The only reason I care about Ubuntu updates is that they are followed by Mint updates. I really don't see why anyone would still want to use Ubuntu when there is an equally good (if not better) Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, especially given Shuttleworth's complete and utter contempt for the open source community.
I argue your premise that "less girls in coding" is currently caused by a past social injustice. Or a present one for that matter.
I'm sure the history of female education (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_education_in_the_United_States) had *nothing* at all to do with it. It's not like actively discouraging women from pursuing math and education would have any effect on the number of female programmers right?
Quick story: I happened to have lunch with my grandmother today. I asked her about the retirement home she lives in, and how many Nobel prize winners lived there. She said 4, but here's the interesting part: in the same breath she exclaimed "and so many woman doctors!" It's easy to forget that being a femaie doctor used to be an incredible thing, in the same league as getting a Nobel prize, just a mere two generations ago.
Maybe it's desirable to have a profession like programming VASTLY dominated by people who are treated with equal benefit and respect and want to program -- regardless of gender.
Of course it is. But what does that have to do with paying teachers to encourage female programmers? Won't those girls they encourage want to program as much as male programmers?
Unless you somehow think it's a good thing to have programmers start with a relatively large gender wage gap in favor of women?
Huh? Again what does that have to do with encouraging girls to program?
And what about the hundreds (thousands?) of soldiers who died? Or the thousands more who were maimed for life, either physically or mentally: was it good for them too?
And that's not even mentioning the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis who died or were similarly maimed in the war. Life's much better for them because Saddam is gone, right?
Wow, it's amazing how so many posts here completely forget about... well about all of humany history. Yes, it is discriminatory to give girl coders a bonus. You know what else was discriminatory? Giving freed slaves 40 acres and a mule; it was absolutely unfair to say "white men, no mule for you!", but we did it anyway. How terribly unfair.
Just because something is discriminatory doesn't make it bad, and if you live in a fantasyland where you think history just goes out the window, and everyone is equal now so we should all just be treated exactly the same... well then you live in a fantasy land. Come to the real world.
Now, that being said, there are often less discriminatory ways to fix past social injustices. Take affirmitive action: you can do it by race and be controversial, or you can do it by social class. If (say) African-Americans really are doing worse in society (as they are), they will be over-represented in the poorest social classes, and so a social-class based affirmitive action system would have the effect of benefiting (poor) African-Americans, without explicitly singling them out.
But it's not like Google can say "if you're a kid (of either gender), and you can see in to the future that you're not going to become a programmer, we'll give you $100". So in this case singling out girls is absolutely the right way to go, unless you think it's a good thing to have a highly desirable profession like programming VASTLY dominated by men.
Does anyone in the open source community even care what anyone from Canonica/Ubuntu has to say anymore? They've basically ostrasized themselves to anyone I know who cares about Linux.
What if we start overreacting and drawing conclusions that are in no way supported by any scientific research (in the original article or elsewhere)?
Please. Old people have been fearfully complaining about the youth doing things differently since the dawn of time. And human society hasn't ended, nor have we all turned in to gibbering idiots. Nor will we ever.
Get over it grandpa, technology does not mean the end of rewarding or fun activity.
It doesn't matter what James Clapper's beliefs are, because he's just one person and we shouldn't judge the entire NSA organization just on the beliefs of a single member.
Yes, he does. And you have the right not to work for or use any of the products of that company. As long as he isn't actually discriminating against anybody, no laws are being broken.
Totally with you so far.
I may not agree with the position, but it's not my business as long as he doesn't discriminate.
Right, but he already has discriminated: he threw several thousand dollars to try and prevent LBGT people from having equal rights. I strongly disagree with that position, and I absolutely think it's my business to care. If the head of Taco Bell suddenly started donating to "BlacksAreMonkeys.com", I'd absolutely boycott Taco Bell. And if I worked for Taco Bell I certainly might tweet my displeasure, (assuming I didn't outright quit).
So what if that unpopular opinion was that blacks are dirty monkey people who are inferior to the glorious white man... but he promises not to discriminate against anyone? Does he still have the "right" to run the company despite his "unpopular opinion"?
