But if a guy took off his pants then there would be screaming and the police would be called. 4. There are entire stores in every shopping mall devoted to selling things that make women look hot and turn guys on (e.g. Victoria's Secret). 5. A girl who wears a miniskirt or tight top *knows* she's going to be getting stares and be the subject of fantasy. Guys never experience this.
I still read papers now and again, not so much for the news but for reviews and editorials and The NY Times Book Review section. When I do, a few things occur to me:
1. Most web sites are incredibly juvenile in comparison. 2. There seems to be a glaring lack of knowledge and experience on many review-oriented web sites. 3. There's an odd tendency on the web for people to latch onto weird marketing-driven causes--Athlon, GeForce, MacOS--and act like developments related to these products are newsworthy. In a newspaper, an article like "Buick to Revamp Interiors of 200 Lineup" would be obviosly a phony advertorial type of article. But on the web those topics are legitimized into real news.
You would really consider looking at the source code--and making an ad hoc fix--to a product that's a 29MB compressed download? That's ridiculous. Your chances of breaking something are much higher than making a correct fix.
It's not that *anyone* is particularly bad, just that you tend to be focused on working on one thing without seeing the big picture. The two biggies:
1. You get more concerned internal schedule details than considering the people who will actually use the program. It's so easy to say "That's not a critical bug; we'll fix it next time around."
2. Microsoft developers are one or two product cycles ahead of what's currently shipping. So right now lots of people at Microsoft are working on followups to Windows 2000 and nobody's actually working on W2K. Of course the general public is just starting to see W2K, so there's a definite gap.
These come from working for a Microsoft contractor for nine months.
I'd like to see the studies, statistics, and data indicating this conclusion. I'm a man, but I know many women in the hacking (no, not cracking, but I'll leave *that* rant to someone more eloquent) community. Granted, there are far fewer women involved in this field than men, but to say that there are "next to no female hackers" is going much too far.
This may be true. And the female hackers may not think of themselves as hackers at all, but something else.
This is similar to the great difference in male and female attitudes toward sex that you see on the web. Go into any chat room and you'll see endless guys making crass come ons that nobody would ever be excited by (except for men posing as women). But even so, any woman you see over, say, 20 has done, to a real guy, exactly what the crass chat room men are always asking for. The difference is that women aren't running around obsessed about it. If there are large numbers of so-called female hackers, then I bet they don't read Slashdot and they don't obssess about the same things typical male hackers do (new kernels, down with Microsoft, lookit how fast my Athlon is).
Even among programmers who use C++ on a daily basis, there seems to be no shortage of people willing to express varying degrees of distaste for C++. This is similar to the popular dislike among some programmers for Microsoft Windows, in that the loud and frequent negativity doesn't have much of an effect on overall popularity. Do all the jokes and complaints about C++ bother you at all?
I would rather pay for their compiler and get the source with it, than download it for nothing.
Is this just a princple thing or would you really dive into several hundred thousand lines of source code and start "fixing" the compiler? You'd really rather do that than write apps with it? You couldn't do one without the other?
In this case, Borland is giving away something genuinely useful. Students and hobbyists are going to flock to Borland C++, rather than paying $100 for the non-optimizing personal edition of Visual C++ or paying $500 for the real thing. You can moan about it not being open source and so on, but Borland C++ is enabling people to develop applications for Windows without additional cost up front, hardware aside. This may be all someone with the next great idea needs to write a wonderful application or utility or game. And in all honesty BC++ is much, much less crusty than gcc. gcc is usable, but nobody will give it more than that.
This is very good. gcc is a great tool, but for various reaons it has generally been a poor choice for the Windows environment. I don't want to argue this point;as a user of both Linux and Windows, I've found it to be true.
What's most interesting about this announcement is that it underscores how little a compiler means to software development these days. Yes, obviously you need a compiler to produce executable code. But a bare compiler has no value to many people unless it comes with a RAD environment or generally does something above and beyond generating code.
What the world really needs is a new OS (perhaps based on the Linux kernel, perhaps not) that bundles ease of use and robustness in a single package.
It's high time some of you stopped deluding yourselves into thinking that GNU/Linux is the be-all and end-all of Operating Systems.
You're right, of course. But that isn't going to happen all at once. And as long as Linux exists and has some advantages, it would be nice to improve it in a good way. I don't see anyone taking any steps toward an alternative system.
Slashdot Mirror
When digital comic strips started becoming big, what jumped out at me was what a change it made in the talents required to draw a cartoon. I've always wanted to do cartooning, and I can come up with punch lines and situations with little effort, but my problem was being able to draw consistently between frames. And since each frame has to be drawn separately, it could easily take four or more hours to do a single strip. It was difficult to put forth that much effort in order to bring a throwaway joke to life. I'd rather have made a wisecrack at a meeting.
