*I* don't actually personally feel uncomfortable with that particular constant in any way shape or form. But I've quit programming jobs before because of other comments that *did* make me feel uncomfortable, and the people who made those comments sounded an awful lot like this when they told me over and over again that I was overreacting.
The main job I'm thinking of where this happened was one in which I was the lead programmer. I was being paid 1099 and my employer never bothered to have me sign a contract, and this employer had a way of getting very, very offensive when he was feeling stressed out. So suddenly I found myself being hounded with uncomfortable texts, Emails and Skype calls and being told that because I'm "just a service provider" I had no right to complain. I ended up leaving him high and dry a few weeks before a hard deadline with a major client, losing him several thousand dollars in the process... Money that he could easily have saved if he'd demonstrated the *slightest* willingness to even *try* to be a little bit more professional with me.
But this isn't about my personal comfort level and how much stress I can tolerate. It's about the idea that encouraging a diverse workplace involves acknowledging that on a personal level, your co-workers may think and feel very differently about things than you do, and demonstrating a willingness to be sensitive to that. Yeah, you're probably right, someone who'll quit her job over one very geeky and mildly dirty joke probably has a few issues. But the question to really ask is how commonplace this type of thing is at any particular company.
"Clearly false if it were written by a woman"... I think it's *you* who's making an assumption here.
I suppose the question of whether "0xFA7C0C45" is sexist or just inappropriate/unprofessional is a fairly subjective one. Is there really that much of a distinction there in your mind?
I don't think there's anything sexist about loving big tits. What *is* sexist is routinely displaying behavior *at work* that would make people of a particular sex feel less welcome there. So no, IMHO your wife's sexual preferences do not in and of themselves make her sexist.
Generally I agree with you -- in fact I'm going to go ahead and say that I too prize individuality.
At the same time, I don't think the workplace is necessarily the best place to express your individuality in its full force. A workplace means being part of a team, and it's in the interest of the employer to make sure that talented individuals who are great at their jobs and have something to contribute are going to feel comfortable at the office and able to contribute their best. This frequently means sacrificing some of your individuality while at the workplace.
I think working as a programmer should only require that you be *good at writing code*. It shouldn't matter how sensitive or insensitive you are, and it shouldn't matter how much capacity you have for handling stress coming from having blatantly insensitive, domineering coworkers. I think it is to the best advantage of employers to manage their businesses in a way that promotes having anyone who is *good at writing code* feel comfortable at the office.
I don't really feel like this is an appropriate forum to get into an in-depth discussion of feminist philosophy.
That being said, IMHO if female coworkers were routinely commenting on the size of your nose or your waist line, that would very definitely be unprofessional behavior on their part. And if a female programmer named her constants things like "TINY_DICK_LOSER," I'd count that as sexism.
I'm not suggesting or supporting any sort of double standard -- I'm just suggesting that a professional environment involves placing a few boundaries on your behavior in order to make *sure* that, to use your words, "everyone gets along, has a good time and enjoys what they're doing." That might mean not making the overweight man overly self conscious about his weight, it might mean making a point of making *eye contact* with the lady with the well-endowed chest, it might mean refraining from mentioning that you spent your weekend picketing an abortion clinic, or that you spent your weekend campaigning for gay marriage.
You don't make the assumption that your co-workers are all going to feel the same way as you on any potentially charged issue.
You're right, I should have said "one of the reasons" and my use of finger-wagging humor did indeed trivialize a situation that shouldn't be trivialized. Consider me schooled. :)
I'm sorry to say this, but this is another bit of typical patriarchy talk -- if a woman feels uncomfortable with something men are doing, she's automatically "uptight" or "frigid." Sorry, but no. Professionalism dictates keeping this sort of thing out of the workplace. Sure, some women may be able to laugh it off for the sake of appearing to be a "team player" and putting the men on the team at ease, but honestly I can't imagine very many of us are actually truly completely comfortable with the idea of people we aren't reasonably intimate with commenting on our chests.
