iBooks works just fine with DRM-free ePub & PDF documents purchased elsewhere, and coexists quite nicely with them - I can't speak for other formats, but my iPad currently has half a dozen PDFs, a few books purchased from the iBook store, and a couple.epubs that I've downloaded from the web - among them the Pro Git epub available here.
Hard to say whether or not the iBooks Authoring tool will allow you to publish epubs for non-Apple platforms - it publishes in an epub format, but some reports are saying that there appear to be proprietary extensions to the epub3 format, which could pose a problem for distribution to non-iBooks clients.
My *guess* is that epubs created on other platforms will work just fine in iBooks provided there's no DRM on the file to prevent it, and they're not abusing the standards. Jury's still out on whether or not epubs created in the iBooks Authoring tool will be work properly on other platforms, though I suspect that that's the (eventual) goal. Remember, Apple wants to sell you Macs to create iBooks on, as well as iPads to read them on. If they have the "premiere" authoring tool available, it's a selling point.
Yes, because animations, layered charts, zoomable 3d models - these would all be useless, pointless frippery in, say, a science textbook.
Who wants a 3d image of the various muscles of the human body? Who wants a zoomable model of a plant to inspect various structures in finer detail. Who wants a math textbook that will allow you to manipulate functions and graphs in real time?
That's all useless crap that NOBODY will ever use, want, or benefit from! Black and white words on paper were good enough for years, and by god, that's all these punk kids should get!
Why wouldn't it? You can't resell your DRM'ed ePub anyway, so there's no benefit to the textbook authors in making changes to force new students to purchase new, rather than used.
So what would be the point of making minor formatting updates - are the students who took the course last year going to buy a new copy this year because there was an update?
So what? Check out any knitting club and you will see almost 100% females. And yet I don't see anyone getting too bent out of shape over this.
Are you really that stupid? Seriously? Let's look at the facts of the situation:
1) Women pursue development careers, and work as software engineers, in reasonably large (though still disproportionate) numbers - in 2009, 25% of computing jobs were held by women. (source) 2) That number is *decreasing* - in 1985, 37% of Undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women. In 2009, 18% of undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women. (source) 3) Most studies of Open Source communities show women's involvement at anywhere from ~1.5% to 5%. (source)
In other words: EVEN allowing for a "biological" difference to explain for the relatively low (and further declining) participation of women in Computer Science, the open source community shows an even sharper disparity - if 25% of computing jobs were held by women, and if 18% of undergrad CS degress are being awarded to women, why are so few of the qualified women choosing to further participate in the Open Source community? And why does that number continue to decline? Please explain the biological basis for some new evolutionary event that happened back around 1985 that would explain this?
And here we have main fault of this kind of "studies". They start with already made conclusion that problem is those nasty nerds who drive poor females away. And of course anybody who does not immediately agree is "part of the problem". That's how you conduct religious cult, not research.
Cute bumper sticker, but of course, you've provided no facts to back up your assertion that there's a biological basis for this disparity, either. You've hand-waved a lot of "uh girls have brain differences, so therefore maybe they don't like computers," mumbo-jumbo, and I've pointed out that there is absolutely no body of evidence to support this conclusion, and there is significant evidence that the disparities are cultural and social. Let's be clear: we're talking about very minor differences between two genders of the same species, not trying to argue that there's a biological basis for primates being tool makers on account of primates having opposable thumbs.
"There is no particular biological basis for this" . To me it seems like expression of certainty.
Yes, if you take what I wrote out of context to support your straw man, I'm sure it might seem that way. What I wrote was this: "Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns." There is no particular biological basis for this, so again, there'd be no reason to expect this to be the case, unless there is a cultural reason for it."
The "this" that I'm saying there's no particular biological basis to support is the "girls like dolls, boys like guns" assertion. If you'd like to point out some evidence for the elusive "liking guns" gene being sex-linked, I'd be more than happy to concede I was wrong on that point... but having studied biology, I'm fairly certain that you're not going to be able to provide any evidence for it.
"Anecdote from when I was 7" ? Where the hell do you see any anecdotes in my posts?
It was a challenge to you, not a statement that you used an anecdote. Provide *evidence* for your assertion that there's a biological basis for the disparities we're talking about, or start listening to the facts that suggest a cultural & social explanation for it.
I am not talking about ability - I don't see any reason to think that code produced by female programmers is any worse or better on average. I suggest that mental differences (you want biologi
And yet a simple google search shows scholarly and serious articles discussing the issue of men's under-representation in nursing, including a very official-sounding organization known as the AAMN whose first goal is "Encourage men of all ages to become nurses and join together with all nurses in strengthening and humanizing health care."
I guess we should just conclude that these people are misguided, and that men are BIOLOGICALLY unsuited for nursing careers, rather than culturally and socially influenced. I guess we should also just conclude that the over-representation of young black men in jail also has a basis in their biology, rather than in the very real social and cultural issues affecting the black community? Hell, let's just declare every problem biological in nature, and wash our hands of it. Poverty? You're biologically unsuited to making money! Can't find a job? You must be biologically unsuited for it!
