Since my parents live and try to do business out of a house where the fastest connection they can get is 26k (on a good day), I'd kill for 200kbps "broadband".
I guess my experience (and that of my fiancee, who is also a computer programmer) has been that of guys welcoming any girl even remotely interested in computers to join their groups - normally not even in a way that would be considered creepy.
Who knows, maybe things have changed with that - most girls I have known in groups like that have had to deal with being a bit of the center of attention, but nothing worse than that.
Twenty years ago there was a higher percentage of women in CS than there are now. Back when it was more scientific research.
It's the hobbyists that changed it. Every guy I know in CS has been programming or at least playing video games since middle school. How many girls did you know in middle school who were programming?
The female gender role is not suited to the obsessive level of hobbyist interest found in CS today, ESPECIALLY self-trained areas like open-source. Regardless of natural aptitude, women are not brought up to be computer hackers - the level of specialization, competition, and self-isolation that usually accompanies it are directly against everything society teaches them.
You want to get women into CS? Get them young. Teach your daughters programming, or computer graphics, or even just how to play something that requires they look at the system requirements:) Most guys I know who are doing well in CS had it picked as their field by the time they were freshmen in high school. Most girls I know in CS, even the good ones, weren't really sure until they were looking at colleges.
The crazy thing is that the exact attributes that often lead people into programming - the overly-rational mind, the nearly anti-social enjoyment of spending long hours alone in front of the computer - often make people very difficult members of a software development TEAM.
This type of problem of "random things breaking with large amounts of memory" isn't limited to Apple, unfortunately. I've got a Dell that doesn't wake from sleep because of its 2g of memory. They have a fix, but you can't get it publicly, and I haven't forced myself to wait through their tech support to get it from them yet.
They aren't going for exactly the same market - they're more competing with Final Cut Express. Premiere has always been significantly cheaper than FCP, and from what I understand you get what you pay for, but it isn't necessarily a bad product.
I know local TV stations and educational programs often used to use Premiere because it allowed them to be cross platform, was good enough, and was cheaper.
I don't know that Premiere was ever really as big in the movie space where FCP really makes its mark.
Now, after effects has always worked hand in hand with FCP or premiere, and it will be nice to have a mac native version of it for Intel.
Virus software as it currently exists only identifies known threats. A firewall blocking outbound connections will catch any new software that attempts to phone home that does not specifically attempt to bypass that firewall. Including those gray-area "legitimate" companies that some malware companies leave off of their lists.
It's not the only feature on which a firewall should be judged, but it is useful to know which ones do it properly.
On the other hand, while I would prefer to keep termites out of my house completely, I would rather know when I have an infestation before they eat the entire house.
The whole idea of a trojan is that the user doesn't know that it's running. Having something that might alert you to it can be quite helpful. And yes, SOME trojans install enough of a rootkit that they will be undetectable, but much malware just creates a "Happy bunnies.exe" process that sends your information out. I'd like to have some opportunity to have a "wtf did I install happy bunnies and why does it need to connect to the internet" before it starts sending out my personal info. It should definitely be a second line of defense, but that doesn't negate its utility.
A minivan can haul, to a degree. Heck, even my Celica can pull a small trailer. But there are weight limits, and depending on the size of what you are pulling you will need something with a sturdier rear frame and suspension as well as a heftier engine to pull it. I'm pretty darn sure that most minivans are not rated for even a skid loader's weight, although they might do a small boat.
There's also a significant difference between what you CAN pull and what you can pull safely and without damaging your vehicle.
Depends what you're hauling. A minivan can't pull the trailer with the skid loader or excavator you picked up to finish the trenching and grading around your project. It can't pull a boat either. Are you saying that anyone who owns a boat should have to run a truck every time they go out, because they only boat once a month?
The real problem I see (and I'm guilty as well) is that 90% of the people driving to work every morning are driving alone. Your fuel efficiency per passenger is multiplicative by the number of people your car is carrying.
I have a friend who is a does traffic engineering and he says that the number one thing anyone can do to solve congestion, pollution from gas, etc, is to actually put more than one person in that car.
Even an SUV (and believe me, in more than 2/3rds of cases I see no reason someone should be driving one of those instead of a fuel-efficient minivan or *gasp* a station wagon) with three people in it will be burning less gas per person transported than a hybrid carrying one. With how much single passenger traffic there is it's kind of a shame that scooters and motorcycles aren't more popular.
