I don't agree. I have two PCs by my feet, one a Dell and one a home built. Both are plagued with various subtle issues and bizarre design choices. They were indeed cheap, but they've required constant maintenance over the years (both are 10 year old chassis with 1-10 year old parts). By comparison I have an (old) mac pro and two macbook pro's, both work flawlessly (in windows too) and have never required any form of service.
It makes a lot of sense to run linux on a mac, depending on your threshold of pain vs. price.
That paragraph, used to explain "horrifying steeplechase" describes every tech interview I have ever been on, ever. I'm a man, it's not a thing we do to women just 'cuz. We're insensitive, socially inept clods and that is the defining culture in highly technical fields. I would think a woman would appreciate this MOST, we're purely and entirely interested in her brain and what it can do. I would have been far more disgusted with my peers if they were leering or chatting her up, trying to use this as a first date scenario... THAT would be unacceptable.
If these women are unable to tolerate geekdom, they probably will not enjoy working in their job. I'm sitting in a building with 120 people right now, it's quiet as a graveyard but everyone is here. I have an IM conversation going on with the guy in the cube next to me, not about football or his wife, but about cool compiler tricks. This is our job, this is also who we are. If you are a woman in tech, this is how you too must be, or else you're applying to the wrong sort of job. If you want to be tech-savvy marketing, apply to marketing. if you want to make business decisions, get an MBA. But if you want to DO technology, and be a practitioner, then we're looking for you and you should be happy to answer repetitive mundane questions about C calling conventions or the various drawbacks of exception handling. It's a calling, not everyone fits. I don't see it as mutually exclusive with women, just exclusive with women who want to be above it all. Much like men who wish the same, you need not apply, we're weeding you out.
I'm going to interview a woman in about 40 minutes. HR put on my agenda to make sure I ask if the candidate needs water or a restroom break. Because I trust HR (in this instance) I will do that, when someone tells me what to do in social scenarios I do it. But if they don't, I probably won't remember. In fact I may not remember if my computer shuts off during the interview. If you've been in tech school for the past 4+ years, or in the industry, you're used to this and don't think about it, you want to know about the job details and what I'm working on. If you're not really interested in being an engineer, but just want the paycheck and a shot at management, no one is going to want to hire you, including my female manager. First and foremost we're interested in your technical output, if it's not there and we don't think it can be there, go away. And if you are serious about doing this job, and understand what it means to be on a team, and to produce a product, you would be the same way. People who don't pull their weight crater the company, prove to us you're going to pull your weight.
Rather than "save us from the Machines", maybe "save us from our children", because that ends up being more or less the same thing: systems far too complex and independent to be controllable, with the capacity and occasional desire to cause harm, to which the creators are responsible for a little while.
Clear justification for net neutrality and taking content & services away from them entirely. Yes, they will still stick us with the bill. But we can limit our involvement and simplify the discussion to BW/$. Bundling makes the conversation confusing and gets too many "interested third parties" creating misleading noise.
I'm not going to disagree with most things. I'm curious what issues you are having with Family Sharing. After a few updates (noteably 8.1) I found it actually works like I expected, and my son can request apps and I can approve them on my own device. Usually. That's more or less what I wanted from the feature.
I have a few issues in decreasing severity: - It wasn't clear when it rolled out that you don't HAVE to give your 6yo his own Apple ID (or your 13yo), and once done can't be undone. It's quite clear now though. So back then, I set one up, and live in fear of all the communication tools he has access to that i can't restrict. I'm somewhat conservative in that I don't think a 6yo should have open access to all persons, and I should be able to shut that off. - Sometimes permission requests get dropped, or don't get to my iPhone. Bug. Much less frequent lately, but still lurking. - Annoyingly asks for the youngin's password too many times
I suspect that merging IDs will never happen, but the reason I would want that is exactly family sharing.
I don't, that means there will be wasted memory that i could otherwise be using. I'd rather free up space for an upgrade if I want it, than have excess space I can't use.
What "we" as consumers really want is less $ per GB for the upgrade iDevices, but that would require someone other than Apple producing decent hardware, when the trend is Chinese shitshops producing junk.