As soon as the President of Harvard said he wanted to study if women were not as good in Math as men, he was vilified in the press and fired from his post.
Because, of course, he was wrong, not just spouting an unpopular opinion. No significant gender gap appears in studies until secondary education, and that gap closes as more females participate in the advanced math classes. In other words: the gender gap only appears because women weren't pursuing mathematics, and rapidly closes as more women are encouraged to participate. You could, perhaps start educating yourself on the issue here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.htm
I know it's not politically correct to say, but there is probably a biological reason why males are much more likely to be diagnosed as color-blind [wikipedia.org], stutterers, autistic, or as having aspergers syndrome, than women.
Yes, they're called sex-linked traits, and are generally tied at least in part to mutations on the X or Y chromosomes. Of course, we can empirically determine that more men than women are subject to color blindness; we have not yet empirically determined that women are "bad at math and science." It's a question of *participation* not one of *ability*.
And is this a problem serious enough to try and solve it with yet another "initiative" every several months? Is this even a problem at all or just observation?
Well, let's consider this question for a moment. People have pointed out that women's involvement in open source development is *extremely* low, despite the fact that, even in non-OSS development, women have a much higher proportion of representation. So... is it a problem that a significant portion of people eligible to contribute to OSS development are electing not to? You tell me!
For me, I'd say yes, to the extent that anybody who COULD contribute, and who might be interested in contributing to a community, but who is instead driven away by actively hostile elements of that community's culture, there is a "problem." If you want to say "It's a boy's club, girls not welcome," that's fine. But let's not pretend that women aren't participating because their poor little heads just explode like Lucy & Ethel at the candy factory.
So? Don't mistake political correctness for reality
Ah, so you view "girls like dolls, boys like guns" as an immutable biological reality? I see why you can't see the problem now... you're part of it.
How do you know there is no biological basis?
Because study after study have shown little-to-no statistically significant disparity between the performance of boys and girls in areas of math and science, areas which computer science most certainly relates to. And yet time and again, apologists like you trot out this "you don't know there's no biological basis." I never said "there wasn't any," I said that you've got "a long way to go to establish any sort of biological reason for this disparity." Proceed to establish your biological basis with facts, not half-assed stereotypes paired with an anecdote from when you were 7 years old, and I'll be happy to listen.
I thought nerds were supposed to be rational and fact based... yet you're asking me to prove a negative, and clinging to your own prejudices and stereotypes when faced with ACTUAL EVIDENCE that there is no supporting data for a "gender gap" in terms of performance and ability in math and science.
Whether that's creepy behavior when they get acknowledged for their technical skill, or for when they get extra recognition for simply having any technical skill at all. Both are sexist.
Totally agree on that point. And yes, anonymity is a pragmatic way of dealing with it... but it does seem to suggest that there's something "wrong" in a culture in which that's viewed as the "best solution" for a woman to participate without practically needing a restraining order.
Gender performance in mathetmatics (certainly relevant to computer science and programming, no?) shows fairly little gender variance until secondary schooling, and in recent years, that gap has closed as women are encouraged to participate in greater numbers in the more advanced math classes on offer. Some studies find boys test better on SATs... other studies find girls do better in classroom studies. There's very little to suggest that girls are "biologically" disinclined to participate in math and science as a career.
I'd agree that the notion shouldn't be rejected out of hand, but there's also a pretty strong body of evidence that indicates that, as far as math and science learning is concerned, there's not a lot of difference inherent to the genders - it's not really a "boys only" or "girls only" thing. There are huge swaths of evidence suggesting that sexism, cultural norms, and social pressures contribute to these disparities. This certainly suggests a parallel to the situation here, where programming, and especially Open Source programming, is a "boys club," where social pressures, rather than biological, keep female participation low.
"Open Source is a magical land where everybody strives for excellence, and so women are inherently disinclined or disadvantaged when it comes to that type of work, whereas men practically piss excellence by comparison."
You're right, I clearly fail to comprehend the communities.
"We'd accept women into our community with open arms, if only they'd hide the fact that they're women, so as to avoid distracting us with thoughts of boobies and such."
Then explain to me, as I commented above, why the sex that is, in your opinion, biologically predisposed to community building, consensus building, sharing, and doing things for the good of others, is dramatically UNDER-represented in a community whose entire goal is the creation of community resources that can be shared by all freely?
And why that same selfless community of sharers is dominated by the gender that you're suggesting is biologically predisposed to a competitive, aggressive, confrontational nature?
Ah yes, because the sex that we're being told is biologically predisposed towards nurturing, consensus-building, sharing, caring behavior... ALL they care about is getting paid for everything they do. And the men, who are biologically predisposed towards aggression, competition, and dominance... all they care about is sharing their code and delighting other people with the free software they've helped create.
Your commentary falls far short of any sort of proof, and also suggests you didn't read even the summary:
Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development.
We're not talking strictly about "women in development jobs," we're talking about women in one type versus women in another type of development jobs.