I don't disagree that this can often be an exceedingly boring field to work in. At the same time, it's a reasonably well paying one, and a basement office can still be brightened up considerably with a few plants and tasteful paintings. As long as you don't have an officemate who's constantly showering you with unsolicited innuendo.
Right, because adult women are all obviously (1) straight (2) insecure about our chests and (3) married to men with "real jobs" who take care of all our "real" needs.
No, we write code to pay our rent and put food on the table, just like you. And some of us are nerdy enough to immediately notice words in hex codes, just like some of you are.
It's sexist in that if a very talented woman programmer was going around hacking in the kernel and found it, it might make her feel uncomfortable. As such, it contributes to the feeling that Linux kernel development is an area in which women aren't welcome... And believe it or not, sort of thing is the reason why there are so few female programmers. Our "tiny female brains" can cope with the actual work *just fine*. :)
Oh who the heck cares? My point is that jQuery isn't actually dropping support for legacy versions of IE -- they're just creating a more optimal version of their library for newer browsers. And I was trying to keep my code example reasonably clear and simple.
By all means, though, go ahead and start a whole sub-thread about what the most optimal way to do the browser detection would be. There seems to be a lot of commenters who feel it ought to be done using IE conditional comments.
It's not just that 2.0 won't need to check which hacks are needed to support all the different weirdness of different legacy versions of IE... It's also that HTML5 has a lot of features that can make much of jQuery's functionality much simpler, and HTML5 isn't really IN IE8 and older.
If, as the article suggest, there will be "full API compatibility" then any plugins that require one of them should also work with the other.
Don't get me wrong, full API compatibility is one heck of a claim to make and I guess we'll have to see just how close they actually get to it indeed being full. But assuming they largely make good on their claim, this just isn't really major news. They're creating a more optimized version of their library for more modern browsers.
2.0 will implement the same features as 1.9 but in more optimized ways, by relying on browser features not available in legacy versions of IE. The whole point of having a standardized API is that you can provide different implementations of that API.
There's already a fair bit of divergence between what you can do in IE and what you can do in other browsers. IE (including IE9) doesn't implement as much of HTML5 as other browsers. IE's SVG support is in its infancy compared to other browsers', and completely nonexistent before IE9.
So we might end up with some jQuery functionality silently being disabled in legacy versions of IE too. Big whoop.
"Full API compatibility" means the same identical code should be able to work with the slower-performing version 1.9 on legacy IE browsers *and* with the more optimized version 2 on IE9 and standards compliant browsers.
All you need is some back-end code to examine the user's browser's "useragent" string and figure out which version of jQuery to serve.
You see the bit where it says "full API compatibility"?
That means with a few lines of PHP (or some equivalent back-end language) you can have a look at the user's browser USERAGENT string, figure out if it's an MSIE browser or not and serve the preferable version of jQuery... 1.9 for legacy IE, 2.0 for IE9 and for standards compliant browsers. And the "full API compatibility" means the rest of your code will play nice with either.
Personally I'd absolutely love it if an employer made free candy bars available. I've had an employer buy the entire (about 15 employee) company free Subway on Fridays when the company was doing well enough, just to keep up morale... Which was awesome.
I tend to think the unemployed would appreciate free candy bars too, or any kind of free food really. The problem with capes is that they're useless, not that they're patronizing. You can't eat them, you can't pay the bills with them, you can't wear them to a job interview, you can't print extra copies of your resume with them, you can't use them as transportation to a job interview... Any of which would have been better things to spend the money on.
That's one heck of a false analogy. Electricity is a homogeneous quantity. It's all the same, regardless of which company produced it and how it was produced. I can count on my laptop working the same whenever I plug it into any US power outlet that's getting power, regardless of who the local power company is and whether they produced that power from nuclear sources, windmills, hydro power, solar cells, or any combination thereof. The company that's providing me with the electricity owns both the electricity they're providing me and the cables over which it's being delivered, and what they charge me for is the electricity - the content - not the delivery system. They maintain the delivery system because it's in their best interest to be able to bring their content (the electricity) to as many consumers as possible.