Now, of course a hybrid that's packed with people would be the best solution, but you can make a big impact without forcing people to give away their SUVs.
I think you're on to something, but not necessary in the way that you said.
Many younger people I know see a PC as what they play games on at home, and a mac as that old, slow, crappy thing they have to use at school that doesn't read their works files.
School computers are almost by definition old and poorly administrated, which leads to them being slow, unreliable, and generally frustrating to use, mac, linux, or PC.
While the average quality of pages on Wikipedia may be high, there are quite a few incorrect ones. Without the expert ability to gauge the accuracy of a page, one makes the safer assumption of lower quality. The lack of information on the non-expert's part combines with the presence of poor quality articles to lower the perceived quality of the higher quality articles.
An expert in a field has the knowledge to verify the quality of the articles, and therefore can assess their true reliability.
I'm sorry, I think I would have made this much clearer if I had said travel TO Europe.
Similarly, most people in the midwest won't visit LA more than once or twice in their lifetime, because plane tickets are not cheap. As your example shows, you're spending half of your vacation budget just getting there... that doesn't make it a common or easy trip.
I agree that it is a global economy and that anyone who has any desire to go into international business should learn as many languages as possible.
But I have had no need to.
Now, despite this, I have learned Spanish because other cultures INTEREST me. But so far it has provided absolutely no worth to me on anything more than an intellectual, self-fulfilling level. To those for whom learning a second language is difficult and/or not interesting, there is no motivation.
Some Americans need to deal with Quebec and French businesses... the vast majority of Americans do not. Most work is done for other Americans, with other American companies, or in those few rare cases where you might deal with a foreign business, they speak English. Several years of a foreign language is a graduation requirement for all high schools in the US as well as most colleges - not the level of English instruction you see in many schools, but it is a requirement. And five years later, no one remembers any of it, because unless you go into international business you never use it.
Because the car is a necessity for my job, whereas a fun flight to Europe isn't.
I'm just saying that it's expensive for an american to visit Paris when compared to an american visiting Chicago or a German visiting Paris, and that that expense is enough to provide reasonable justification for not having done it, without having to throw in anything about us being intentionally ignorant or disrespectful of the rest of the world.
First off, it likely is not nearly as inexpensive to travel in the US as you assume. For many people the fact you are paying in US Dollars is a safety net and somehow reduces the cost.
The US dollars have nothing to do with it - the ability to drive to my destination does. I'm going to bet that one's normal expenses (hotels, meals, etc) aren't significantly different price-wise in the US or Europe. But for all that I live in the middle of nowhere, a six hour drive to Chicago is going to cost me a tank of gas (probably equivalent to the cost of visiting Paris from Spain), as opposed to hundreds of dollars at least in airline tickets. Even most domestic flights are half the cost of a trans-atlantic, for obvious reasons. My general comparison, though, is the ability to drive to a vacation spot as opposed to flying halfway across the world - there is a tremendous price difference there.
I took my wife to Amsterdam for a 4 day weekend in March. I bought the package of airfare and hotel for US$1600 in December. If you are serious about going to Europe you can look at the travel packages offered by airlines and credit card companies.
$1600 for four days, over 16 hours of which (at least) are spent in airports and on a plane? And that isn't expensive?
I think my general feeling (and again, I'm assuming that anyone else shares this) is that a trip to Europe is expensive enough to not be taken lightly, and a large chunk of the cost is getting there - especially if you are camping or staying in hostels and the like. Most of that 1600 was spend in getting to Amsterdam to begin with - it seems a shame to use it on only four days!
And as for people who speak foreign languages in major cities, that is undoubtedly true! Especially at major universities. However... they also speak English. The only reason in America to learn a foreign language is to attempt to talk to your waiter at an ethnic restaurant. For the majority of people there are no practical situations where they feel the lack. It's an indirect consequence of our size and of the universality of our native tongue, but I don't know that it necessarily reflects the view that the rest of the world isn't as important - it's just that we don't have to interact with the rest of the world too often.
You forgot the most important one: it's really darn expensive to go to Europe.
Yes, I could afford it - if I save up all year and make it a high priority. I actually plan on doing that. But there's no way my parents could, and they're solidly middle class. They bought a house instead.
Not to mention the fact that because of its expense I have to find two weeks of vacation available for it, at the same time as my wife.
Or... I can hop in a car on a weekend and drive to any number of parks or interesting cities here. Are they as cool as some of the ancient wonders of Europe? I'll bet not, but I can't see Paris in a weekend.