I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders, the early part of the year was lousy for me individually which evolved to be generally fantastic. Nevertheless, I think it's legit to complain and remind them that we upload pictures for a number of reasons, and the emotions attached to them change a lot over a year. Complaining in the form of feedback is perfectly acceptable. It's the incessant lawsuits and mass media editorials that wear on our nerves.
I think the reasonable solution is to make this an optional feature that they advertise for instead of just dump on your page. Even allow you to choose the photos to show and save for posterity.
Yet "high-tech" started long before that, and was already very gender biased. The article specifically said "email", which was quite common in the 80s on college campuses and high tech industries, I know because I had to maintain some legacy scripts, rules for which were set up in the 80s and nobody really understood anymore in 2000.
The article is correct on some facts, but is entirely lost in narrative.
I thought it was serious until I read that students showed up at Stanford in 1994 barely knowing what email was. Then I realized it's satire. I mean, you can't seriously propose that the tech revolution started in 1994, right? Even Intel, Apple and Microsoft are latecomers to teh tech revolution, which was already very gender biased in the late 70s. When did "high tech" begin? I'm not sure, maybe WWII, maybe the industrial revolution, or maybe as late as teh semiconductor. All of these were well before Stanford class of '94 graduates were BORN. Even I knew what email was long before 1994, I even had email of my own.
This isn't intended to be a geriatric post where I try to claim I'm an OG, most things high-tech were invented before I was born. C existed, Unix was a thing. The only thing the mid-90s meant to high-tech was the birth of the popular internet, which many of us remember being the death of the useful internet.
It's true they can't interfere with other communications intentionally, or through some byproduct of their transmitter that doesn't fit within spec. However if they are sending data over all the available channels on their wifi links, that is "legal" as long as they have plausible deniability and feel comfortable defending it in court.
No one can stop them from building a faraday cage around their hotel, but they absolutely should not be allowed to jam anything (via intentionally emitting interfering signals)...that can only ever do bad things.
More or less. If you build a faraday cage around your house, that's legal. If you build a jammer, that is illegal.
It seems like jammers are bad because you can't control the range of their effectiveness. On the other hand faraday cages tend to block more frequencies than you'd like, ex. you probably also would block cell reception.
Are parents going to allow their kids to see this movie know a lone gun nut might kill them?
Or more accurately let them go see The Hobbit 3, or other big blockbusters that might show in the same theater and would otherwise draw in a lot of money.
And China. China probably wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire, but wouldn't like us dropping troops next door or risking Dear Lunatic lighting off a nuke to make a point.
There's no way Sony would be liable for an act of war or terrorist attack due to their decision to air a movie. We can't even hold them responsible for the financial loss and emotional damages that most of their movies already cause, and that is absolutely through their own negligence!
I wonder too, considering by some accounts it's just a really bad movie (http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/17/opinion/stanley-interview-threats/index.html?hpt=hp_t3 , warning, it's CNN and it's an editorial, take with a shot of tequila and a salt shaker). The only known way of making people see a really bad movie is to have Michael Bay do the special effects, or make some controversy around it. Michael Bay is no doubt working on Transformers N: Plan Gigli from Outer Space
I don't think NK has the capability of making good on telegraphed threats, nor would they like the response.
I'm not sure hacking Sony implies the capacity to pull off "9/11 style attacks". Further, pulling off "9/11 style attacks" might be considered an overt act of war, and regardless of the difficult political situation there, little Kimmy might find himself the victim of "Iraq Style Liberation".
Why do we have to assume one way or the other? Why not just admit we don't know and let people do what they want instead of trying to push them to do what we think they should?
So I agree, no one should push you into a career you don't want to be in. The question is whether something is pushing them out of STEM, even if they do want to be in it. I don't think that's answered by the horseshit in TFA. The question is whether these people are lefties because that is their dominant hand, or because all they have is left-handed scissors.
I disagree that we should just accept the status quo without further investigation. The problem in a nutshell: the gender pay gap. If you are going to doom a demographic to lower wages, you should have good reasons for it. Is there a good reason for it? What is that reason? Is it solvable in a way we can tolerate?