By contrast, with the Internet, we have to deal with one company that owns the delivery system (the ISP) and one company that owns the content. And both can vary a great deal -- Gmail does not have the same features as Yahoo. Hulu does not have the exact same content as Netflix. World of Warcraft is not exactly the same as Everquest. So you get to make choices as to which content you prefer to pay for. Ideally you'd also be able to make choices over which delivery method you'd prefer. Which is to say, ideally any major urban area should have enough competition between broadband Internet providers to give you some real choices. In reality this isn't necessarily the case.
Now, as things stand, people who consume more content generally do pay more for that content. Netflix subscriptions cost money. So do most VoIP services (Packet8, Vonage, etc). And that's when you start seeing the real problem. Chances are your broadband Internet provider also has a digital phone service and possibly TV service. And chances are that, in order to compete with independent VoIP providers, Netflix, and hulu, they're already offering you various "bundle discounts" that will get you cheaper Internet if you also get your TV service or phone service through them.
If net neutrality isn't mandated by law, then [random broadband Internet provider] would be legally allowed to artificially slow down any traffic between their subscribers' computers and the servers of companies that compete with them - Vonage, Packet8, Netflix, hulu, etc. And then they'd be able to send you promotional materials telling you that their phone service has better call quality, fewer dropped calls and less "cut up sound" during calls than Packet8 and Vonage have... And that their TV services never pauses suddenly like Netflix and hulu. And of course, that on top of that, you'll get a discount on your Internet if you subscribe to either.
It's this type of scenario that net neutrality is really trying to prevent. And at it's core, it isn't something that the FCC should be concerned with. It's a clear cut anti-trust law issue. It's companies that provide service in numerous realms (Internet, TV, phone) using their virtual monopolies in one realm (Internet) to compete unfairly in another realm (phone and TV). I believe there was already a ruling several years ago declaring that DSL providers have to give their customers the option of ordering "naked" DSL - DSL Internet without any accompanying phone service. What really ought to happen, though, is a ruling that says companies that provide broadband Internet cannot also provide other services that may unfairly compete with services offered independently online... In other words, broadband providers need to be forced to split off their Internet service into a separate company from the rest of their services, like what happened to the phone companies in the 80's and like they tried to do to Microsoft in the 90's.
When you go to the supermarket to buy a particular product... Let's say KETCHUP... You'll usually find you have several different brands available to you. The more expensive name brands are usually placed right at eye level, whereas the least expensive store brands are usually on the bottom shelf, where you're only likely to notice them if you're really looking for a deal. This is called SEGMENTED MARKETING. The name brand is targeted to the people who have the high-stress, well-paying jobs and don't have the time or energy to try to find the best deals. But the best deals are still available for those who need them.
I'm yet to see cable companies and "content providers" doing anything equivalent. But they really ought to. The vast majority of people who spend time and energy on piracy are students and low-income people who couldn't buy the content legitimately. People who have active, stressful lives and who make enough money will frequently fork over the money for legitimate copies of the content they're interested in just because it's less of a hassle to do so.
What cable companies and content providers ought to be doing is trying to come up with that deal saving "store brand" version of their content. The content that could still appeal even to the starving college students and minimum wage slaves that they'd consider shelling out a few bucks on it here and there.
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*I* don't actually personally feel uncomfortable with that particular constant in any way shape or form. But I've quit programming jobs before because of other comments that *did* make me feel uncomfortable, and the people who made those comments sounded an awful lot like this when they told me over and over again that I was overreacting.
