At the risk of showing my age, the only other options were Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and Mr. PotatoHead. Legos were a big step up. As a kid, I missed out on all the cool new stuff.
This is too cool! I attribute my aptitude for technical jobs to an early addiction to Legos. It is cool to see that other adults do not underestimate the educational value of toys. After all, the Internet is the biggest Lego set ever made:)
I can't speak for the free software movement community, but in the corporate world, there are women in IT. For example, there are 8 women in my group of 50 consultants, one that is a senior project manager. I have had three women supervisors, one was a senior project manager and two were department heads. Although the numbers are not overwhelming, the women are there. I enjoyed working for these women but was often accused of being a "traitor" by some of my male colleagues when I agreed with the female supervisor.
I think the lack of women in startups and garage shop environments has more to do with culture than skill. Most women would not be interested in working with a group of single males in an enterprise with a high degree of risk. Why work for stock options and ramen noodles when you can work for a consulting firm with a 401K and health benefits. In general, women have different priorities, which is not bad, but different. People who are married, both male and female, have very different priorities, especially if they have families.
I would say that at college and entry-level positions, brute force, geek aggression is widespread. This is a big turn off to women looking into computing as a career. Unfortunately, entry level CS jobs do not require good communication skills or most geeks would be hard up on getting a job. As one moves up the food chain, communication becomes very important and women tend to excel in these areas. The trick is surviving the tree house mentality - No Girls Allowed! Geeks tend to value pure technical skills and not appreciate skills like project management. Measuring the involvement of females in IT on the basis of the number of lines of code contributed to the free source movement is a very one-dimensional view of the computing world.
As for my part, I try to mentor newbies from both sexes and to network with female IT professionals. The good news for all of us is that GCC is an equal opportunity compiler:)
This is one of the few times I would respond to a topic like this. All OS's have bad hair days and crappy support lines, not to mention user error, but SGI takes the cake. I worked at shop that ran a mix of Solaris, FreeBSD and WinNT. The offending product was an Origin 2000 (nicknamed "Barney" due to its purple box) that was forced on to us by a client and a sales manager. We spent 2 weeks trying to compile GCC on it. After 2 weeks, we called SGI, and they tell us we will have to buy their C compiler. Ok, fair enough, we fork out the cash.
After another week of trying to install their compiler we call SGI again to get support. They now tell us that should have ordered the server with the C compiler pre-installed and that we will have to ship the box back to SGI. More time and money. Basically, they try to structure their support such that anything you need on box has to be loaded at the factory or be installed by field rep. Which all adds up to $$$$. I guess if I was a high-end animation house, I might want this type of service. But for shops who are used to doing their own work, this is a very expensive way get a box in production.
I would say that we might have been boneheads about the install except that installing GCC on Solaris, HPUX, Linux or FreeBSD is a 20-minute task. What is troublesome is SGI reaction to the problem. They never gave us information to resolve the problem, they only tried to get more $$$ out of us. Call SGI support and then call Cisco and you will see what I am talking about.
And yes, IRIX is not secure. Check out the security sites if you are in doubt.
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At the risk of showing my age, the only other options were Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and Mr. PotatoHead. Legos were a big step up. As a kid, I missed out on all the cool new stuff.
This is too cool! I attribute my aptitude for technical jobs to an early addiction to Legos. It is cool to see that other adults do not underestimate the educational value of toys. After all, the Internet is the biggest Lego set ever made :)
I can't speak for the free software movement community, but in the corporate world, there are women in IT. For example, there are 8 women in my group of 50 consultants, one that is a senior project manager. I have had three women supervisors, one was a senior project manager and two were department heads. Although the numbers are not overwhelming, the women are there. I enjoyed working for these women but was often accused of being a "traitor" by some of my male colleagues when I agreed with the female supervisor.
:)
I think the lack of women in startups and garage shop environments has more to do with culture than skill. Most women would not be interested in working with a group of single males in an enterprise with a high degree of risk. Why work for stock options and ramen noodles when you can work for a consulting firm with a 401K and health benefits. In general, women have different priorities, which is not bad, but different. People who are married, both male and female, have very different priorities, especially if they have families.
I would say that at college and entry-level positions, brute force, geek aggression is widespread. This is a big turn off to women looking into computing as a career. Unfortunately, entry level CS jobs do not require good communication skills or most geeks would be hard up on getting a job. As one moves up the food chain, communication becomes very important and women tend to excel in these areas. The trick is surviving the tree house mentality - No Girls Allowed! Geeks tend to value pure technical skills and not appreciate skills like project management. Measuring the involvement of females in IT on the basis of the number of lines of code contributed to the free source movement is a very one-dimensional view of the computing world.
As for my part, I try to mentor newbies from both sexes and to network with female IT professionals. The good news for all of us is that GCC is an equal opportunity compiler
This is one of the few times I would respond to a topic like this. All OS's have bad hair days and crappy support lines, not to mention user error, but SGI takes the cake. I worked at shop that ran a mix of Solaris, FreeBSD and WinNT. The offending product was an Origin 2000 (nicknamed "Barney" due to its purple box) that was forced on to us by a client and a sales manager. We spent 2 weeks trying to compile GCC on it. After 2 weeks, we called SGI, and they tell us we will have to buy their C compiler. Ok, fair enough, we fork out the cash.
After another week of trying to install their compiler we call SGI again to get support. They now tell us that should have ordered the server with the C compiler pre-installed and that we will have to ship the box back to SGI. More time and money. Basically, they try to structure their support such that anything you need on box has to be loaded at the factory or be installed by field rep. Which all adds up to $$$$. I guess if I was a high-end animation house, I might want this type of service. But for shops who are used to doing their own work, this is a very expensive way get a box in production.
I would say that we might have been boneheads about the install except that installing GCC on Solaris, HPUX, Linux or FreeBSD is a 20-minute task. What is troublesome is SGI reaction to the problem. They never gave us information to resolve the problem, they only tried to get more $$$ out of us. Call SGI support and then call Cisco and you will see what I am talking about.
And yes, IRIX is not secure. Check out the security sites if you are in doubt.