We have an open plan office here, with plenty of natural daylight which is great, but what we don't have is a way to muffle any conversations going on nearby. At least with cubicles we could have relative silence; I've had to invest in some noise-canceling headphones so I can concentrate on my code.
I find it nice for all the stuff I usually fish out my phone for, except now I don't have to do that. I use the custom face, so I've got temperature, my exercise goals, all that jazz on it. Got it synced to my home & work calendars too, so I always see my next appointment.
The killer app for me is basically Siri. I use it all the time to look things up, get directions, and set timers/alarms (I do a lot of craft/prop building, which means timing glue and paint). Haven't really had too much trouble with battery life: I put it on around 7ish, take it off about midnight, usually got >30% juice left, usually closer to 40%. Occasionally use the Wallet app, but not on any sort of regular basis.
Things I don't like: Siri doesn't always come when I call. The history feature is more in the way than anything, and the screen doesn't fire up every time I turn my wrist like ti's suposta. I tend to wiggle it a couple times, then give up and just tap the screen:P
Still, I like it for the most part. Still use it every day. It makes a nice sort of 80/20 remote terminal for my phone, if you see what I mean. For that, it does a good job.
Just think: before too long, online dating will have removed actual people from the process altogether! You'll just sign up, roll a character, and two weeks later get an email letting you know your algorithm has hooked up with another algorithm and they're having lots of little subroutines together. Think of the convenience!
Well, therein lies the paradox, you know? I mean, I for one am interested in machine learning, though admittedly I don't know much about the nuts and bolts of it. In the abstract, I would love to see how the software actually works, how it improves over time, etc. In the concrete, however, the fact he's using it for this is mashing my "eugh" button pretty hard.
That being said, a "would probably be into you" filter would be awesome as hell. I wonder how that could be implemented.
...it was a couple years back. Met this girl online, real nice, pretty photo, all that jazz. She got real close real quick--quick enough that I started doing a little research on the side. Like when she said her brother had died of cancer, and the only person I could find with that name had died in a drive-by. Then she lowered the boom: she was stuck in a hotel in London, her finances from the family business had some sort of snarl-up, and she couldn't leave until she got money to pay the bill.
A-ha.
I played ignorant at first, not quite taking the hint when she asked for help. When she gave up on subtlety, I plead poverty, but wished her all the luck in the world and told her to get in touch once she got out of there.
Basically, the table on page 3 is probably where you want to start looking. TorGuard, PrivateInternetAccess, VyperVPN & Mullvad are proof against IPv6 leakage, so it's actually 10 of 14 that aren't.
Also, they found Astrill is proof against OpenVPN and PPTP/L2TP DNS hijacking. Interesting read.
So, does this mean that somewhere out there is someone who wanted to join Al-Qaeda and become a terrorist and blow themselves up and all that jazz but got rejected for poor penmanship?
"Well, Ahmed, you scored high in fanaticism and lack of moral scruples, but this application is frankly a mess. I could barely read the thing. I'm afraid you're just not what we're looking for, sorry. Have you tried Amway?"
Yeah, they do seem to have been run through a legal/marketing filter, don't they? Certainly don't sound like engineer's answers. I have a sneaking suspicion that her actual answers were swooped upon by serious people in serious suits until we got the above. Frankly, I kept expecting the phrase:
"Thank you for asking. Your question is very important to us. Unfortunately we cannot answer your question at this time. Please ask again later. Thank you. [BEEP]"
To pop up.
Still, the few little nuggets of info we did get were pretty neat. I like about getting more recharge stations in new home building, and standardizing the charger plugs. Hopefully those will have spread a bit more by the time these suckers get down to my price level.
Yes! I was hoping somebody would mention this:) I read it when I was a kid in school, and it chilled me to the bone. I wasn't really into sci-fi at the time, but Bradbury always knocked me out with his stories. He really got into the human side of things in a way a lot of the "space opera" types never did. This particular story is very haunting, and I think comes very close to how it will be--heck, come back and read this thing now, and see how plausible most of it is as our homes get smarter and smarter.
(*skips over the inevitable juvenile comments, false equivalencies, and associated detritus that always show up when feminism comes up in geek spaces. I don't even see 'em anymore.)
I have to say that for most of my career a lot of the software I've been involved with has been, if not passing the test, fairly close to. At every place I've worked, there have been women on my team at least part of my time there. It tends to fluctuate a bit--at the moment, there's one other on my team, and she's actually a QA (and why *do* we have so many women in QA?). So I guess our last project doesn't pass. Still, the company as a whole passes with flying colors, so that's cool. There's only a few of us, relatively speaking, but we're spread out pretty good. So our code may not intersect often but we're affecting every part of what our company does. So I think that's important too.
In short, I think it makes for an interesting thought experiment, kind of evaluate where you and your team/department/company stand. I'm sure people will get all defensive, yell about quotas and all that jazz, but really it just asks you to think about it for a moment. Not at all unreasonable I think.
You know, Reaper Man was the first Pratchett book I ever read. I was in tech school in the Air Force, just after basic. We got to go off base and go shopping, so I picked up the Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus which had just come out. Another airman saw it, and lent me his copy of Reaper Man. I've been hooked ever since. The guy was flat-out one of the best writers in terms of sheer skill I have ever seen in any genre. Reading Pratchett spoils you, and so much comes off short after you've seen what a real master of the written word could do.
Anyway, as someone up there said, this sucks. Now I'm thinking about that book, and how it was, reading it for the first time... I think I'm going to have to reread it again.
The "Embuggerance" was his name for Alzheimer's. It wasn't a euphemism so much as his using his gift for language to very concisely convey what it was like having this happen to him.