Clearly, there is an additional factor dissuading them from participating in open source. What biological factor related to their brain development would you posit is related to this?
I'd like to nominate this comment for "Understatement of the Year." Here's what you just wrote, more or less:
"Girls need to have babies, and this overwhelming urge drives them to seek out a mate so that he may plant his fertile man seed in her receptive girly parts. Who can blame them for not being interested in contributing to open source?! Also, those bitches need to raise mah babbies, not pretend like they can write software!"
Sexism is not biological, it's cultural - as you've just illustrated in amazing detail.
You expect to see proportional involvement across all activities because that's the way statistics suggests they should. If you selected people at random from the general population to fill 10,000 programming jobs, you would expect that the gender & ethnic composition of that 10,000 would largely be reflective of the population the random sampling was drawn from. When your composition varies - in this case widely - from the expected results, there is an interesting question of, "why?"
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you? How do you explain it, if "being a woman" doesn't automatically mean someone's probably bad at programming? "Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns." There is no particular biological basis for this, so again, there'd be no reason to expect this to be the case, unless there is a cultural reason for it.
Now, you can certainly argue whether or not culturally-reinforced 'gender roles' are desirable or undesirable, but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
... then the term "monoculture" is meaningless as he's used it, and represents neither insightful commentary, nor incisive criticism. "All iOS devices run iOS, therefore it's a monoculture" is a reflexive redefinition of the term, apparently in an attempt to sound smart and "science-y". The current situation in the phone market is, in fact, the very opposite of a monoculture - it is a healthy, diverse ecosystem with many competing systems available, across a range of hardware. If something happened to instantaneously destroy or compromise every Apple device on this planet, the vast majority of mobile devices would continue working just fine.
The fact that Android runs on a huge variety of devices *isn't* seen as the problem; the fact that Android runs - OFTEN POORLY - on many of those devices is. Android runs the risk of developing a "caveat emptor" reputation: The carriers are crippling the devices with bloatware and lockdowns; They are cramming the system into cheap, effectively disposable phones which are underpowered; and they are providing virtually zero longer-term support for OS upgrades beyond the bare minimum that they might be required to do to keep your phone marginally operational.
This unevenness in user experience is what is going to hurt Android in the long run, and make the "Android" brand irrelevant as a selling point, because "powered by Android" will describe everything from the cheapest POS on the market to the most expensive, best-designed Samsung/Motorola/HTC/etc devices. It won't be a competitive differntiator versus other devices, it'll be something that consumers say, "Yeah, and... does this Android model work Last Android I had was a piece of shit." in response to.
what happens if you're in an area without a connection? or need to go into airplane mode?
Then you're stuck in the dark ages of "life before icloud." With iCloud, you download tracks to your phone, where they live, they do not stream, though they will begin playing as soon as they've buffered enough to begin playing the track. Having no network connection means you simply can't download new tracks that aren't on your phone, you can quite happily listen to every single one that's already downloaded.
what happens if Apple suddenly decides to change your EULA and/or access terms?
Then all of your DRM-free music is still sitting on your hard drive at home, where you can listen to it from your hard drive, export it, or load it onto any music player you want without having to worry about (or be dependent on) iCloud - in other words, if iCloud and iTunes Match ceased to exist this instant, it wouldn't fundamentally affect anything more than how easy it is to load music onto multiple devices
you're also paying an extra amount every month for that service, aren't you?
Only if you use the iTunes Match option. iCloud is free, and includes downloads to any device of any song, book, or (I believe) app that you purchase from iTunes to any device you own that's registered to your Apple ID. iTunes Match is what allows you to match/upload your entire library to the iCloud servers and make them available to all your devices. It doesn't stop housing things on your hard drive unless you specifically delete the tracks from your hard drive, it just uploads anything new to iCloud which makes it immediately available to all your other devices without a ton of syncing.
I have a personal laptop & desktop at home, plus a work laptop, plus an iPhone - having access easily to all my music on any of those devices makes me happy, and to me is well worth the $2.09 a month that iTunes Match costs. I spend more than that on a cup of coffee every morning I stop at the cafe.
No, they didn't complain about fragmentation per-se in the Windows market, because regardless of the machine you bought, it ran pretty much the same software, and looked and behaved the same. But remember all the flak Microsoft took for it's multitude of slightly-different editions of Windows? Remember all the grousing about bloatware and crapware added by manufacturers?
That's what you're seeing with Android: it's got a bunch of slightly different editions, not all hardware supports all editions, and it almost ALWAYS comes preloaded with bloatware. Android's "run-anywhere" openness is double-edged: the experience is uneven & unpredictable - it means very little to say "powered by Android," because that same phrase could be used to describe a $10 piece of plastic junk, or the latest and greatest device rolling out of Samsung's high-end design lab. "Powered by Android" means - what, exactly - in those two cases? The experience, the reliability, even the basic interface are going to be incredibly different. And this is the real "fragmentation" danger.
