i've never met a male, much less a male geek, who didn't think geek grrls were cool.
Now you've met one. Female geeks as such are no more cool than male geeks. To think otherwise is implicitly sexist. Consider your horizons broadened.
Your assumption that the parents' opinions and occupations greatly influence the career paths of their children cannot be assumed these days, as it often could have been a couple of generations ago. My father made printing ink and my mother was a teacher. I'm a programmer, my sister is a BOFH, and my brother is a buyer. Do you see the correlation? You do? Then you're insane. There isn't one.
The term computers was actually used to describe the women who 'computed' for the US Government if I'm not mistaken.
"Computer" was a job description, like "welder", "janitor", or "secretary", and consisted of performing arithmetic calculations. Some were employed by the government (which also employed welders, janitors, and secretaries) but for the most part they existed in those segments of private industry that required numbers to be crunched. As with any job outside the home in the early part of the century, they were usually men. During WWII there were a lot of computers who were women and who worked for the government, but the same could be said of welders.
I may ramble a bit. It's a big subject, and in my view there's a lot wrong.
Frankly, the idea of "gender issues" gives me hives. Clearly, in an ideal world career opportunities would be available strictly based on ability and performance. Relative to a community, we might speak in terms of esteem and contribution rather than opportunity and ability. That we do not live in an ideal world, and that "gender" as such plays a role in these things is self-evident - and unfortunate. But it is easy to over-analyze this fact to the point of absurdity, and to overstate the problem to the point of untruthfulness. I think that is what has been done in this issue of the CPSR newsletter.
I put "gender" in quotes because I'm a bit of a language purist. I believe that current trends in the development of English tend to make it a clumsier and less expressive form of communication. I therefore strongly dislike the use of "gender" to mean "sex." Not so long ago, "gender" was a strictly grammatical term, and "sex" was used to denote both the act of copulation and la difference. Somehow, in the process of the societal changes that made copulation so free and easy (in theory anyway), "sex" lost it's second meaning. I'm sure that a contributing factor is that there is no gender in English, and where it does occur it tends to be in loan words or neologisms from Latin. An irritant, nevertheless.
I only had time to read the introduction and selected articles, but if the sort of research exemplified by this article is any sample, the data presented is virtually worthless. The information presented about "Women's Language" vs. "Men's Lanugage" in online interactions, for example, is nonsensical. It is:
Dated - the data are from 1994. This is an eternity online. Does the author really imagine that nothing has changed since then?
Subjective - An example is "Explicit justifications" under Women's Language vs. "Presuppositions" under Men's. Well, maybe the author thought so. But anyone who routinely interacts with MOTOS, and is paying attention, knows that each sex possesses its own set of presuppositions which are often so ingrained as to be invisible to the individual. Besides, justifications can only go so far. Behind every justification is a set of presuppositions. Formally, these are called "axioms".
Inaccurate - According to this table, women do not engage in humor or sarcasm online. Apparently these people have never met my wife, or the women with whom she interacts online - or, for that matter the women with whom I interact online. I could say the same about some the other characterizations.
Actually, every "fact" presented in this article is contradicted by my personal experience. While the latter necessarily constitutes nothing more than anecdotal evidence, I would expect that I would encounter at least some examples of the general case! I participate in discussion groups on a number of topics ranging from Eastern Orthodox Christianity to Renaissance Faires to PC games, to the panoply of topics on Slashdot. In every instance, where the topic may be expected to be of equal interest to both sexes, there is equal or superior representation of women both numerically and in terms of participation.
One irritating assumption is that it is necessarily a Bad Thing that women are underrepresented in the technical occupations. Why should that be perceived as a problem? Is there a great deal of concern over the preponderance of women in the teaching profession? Or nursing? As small-business owners? As recipients of college degrees? As moralistic nationally syndicated talk show hosts?
I don't know why the fact, evident from centuries of experiences of both sexes, that men and women do not think the same way, have different priorities in life, and find different things to be interesting, should be so disturbing. Women as a group are simply not interested in things geekly. I received my bachelor's degree in 1985 from a small engineering college on the East Coast. Formerly a men-only institution, they had been co-ed for at least 10 years by the time I matriculated. The male-to-female ratio was 7:1, and from what I hear this hasn't changed. Similar trends obtain nationwide. There is no bar, either legally or socially, against women attending these institutions. They don't want to.