I agree that it's good for anyone to travel and get different perspectives - but it's not always practical. I've travelled enough in the US to have crossed Europe twice over, and for a combined cost similar to what it would have been to go to Europe once. I mean, it's not as though I see a bunch of Europeans walking around Columbus, OH on vacation. You see some at the grand canyon, some in New York... but it's not as though everyone over there is traveling "abroad," ie, outside of their EU, western-european dominated culture to see the rest of the world, either. Ask how many people in Europe have been to Africa or Eastern Asia, and you'll probably get fewer responses than Americans who have visited Europe.
As for the language... yeah, it sucks that they don't teach more in school here. On the other hand, I learned spanish well, and all it's ever let me do is overhear what the workers at the fast food restaurant are talking about. No one values foreign languages here because you have to go looking for uses for them. A german can learn his German, English, and French, and probably have a common use for all three of those (obviously, I wouldn't know as many Europeans as I do online if none of them spoke English, and it's just a weekend train ride or drive to go pick up some French ladies).
I guess what I'm saying is... people look for all these huge reasons why Americans don't have much first-hand knowledge of the rest of the world, and my answer to much of it isn't that we're a superpower (that's why you know so much about us) or that we don't like you or anything, it's that you're FAR FAR away, and most people will have little chance or need to actually ever use that knowledge.
And those of us over here who actually do know something are just as sad about it.
In Japan there are (or were a few years ago) "celebrities" who make their living doing nothing but being americans. They appear on talk shows, game shows, commercials, you name it. They tend to have overly stylized american features, dress, and haircuts that they have admitted are there simply for the act, and that they would be a nobody in show business here. It's really kind of amusing.
I guess every country likes to laugh at parodies of foreigners.
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Since my parents live and try to do business out of a house where the fastest connection they can get is 26k (on a good day), I'd kill for 200kbps "broadband".
Some guns fire subsonically, some guns don't. Most pistols are subsonic, most rifles super-sonic, but there are exceptions to both.
I'm not really sure about shipboard artillery - but I'd imagine that they don't put giant silencers on them.
I guess my experience (and that of my fiancee, who is also a computer programmer) has been that of guys welcoming any girl even remotely interested in computers to join their groups - normally not even in a way that would be considered creepy.
Who knows, maybe things have changed with that - most girls I have known in groups like that have had to deal with being a bit of the center of attention, but nothing worse than that.
Twenty years ago there was a higher percentage of women in CS than there are now. Back when it was more scientific research.
:) Most guys I know who are doing well in CS had it picked as their field by the time they were freshmen in high school. Most girls I know in CS, even the good ones, weren't really sure until they were looking at colleges.
It's the hobbyists that changed it. Every guy I know in CS has been programming or at least playing video games since middle school. How many girls did you know in middle school who were programming?
The female gender role is not suited to the obsessive level of hobbyist interest found in CS today, ESPECIALLY self-trained areas like open-source. Regardless of natural aptitude, women are not brought up to be computer hackers - the level of specialization, competition, and self-isolation that usually accompanies it are directly against everything society teaches them.
You want to get women into CS? Get them young. Teach your daughters programming, or computer graphics, or even just how to play something that requires they look at the system requirements
The crazy thing is that the exact attributes that often lead people into programming - the overly-rational mind, the nearly anti-social enjoyment of spending long hours alone in front of the computer - often make people very difficult members of a software development TEAM.
This type of problem of "random things breaking with large amounts of memory" isn't limited to Apple, unfortunately. I've got a Dell that doesn't wake from sleep because of its 2g of memory. They have a fix, but you can't get it publicly, and I haven't forced myself to wait through their tech support to get it from them yet.
They aren't going for exactly the same market - they're more competing with Final Cut Express. Premiere has always been significantly cheaper than FCP, and from what I understand you get what you pay for, but it isn't necessarily a bad product.
I know local TV stations and educational programs often used to use Premiere because it allowed them to be cross platform, was good enough, and was cheaper.
I don't know that Premiere was ever really as big in the movie space where FCP really makes its mark.
Now, after effects has always worked hand in hand with FCP or premiere, and it will be nice to have a mac native version of it for Intel.
Virus software as it currently exists only identifies known threats. A firewall blocking outbound connections will catch any new software that attempts to phone home that does not specifically attempt to bypass that firewall. Including those gray-area "legitimate" companies that some malware companies leave off of their lists.