:)
But now, with cut-and-paste cartooning, it's easy to pump out the strips. The drawing aspect and time consuming portion have been removed. And it's fun! I laughed at the Red Meat strips with dialog from Star Wars pasted in verbatim. The average strip at TheBench.org is lightly funny in about the same way as most strips I've read, at least as funny as most things printed in the Sunday paper. I suspect that if Dilbert or Mutts or other popular recent strips (though Dilbert is over ten years old now) had construction kits, the average person could be about as funny as Scott Adams. In general, this makes me wonder at the value of most Internet strips. I could pump out a User Friendly strip in fifteen minutes, and it would probably be funnier than the originals. Is that worth a book deal or merchandising? Basically, all the jokes tossed out over breakfast at the dorm cafeteria or amusing things you think of saying but never do can be pasted into a strip and be funny. This is much different than having to spend a year or three writing a novel. Is doing this for a living respectable any more? (Okay, you could take the angle of putting yourself in a strip and wearing short skirts and boots so geeks will drool over you
Many large companies, like the one I work for, have usability departments with Intranet pages linked to Jacob's pages - and yet the company's pages still have way too many images all in the name of marketing.
This is a classic problem. At every company that has a project massively behind schedule, you'll find copies of _The Mythical Man Month_ and _Understanding the Software Development Process_. Heck, Microsoft Press publishes some of the most respected books about software development, and look at the messes their parent company produces.
It's easy to chalk this up to the "That doesn't apply to me" syndrome, but I think it's simpler than that: people know what all the experts say, and might even quote them in interviews, but they don't really believe it deep down inside. Someone wanting to start up a news site, for example, may read all the books about site design, but goes with a graphic-laden site because (1) that's what other sites do, and (2) he or she wants to look as good as the pros and not so homemade. We *know* that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but then we still want the fancy packaging. I've known people who have bitterly complained about software packages that come in jewel cases or have black and white manuals. They'll just shove the case in the closet and never read the manual, but they want all the useless frills anyway.
One time I used 100% recycled paper for a customer mailing. I thought using recycled paper was a good thing, and I was glad to support the maker of the paper. But in the end I think that people looked at the gray paper as cheap and very unpolished and would have preferred something on bleached white, virgin paper. If you asked all those people if they supported recycling, though, they all would have said yes.
The bottom line is that it's easy to convince people that usability and simplicity are more important to web site design than gobs of professionally done graphics, but that doesn't mean they'll listen. Because they won't.
The advantage here is that realistic amounts of memory--128MB or more--can be put on chip with the processor. In effect, all memory is cache. This would be fantastic both in terms of speed and low cost.
Ah, this is great. Chip manufacturers are increasing power consumption in exchange for no notcible benefit. Could we please get back on track and work on something that computer users really want, like:
* Dirt cheap price (i.e. a fast CPU for $20).
* Negligible power consumption.
* Much smaller, less clunky systems (of which a low power, cheap CPU is an important part).
* Zero boot time.
There are companies working on such things, but other than Transmeta you never hear about them. iTV has been working on a CPU that costs $2, with the goal of manufacturing network-aware devices for under $50. And there are others.
Open Source has nothing to do with the platform. There are plenty of Windows programs that have the source code available, but they tend to be low-key things like lcc and such, and not the big moneymakers behind Windows' popularity (Word, Quicken, Delphi, most games). Then again, Linux doesn't have programs that that fit into that class at the moment.
Note: I work in the game industry.
This is possibly the best book yet on the subject of game development, but it greatly saddens me. This isn't a book about the magic of game design and creation, it's a book about navigating the passageways of the game industry. Even that we have to call it an "industry" now is depressing. If you want to start a game company that yammers on about innovation and cutting edge technology, and then goes on to create Yet Another Realtime Strategy Game That Wishes It Were Starcraft and such, then go ahead. But otherwise this is on par with a book about getting into the consulting business. Bleah.
The race to 1GHz is at the expense of things that really matter to people who use computers. I stopped being able to tell the difference in processor speed after about 200MHz or so. After that point, resources would have been better spent on getting a processor that uses very little power and costs $10. In some ways we're not advancing at all. I could boot up a circa 1984 PC into WordStar--from diskette--faster than I can boot a Linux machine and get into Emacs.
Katz's oft-repeated claim is that "geeks are in love with pop culture."