Your critique of technology monoculture only has teeth if iOS is the OS powering a huge portion of all these devices, to the extent that there is no real legitimate alternative. Android, the Blackberry OS, WP7, WebOS, Symbian, and Nokia's various OS experiments would all like a word with you about your claims of a monoculture in smartphone OS. You might as well complain about Toyota's creation of a stagnant "monoculture" because they're the only company producing a midsized sedan named "Camry". Other quite comparable midsized sedans exist on the market; That Toyota doesn't offer 12 models of Camry doesn't mean they've created a monoculture.
One more time, you are speaking a completely different dialect than the one marketing speaks. You view an opening gambit in a negotiation as a "lie," because all the parties around the table know it's not what they're going to walk out of the negotiations with. And that effectively shuts down negotiations. It's not a "lie" it's a statement of "what I want, what I think I need, and what I hope to get a commitment for out of this discussion."
To turn it around on you: you and I both know you're overstating the case when you say that the majority of feature requests from sales or marketing includes the caveat that "if you can't do this by Date X, the company will collapse." Why would you lie that way? You also know that there's virtually no such thing as "It cannot possibly be done by Date X," except in a very small set of crisis cases, e.g. Apollo 13. - so why would you lie that way to marketing, instead of responding with a realistic assessment of what you'd need to be able to deliver their stated requirements by Date X? Maybe you need more engineers? Maybe you need more equipment? Maybe you need to clear your schedule of some other work? Maybe you simply don't have the expertise, and so the expertise of another engineer is needed? Maybe there's a conflict with other, higher priority work that the marketer doesn't even know exists?
Their job is to maximize the stuff they can get out of you to make the customer happy. Your job is to avoid over-committing so that you can actually meet the dates you've said you will.
It's a negotiation, stop treating every parameter marketing gives you as an inflexible edict, and you'll both end up a lot happier in the long run. And you'll also develop a much better rapport with your marketing counterparts, to the point where these discussions will flow a lot more smoothly, because you'll understand each other a lot better, and have a better awareness of the constraints you're both working under.
Already answered that question in my original post - the marketing & sales guys are negotiators. It's what they do day in and day out:
Marketing guy says, "We need to do X by date Y," and it's usually a prelude to a discussion.
It's not that they're not being straight with you, they're setting out their starting position for what they figure will be the inevitable negotiation and back-and-forth discussion about the feature. That's when you're expected to make a counter-offer. They wouldn't get much done if they just said "Could I maybe have, um... a text entry field or something, if it's not too much trouble? Whatever you can give me, is okay, really. I'm sorry to be such a worthless parasite, o mighty technical wizard."
They're coming to you, and saying, "Customer wants a a full-featured Rich Text editing feature in our forum software by March 1." They don't know what "can be done" because they're not the tech experts. If you respond with "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE GO FUCK YOURSELF," you've effectively ended the negotiation session they expected to have. If you try saying, "That's a pretty tall order... but I could maybe support some limited set of rich text - say bold, italics, underlining, and bullet points - by end of March, with a fuller-featured implementation in our next major release in September? That might be possible..." you're speaking their language - which is the language of negotiation and compromise. Not the binary language of "YES / NO".
At the end of that discussion, maybe you've committed to Bold, Italics and Underlining by March 1; Indenting & Bullet points by May 1, and a full Rich Text feature set in the next major release slated for September - a realistic schedule for you, and a happy customer & marketing guy.
If you refuse to negotiate, you will simply be handed edicts because marketing will go over your head to management if you shut them down, and then it will be two people who don't understand the tech details (a manager and a marketer) hammering out implementation details for something they don't understand, and handing it to you with the demand that you "make it work."
Wait, the names of my family and friends is now "private, privileged information"? Since fucking when?
Jesus you schizos need some perspective. If you're using Facebook to store your medical data, carry on illicit affairs with co-workers, orchestrate & document your life of crime, and post videos, photos, and messages about your kinky sexual fetishes - if you entrust anything other than the most banal trivia to Facebook, in other words - you're a first rate idiot.
"I LOVE KELLY CLARKSON'S NEW SONG!" and "LOL MY CAT POOPED A LOT TODAY! GROSS!" are not exactly "private, privileged" pieces of information that are going to have immense negative social and financial repercussions on the person posting them. If you cannot draw a line between information that is "private and privileged" and information that is "of no particular private or privileged nature," then you probably shouldn't be on Facebook at all.
Right, because Google+ - created by a company whose entire existence is predicated on the serving of ads to subsidize all their "free" content and services - isn't going to use their data to serve you ads, either.
there apparently is not a way to rescind a "Facebook Like".
That'd be downright nefarious and dastardly, if it were even remotely true. From Facebook's online help system:
How do I unlike something?
You can unlike a piece of content or a Page on Facebook. To unlike a piece of content that you or a friend has posted, just click the Unlike link that appears beneath the content itself. To unlike a Page (which will also remove it from your profile/timeline), go directly to the Page and click the Unlike link in the lower left-hand column.
