As a woman in IT, i can't say I've had any trouble with male "cliques". I'm also surprised by those stories about sexual harassment accusations which is something I've never encountered or even heard of over here in Europe.
One thing that is true is that guys usually view their female co-workers as less competent. They go to great lengths to explain simple things to you over and over again as if they doubted your ability to comprehend basic technical matters. In general, males also tend to be over-helpful, trying to do things for you they assume to be too complicated for a woman. "This part is tricky, it needs to be written in assembley language, we'll give it to someone else" combined with a knowing smile isn't something most male programmers would hear very often.
My usual reaction to this is to turn down the entire contract offer.
On a positive note though, once you've worked together for some time, respect for your abilities does eventually turn in. However, it is rarely shown in public. It's more like <whisper>hey, you're good</whisper>. I'm a long time regular on various technical IRC channels, and while guys on those channels do seek my help with tricky problems, they mainly use private/msgs to do so as opposed to suffering the humiliation of having a girl tell them how to debug their C progams in public. Approximately the same thing happens in the workplace. The main problem with people not talking about your skills publicly is that, this way, you're getting little public credit for your achievements.
The article ist way too one-sided. While this is understandable given that Lee Smolin has a competing theory of quantum gravity to defend, it prevents a real critique of the current state of theoretical physics. The structure of spacetime at (currently unobservable) very small scales is an issue not just for string theory, but for every quantum theory of gravity. Testing any such theory is a major challenge as, presumably, it will almost only differ from General Relativity at very high energies.
Even then, it is not true that string theory deals with entirely unobservable phenomena. For example, testable predictions can be derived from the Randall-Sundrum models. A valid point though, is that today, experimental science needs to catch up with theoretical physics. An important step will be the Large Hadron Collider currently being built in Switzerland, which could either help detect so called "superpartners" for known particles, or help put constraints on their nature.
One thing many traditional server&workstation companies such as SGI never realized is that, unless you're a high volume, low cost business such as Dell, hardware isn't enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. It's not hardware that people interact with, but software.
Apple succeeded spectacularly in that area by creating OS X with all the applications that go with it. Sun did something similar with Java, and to a lesser extent recent Solaris versions. SGI, on the other hand, hasn't had a modern OS in years. Irix has been left to rot, and Linux is something everybody else has. They don't have anything that would even come close to being a user interface that could enthuse their target audience.
The little pieces of software they had, which could have been part of a broader software strategy (( read Maya and Studio Tools )) got sold some time ago. Relying on 3rd party vendors to cover the software side of their business has turned SGI into a pretty faceless company.
Also, they completely underestimated the importance of things such as wireless technology, laptops, tablet computers etc to their market. In fact, with the right strategy, SGI could have done for for video what Apple and the iPod did for Audio, with the addition that SGI's lead in that area could have included the production side in addition to the consumer side. At least, plenty of the technology&creativity necessary to do this would have been in the company.
I have a real problem with attitudes like "we do not support non-free operating systems". Of course, software should be free IMHO. But dropping support for non-free platforms takes away the ability to use at least free application software from users who aren't in a position to decide which os they want to use, be it at work or due to limited technical skills.
Even more important, this type of attitude (( flame me, but I'd call it bunker mentality )) harms collaboration between open source projects, and also between commercial software vendors and open source projects. (( if you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the copyright notices for g++'s STL headers ))
To make the point clearer, let's take Ulrich's ideas a bit further. From a BSD purist's point of view, GPL licensed software does qualify as "non-free".
What if e.g. the OpenSSH guys decided to drop support for non-free operating systems such as Linux, particularly commercial distributions like Redhat that include proprietary code?
"Of course, you Linux guys may always maintain a separate tree that includes supports for those exotic systems."
So we'd have X people who could be working on something way more useful, trying to keep a forked tree in sync with the original project. Great.
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As a woman in IT, i can't say I've had any trouble with male "cliques". I'm also surprised by those stories about sexual harassment accusations which is something I've never encountered or even heard of over here in Europe.
/msgs to do so as opposed to suffering the humiliation of having a girl tell them how to debug their C progams in public. Approximately the same thing happens in the workplace. The main problem with people not talking about your skills publicly is that, this way, you're getting little public credit for your achievements.
One thing that is true is that guys usually view their female co-workers as less competent. They go to great lengths to explain simple things to you over and over again as if they doubted your ability to comprehend basic technical matters. In general, males also tend to be over-helpful, trying to do things for you they assume to be too complicated for a woman. "This part is tricky, it needs to be written in assembley language, we'll give it to someone else" combined with a knowing smile isn't something most male programmers would hear very often.
My usual reaction to this is to turn down the entire contract offer.
On a positive note though, once you've worked together for some time, respect for your abilities does eventually turn in. However, it is rarely shown in public. It's more like <whisper>hey, you're good</whisper>. I'm a long time regular on various technical IRC channels, and while guys on those channels do seek my help with tricky problems, they mainly use private
The article ist way too one-sided. While this is understandable given that Lee Smolin has a competing theory of quantum gravity to defend, it prevents a real critique of the current state of theoretical physics. The structure of spacetime at (currently unobservable) very small scales is an issue not just for string theory, but for every quantum theory of gravity. Testing any such theory is a major challenge as, presumably, it will almost only differ from General Relativity at very high energies.
Even then, it is not true that string theory deals with entirely unobservable phenomena. For example, testable predictions can be derived from the Randall-Sundrum models. A valid point though, is that today, experimental science needs to catch up with theoretical physics. An important step will be the Large Hadron Collider currently being built in Switzerland, which could either help detect so called "superpartners" for known particles, or help put constraints on their nature.
One thing many traditional server&workstation companies such as SGI never realized is that, unless you're a high volume, low cost business such as Dell, hardware isn't enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. It's not hardware that people interact with, but software.
Apple succeeded spectacularly in that area by creating OS X with all the applications that go with it. Sun did something similar with Java, and to a lesser extent recent Solaris versions. SGI, on the other hand, hasn't had a modern OS in years. Irix has been left to rot, and Linux is something everybody else has. They don't have anything that would even come close to being a user interface that could enthuse their target audience.
The little pieces of software they had, which could have been part of a broader software strategy (( read Maya and Studio Tools )) got sold some time ago. Relying on 3rd party vendors to cover the software side of their business has turned SGI into a pretty faceless company.
Also, they completely underestimated the importance of things such as wireless technology, laptops, tablet computers etc to their market. In fact, with the right strategy, SGI could have done for for video what Apple and the iPod did for Audio, with the addition that SGI's lead in that area could have included the production side in addition to the consumer side. At least, plenty of the technology&creativity necessary to do this would have been in the company.
I have a real problem with attitudes like "we do not support non-free operating systems". Of course, software should be free IMHO. But dropping support for non-free platforms takes away the ability to use at least free application software from users who aren't in a position to decide which os they want to use, be it at work or due to limited technical skills.
Even more important, this type of attitude (( flame me, but I'd call it bunker mentality )) harms collaboration between open source projects, and also between commercial software vendors and open source projects. (( if you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the copyright notices for g++'s STL headers ))
To make the point clearer, let's take Ulrich's ideas a bit further. From a BSD purist's point of view, GPL licensed software does qualify as "non-free".
What if e.g. the OpenSSH guys decided to drop support for non-free operating systems such as Linux, particularly commercial distributions like Redhat that include proprietary code?
"Of course, you Linux guys may always maintain a separate tree that includes supports for those exotic systems."
So we'd have X people who could be working on something way more useful, trying to keep a forked tree in sync with the original project. Great.