It's not the only feature on which a firewall should be judged, but it is useful to know which ones do it properly.
On the other hand, while I would prefer to keep termites out of my house completely, I would rather know when I have an infestation before they eat the entire house.
The whole idea of a trojan is that the user doesn't know that it's running. Having something that might alert you to it can be quite helpful. And yes, SOME trojans install enough of a rootkit that they will be undetectable, but much malware just creates a "Happy bunnies.exe" process that sends your information out. I'd like to have some opportunity to have a "wtf did I install happy bunnies and why does it need to connect to the internet" before it starts sending out my personal info. It should definitely be a second line of defense, but that doesn't negate its utility.
To be fair - I almost cracked someone's ribs playing red rover once. Guy didn't want to move, so I moved him.
But I can't see that kind of violent outcome in a game of Halo2.
Well, it varies a lot depending on where you live. Few people in Ohio make $100k a year, but our cost of living is a lot lower.
Starting pay in my first in California is 60-70k, whereas here it's 40-50.
A minivan can haul, to a degree. Heck, even my Celica can pull a small trailer. But there are weight limits, and depending on the size of what you are pulling you will need something with a sturdier rear frame and suspension as well as a heftier engine to pull it. I'm pretty darn sure that most minivans are not rated for even a skid loader's weight, although they might do a small boat.
There's also a significant difference between what you CAN pull and what you can pull safely and without damaging your vehicle.
Depends what you're hauling. A minivan can't pull the trailer with the skid loader or excavator you picked up to finish the trenching and grading around your project. It can't pull a boat either. Are you saying that anyone who owns a boat should have to run a truck every time they go out, because they only boat once a month?
The real problem I see (and I'm guilty as well) is that 90% of the people driving to work every morning are driving alone. Your fuel efficiency per passenger is multiplicative by the number of people your car is carrying.
I have a friend who is a does traffic engineering and he says that the number one thing anyone can do to solve congestion, pollution from gas, etc, is to actually put more than one person in that car.
Even an SUV (and believe me, in more than 2/3rds of cases I see no reason someone should be driving one of those instead of a fuel-efficient minivan or *gasp* a station wagon) with three people in it will be burning less gas per person transported than a hybrid carrying one. With how much single passenger traffic there is it's kind of a shame that scooters and motorcycles aren't more popular.
Now, of course a hybrid that's packed with people would be the best solution, but you can make a big impact without forcing people to give away their SUVs.
I think you're on to something, but not necessary in the way that you said.
Many younger people I know see a PC as what they play games on at home, and a mac as that old, slow, crappy thing they have to use at school that doesn't read their works files.
School computers are almost by definition old and poorly administrated, which leads to them being slow, unreliable, and generally frustrating to use, mac, linux, or PC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(economics)
While the average quality of pages on Wikipedia may be high, there are quite a few incorrect ones. Without the expert ability to gauge the accuracy of a page, one makes the safer assumption of lower quality. The lack of information on the non-expert's part combines with the presence of poor quality articles to lower the perceived quality of the higher quality articles.
An expert in a field has the knowledge to verify the quality of the articles, and therefore can assess their true reliability.
Well yes... so what percentage of Europeans have been to the US and know about us from more than bad television exports?
I'm sorry, I think I would have made this much clearer if I had said travel TO Europe.
Similarly, most people in the midwest won't visit LA more than once or twice in their lifetime, because plane tickets are not cheap. As your example shows, you're spending half of your vacation budget just getting there... that doesn't make it a common or easy trip.
I agree that it is a global economy and that anyone who has any desire to go into international business should learn as many languages as possible.
But I have had no need to.
Now, despite this, I have learned Spanish because other cultures INTEREST me. But so far it has provided absolutely no worth to me on anything more than an intellectual, self-fulfilling level. To those for whom learning a second language is difficult and/or not interesting, there is no motivation.
Some Americans need to deal with Quebec and French businesses... the vast majority of Americans do not. Most work is done for other Americans, with other American companies, or in those few rare cases where you might deal with a foreign business, they speak English. Several years of a foreign language is a graduation requirement for all high schools in the US as well as most colleges - not the level of English instruction you see in many schools, but it is a requirement. And five years later, no one remembers any of it, because unless you go into international business you never use it.
Because the car is a necessity for my job, whereas a fun flight to Europe isn't.