The main job I'm thinking of where this happened was one in which I was the lead programmer. I was being paid 1099 and my employer never bothered to have me sign a contract, and this employer had a way of getting very, very offensive when he was feeling stressed out. So suddenly I found myself being hounded with uncomfortable texts, Emails and Skype calls and being told that because I'm "just a service provider" I had no right to complain. I ended up leaving him high and dry a few weeks before a hard deadline with a major client, losing him several thousand dollars in the process... Money that he could easily have saved if he'd demonstrated the *slightest* willingness to even *try* to be a little bit more professional with me.
But this isn't about my personal comfort level and how much stress I can tolerate. It's about the idea that encouraging a diverse workplace involves acknowledging that on a personal level, your co-workers may think and feel very differently about things than you do, and demonstrating a willingness to be sensitive to that. Yeah, you're probably right, someone who'll quit her job over one very geeky and mildly dirty joke probably has a few issues. But the question to really ask is how commonplace this type of thing is at any particular company.
Well, best of luck to you with that philosophy. :)
"Clearly false if it were written by a woman"... I think it's *you* who's making an assumption here.
I suppose the question of whether "0xFA7C0C45" is sexist or just inappropriate/unprofessional is a fairly subjective one. Is there really that much of a distinction there in your mind?
I've apparently poorly communicated my point.
I don't think there's anything sexist about loving big tits. What *is* sexist is routinely displaying behavior *at work* that would make people of a particular sex feel less welcome there. So no, IMHO your wife's sexual preferences do not in and of themselves make her sexist.
Generally I agree with you -- in fact I'm going to go ahead and say that I too prize individuality.
At the same time, I don't think the workplace is necessarily the best place to express your individuality in its full force. A workplace means being part of a team, and it's in the interest of the employer to make sure that talented individuals who are great at their jobs and have something to contribute are going to feel comfortable at the office and able to contribute their best. This frequently means sacrificing some of your individuality while at the workplace.
I think working as a programmer should only require that you be *good at writing code*. It shouldn't matter how sensitive or insensitive you are, and it shouldn't matter how much capacity you have for handling stress coming from having blatantly insensitive, domineering coworkers. I think it is to the best advantage of employers to manage their businesses in a way that promotes having anyone who is *good at writing code* feel comfortable at the office.
Precisely what part of my actual comment did you interpret to mean that I made the assumption that a male inserted that constant?
I don't really feel like this is an appropriate forum to get into an in-depth discussion of feminist philosophy.
That being said, IMHO if female coworkers were routinely commenting on the size of your nose or your waist line, that would very definitely be unprofessional behavior on their part. And if a female programmer named her constants things like "TINY_DICK_LOSER," I'd count that as sexism.
I'm not suggesting or supporting any sort of double standard -- I'm just suggesting that a professional environment involves placing a few boundaries on your behavior in order to make *sure* that, to use your words, "everyone gets along, has a good time and enjoys what they're doing." That might mean not making the overweight man overly self conscious about his weight, it might mean making a point of making *eye contact* with the lady with the well-endowed chest, it might mean refraining from mentioning that you spent your weekend picketing an abortion clinic, or that you spent your weekend campaigning for gay marriage.
You don't make the assumption that your co-workers are all going to feel the same way as you on any potentially charged issue.
You're right, I should have said "one of the reasons" and my use of finger-wagging humor did indeed trivialize a situation that shouldn't be trivialized. Consider me schooled. :)
*curtsies*
I'm sorry to say this, but this is another bit of typical patriarchy talk -- if a woman feels uncomfortable with something men are doing, she's automatically "uptight" or "frigid." Sorry, but no. Professionalism dictates keeping this sort of thing out of the workplace. Sure, some women may be able to laugh it off for the sake of appearing to be a "team player" and putting the men on the team at ease, but honestly I can't imagine very many of us are actually truly completely comfortable with the idea of people we aren't reasonably intimate with commenting on our chests.
I don't disagree that this can often be an exceedingly boring field to work in. At the same time, it's a reasonably well paying one, and a basement office can still be brightened up considerably with a few plants and tasteful paintings. As long as you don't have an officemate who's constantly showering you with unsolicited innuendo.