Exactly. And it's true. The dichotomy is that the stereotypical web geek likes to think that he's underground and subversive, but what TV shows does he like? Buffy, X-Files and The Simpsons. What movies? The Matrix and The Phantom Menace. What books? Pulp fantasy, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson. The Matrix isn't some underground secret; it was one of the most heavily marketed money makers of 1999. Yes, this is a stereotype, but there's a reason that the recent X-Files news item on Slashdot had 500+ comments posted about it.
In general, I'd say that the typical geek is about as trend following and mainstream as anyone else, much to his chagrin.
Since the first of the year, I've seen lots of mail and newsgroup postings with wacky dates, usually far in the future. So apparently this hit many people, though whether or not they realize it is something else altogether.
The Matrix did it, X-Files did it last night, The Thirteenth Floor (avoid this movie), did it too. The Matrix explained it as "the body cannot live without the mind" as I recall.
"Video games are real" was a tired old plot back in the mid 1980s. You can find editorials in writing magazines about this being a science fiction plot to avoid at all costs. Not too surprising that poppy mass media TV shows and movies are falling back on corny old plots, now is it?
I've never understood how people can be such rabid devotees of particular consoles. It's even more amazing that someone can read a few sparse press releases and become a disciple of a console that he's never seen, doesn't really know anything about, and that isn't supposed to be available for 18 months. Bizarre.
Well, YES, it IS, for many people, Linux has made computing _fun_ again, which for a long time it wasn't. Sure you can use linux to do real work, but the main point for me and for a lot of people out there coding for free is that Linux is fun. If it weren't fun, they wouldn't be writing all that code.
"Fun to code for" and "slick and easy to use" are not mutually exclusive. You're envisioning some sort of Barbie user interface where you there giant buttons on the screen reading "SEND MAIL," "DOWNLOAD PICTURES OF RICKY MARTIN," and "WRITE BOOK REPORT."
At one time the NeXT interface was both slick and fun. Now BeOS seems to have that niche, but MacOS X might be the new king. Meanwhile, over in Linux land, we're still dealing with byzantine combinations of poorly designed UIs tacked onto clunky windowing systems that would have still been clunky in 1985. We justify this by saying "We are elite! We have choice!" But in the end we look like some crazed old coots yelling "Down with CDs! Vinyl has much better sound quality!"
All of that is true. Human interface designers won't hesitate to show all the serious problems with the Windows interface (see the UI Hall of Shame for many, many examples).
We don't want the Windows interface. We want something that's rock solid, consistent, well-designed, less cluttered, and infinitely usable. And we also want to be able to hit a couple of keys and pop up a nifty terminal window at any time (though many people never will use it or care that it exists). So we don't need to have every esoteric bit of system administration turned into a control panel (a la KDE).
Almost every Linux user uses Xwindows with the WM of their choice. So if this window manager could be something that's not stuck in the 1970s, something that's slick and usable, and something that's not Windows, then what's the problem if non-techies can also use it? Absolutely nothing. Nobody would prefer one of the current half-baked destop environments over something with some thought behind it other than "Look at me! I'm copying Microsoft!"
Many of the responses to this article tend to go like this:
"Who needs a fancy schmancy interface? Raw Xwindows is great!"
"We don't want to make Linux easier to use!"
Look, Linux started out as a private hack that went public and has grown into a very stable operating system kernel. But the long line of open source development and bleeding edge kernels is not the means, not an end. The goal is not for Linux to be the OS of the 3/_33t who like recompiling kernels and hacking X windows config files. If you want to be able to graduate and not have to use Windows on the job, then Linux has to progress beyond the embryonic stage.
Quite frankly, we need the expertise of people like those at Eazel. I recently tried out OS X for the Mac (which runs on a Mach kernel), and it's far from perfect but it's so far above and beyond anything for X, including MacOS-like themes, that you can't make valid comparisons.
Part of the solution is to avoid knee-jerk changes in format. For example, the Word file format gets changed every few years, but to what end? ASCII may eventually go out of date (as did EBCDIC), but at least a text file tends to be more future proof than a proprietary binary format. In terms of the web, there's already been a lot of nonsense caused by some people using Flash and other people using style sheets and other people using Microsoft or Netscape extensions to HTML. Is it really worth it? Or would it be better to stick to the least common denominator of pure HTML? I say yes, but apparently a significant number of web page creators disagree.
You have to admit that there are big mysteries to being a woman, at least from a guy's point of view. The opposite isn't nearly as true; "the guy experience" tends to be a small subset of "the girl experience." Consider:
1. In the average deparment store, womens' clothing takes up an entire floor, where mens' clothing is maybe 1/8 of that.
2. Anything a guy wears a woman can wear, but there's a long list of things that are only for women: dresses, skirts, hose, lots of types of shoes, formal wear other than tuxedos, much greater variety of colors and materials, etc.