Marketing & development both speak English, but they're certainly different dialects. You're probably literally saying "It can't be done," or "There's not enough time for that," as an endpoint statement of fact, rather than offering them a solution and a proposal for what you CAN do in the time specified, or when you CAN offer the feature they want. It's the difference between "No!" and "Not now," that I see many programmers get hung up on. Marketing guy says, "We need to do X by date Y," and it's usually a prelude to a discussion. Developer often hears "I need impossible feature by impossible date," and simply shuts down, saying "That's not possible."
If you're straight with most of your marketing & sales guys, you'll find that they're well aware that what they're asking for "can't be done" when they ask for it, and are perfectly happy to negotiate on a phased delivery, or a longer timetable, or a reduced feature set hit that scratches the right itch for the customer in question. Don't assume they're idiots, tell them what you need to do what they're asking for. If your plate is full, tell them, "I'd love to work on that feature, but I'm booked solid; If you want to talk to my manager about reallocating my time to support this, I'll be happy to have a discussion about what we can do and when we can do it for you."
Slashdot Mirror
iBooks works just fine with DRM-free ePub & PDF documents purchased elsewhere, and coexists quite nicely with them - I can't speak for other formats, but my iPad currently has half a dozen PDFs, a few books purchased from the iBook store, and a couple .epubs that I've downloaded from the web - among them the Pro Git epub available here.
Hard to say whether or not the iBooks Authoring tool will allow you to publish epubs for non-Apple platforms - it publishes in an epub format, but some reports are saying that there appear to be proprietary extensions to the epub3 format, which could pose a problem for distribution to non-iBooks clients.
My *guess* is that epubs created on other platforms will work just fine in iBooks provided there's no DRM on the file to prevent it, and they're not abusing the standards. Jury's still out on whether or not epubs created in the iBooks Authoring tool will be work properly on other platforms, though I suspect that that's the (eventual) goal. Remember, Apple wants to sell you Macs to create iBooks on, as well as iPads to read them on. If they have the "premiere" authoring tool available, it's a selling point.
Yes, because animations, layered charts, zoomable 3d models - these would all be useless, pointless frippery in, say, a science textbook.
Who wants a 3d image of the various muscles of the human body? Who wants a zoomable model of a plant to inspect various structures in finer detail. Who wants a math textbook that will allow you to manipulate functions and graphs in real time?
That's all useless crap that NOBODY will ever use, want, or benefit from! Black and white words on paper were good enough for years, and by god, that's all these punk kids should get!
Why wouldn't it? You can't resell your DRM'ed ePub anyway, so there's no benefit to the textbook authors in making changes to force new students to purchase new, rather than used.
So what would be the point of making minor formatting updates - are the students who took the course last year going to buy a new copy this year because there was an update?
Are you really that stupid? Seriously? Let's look at the facts of the situation:
1) Women pursue development careers, and work as software engineers, in reasonably large (though still disproportionate) numbers - in 2009, 25% of computing jobs were held by women. (source)
2) That number is *decreasing* - in 1985, 37% of Undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women. In 2009, 18% of undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women. (source)
3) Most studies of Open Source communities show women's involvement at anywhere from ~1.5% to 5%. (source)
In other words: EVEN allowing for a "biological" difference to explain for the relatively low (and further declining) participation of women in Computer Science, the open source community shows an even sharper disparity - if 25% of computing jobs were held by women, and if 18% of undergrad CS degress are being awarded to women, why are so few of the qualified women choosing to further participate in the Open Source community? And why does that number continue to decline? Please explain the biological basis for some new evolutionary event that happened back around 1985 that would explain this?
Cute bumper sticker, but of course, you've provided no facts to back up your assertion that there's a biological basis for this disparity, either. You've hand-waved a lot of "uh girls have brain differences, so therefore maybe they don't like computers," mumbo-jumbo, and I've pointed out that there is absolutely no body of evidence to support this conclusion, and there is significant evidence that the disparities are cultural and social. Let's be clear: we're talking about very minor differences between two genders of the same species, not trying to argue that there's a biological basis for primates being tool makers on account of primates having opposable thumbs.
Yes, if you take what I wrote out of context to support your straw man, I'm sure it might seem that way. What I wrote was this: "Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns." There is no particular biological basis for this, so again, there'd be no reason to expect this to be the case, unless there is a cultural reason for it."
The "this" that I'm saying there's no particular biological basis to support is the "girls like dolls, boys like guns" assertion. If you'd like to point out some evidence for the elusive "liking guns" gene being sex-linked, I'd be more than happy to concede I was wrong on that point... but having studied biology, I'm fairly certain that you're not going to be able to provide any evidence for it.
It was a challenge to you, not a statement that you used an anecdote. Provide *evidence* for your assertion that there's a biological basis for the disparities we're talking about, or start listening to the facts that suggest a cultural & social explanation for it.
And yet a simple google search shows scholarly and serious articles discussing the issue of men's under-representation in nursing, including a very official-sounding organization known as the AAMN whose first goal is "Encourage men of all ages to become nurses and join together with all nurses in strengthening and humanizing health care."