Private entities pay for cops all the time, this isn't as radical as it seems. For instance, when I used to be involved in student government we knew that part of the cost of having a big event was having to pay for the mandatory number of cops who had to be there. The city knew that college students in large groups were trouble, and they didn't want to have to foot the bill, so they passed an ordance that required us to foot the bill for any event with X number of people expected (I forget what X was).
I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with some concerts, sporting events, etc.: the municipalities don't want to pay, so they make the entity responsible pay for it. Then again, lots of stadium owners have cozy deals with the city, which probably avoid this sort of thing.
In any case, the only unusual thing about this that I can see is that's a full-time gig.
When I was a kid Mrs. Dunn (one of the parents of a kid at the school) taught an optional "math club" a half hour before school on Wednesdays. I don't remember exactly what we learned (it's since merged with all the "real" math classes I took), but I do remember learning sumnation and some other fairly advanced concepts.
Kids are smart, and they are totally capable of learning a lot of advanced math.
So you've never seen a line of my code, or heard a single word from any of my supervisors, or gotten any other indication of my actual programming ability, but because I didn't take calculus more than ten years ago in college you believe I'm a fuckup who should get out of *your* profession?
The fundamentals never change. With a solid base, there is nothing a programmer can't do.
An AA program focused on what will get them hired today is exactly what will not get them hired tomorrow.
Spoken like someone who wasted a lot of time learning fundamentals and now wants to make sure everyone else has to waste just as much time.
I'm a professional Javascript programmer, and I've been working for almost ten years now. I graduated with a degree in Modern Literature, and I have never once needed any of the Calculus and above math classes or any of the other "fundamentals" that are supposedly so important.
Oh, and I make six figures and could get a new job tomorrow if I wanted to because our industry is DESPERATE for new web developers. So do tell why someone following the same exact path as me would not get hired tomorrow.
Project 1999 is an emulated Everquest server that only has the original game and one expansion (they plan to add one more expansion then stop). It's free, it's just as much (if not more) fun as Everquest was back in 1999, and I highly recommend it to any current or former Ever-Crackers.
(To be fair this new hire has a PhD in a neuroscience, so she's no dummy. I'm not saying just anyone can be a programmer, but I am saying that I've seen evidence that a smart person can get entry-level skills from such a program.)
We actually just hired a graduate of Hack Reactor. She hasn't started yet, so I have yet to see her do anything more than a "Fizz Buzz", but just based on that an hour or so of interviewing she seems to have picked up a lot in her short time there.
A BS in Computer Science teaches you... just about nothing applicable in the real world of programming. Don't deny it, all that math you did was a giant waste of time right (except for the maybe 5% of you for whom that math is totally relevant). So to me it's no surprise that someone could condense all the actual "programmer stuff" that a new college grad comes equipped with in to a few weeks.
There have been LOTS of attempts at "visual code", and they all look great when you watch the 10 minute presentation on them, but when you actually try to use them you find that they all solve a very small set of problems. Programmers in the real world need to solve a wide variety of problems, and the only medium (so far) that can handle that is text code.
It's like saying "why don't we write essays in pictograms?" You might be able to give someone directions to your house using only pictograms (and street names), but if you want to discuss why Mark Twain is brilliant, pictograms just don't cut it: you need the English (or some other) language.
As a Literature Major/Programmer, let me start by admitting the obvious: of course code is not literature, it's code. That being said, there is far more in common between the two than most programmers realize. Just as you can write an essay that's easy to understand and follow, or hard, regardless of the topic of the essay, so can you write code that easy/hard to grok regardless of what it actually does.
In both cases a good writer tries to make the subject matter accessible to the reader, precisely so that they *don't* have to go on a scientific expedition just to grok it.
Sony has not "gone open" in any significant sense at all; the only thing they deserve credit only for is making a good business decision. Think about it: when Apple started the iTunes store, they were creating the marketplace, so they went proprietary. Then Amazon came in to the MP3 market, and "went open" because they were the one locked out of the marketplace.