If anyone is saying that, they are clearly idiots. The internet has copious data regarding the differences between boys and girls. Even after eliminating the porn sites, you end up with various physiological and psychological differences. We're very different in general, the extent to which and whether it's nature or nurture will no doubt rage on for the rest of our lives. There is absolutely no reason to think men and women are the same...
The question of equality is where they are asserting men and women can perform the same. Until evidence exists to the contrary, we have to assume this is true. This is not to say that men and women will do the same things to establish this equality, or will acquire knowledge or even perform the function identically. Only that in the end they will produce the same results.
to create curriculum specifically for girls, who are no different than boys
Accepting the above, which I believe with conviction, this then falls apart. However, where I would direct my nerd rage is at the conclusion that lead to creating a gender specific curriculum as a solution. It must have been something like "CS education as it exists is incompatible with female psychology; a CS education program which can target both genders is impossible, ergo we need to fork a new curriculum". I can't imagine the kind of data that existed to justify this. If it did exist, it seems like a likely assumption than the genders will probably require dedicated education on other topics as well, and maybe we should go back to having boys and girls schools across the board.
Personally I think the problem is entirely social and cultural, and we're wasting our time with this stuff.
Stop being sensible. This is our weekly "fear the AI" post. Soon they'll have to change the tagline: news for luddites, stuff to fear.
Obviously the solution is going to have to be to figure out how to retrain people in later life, the system already doesn't work even without AI, but put in context of changing technology and shifting labor forces. You wake up one day and some wall st. nitwit has decided that china or india has a comparative advantage for certain kinds of work, and whether that's true or not he will make it true by sending the work over there. So it will be time to retrain. Asking the average guy who is in debt for his house, his car, often his regular living expenses to also be saving money for re-education is just not going to fly.
But we can just blame AI for taking our jobs because that's easy and doesn't sound like a tax hike on the wealthy.
That's kind of the problem and why I dropped subscription a while back. The explosion of computing and computing jobs means that their target audience is wildly diverse and I found maybe one article in a year would touch on a subject or topic that was remotely applicable to me, and it wasn't paying out.
Offensive jokes, even if they were not intended to be offensive. First you are alienating the person, simultaneously recognizing his success and his not-belongingness; secondly, while I don't know that being proud of one's race should be a thing, any such pride is diminished by the joke.
I'm not ready to start a campaign of sensitivity training for the whole world or have people fired for racism etc., people do need to have a thick skin and let the little stuff pass, but our actions do impact the world. There are good reasons to pass on these jokes, and none to let them fly.
None proves it, but the question was how to break in to the field, this implies an interest in being successful in the field, not cheating your way to a diploma. There are many STEM careers that are hard or impossible to get in to without going back to school and getting the specialized degree. EE, CompE, Chemical engineering are all tough to break in to on your own. You could of course read a lot of books, but it's probably tough and you're unlikely able to get the kind of focus you need on the areas you will use on your specialization. A dirty secret is perhaps that if you go to school for say EE and you study RF, you may have a very hard time breaking in to computer engineering later, or even the much more closely related power systems. These areas end up being super specialized and your school+work experience ends up binning you into your niche. Later in life your "experience" is expected to be pretty fine grained and deep, so the breadth that's frequently touted as an advantage for liberal arts is actually a drawback for STEM fields outside of academia.
The trick is getting past the resume screen, that's tough to do without the degree in the first place. Then once you do, prepare for an 8 hour long interview that is going to make many PhD defenses seem trivial. There's no risk taking in the hiring process, they will be looking for you to demonstrate a large set of active knowledge on the spot. If you make it through there, be prepared to be learning hte rest of your life and never let yourself get comfortable. The fields change fast, your niche may disappear or more likely be outsourced, so you want to be able to shift focus believably and keep your eyes on trends.
In theory some software programming jobs are easier and don't necessarily require a degree, but I would absolutely be prepared to demonstrate expert knowledge on the language they use (exclusively C in my line of work) and if you're in to systems programming you better know hardware really well too. A CS degree really only helps with the social factor, even if you already know how to code well and have some documented experience on open source.