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Men+in+nursing
http://aamn.org/aamn.shtml
I guess we should just conclude that these people are misguided, and that men are BIOLOGICALLY unsuited for nursing careers, rather than culturally and socially influenced. I guess we should also just conclude that the over-representation of young black men in jail also has a basis in their biology, rather than in the very real social and cultural issues affecting the black community? Hell, let's just declare every problem biological in nature, and wash our hands of it. Poverty? You're biologically unsuited to making money! Can't find a job? You must be biologically unsuited for it!
Because, of course, he was wrong , not just spouting an unpopular opinion. No significant gender gap appears in studies until secondary education, and that gap closes as more females participate in the advanced math classes. In other words: the gender gap only appears because women weren't pursuing mathematics, and rapidly closes as more women are encouraged to participate. You could, perhaps start educating yourself on the issue here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.htm
Yes, they're called sex-linked traits, and are generally tied at least in part to mutations on the X or Y chromosomes. Of course, we can empirically determine that more men than women are subject to color blindness; we have not yet empirically determined that women are "bad at math and science." It's a question of *participation* not one of *ability*.
Well, let's consider this question for a moment. People have pointed out that women's involvement in open source development is *extremely* low, despite the fact that, even in non-OSS development, women have a much higher proportion of representation. So... is it a problem that a significant portion of people eligible to contribute to OSS development are electing not to? You tell me!
For me, I'd say yes, to the extent that anybody who COULD contribute, and who might be interested in contributing to a community, but who is instead driven away by actively hostile elements of that community's culture, there is a "problem." If you want to say "It's a boy's club, girls not welcome," that's fine. But let's not pretend that women aren't participating because their poor little heads just explode like Lucy & Ethel at the candy factory.
Ah, so you view "girls like dolls, boys like guns" as an immutable biological reality? I see why you can't see the problem now... you're part of it.
Because study after study have shown little-to-no statistically significant disparity between the performance of boys and girls in areas of math and science, areas which computer science most certainly relates to. And yet time and again, apologists like you trot out this "you don't know there's no biological basis." I never said "there wasn't any," I said that you've got "a long way to go to establish any sort of biological reason for this disparity." Proceed to establish your biological basis with facts, not half-assed stereotypes paired with an anecdote from when you were 7 years old, and I'll be happy to listen.
I thought nerds were supposed to be rational and fact based... yet you're asking me to prove a negative, and clinging to your own prejudices and stereotypes when faced with ACTUAL EVIDENCE that there is no supporting data for a "gender gap" in terms of performance and ability in math and science.
Totally agree on that point. And yes, anonymity is a pragmatic way of dealing with it... but it does seem to suggest that there's something "wrong" in a culture in which that's viewed as the "best solution" for a woman to participate without practically needing a restraining order.
Gender performance in mathetmatics (certainly relevant to computer science and programming, no?) shows fairly little gender variance until secondary schooling, and in recent years, that gap has closed as women are encouraged to participate in greater numbers in the more advanced math classes on offer. Some studies find boys test better on SATs... other studies find girls do better in classroom studies. There's very little to suggest that girls are "biologically" disinclined to participate in math and science as a career.
I'd agree that the notion shouldn't be rejected out of hand, but there's also a pretty strong body of evidence that indicates that, as far as math and science learning is concerned, there's not a lot of difference inherent to the genders - it's not really a "boys only" or "girls only" thing. There are huge swaths of evidence suggesting that sexism, cultural norms, and social pressures contribute to these disparities. This certainly suggests a parallel to the situation here, where programming, and especially Open Source programming, is a "boys club," where social pressures, rather than biological, keep female participation low.
Oh, I see. Thanks for clearing it up.
"Open Source is a magical land where everybody strives for excellence, and so women are inherently disinclined or disadvantaged when it comes to that type of work, whereas men practically piss excellence by comparison."
You're right, I clearly fail to comprehend the communities.
"We'd accept women into our community with open arms, if only they'd hide the fact that they're women, so as to avoid distracting us with thoughts of boobies and such."
Then explain to me, as I commented above, why the sex that is, in your opinion, biologically predisposed to community building, consensus building, sharing, and doing things for the good of others, is dramatically UNDER-represented in a community whose entire goal is the creation of community resources that can be shared by all freely?
And why that same selfless community of sharers is dominated by the gender that you're suggesting is biologically predisposed to a competitive, aggressive, confrontational nature?
Ah yes, because the sex that we're being told is biologically predisposed towards nurturing, consensus-building, sharing, caring behavior... ALL they care about is getting paid for everything they do. And the men, who are biologically predisposed towards aggression, competition, and dominance... all they care about is sharing their code and delighting other people with the free software they've helped create.
It's ironclad, I guess I have to concede defeat.
Your commentary falls far short of any sort of proof, and also suggests you didn't read even the summary:
We're not talking strictly about "women in development jobs," we're talking about women in one type versus women in another type of development jobs.
Clearly, there is an additional factor dissuading them from participating in open source. What biological factor related to their brain development would you posit is related to this?