Right, because adult women are all obviously (1) straight (2) insecure about our chests and (3) married to men with "real jobs" who take care of all our "real" needs.
No, we write code to pay our rent and put food on the table, just like you. And some of us are nerdy enough to immediately notice words in hex codes, just like some of you are.
It's sexist in that if a very talented woman programmer was going around hacking in the kernel and found it, it might make her feel uncomfortable. As such, it contributes to the feeling that Linux kernel development is an area in which women aren't welcome... And believe it or not, sort of thing is the reason why there are so few female programmers. Our "tiny female brains" can cope with the actual work *just fine*. :)
Thank you -- finally someone who's provided a coherent reason for why conditional comments are preferable.
That being said, isn't any page containing dynamic content of any sort already incompatible with caching anyway?
Does this also load 2.0.0 for browsers that aren't IE at all, or would you have to do something extra for that part?
I don't disagree.
Oh who the heck cares? My point is that jQuery isn't actually dropping support for legacy versions of IE -- they're just creating a more optimal version of their library for newer browsers. And I was trying to keep my code example reasonably clear and simple.
By all means, though, go ahead and start a whole sub-thread about what the most optimal way to do the browser detection would be. There seems to be a lot of commenters who feel it ought to be done using IE conditional comments.
It's not just that 2.0 won't need to check which hacks are needed to support all the different weirdness of different legacy versions of IE... It's also that HTML5 has a lot of features that can make much of jQuery's functionality much simpler, and HTML5 isn't really IN IE8 and older.
I don't love anything about IE. IE is that extra browser I have to load VMware to test stuff in.
If, as the article suggest, there will be "full API compatibility" then any plugins that require one of them should also work with the other.
Don't get me wrong, full API compatibility is one heck of a claim to make and I guess we'll have to see just how close they actually get to it indeed being full. But assuming they largely make good on their claim, this just isn't really major news. They're creating a more optimized version of their library for more modern browsers.
Big whoop.
RTFA.
2.0 will implement the same features as 1.9 but in more optimized ways, by relying on browser features not available in legacy versions of IE. The whole point of having a standardized API is that you can provide different implementations of that API.
There's already a fair bit of divergence between what you can do in IE and what you can do in other browsers. IE (including IE9) doesn't implement as much of HTML5 as other browsers. IE's SVG support is in its infancy compared to other browsers', and completely nonexistent before IE9.
So we might end up with some jQuery functionality silently being disabled in legacy versions of IE too. Big whoop.
"Full API compatibility" means the same identical code should be able to work with the slower-performing version 1.9 on legacy IE browsers *and* with the more optimized version 2 on IE9 and standards compliant browsers.
All you need is some back-end code to examine the user's browser's "useragent" string and figure out which version of jQuery to serve.
<?php
preg_match( '/MSIE ([0-9\.]+)/', $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_USER_AGENT' ], $matches );
if ( ( count( $matches ) == 2 ) && ( floatval( $matches[ 1 ] ) < 9.0 ) )
echo "<script type='text/javascript' src='jQuery-1.9.min.js'></script>";
else
echo "<script type='text/javascript' src='jQuery-2.0.min.js'></script>";
?>
You see the bit where it says "full API compatibility"? That means with a few lines of PHP (or some equivalent back-end language) you can have a look at the user's browser USERAGENT string, figure out if it's an MSIE browser or not and serve the preferable version of jQuery... 1.9 for legacy IE, 2.0 for IE9 and for standards compliant browsers. And the "full API compatibility" means the rest of your code will play nice with either.
Personally I'd absolutely love it if an employer made free candy bars available. I've had an employer buy the entire (about 15 employee) company free Subway on Fridays when the company was doing well enough, just to keep up morale... Which was awesome. I tend to think the unemployed would appreciate free candy bars too, or any kind of free food really. The problem with capes is that they're useless, not that they're patronizing. You can't eat them, you can't pay the bills with them, you can't wear them to a job interview, you can't print extra copies of your resume with them, you can't use them as transportation to a job interview... Any of which would have been better things to spend the money on.