(As it happens, my own social circle in college was split between the sexes roughly 50-50 as is my group here at work, so I obviously know a large number of women who are interested. I speak in the general case.)
I can only conclude that the author of this particular article, and the others in this issue of the CPSR newsletter, feel they have some vested interest in generating a sense of sex-based exclusion in online interactions that does not in fact exist. I decline to speculate on what that might be. I do think that as a result their views are not worthy of serious consideration - and certainly not of affecting public policy - unless they can assemble a more compelling set of data.
As recently pointed up by Nitrozac (herself a major geek-babe) in After Y2Y. This is their first "in-person" appearence in the strip.
Hedy Lamarr (besides being a sex symbol) helped design and patent spread-spectrum wireless technologies that were half a century ahead of their time.
Not that far ahead. Her scheme for spread spectrum (also known as frequency hopping) involved synchronizing frequencies using player-piano rolls. She in fact got the idea while playing a piano duet with one of her children. A truly innovative idea, but one well within the technology of the time.
Stop whining. If you think that holiday schedules benefit anyone but Protestant Christians, you're too ignorant to comment on the subject.
I am an Orthodox Christian. Christmas is 13 days later for me than for everyone else. Easter is usually on a different day, and no allowances are made for Holy Week observances regardless of when it falls. And there are 11 other major feast days throughout the year that the Protestant denominations - and therefore work holiday schedules - take no note of whatsoever. I get none of these days off gratis. During Lent and Advent, which are seasons when I am required to abstain from meat, dairy products, fish, alcohol and vegetable oil, the company cafeteria continues to offer the same old deep fried, greasy, cholesterol-laden fare.
I could bitch a blue streak about it. Or I could just do as I do: bring my own lunch when necessary, and use comp time, flex time and vacation days to fulfill my religious obligations. If you really resent the days off you are obligated to take, why don't you offer to cover for those days (if staffing is required) in exchange for days off when you could use them?
Incidently, the original post ought to have been moderated down "offtopic." There is nothing particularly Christian about when the New Year begins. It's a result of the calendar reforms of Julius Caesar. In the intervening centuries, a number of other dates were used for the beginning of the year, and these generally were chosen for religious reasons, but January 1 is a purely secular holiday.
If you're going to go on a self-righteous tirade, it helps to have actual facts in hand.
It just so happens, Mr. Smarty-Pants, that I know plenty of fully competent programmers who subsist on Ho-Hos.
Geeks are a diverse lot, and their choice of junk food should be left up to the individual as a lifestyle choice, not dictated to them by some nebulous set of "community standards." Sheesh, it's not as if they wanted to wear a Microsoft t-shirt or perform some other immoral act.
Hey, maybe we could get some of those suckers who invested beaucoup $$ in Randell "Smarter Than All Physicists" Mills' magic hydrogen atom technology to toss a few bills in Jim's direction. They've obviously all got too much money anyway.
This is almost exactly what we do in my shop. I work on a system for realtime telemetry processing. We have an enormous amount of legacy Fortran code. As things have evolved over the years, the core Fortran routines have remained relatively stable. New code tends to be written in C as a wrapper around the Fortran. I have, for example, developed Motif interfaces to replace our old command line and SMG (the proprietary DEC equivalent of curses) interfaces. All the old Fortran was accessed through callbacks from Motif written in C.
I work on a space program that earlier this year suffered the most expensive unmanned space accident in history, on a relatively routine insertion into a geosynchronous orbit. I no longer harbor high expectations for this kind of thing.
As of this writing, the first signals from the Martian Lander were supposed to have been received about 35 minutes ago. So far they have been unable to detect any. JPL is saying that there is no reason for extreme pessimism just yet. There are a number of possibilities as to the cause, and some of them are correctable.
I never thought I'd be wishing I lived in Finland, but this is awfully tempting. It must have been very hard on Linus to go slumming here in Silicon Valley when it came to Internet connectivity.
How uncommonly candid for a software company! Most of the ones I work with claim to provide features! Bugs are what I get, of course, but this is the first time I've ever heard of someone being honest about it.
I had lost interest in the series before Generations came along, but I must confess to wanting Kirk out of the picture ever since ST:TMP. He was just laughable in that, and never improved. The first time you see him ruined the character for the rest of the movie.