I'd like to nominate this comment for "Understatement of the Year." Here's what you just wrote, more or less:
"Girls need to have babies, and this overwhelming urge drives them to seek out a mate so that he may plant his fertile man seed in her receptive girly parts. Who can blame them for not being interested in contributing to open source?! Also, those bitches need to raise mah babbies, not pretend like they can write software!"
Sexism is not biological, it's cultural - as you've just illustrated in amazing detail.
You expect to see proportional involvement across all activities because that's the way statistics suggests they should. If you selected people at random from the general population to fill 10,000 programming jobs, you would expect that the gender & ethnic composition of that 10,000 would largely be reflective of the population the random sampling was drawn from. When your composition varies - in this case widely - from the expected results, there is an interesting question of, "why?"
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you? How do you explain it, if "being a woman" doesn't automatically mean someone's probably bad at programming? "Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns." There is no particular biological basis for this, so again, there'd be no reason to expect this to be the case, unless there is a cultural reason for it.
Now, you can certainly argue whether or not culturally-reinforced 'gender roles' are desirable or undesirable, but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
... then the term "monoculture" is meaningless as he's used it, and represents neither insightful commentary, nor incisive criticism. "All iOS devices run iOS, therefore it's a monoculture" is a reflexive redefinition of the term, apparently in an attempt to sound smart and "science-y". The current situation in the phone market is, in fact, the very opposite of a monoculture - it is a healthy, diverse ecosystem with many competing systems available, across a range of hardware. If something happened to instantaneously destroy or compromise every Apple device on this planet, the vast majority of mobile devices would continue working just fine.
The fact that Android runs on a huge variety of devices *isn't* seen as the problem; the fact that Android runs - OFTEN POORLY - on many of those devices is. Android runs the risk of developing a "caveat emptor" reputation: The carriers are crippling the devices with bloatware and lockdowns; They are cramming the system into cheap, effectively disposable phones which are underpowered; and they are providing virtually zero longer-term support for OS upgrades beyond the bare minimum that they might be required to do to keep your phone marginally operational.
This unevenness in user experience is what is going to hurt Android in the long run, and make the "Android" brand irrelevant as a selling point, because "powered by Android" will describe everything from the cheapest POS on the market to the most expensive, best-designed Samsung/Motorola/HTC/etc devices. It won't be a competitive differntiator versus other devices, it'll be something that consumers say, "Yeah, and... does this Android model work Last Android I had was a piece of shit." in response to.
Then you're stuck in the dark ages of "life before icloud." With iCloud, you download tracks to your phone, where they live, they do not stream, though they will begin playing as soon as they've buffered enough to begin playing the track. Having no network connection means you simply can't download new tracks that aren't on your phone, you can quite happily listen to every single one that's already downloaded.
Then all of your DRM-free music is still sitting on your hard drive at home, where you can listen to it from your hard drive, export it, or load it onto any music player you want without having to worry about (or be dependent on) iCloud - in other words, if iCloud and iTunes Match ceased to exist this instant, it wouldn't fundamentally affect anything more than how easy it is to load music onto multiple devices
Only if you use the iTunes Match option. iCloud is free, and includes downloads to any device of any song, book, or (I believe) app that you purchase from iTunes to any device you own that's registered to your Apple ID. iTunes Match is what allows you to match/upload your entire library to the iCloud servers and make them available to all your devices. It doesn't stop housing things on your hard drive unless you specifically delete the tracks from your hard drive, it just uploads anything new to iCloud which makes it immediately available to all your other devices without a ton of syncing.
I have a personal laptop & desktop at home, plus a work laptop, plus an iPhone - having access easily to all my music on any of those devices makes me happy, and to me is well worth the $2.09 a month that iTunes Match costs. I spend more than that on a cup of coffee every morning I stop at the cafe.
No, they didn't complain about fragmentation per-se in the Windows market, because regardless of the machine you bought, it ran pretty much the same software, and looked and behaved the same. But remember all the flak Microsoft took for it's multitude of slightly-different editions of Windows? Remember all the grousing about bloatware and crapware added by manufacturers?
That's what you're seeing with Android: it's got a bunch of slightly different editions, not all hardware supports all editions, and it almost ALWAYS comes preloaded with bloatware. Android's "run-anywhere" openness is double-edged: the experience is uneven & unpredictable - it means very little to say "powered by Android," because that same phrase could be used to describe a $10 piece of plastic junk, or the latest and greatest device rolling out of Samsung's high-end design lab. "Powered by Android" means - what, exactly - in those two cases? The experience, the reliability, even the basic interface are going to be incredibly different. And this is the real "fragmentation" danger.
Your critique of technology monoculture only has teeth if iOS is the OS powering a huge portion of all these devices, to the extent that there is no real legitimate alternative. Android, the Blackberry OS, WP7, WebOS, Symbian, and Nokia's various OS experiments would all like a word with you about your claims of a monoculture in smartphone OS. You might as well complain about Toyota's creation of a stagnant "monoculture" because they're the only company producing a midsized sedan named "Camry". Other quite comparable midsized sedans exist on the market; That Toyota doesn't offer 12 models of Camry doesn't mean they've created a monoculture.