Same thing is happening with eBooks: because Amazon created the marketplace, they went proprietary. Now Sony wants to break in, so suddenly they're all about open formats. But it has nothing to do with Sony in general. You can bet that the next time they think they can get another Walkman, they'll go to the mat with another Betamax/VHS, Blue-Ray/HDDVD, etc. fight to the death over their latest proprietary format.
Sony 3's controlling proprietary formats, they always have, and they (almost certainly) always will. They just settle for open formats when they're late to the table.
Bump. SugarCRM rocks, and is more than adequate for any small to mid-size company (my company is almost up to 100 employees, and we have yet to have any issues).
Dude, you owned me with your research skills:-) And I really goofed on the NFL; the irony is that I'm actually a card-carrying member of the NFL (from my high school debate days), so I should have known better. Still, you evidently got the idea of what I was talking about.
In any case, my point wasn't to say that there's proof of a cover-up with JFK, just that there was far more evidence suggesting it. With UFOs/bigfoot/Elvis/etc. conspiracies, you have rubber suits and very crappy video footage. With JFK, you've got: * an assasin who was clearly a CIA agent (you don't train at a CIA base, defect to Russia, then defect back if you're not) * he's caught at a location he couldn't possibly have gotten to if he was had shot JFK from the place he supposedly shot him from (I forget the name, but some TV show actually had an olympic sprinter try, and fail, to make that run) * JFK's brain going missing * forensics that call in to question the official story (and I really thought they had shown a single shooter was very unlikely, but I can't find that report) and a bunch more things that I'm too lazy to enumerate as well.
Maybe it really was one crazy former CIA agent who shot JFK. I certainly don't know. But given all *facts* in the story, there's really a world of difference between the chances of an actual JFK conspiracy and the chances of UFOs/bigfoot/whatever.
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The only reason I care about Ubuntu updates is that they are followed by Mint updates. I really don't see why anyone would still want to use Ubuntu when there is an equally good (if not better) Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, especially given Shuttleworth's complete and utter contempt for the open source community.
I argue your premise that "less girls in coding" is currently caused by a past social injustice. Or a present one for that matter.
I'm sure the history of female education (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_education_in_the_United_States) had *nothing* at all to do with it. It's not like actively discouraging women from pursuing math and education would have any effect on the number of female programmers right?
Quick story: I happened to have lunch with my grandmother today. I asked her about the retirement home she lives in, and how many Nobel prize winners lived there. She said 4, but here's the interesting part: in the same breath she exclaimed "and so many woman doctors!" It's easy to forget that being a femaie doctor used to be an incredible thing, in the same league as getting a Nobel prize, just a mere two generations ago.
Maybe it's desirable to have a profession like programming VASTLY dominated by people who are treated with equal benefit and respect and want to program -- regardless of gender.
Of course it is. But what does that have to do with paying teachers to encourage female programmers? Won't those girls they encourage want to program as much as male programmers?
Unless you somehow think it's a good thing to have programmers start with a relatively large gender wage gap in favor of women?
Huh? Again what does that have to do with encouraging girls to program?
And what about the hundreds (thousands?) of soldiers who died? Or the thousands more who were maimed for life, either physically or mentally: was it good for them too?
And that's not even mentioning the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis who died or were similarly maimed in the war. Life's much better for them because Saddam is gone, right?
Wow, it's amazing how so many posts here completely forget about ... well about all of humany history. Yes, it is discriminatory to give girl coders a bonus. You know what else was discriminatory? Giving freed slaves 40 acres and a mule; it was absolutely unfair to say "white men, no mule for you!", but we did it anyway. How terribly unfair.
Just because something is discriminatory doesn't make it bad, and if you live in a fantasyland where you think history just goes out the window, and everyone is equal now so we should all just be treated exactly the same ... well then you live in a fantasy land. Come to the real world.
Now, that being said, there are often less discriminatory ways to fix past social injustices. Take affirmitive action: you can do it by race and be controversial, or you can do it by social class. If (say) African-Americans really are doing worse in society (as they are), they will be over-represented in the poorest social classes, and so a social-class based affirmitive action system would have the effect of benefiting (poor) African-Americans, without explicitly singling them out.