3. If a female college student suddely took her shirt off in the middle of campus, there would be catcalls and hollering and lots of attention. But if a guy took off his pants then there would be screaming and the police would be called.
4. There are entire stores in every shopping mall devoted to selling things that make women look hot and turn guys on (e.g. Victoria's Secret).
5. A girl who wears a miniskirt or tight top *knows* she's going to be getting stares and be the subject of fantasy. Guys never experience this.
Weird? Yeah. But no wonder guys wonder.
I still read papers now and again, not so much for the news but for reviews and editorials and The NY Times Book Review section. When I do, a few things occur to me:
1. Most web sites are incredibly juvenile in comparison.
2. There seems to be a glaring lack of knowledge and experience on many review-oriented web sites.
3. There's an odd tendency on the web for people to latch onto weird marketing-driven causes--Athlon, GeForce, MacOS--and act like developments related to these products are newsworthy. In a newspaper, an article like "Buick to Revamp Interiors of 200 Lineup" would be obviosly a phony advertorial type of article. But on the web those topics are legitimized into real news.
You would really consider looking at the source code--and making an ad hoc fix--to a product that's a 29MB compressed download? That's ridiculous. Your chances of breaking something are much higher than making a correct fix.
It's not that *anyone* is particularly bad, just that you tend to be focused on working on one thing without seeing the big picture. The two biggies:
1. You get more concerned internal schedule details than considering the people who will actually use the program. It's so easy to say "That's not a critical bug; we'll fix it next time around."
2. Microsoft developers are one or two product cycles ahead of what's currently shipping. So right now lots of people at Microsoft are working on followups to Windows 2000 and nobody's actually working on W2K. Of course the general public is just starting to see W2K, so there's a definite gap.
These come from working for a Microsoft contractor for nine months.
I'd like to see the studies, statistics, and data indicating this conclusion. I'm a man, but I know many women in the hacking (no, not cracking, but I'll leave *that* rant to someone more eloquent) community. Granted, there are far fewer women involved in this field than men, but to say that there are "next to no female hackers" is going much too far.
This may be true. And the female hackers may not think of themselves as hackers at all, but something else.
This is similar to the great difference in male and female attitudes toward sex that you see on the web. Go into any chat room and you'll see endless guys making crass come ons that nobody would ever be excited by (except for men posing as women). But even so, any woman you see over, say, 20 has done, to a real guy, exactly what the crass chat room men are always asking for. The difference is that women aren't running around obsessed about it. If there are large numbers of so-called female hackers, then I bet they don't read Slashdot and they don't obssess about the same things typical male hackers do (new kernels, down with Microsoft, lookit how fast my Athlon is).
Even among programmers who use C++ on a daily basis, there seems to be no shortage of people willing to express varying degrees of distaste for C++. This is similar to the popular dislike among some programmers for Microsoft Windows, in that the loud and frequent negativity doesn't have much of an effect on overall popularity. Do all the jokes and complaints about C++ bother you at all?
I would rather pay for their compiler and get the source with it, than download it for nothing.
Is this just a princple thing or would you really dive into several hundred thousand lines of source code and start "fixing" the compiler? You'd really rather do that than write apps with it? You couldn't do one without the other?
Stop the whining. It is clouding your vision.
In this case, Borland is giving away something genuinely useful. Students and hobbyists are going to flock to Borland C++, rather than paying $100 for the non-optimizing personal edition of Visual C++ or paying $500 for the real thing. You can moan about it not being open source and so on, but Borland C++ is enabling people to develop applications for Windows without additional cost up front, hardware aside. This may be all someone with the next great idea needs to write a wonderful application or utility or game. And in all honesty BC++ is much, much less crusty than gcc. gcc is usable, but nobody will give it more than that.
This is very good. gcc is a great tool, but for various reaons it has generally been a poor choice for the Windows environment. I don't want to argue this point;as a user of both Linux and Windows, I've found it to be true.
What's most interesting about this announcement is that it underscores how little a compiler means to software development these days. Yes, obviously you need a compiler to produce executable code. But a bare compiler has no value to many people unless it comes with a RAD environment or generally does something above and beyond generating code.
What the world really needs is a new OS (perhaps based on the Linux kernel, perhaps not) that bundles ease of use and robustness in a single package.
It's high time some of you stopped deluding yourselves into thinking that GNU/Linux is the be-all and end-all of Operating Systems.
You're right, of course. But that isn't going to happen all at once. And as long as Linux exists and has some advantages, it would be nice to improve it in a good way. I don't see anyone taking any steps toward an alternative system.