Long, establishing shot of a futuristic San Francisco, with sleek, graceful vehicles moving over the Golden Gate Bridge... Pan around to Starfleet Headquarters, as a shuttle pulls in... a dramatic moment, as we are about to see the great Captain in a new adventure for the first time in ten years... The shuttle doors open... and there is ADMIRAL KIRK!!!!
With a hideous toupee. Obviously wearing a girdle. In a uniform that makes him look like a dental assistant.
It's a well known fact that both Shatner and Nemoy have at one time or another denounced the fandom of Trek ("I'm Not Spock", "Get A Life")
Perhaps he talked to the stars of the original series because, for all the cheap SFX and hokey sets - a ship clearly made out of plywood on the inside, and planets apparently constructed entrely out of Styrofoam - it is felt by many to be the best written and best acted portion of the oeuvre. Furthermore, the original actors have been involved with the franchise for more than 30 years, and they might be expected to have a better idea of "the big picture" about it than the actors who came later. Most particularly, they had worked with Gene Roddenberry for a long time, and so were well placed to contrast his management of the franchise with Berman's.
Of course, Nimoy later changed his mind, with a more recent book titled I Am Spock. And Shatner was speaking scripted lines in a SNL sketch when he did the "Get a Life" speech. He may well have felt that way, but a comedy sketch is no proof of that.
TNG SAVED Trek.
Then why did TNG kill all interest in the series for me? It set the precedent for the franchise of always sticking to safe subjects and to always express a politicaly correct point of view. It had shallow characters, stale plots (a good portion of which were lifted wholesale from the original series), presented dialogue filled with meaningless jargon and boring cliches, and by God that bridge did look like a hotel lobby. If the franchise had started with a series the quality of TNG, we wouldn't be having this discussion now. Star Trek would be a long forgotten bit of TV fluff, remembered only by Trivial Pursuit champions.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you've met one. Female geeks as such are no more cool than male geeks. To think otherwise is implicitly sexist. Consider your horizons broadened.
Your assumption that the parents' opinions and occupations greatly influence the career paths of their children cannot be assumed these days, as it often could have been a couple of generations ago. My father made printing ink and my mother was a teacher. I'm a programmer, my sister is a BOFH, and my brother is a buyer. Do you see the correlation? You do? Then you're insane. There isn't one.
"Computer" was a job description, like "welder", "janitor", or "secretary", and consisted of performing arithmetic calculations. Some were employed by the government (which also employed welders, janitors, and secretaries) but for the most part they existed in those segments of private industry that required numbers to be crunched. As with any job outside the home in the early part of the century, they were usually men. During WWII there were a lot of computers who were women and who worked for the government, but the same could be said of welders.
Frankly, the idea of "gender issues" gives me hives. Clearly, in an ideal world career opportunities would be available strictly based on ability and performance. Relative to a community, we might speak in terms of esteem and contribution rather than opportunity and ability. That we do not live in an ideal world, and that "gender" as such plays a role in these things is self-evident - and unfortunate. But it is easy to over-analyze this fact to the point of absurdity, and to overstate the problem to the point of untruthfulness. I think that is what has been done in this issue of the CPSR newsletter.
I put "gender" in quotes because I'm a bit of a language purist. I believe that current trends in the development of English tend to make it a clumsier and less expressive form of communication. I therefore strongly dislike the use of "gender" to mean "sex." Not so long ago, "gender" was a strictly grammatical term, and "sex" was used to denote both the act of copulation and la difference. Somehow, in the process of the societal changes that made copulation so free and easy (in theory anyway), "sex" lost it's second meaning. I'm sure that a contributing factor is that there is no gender in English, and where it does occur it tends to be in loan words or neologisms from Latin. An irritant, nevertheless.
I only had time to read the introduction and selected articles, but if the sort of research exemplified by this article is any sample, the data presented is virtually worthless. The information presented about "Women's Language" vs. "Men's Lanugage" in online interactions, for example, is nonsensical. It is:
- Dated - the data are from 1994. This is an eternity online. Does the author really imagine that nothing has changed since then?