But it's not like Google can say "if you're a kid (of either gender), and you can see in to the future that you're not going to become a programmer, we'll give you $100". So in this case singling out girls is absolutely the right way to go, unless you think it's a good thing to have a highly desirable profession like programming VASTLY dominated by men.
Does anyone in the open source community even care what anyone from Canonica/Ubuntu has to say anymore? They've basically ostrasized themselves to anyone I know who cares about Linux.
What if we start overreacting and drawing conclusions that are in no way supported by any scientific research (in the original article or elsewhere)?
Please. Old people have been fearfully complaining about the youth doing things differently since the dawn of time. And human society hasn't ended, nor have we all turned in to gibbering idiots. Nor will we ever.
Get over it grandpa, technology does not mean the end of rewarding or fun activity.
It doesn't matter what James Clapper's beliefs are, because he's just one person and we shouldn't judge the entire NSA organization just on the beliefs of a single member.
Yes, he does. And you have the right not to work for or use any of the products of that company. As long as he isn't actually discriminating against anybody, no laws are being broken.
Totally with you so far.
I may not agree with the position, but it's not my business as long as he doesn't discriminate.
Right, but he already has discriminated: he threw several thousand dollars to try and prevent LBGT people from having equal rights. I strongly disagree with that position, and I absolutely think it's my business to care. If the head of Taco Bell suddenly started donating to "BlacksAreMonkeys.com", I'd absolutely boycott Taco Bell. And if I worked for Taco Bell I certainly might tweet my displeasure, (assuming I didn't outright quit).
That logic totally holds up; after all, the responsibilities of the CEO of a company are identical to the average employee in that company, right?
We've had blacklisting based on political associations before, and I thought we all agreed it's a bad thing?
Yeah, we all agreed it's bad. Like remember when the world blacklisted apartheid South Africa and its supporters? That was terrible wasn't it?
So what if that unpopular opinion was that blacks are dirty monkey people who are inferior to the glorious white man ... but he promises not to discriminate against anyone? Does he still have the "right" to run the company despite his "unpopular opinion"?
Private entities pay for cops all the time, this isn't as radical as it seems. For instance, when I used to be involved in student government we knew that part of the cost of having a big event was having to pay for the mandatory number of cops who had to be there. The city knew that college students in large groups were trouble, and they didn't want to have to foot the bill, so they passed an ordance that required us to foot the bill for any event with X number of people expected (I forget what X was).
I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with some concerts, sporting events, etc.: the municipalities don't want to pay, so they make the entity responsible pay for it. Then again, lots of stadium owners have cozy deals with the city, which probably avoid this sort of thing.
In any case, the only unusual thing about this that I can see is that's a full-time gig.
When I was a kid Mrs. Dunn (one of the parents of a kid at the school) taught an optional "math club" a half hour before school on Wednesdays. I don't remember exactly what we learned (it's since merged with all the "real" math classes I took), but I do remember learning sumnation and some other fairly advanced concepts.
Kids are smart, and they are totally capable of learning a lot of advanced math.
So you've never seen a line of my code, or heard a single word from any of my supervisors, or gotten any other indication of my actual programming ability, but because I didn't take calculus more than ten years ago in college you believe I'm a fuckup who should get out of *your* profession?
The fundamentals never change. With a solid base, there is nothing a programmer can't do.
An AA program focused on what will get them hired today is exactly what will not get them hired tomorrow.
Spoken like someone who wasted a lot of time learning fundamentals and now wants to make sure everyone else has to waste just as much time.
I'm a professional Javascript programmer, and I've been working for almost ten years now. I graduated with a degree in Modern Literature, and I have never once needed any of the Calculus and above math classes or any of the other "fundamentals" that are supposedly so important.
Oh, and I make six figures and could get a new job tomorrow if I wanted to because our industry is DESPERATE for new web developers. So do tell why someone following the same exact path as me would not get hired tomorrow.