None of what I said sounds like it should be the case, but it absolutely is. It strikes me that degrees are being used as professional training program (ex. med school, law school) not for general education, as they should be.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree. I have two PCs by my feet, one a Dell and one a home built. Both are plagued with various subtle issues and bizarre design choices. They were indeed cheap, but they've required constant maintenance over the years (both are 10 year old chassis with 1-10 year old parts). By comparison I have an (old) mac pro and two macbook pro's, both work flawlessly (in windows too) and have never required any form of service.
It makes a lot of sense to run linux on a mac, depending on your threshold of pain vs. price.
That paragraph, used to explain "horrifying steeplechase" describes every tech interview I have ever been on, ever. I'm a man, it's not a thing we do to women just 'cuz. We're insensitive, socially inept clods and that is the defining culture in highly technical fields. I would think a woman would appreciate this MOST, we're purely and entirely interested in her brain and what it can do. I would have been far more disgusted with my peers if they were leering or chatting her up, trying to use this as a first date scenario... THAT would be unacceptable.
If these women are unable to tolerate geekdom, they probably will not enjoy working in their job. I'm sitting in a building with 120 people right now, it's quiet as a graveyard but everyone is here. I have an IM conversation going on with the guy in the cube next to me, not about football or his wife, but about cool compiler tricks. This is our job, this is also who we are. If you are a woman in tech, this is how you too must be, or else you're applying to the wrong sort of job. If you want to be tech-savvy marketing, apply to marketing. if you want to make business decisions, get an MBA. But if you want to DO technology, and be a practitioner, then we're looking for you and you should be happy to answer repetitive mundane questions about C calling conventions or the various drawbacks of exception handling. It's a calling, not everyone fits. I don't see it as mutually exclusive with women, just exclusive with women who want to be above it all. Much like men who wish the same, you need not apply, we're weeding you out.
I'm going to interview a woman in about 40 minutes. HR put on my agenda to make sure I ask if the candidate needs water or a restroom break. Because I trust HR (in this instance) I will do that, when someone tells me what to do in social scenarios I do it. But if they don't, I probably won't remember. In fact I may not remember if my computer shuts off during the interview. If you've been in tech school for the past 4+ years, or in the industry, you're used to this and don't think about it, you want to know about the job details and what I'm working on. If you're not really interested in being an engineer, but just want the paycheck and a shot at management, no one is going to want to hire you, including my female manager. First and foremost we're interested in your technical output, if it's not there and we don't think it can be there, go away. And if you are serious about doing this job, and understand what it means to be on a team, and to produce a product, you would be the same way. People who don't pull their weight crater the company, prove to us you're going to pull your weight.
Rather than "save us from the Machines", maybe "save us from our children", because that ends up being more or less the same thing: systems far too complex and independent to be controllable, with the capacity and occasional desire to cause harm, to which the creators are responsible for a little while.
I was unable to read your post because it didn't contain any pictures to look at or a monkey I could punch.
Clear justification for net neutrality and taking content & services away from them entirely. Yes, they will still stick us with the bill. But we can limit our involvement and simplify the discussion to BW/$. Bundling makes the conversation confusing and gets too many "interested third parties" creating misleading noise.
I'm not going to disagree with most things. I'm curious what issues you are having with Family Sharing. After a few updates (noteably 8.1) I found it actually works like I expected, and my son can request apps and I can approve them on my own device. Usually. That's more or less what I wanted from the feature.
I have a few issues in decreasing severity:
- It wasn't clear when it rolled out that you don't HAVE to give your 6yo his own Apple ID (or your 13yo), and once done can't be undone. It's quite clear now though. So back then, I set one up, and live in fear of all the communication tools he has access to that i can't restrict. I'm somewhat conservative in that I don't think a 6yo should have open access to all persons, and I should be able to shut that off.
- Sometimes permission requests get dropped, or don't get to my iPhone. Bug. Much less frequent lately, but still lurking.
- Annoyingly asks for the youngin's password too many times
I suspect that merging IDs will never happen, but the reason I would want that is exactly family sharing.
I don't, that means there will be wasted memory that i could otherwise be using. I'd rather free up space for an upgrade if I want it, than have excess space I can't use.
What "we" as consumers really want is less $ per GB for the upgrade iDevices, but that would require someone other than Apple producing decent hardware, when the trend is Chinese shitshops producing junk.