- Subjective - An example is "Explicit justifications" under Women's Language vs. "Presuppositions" under Men's. Well, maybe the author thought so. But anyone who routinely interacts with MOTOS, and is paying attention, knows that each sex possesses its own set of presuppositions which are often so ingrained as to be invisible to the individual. Besides, justifications can only go so far. Behind every justification is a set of presuppositions. Formally, these are called "axioms".
- Inaccurate - According to this table, women do not engage in humor or sarcasm online. Apparently these people have never met my wife, or the women with whom she interacts online - or, for that matter the women with whom I interact online. I could say the same about some the other characterizations.
Actually, every "fact" presented in this article is contradicted by my personal experience. While the latter necessarily constitutes nothing more than anecdotal evidence, I would expect that I would encounter at least some examples of the general case! I participate in discussion groups on a number of topics ranging from Eastern Orthodox Christianity to Renaissance Faires to PC games, to the panoply of topics on Slashdot. In every instance, where the topic may be expected to be of equal interest to both sexes, there is equal or superior representation of women both numerically and in terms of participation.One irritating assumption is that it is necessarily a Bad Thing that women are underrepresented in the technical occupations. Why should that be perceived as a problem? Is there a great deal of concern over the preponderance of women in the teaching profession? Or nursing? As small-business owners? As recipients of college degrees? As moralistic nationally syndicated talk show hosts?
I don't know why the fact, evident from centuries of experiences of both sexes, that men and women do not think the same way, have different priorities in life, and find different things to be interesting, should be so disturbing. Women as a group are simply not interested in things geekly. I received my bachelor's degree in 1985 from a small engineering college on the East Coast. Formerly a men-only institution, they had been co-ed for at least 10 years by the time I matriculated. The male-to-female ratio was 7:1, and from what I hear this hasn't changed. Similar trends obtain nationwide. There is no bar, either legally or socially, against women attending these institutions. They don't want to.
(As it happens, my own social circle in college was split between the sexes roughly 50-50 as is my group here at work, so I obviously know a large number of women who are interested. I speak in the general case.)
I can only conclude that the author of this particular article, and the others in this issue of the CPSR newsletter, feel they have some vested interest in generating a sense of sex-based exclusion in online interactions that does not in fact exist. I decline to speculate on what that might be. I do think that as a result their views are not worthy of serious consideration - and certainly not of affecting public policy - unless they can assemble a more compelling set of data.
As recently pointed up by Nitrozac (herself a major geek-babe) in After Y2Y. This is their first "in-person" appearence in the strip.
Hedy Lamarr (besides being a sex symbol) helped design and patent spread-spectrum wireless technologies that were half a century ahead of their time.
Not that far ahead. Her scheme for spread spectrum (also known as frequency hopping) involved synchronizing frequencies using player-piano rolls. She in fact got the idea while playing a piano duet with one of her children. A truly innovative idea, but one well within the technology of the time.
I am an Orthodox Christian. Christmas is 13 days later for me than for everyone else. Easter is usually on a different day, and no allowances are made for Holy Week observances regardless of when it falls. And there are 11 other major feast days throughout the year that the Protestant denominations - and therefore work holiday schedules - take no note of whatsoever. I get none of these days off gratis. During Lent and Advent, which are seasons when I am required to abstain from meat, dairy products, fish, alcohol and vegetable oil, the company cafeteria continues to offer the same old deep fried, greasy, cholesterol-laden fare.
I could bitch a blue streak about it. Or I could just do as I do: bring my own lunch when necessary, and use comp time, flex time and vacation days to fulfill my religious obligations. If you really resent the days off you are obligated to take, why don't you offer to cover for those days (if staffing is required) in exchange for days off when you could use them?
Incidently, the original post ought to have been moderated down "offtopic." There is nothing particularly Christian about when the New Year begins. It's a result of the calendar reforms of Julius Caesar. In the intervening centuries, a number of other dates were used for the beginning of the year, and these generally were chosen for religious reasons, but January 1 is a purely secular holiday.
If you're going to go on a self-righteous tirade, it helps to have actual facts in hand.
It just so happens, Mr. Smarty-Pants, that I know plenty of fully competent programmers who subsist on Ho-Hos.
Geeks are a diverse lot, and their choice of junk food should be left up to the individual as a lifestyle choice, not dictated to them by some nebulous set of "community standards." Sheesh, it's not as if they wanted to wear a Microsoft t-shirt or perform some other immoral act.