One more time, you are speaking a completely different dialect than the one marketing speaks. You view an opening gambit in a negotiation as a "lie," because all the parties around the table know it's not what they're going to walk out of the negotiations with. And that effectively shuts down negotiations. It's not a "lie" it's a statement of "what I want, what I think I need, and what I hope to get a commitment for out of this discussion."
To turn it around on you: you and I both know you're overstating the case when you say that the majority of feature requests from sales or marketing includes the caveat that "if you can't do this by Date X, the company will collapse." Why would you lie that way? You also know that there's virtually no such thing as "It cannot possibly be done by Date X," except in a very small set of crisis cases, e.g. Apollo 13. - so why would you lie that way to marketing, instead of responding with a realistic assessment of what you'd need to be able to deliver their stated requirements by Date X? Maybe you need more engineers? Maybe you need more equipment? Maybe you need to clear your schedule of some other work? Maybe you simply don't have the expertise, and so the expertise of another engineer is needed? Maybe there's a conflict with other, higher priority work that the marketer doesn't even know exists?
Their job is to maximize the stuff they can get out of you to make the customer happy. Your job is to avoid over-committing so that you can actually meet the dates you've said you will.
It's a negotiation, stop treating every parameter marketing gives you as an inflexible edict, and you'll both end up a lot happier in the long run. And you'll also develop a much better rapport with your marketing counterparts, to the point where these discussions will flow a lot more smoothly, because you'll understand each other a lot better, and have a better awareness of the constraints you're both working under.
Already answered that question in my original post - the marketing & sales guys are negotiators. It's what they do day in and day out:
It's not that they're not being straight with you, they're setting out their starting position for what they figure will be the inevitable negotiation and back-and-forth discussion about the feature. That's when you're expected to make a counter-offer. They wouldn't get much done if they just said "Could I maybe have, um... a text entry field or something, if it's not too much trouble? Whatever you can give me, is okay, really. I'm sorry to be such a worthless parasite, o mighty technical wizard."
They're coming to you, and saying, "Customer wants a a full-featured Rich Text editing feature in our forum software by March 1." They don't know what "can be done" because they're not the tech experts. If you respond with "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE GO FUCK YOURSELF," you've effectively ended the negotiation session they expected to have. If you try saying, "That's a pretty tall order... but I could maybe support some limited set of rich text - say bold, italics, underlining, and bullet points - by end of March, with a fuller-featured implementation in our next major release in September? That might be possible..." you're speaking their language - which is the language of negotiation and compromise. Not the binary language of "YES / NO".
At the end of that discussion, maybe you've committed to Bold, Italics and Underlining by March 1; Indenting & Bullet points by May 1, and a full Rich Text feature set in the next major release slated for September - a realistic schedule for you, and a happy customer & marketing guy.
If you refuse to negotiate, you will simply be handed edicts because marketing will go over your head to management if you shut them down, and then it will be two people who don't understand the tech details (a manager and a marketer) hammering out implementation details for something they don't understand, and handing it to you with the demand that you "make it work."
Wait, the names of my family and friends is now "private, privileged information"? Since fucking when?
Jesus you schizos need some perspective. If you're using Facebook to store your medical data, carry on illicit affairs with co-workers, orchestrate & document your life of crime, and post videos, photos, and messages about your kinky sexual fetishes - if you entrust anything other than the most banal trivia to Facebook, in other words - you're a first rate idiot.
"I LOVE KELLY CLARKSON'S NEW SONG!" and "LOL MY CAT POOPED A LOT TODAY! GROSS!" are not exactly "private, privileged" pieces of information that are going to have immense negative social and financial repercussions on the person posting them. If you cannot draw a line between information that is "private and privileged" and information that is "of no particular private or privileged nature," then you probably shouldn't be on Facebook at all.
Right, because Google+ - created by a company whose entire existence is predicated on the serving of ads to subsidize all their "free" content and services - isn't going to use their data to serve you ads, either.
That'd be downright nefarious and dastardly, if it were even remotely true. From Facebook's online help system:
Marketing & development both speak English, but they're certainly different dialects. You're probably literally saying "It can't be done," or "There's not enough time for that," as an endpoint statement of fact, rather than offering them a solution and a proposal for what you CAN do in the time specified, or when you CAN offer the feature they want. It's the difference between "No!" and "Not now," that I see many programmers get hung up on. Marketing guy says, "We need to do X by date Y," and it's usually a prelude to a discussion. Developer often hears "I need impossible feature by impossible date," and simply shuts down, saying "That's not possible."
If you're straight with most of your marketing & sales guys, you'll find that they're well aware that what they're asking for "can't be done" when they ask for it, and are perfectly happy to negotiate on a phased delivery, or a longer timetable, or a reduced feature set hit that scratches the right itch for the customer in question. Don't assume they're idiots, tell them what you need to do what they're asking for. If your plate is full, tell them, "I'd love to work on that feature, but I'm booked solid; If you want to talk to my manager about reallocating my time to support this, I'll be happy to have a discussion about what we can do and when we can do it for you."