That's one heck of a false analogy. Electricity is a homogeneous quantity. It's all the same, regardless of which company produced it and how it was produced. I can count on my laptop working the same whenever I plug it into any US power outlet that's getting power, regardless of who the local power company is and whether they produced that power from nuclear sources, windmills, hydro power, solar cells, or any combination thereof. The company that's providing me with the electricity owns both the electricity they're providing me and the cables over which it's being delivered, and what they charge me for is the electricity - the content - not the delivery system. They maintain the delivery system because it's in their best interest to be able to bring their content (the electricity) to as many consumers as possible.
By contrast, with the Internet, we have to deal with one company that owns the delivery system (the ISP) and one company that owns the content. And both can vary a great deal -- Gmail does not have the same features as Yahoo. Hulu does not have the exact same content as Netflix. World of Warcraft is not exactly the same as Everquest. So you get to make choices as to which content you prefer to pay for. Ideally you'd also be able to make choices over which delivery method you'd prefer. Which is to say, ideally any major urban area should have enough competition between broadband Internet providers to give you some real choices. In reality this isn't necessarily the case.
Now, as things stand, people who consume more content generally do pay more for that content. Netflix subscriptions cost money. So do most VoIP services (Packet8, Vonage, etc). And that's when you start seeing the real problem. Chances are your broadband Internet provider also has a digital phone service and possibly TV service. And chances are that, in order to compete with independent VoIP providers, Netflix, and hulu, they're already offering you various "bundle discounts" that will get you cheaper Internet if you also get your TV service or phone service through them.
If net neutrality isn't mandated by law, then [random broadband Internet provider] would be legally allowed to artificially slow down any traffic between their subscribers' computers and the servers of companies that compete with them - Vonage, Packet8, Netflix, hulu, etc. And then they'd be able to send you promotional materials telling you that their phone service has better call quality, fewer dropped calls and less "cut up sound" during calls than Packet8 and Vonage have... And that their TV services never pauses suddenly like Netflix and hulu. And of course, that on top of that, you'll get a discount on your Internet if you subscribe to either.
It's this type of scenario that net neutrality is really trying to prevent. And at it's core, it isn't something that the FCC should be concerned with. It's a clear cut anti-trust law issue. It's companies that provide service in numerous realms (Internet, TV, phone) using their virtual monopolies in one realm (Internet) to compete unfairly in another realm (phone and TV). I believe there was already a ruling several years ago declaring that DSL providers have to give their customers the option of ordering "naked" DSL - DSL Internet without any accompanying phone service. What really ought to happen, though, is a ruling that says companies that provide broadband Internet cannot also provide other services that may unfairly compete with services offered independently online... In other words, broadband providers need to be forced to split off their Internet service into a separate company from the rest of their services, like what happened to the phone companies in the 80's and like they tried to do to Microsoft in the 90's.
When you go to the supermarket to buy a particular product... Let's say KETCHUP... You'll usually find you have several different brands available to you. The more expensive name brands are usually placed right at eye level, whereas the least expensive store brands are usually on the bottom shelf, where you're only likely to notice them if you're really looking for a deal. This is called SEGMENTED MARKETING. The name brand is targeted to the people who have the high-stress, well-paying jobs and don't have the time or energy to try to find the best deals. But the best deals are still available for those who need them.
I'm yet to see cable companies and "content providers" doing anything equivalent. But they really ought to. The vast majority of people who spend time and energy on piracy are students and low-income people who couldn't buy the content legitimately. People who have active, stressful lives and who make enough money will frequently fork over the money for legitimate copies of the content they're interested in just because it's less of a hassle to do so.
What cable companies and content providers ought to be doing is trying to come up with that deal saving "store brand" version of their content. The content that could still appeal even to the starving college students and minimum wage slaves that they'd consider shelling out a few bucks on it here and there.