The power's on.
The phones work.
The ISP's up.
The toaster still gets my toast oh, so perfect.
Happy New Year!
Sorry, that's a Brit. Americans look for lawyers who work on contingency.
Can't see dick for the smog, already.
Now that's thick smog. I have always been able to see dick, even after I'd put on a few pounds!
Hey, maybe we could get some of those suckers who invested beaucoup $$ in Randell "Smarter Than All Physicists" Mills' magic hydrogen atom technology to toss a few bills in Jim's direction. They've obviously all got too much money anyway.
This is almost exactly what we do in my shop. I work on a system for realtime telemetry processing. We have an enormous amount of legacy Fortran code. As things have evolved over the years, the core Fortran routines have remained relatively stable. New code tends to be written in C as a wrapper around the Fortran. I have, for example, developed Motif interfaces to replace our old command line and SMG (the proprietary DEC equivalent of curses) interfaces. All the old Fortran was accessed through callbacks from Motif written in C.
BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
I'd be happier if they'd GPL their level maps, too. They're not really giving away the store...
I'd be happier if they'd GPL their level maps, too.
I believe its actually based on the Quake 2 engine. Does anyone recall any other games using the Quake 1 engine? None leap to mind right now.
I don't think it's him; just some other twit with a split tongue.
I'm so excited! Now we can have a "Balrog Wings" thread just like on rec.arts.books.tolkien!!
I guess the question is whether this guy should get prosthetic wings next or not.
WHOOPEEEE!
I work on a space program that earlier this year suffered the most expensive unmanned space accident in history, on a relatively routine insertion into a geosynchronous orbit. I no longer harbor high expectations for this kind of thing.
As of this writing, the first signals from the Martian Lander were supposed to have been received about 35 minutes ago. So far they have been unable to detect any. JPL is saying that there is no reason for extreme pessimism just yet. There are a number of possibilities as to the cause, and some of them are correctable.
I never thought I'd be wishing I lived in Finland, but this is awfully tempting. It must have been very hard on Linus to go slumming here in Silicon Valley when it came to Internet connectivity.
"providers of software bugs"
How uncommonly candid for a software company! Most of the ones I work with claim to provide features! Bugs are what I get, of course, but this is the first time I've ever heard of someone being honest about it.
It makes sense if there are hefty setup fees on the other services.
That was the second movie. But if I had to look at any of the Star Trek cast's tonsils, I think I'd prefer those of Nichelle Nichols. Yowza!
Long, establishing shot of a futuristic San Francisco, with sleek, graceful vehicles moving over the Golden Gate Bridge... Pan around to Starfleet Headquarters, as a shuttle pulls in... a dramatic moment, as we are about to see the great Captain in a new adventure for the first time in ten years... The shuttle doors open... and there is ADMIRAL KIRK!!!!
With a hideous toupee. Obviously wearing a girdle. In a uniform that makes him look like a dental assistant.
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Perhaps he talked to the stars of the original series because, for all the cheap SFX and hokey sets - a ship clearly made out of plywood on the inside, and planets apparently constructed entrely out of Styrofoam - it is felt by many to be the best written and best acted portion of the oeuvre. Furthermore, the original actors have been involved with the franchise for more than 30 years, and they might be expected to have a better idea of "the big picture" about it than the actors who came later. Most particularly, they had worked with Gene Roddenberry for a long time, and so were well placed to contrast his management of the franchise with Berman's.
Of course, Nimoy later changed his mind, with a more recent book titled I Am Spock. And Shatner was speaking scripted lines in a SNL sketch when he did the "Get a Life" speech. He may well have felt that way, but a comedy sketch is no proof of that.
TNG SAVED Trek.
Then why did TNG kill all interest in the series for me? It set the precedent for the franchise of always sticking to safe subjects and to always express a politicaly correct point of view. It had shallow characters, stale plots (a good portion of which were lifted wholesale from the original series), presented dialogue filled with meaningless jargon and boring cliches, and by God that bridge did look like a hotel lobby. If the franchise had started with a series the quality of TNG, we wouldn't be having this discussion now. Star Trek would be a long forgotten bit of TV fluff, remembered only by Trivial Pursuit champions.