I'm just saying that it's expensive for an american to visit Paris when compared to an american visiting Chicago or a German visiting Paris, and that that expense is enough to provide reasonable justification for not having done it, without having to throw in anything about us being intentionally ignorant or disrespectful of the rest of the world.
The US dollars have nothing to do with it - the ability to drive to my destination does. I'm going to bet that one's normal expenses (hotels, meals, etc) aren't significantly different price-wise in the US or Europe. But for all that I live in the middle of nowhere, a six hour drive to Chicago is going to cost me a tank of gas (probably equivalent to the cost of visiting Paris from Spain), as opposed to hundreds of dollars at least in airline tickets. Even most domestic flights are half the cost of a trans-atlantic, for obvious reasons. My general comparison, though, is the ability to drive to a vacation spot as opposed to flying halfway across the world - there is a tremendous price difference there. I took my wife to Amsterdam for a 4 day weekend in March. I bought the package of airfare and hotel for US$1600 in December. If you are serious about going to Europe you can look at the travel packages offered by airlines and credit card companies.
$1600 for four days, over 16 hours of which (at least) are spent in airports and on a plane? And that isn't expensive?
I think my general feeling (and again, I'm assuming that anyone else shares this) is that a trip to Europe is expensive enough to not be taken lightly, and a large chunk of the cost is getting there - especially if you are camping or staying in hostels and the like. Most of that 1600 was spend in getting to Amsterdam to begin with - it seems a shame to use it on only four days!
And as for people who speak foreign languages in major cities, that is undoubtedly true! Especially at major universities. However... they also speak English. The only reason in America to learn a foreign language is to attempt to talk to your waiter at an ethnic restaurant. For the majority of people there are no practical situations where they feel the lack. It's an indirect consequence of our size and of the universality of our native tongue, but I don't know that it necessarily reflects the view that the rest of the world isn't as important - it's just that we don't have to interact with the rest of the world too often.
You forgot the most important one: it's really darn expensive to go to Europe.
Yes, I could afford it - if I save up all year and make it a high priority. I actually plan on doing that. But there's no way my parents could, and they're solidly middle class. They bought a house instead.
Not to mention the fact that because of its expense I have to find two weeks of vacation available for it, at the same time as my wife.
Or... I can hop in a car on a weekend and drive to any number of parks or interesting cities here. Are they as cool as some of the ancient wonders of Europe? I'll bet not, but I can't see Paris in a weekend.
I agree that it's good for anyone to travel and get different perspectives - but it's not always practical. I've travelled enough in the US to have crossed Europe twice over, and for a combined cost similar to what it would have been to go to Europe once. I mean, it's not as though I see a bunch of Europeans walking around Columbus, OH on vacation. You see some at the grand canyon, some in New York... but it's not as though everyone over there is traveling "abroad," ie, outside of their EU, western-european dominated culture to see the rest of the world, either. Ask how many people in Europe have been to Africa or Eastern Asia, and you'll probably get fewer responses than Americans who have visited Europe.
As for the language... yeah, it sucks that they don't teach more in school here. On the other hand, I learned spanish well, and all it's ever let me do is overhear what the workers at the fast food restaurant are talking about. No one values foreign languages here because you have to go looking for uses for them. A german can learn his German, English, and French, and probably have a common use for all three of those (obviously, I wouldn't know as many Europeans as I do online if none of them spoke English, and it's just a weekend train ride or drive to go pick up some French ladies).
I guess what I'm saying is... people look for all these huge reasons why Americans don't have much first-hand knowledge of the rest of the world, and my answer to much of it isn't that we're a superpower (that's why you know so much about us) or that we don't like you or anything, it's that you're FAR FAR away, and most people will have little chance or need to actually ever use that knowledge.
And those of us over here who actually do know something are just as sad about it.
Huh, I always felt that my CS undergrad degree was relatively weak, and we covered almost all of that list, with a few of them being optional.
I know a few as well - I'm marrying one :)
But that doesn't change the fact that there are many more men interested in these fields than women.
Agreed.
The problem isn't that engineers don't like women, it's that women don't like engineers.
Or as the few girls in my freshman engineering classes used to put it, "The odds are good... but the goods are odd."
In Japan there are (or were a few years ago) "celebrities" who make their living doing nothing but being americans. They appear on talk shows, game shows, commercials, you name it. They tend to have overly stylized american features, dress, and haircuts that they have admitted are there simply for the act, and that they would be a nobody in show business here. It's really kind of amusing.
I guess every country likes to laugh at parodies of foreigners.