Project 1999 is an emulated Everquest server that only has the original game and one expansion (they plan to add one more expansion then stop). It's free, it's just as much (if not more) fun as Everquest was back in 1999, and I highly recommend it to any current or former Ever-Crackers.
(To be fair this new hire has a PhD in a neuroscience, so she's no dummy. I'm not saying just anyone can be a programmer, but I am saying that I've seen evidence that a smart person can get entry-level skills from such a program.)
We actually just hired a graduate of Hack Reactor. She hasn't started yet, so I have yet to see her do anything more than a "Fizz Buzz", but just based on that an hour or so of interviewing she seems to have picked up a lot in her short time there.
A BS in Computer Science teaches you ... just about nothing applicable in the real world of programming. Don't deny it, all that math you did was a giant waste of time right (except for the maybe 5% of you for whom that math is totally relevant). So to me it's no surprise that someone could condense all the actual "programmer stuff" that a new college grad comes equipped with in to a few weeks.
There have been LOTS of attempts at "visual code", and they all look great when you watch the 10 minute presentation on them, but when you actually try to use them you find that they all solve a very small set of problems. Programmers in the real world need to solve a wide variety of problems, and the only medium (so far) that can handle that is text code.
It's like saying "why don't we write essays in pictograms?" You might be able to give someone directions to your house using only pictograms (and street names), but if you want to discuss why Mark Twain is brilliant, pictograms just don't cut it: you need the English (or some other) language.
Am I the only one who pictured Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys, staring dumbfoundedly at a lion in the ruins of Baltimore, after reading that?
As a Literature Major/Programmer, let me start by admitting the obvious: of course code is not literature, it's code. That being said, there is far more in common between the two than most programmers realize. Just as you can write an essay that's easy to understand and follow, or hard, regardless of the topic of the essay, so can you write code that easy/hard to grok regardless of what it actually does.
In both cases a good writer tries to make the subject matter accessible to the reader, precisely so that they *don't* have to go on a scientific expedition just to grok it.
Sony has not "gone open" in any significant sense at all; the only thing they deserve credit only for is making a good business decision. Think about it: when Apple started the iTunes store, they were creating the marketplace, so they went proprietary. Then Amazon came in to the MP3 market, and "went open" because they were the one locked out of the marketplace.
Same thing is happening with eBooks: because Amazon created the marketplace, they went proprietary. Now Sony wants to break in, so suddenly they're all about open formats. But it has nothing to do with Sony in general. You can bet that the next time they think they can get another Walkman, they'll go to the mat with another Betamax/VHS, Blue-Ray/HDDVD, etc. fight to the death over their latest proprietary format.
Sony 3's controlling proprietary formats, they always have, and they (almost certainly) always will. They just settle for open formats when they're late to the table.
Bump. SugarCRM rocks, and is more than adequate for any small to mid-size company (my company is almost up to 100 employees, and we have yet to have any issues).
>>Or would that be considered torture by the Geneva Convention? ;-)
Feh, nobody cares about that thing anymore anyway
Dude, you owned me with your research skills :-) And I really goofed on the NFL; the irony is that I'm actually a card-carrying member of the NFL (from my high school debate days), so I should have known better. Still, you evidently got the idea of what I was talking about.
In any case, my point wasn't to say that there's proof of a cover-up with JFK, just that there was far more evidence suggesting it. With UFOs/bigfoot/Elvis/etc. conspiracies, you have rubber suits and very crappy video footage. With JFK, you've got:
* an assasin who was clearly a CIA agent (you don't train at a CIA base, defect to Russia, then defect back if you're not)
* he's caught at a location he couldn't possibly have gotten to if he was had shot JFK from the place he supposedly shot him from (I forget the name, but some TV show actually had an olympic sprinter try, and fail, to make that run)
* JFK's brain going missing
* forensics that call in to question the official story (and I really thought they had shown a single shooter was very unlikely, but I can't find that report)
and a bunch more things that I'm too lazy to enumerate as well.
Maybe it really was one crazy former CIA agent who shot JFK. I certainly don't know. But given all *facts* in the story, there's really a world of difference between the chances of an actual JFK conspiracy and the chances of UFOs/bigfoot/whatever.