I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders, the early part of the year was lousy for me individually which evolved to be generally fantastic. Nevertheless, I think it's legit to complain and remind them that we upload pictures for a number of reasons, and the emotions attached to them change a lot over a year. Complaining in the form of feedback is perfectly acceptable. It's the incessant lawsuits and mass media editorials that wear on our nerves.
I think the reasonable solution is to make this an optional feature that they advertise for instead of just dump on your page. Even allow you to choose the photos to show and save for posterity.
Yet "high-tech" started long before that, and was already very gender biased. The article specifically said "email", which was quite common in the 80s on college campuses and high tech industries, I know because I had to maintain some legacy scripts, rules for which were set up in the 80s and nobody really understood anymore in 2000.
The article is correct on some facts, but is entirely lost in narrative.
I thought it was serious until I read that students showed up at Stanford in 1994 barely knowing what email was. Then I realized it's satire. I mean, you can't seriously propose that the tech revolution started in 1994, right? Even Intel, Apple and Microsoft are latecomers to teh tech revolution, which was already very gender biased in the late 70s. When did "high tech" begin? I'm not sure, maybe WWII, maybe the industrial revolution, or maybe as late as teh semiconductor. All of these were well before Stanford class of '94 graduates were BORN. Even I knew what email was long before 1994, I even had email of my own.
This isn't intended to be a geriatric post where I try to claim I'm an OG, most things high-tech were invented before I was born. C existed, Unix was a thing. The only thing the mid-90s meant to high-tech was the birth of the popular internet, which many of us remember being the death of the useful internet.
It's true they can't interfere with other communications intentionally, or through some byproduct of their transmitter that doesn't fit within spec. However if they are sending data over all the available channels on their wifi links, that is "legal" as long as they have plausible deniability and feel comfortable defending it in court.
No one can stop them from building a faraday cage around their hotel, but they absolutely should not be allowed to jam anything (via intentionally emitting interfering signals)...that can only ever do bad things.
More or less. If you build a faraday cage around your house, that's legal. If you build a jammer, that is illegal.
It seems like jammers are bad because you can't control the range of their effectiveness. On the other hand faraday cages tend to block more frequencies than you'd like, ex. you probably also would block cell reception.
Are parents going to allow their kids to see this movie know a lone gun nut might kill them?
Or more accurately let them go see The Hobbit 3, or other big blockbusters that might show in the same theater and would otherwise draw in a lot of money.
And China. China probably wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire, but wouldn't like us dropping troops next door or risking Dear Lunatic lighting off a nuke to make a point.
There's no way Sony would be liable for an act of war or terrorist attack due to their decision to air a movie. We can't even hold them responsible for the financial loss and emotional damages that most of their movies already cause, and that is absolutely through their own negligence!
I wonder too, considering by some accounts it's just a really bad movie (http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/17/opinion/stanley-interview-threats/index.html?hpt=hp_t3 , warning, it's CNN and it's an editorial, take with a shot of tequila and a salt shaker). The only known way of making people see a really bad movie is to have Michael Bay do the special effects, or make some controversy around it. Michael Bay is no doubt working on Transformers N: Plan Gigli from Outer Space
I don't think NK has the capability of making good on telegraphed threats, nor would they like the response.
I'm totally gonna shoot that pipe bomb, and show it who's boss!
I'm not sure hacking Sony implies the capacity to pull off "9/11 style attacks". Further, pulling off "9/11 style attacks" might be considered an overt act of war, and regardless of the difficult political situation there, little Kimmy might find himself the victim of "Iraq Style Liberation".
Why do we have to assume one way or the other? Why not just admit we don't know and let people do what they want instead of trying to push them to do what we think they should?
So I agree, no one should push you into a career you don't want to be in. The question is whether something is pushing them out of STEM, even if they do want to be in it. I don't think that's answered by the horseshit in TFA. The question is whether these people are lefties because that is their dominant hand, or because all they have is left-handed scissors.
I disagree that we should just accept the status quo without further investigation. The problem in a nutshell: the gender pay gap. If you are going to doom a demographic to lower wages, you should have good reasons for it. Is there a good reason for it? What is that reason? Is it solvable in a way we can tolerate?
there ARE no differences between boys and girls
If anyone is saying that, they are clearly idiots. The internet has copious data regarding the differences between boys and girls. Even after eliminating the porn sites, you end up with various physiological and psychological differences. We're very different in general, the extent to which and whether it's nature or nurture will no doubt rage on for the rest of our lives. There is absolutely no reason to think men and women are the same...
The question of equality is where they are asserting men and women can perform the same. Until evidence exists to the contrary, we have to assume this is true. This is not to say that men and women will do the same things to establish this equality, or will acquire knowledge or even perform the function identically. Only that in the end they will produce the same results.
to create curriculum specifically for girls, who are no different than boys
Accepting the above, which I believe with conviction, this then falls apart. However, where I would direct my nerd rage is at the conclusion that lead to creating a gender specific curriculum as a solution. It must have been something like "CS education as it exists is incompatible with female psychology; a CS education program which can target both genders is impossible, ergo we need to fork a new curriculum". I can't imagine the kind of data that existed to justify this. If it did exist, it seems like a likely assumption than the genders will probably require dedicated education on other topics as well, and maybe we should go back to having boys and girls schools across the board.
Personally I think the problem is entirely social and cultural, and we're wasting our time with this stuff.
Stop being sensible. This is our weekly "fear the AI" post. Soon they'll have to change the tagline: news for luddites, stuff to fear.
Obviously the solution is going to have to be to figure out how to retrain people in later life, the system already doesn't work even without AI, but put in context of changing technology and shifting labor forces. You wake up one day and some wall st. nitwit has decided that china or india has a comparative advantage for certain kinds of work, and whether that's true or not he will make it true by sending the work over there. So it will be time to retrain. Asking the average guy who is in debt for his house, his car, often his regular living expenses to also be saving money for re-education is just not going to fly.
But we can just blame AI for taking our jobs because that's easy and doesn't sound like a tax hike on the wealthy.
That's kind of the problem and why I dropped subscription a while back. The explosion of computing and computing jobs means that their target audience is wildly diverse and I found maybe one article in a year would touch on a subject or topic that was remotely applicable to me, and it wasn't paying out.
Offensive jokes, even if they were not intended to be offensive. First you are alienating the person, simultaneously recognizing his success and his not-belongingness; secondly, while I don't know that being proud of one's race should be a thing, any such pride is diminished by the joke.
I'm not ready to start a campaign of sensitivity training for the whole world or have people fired for racism etc., people do need to have a thick skin and let the little stuff pass, but our actions do impact the world. There are good reasons to pass on these jokes, and none to let them fly.
None proves it, but the question was how to break in to the field, this implies an interest in being successful in the field, not cheating your way to a diploma. There are many STEM careers that are hard or impossible to get in to without going back to school and getting the specialized degree. EE, CompE, Chemical engineering are all tough to break in to on your own. You could of course read a lot of books, but it's probably tough and you're unlikely able to get the kind of focus you need on the areas you will use on your specialization. A dirty secret is perhaps that if you go to school for say EE and you study RF, you may have a very hard time breaking in to computer engineering later, or even the much more closely related power systems. These areas end up being super specialized and your school+work experience ends up binning you into your niche. Later in life your "experience" is expected to be pretty fine grained and deep, so the breadth that's frequently touted as an advantage for liberal arts is actually a drawback for STEM fields outside of academia.
The trick is getting past the resume screen, that's tough to do without the degree in the first place. Then once you do, prepare for an 8 hour long interview that is going to make many PhD defenses seem trivial. There's no risk taking in the hiring process, they will be looking for you to demonstrate a large set of active knowledge on the spot. If you make it through there, be prepared to be learning hte rest of your life and never let yourself get comfortable. The fields change fast, your niche may disappear or more likely be outsourced, so you want to be able to shift focus believably and keep your eyes on trends.
In theory some software programming jobs are easier and don't necessarily require a degree, but I would absolutely be prepared to demonstrate expert knowledge on the language they use (exclusively C in my line of work) and if you're in to systems programming you better know hardware really well too. A CS degree really only helps with the social factor, even if you already know how to code well and have some documented experience on open source.
None of what I said sounds like it should be the case, but it absolutely is. It strikes me that degrees are being used as professional training program (ex. med school, law school) not for general education, as they should be.