I can vouch for this. Google was VERY active in the east and south sides of KCMO during the various rollout waves, going out to community gathering places, knocking on doors, the whole bit. And these are not nice neighborhoods I'm talking about either. I was doing voter registration at the time in some of the same areas, and we did tend to bump into each other. They really wanted to get demand sufficient for all the neighborhoods they could, particularly those with schools in. I gotta say they did a pretty good job, too: in our neck of the woods, I think only 3 out of the 70-odd "fiberhoods" didn't qualify.
OK, so we use vertical resolution for years and years, and everyone susses it out. 480 interleaved? Got it. 720 progressive? Keen. So what genius decided to switch us over to the horizontal resolution? I'll bet you anything it was some schmo in Marketing who figured hey, the horizontal is twice the vertical, so if we use that number instead it'll make our TVs sound twice as good. Instead, it's confusing as hell and deeply annoying for anyone trying to keep u with this crap.
Personally, I think they should do like camera sensors, and go by megapixels. 1080p? 2 megapixels? Got it. 4K? 8 megapixels? Spiffy.
Anyway. I reckon 1080p will hold me just fine for a good while. I'm in no hurry to upgrade. And I doubt many people are.
So I just tried it (it's digitalshadow.com if you are having trouble digging it up), and it's not great shakes. Mostly I got "Insufficient Data", but what few things it worked out it got mostly--even comically--wrong.
Okay, kiddies, gather round. Auntie is going to explain to you little soandsos why this is a good thing and not TEH EVUL REVARSE DISCIRMINASHUNZ like about 85 people have already cried. And I think I do mean cried.
Let me lay you down some truths about being a woman in IT: I love programming, me. Been programming since I got my hands on a TRS-80 during a summer gifted program. I've moved from BASIC to Pascal to C / C++ to.net and java and javascript and lately Python, with god alone knows how many steps in between. I hope to be able to spend the rest of my life doing this. And in all that time, I have *never* worked in a place where the women weren't outnumbered 2 to 1. Every dang time. Now, why is that? Is it because girls aren't interested in this stuff? Well, more like girls are *told* we aren't interested in this stuff, and we have to find out to the contrary ourselves. The same old 19th century B.S. about how our brains would overheat if exposed to math and such is still in there today, vestigially steering us away from STEM in general and computers in particular. And that sucks.
See, the thing is, sexism is like racism--you get the big ugly obvious kind, everyone can see that, but then as well you get much more the subtle kind, where the person doing it doesn't even realize it. Like that friend of yours in college who went and did blackface for Halloween that one year (and yet swore up and down that he, like, totally wasn't a racist, dude) vs the hiring manager who is more likely to hire someone their own color, not out of malice or anything, just because human beings tend to take a shine to people that resemble them. It's built in to us. And it goes out into the culture we live in, and we soak it up like radiation. And the cycle just keeps on going.
So. Enter things like Affirmative Action, and this here bounty thingie. The idea behind these things is not to discriminate, rather it is to *compensate for the discrimination that is already there*. We already know the bias rolls in favor of men over women, or whites over blacks. We know this. We don't like it. We wish it would go away. But it's there. No matter how nice it feels to pretend we are above that sort of thing, if we are honest we know it's in there. Lurking. Lurrrrrrrking. And so we throw these things into the mix to try to tilt the needle back toward the middle.
Look: I would love to live in a world where these things were not necessary. That would be great. But this ain't that world. If it makes you feel any better, know that no amount of things like this will ever push you from your top slot in computer classes. You'll *always* be the teacher's pets. You got it made. Seriously. We ain't looking to displace you: we're just trying to give our sisters a boost-up. That first rung on the IT ladder is rather higher up there when you're a girl (and they're spaced farther apart as you go up, I might add). There's a lot of potential tech talent lurking on the distaff side, and it takes a hell of an initial push to get it moving against the flow of how we've been raised.
And I'll just leave you with one more thing: to those who say that girls who come through a system like this--be it teacher bounties, be it special scholarships, whatever--don't have what it takes to be a coder, or are just in it for the money or whatever, I want you to understand that we go to work every day outnumbered. We're in a field--and have been since the beginning--where no matter what we do, how much we build or accomplish, some people still can't quite believe we're here. We have to fight like mama bears for every bit of respect we got. And any woman who plows through all of this B.S. and is still there, doing it every day, kicking code and stomping bugs, you better BELIEVE they love what they're doing. And that's why we get up and go every single damn day, putting up with all of it. And if you know what that is say amen, and if you don't well you never well. And I wish you success in management.
I've never worked in a startup type company, but I've been in IT my entire professional life and have never seen ageism in any of the places I've worked. Mind you, they've mostly been medium-to-large corporations that have been around for a while. But there's always been a good spread from 20s up to 60s in terms of who you had running around in the shop. At 40, I have yet to have a boss younger than me. It's been weighing on my mind, though--I've seen the same news items as everyone else--and I'm trying to get a realistic assessment of how bad it is outside the west coast/startup kinda zones. Anyone got any experience to share?
South KCMO here. Got to my polling place at 6:30, got out right around 7. We had one of the electronic ones, and everyone else was using the Scantrons. Place was packed! Little church fellowship hall, with both A-L and M-Z lines stretching back and going around on themselves.
Well yeah, but there's other people in KY you know. My poor family, for one. I'm the only one who escaped; they're all still stuck there. C'mon, do it for them; don't they have it bad enough already?;)
Slashdot Mirror
We have an open plan office here, with plenty of natural daylight which is great, but what we don't have is a way to muffle any conversations going on nearby. At least with cubicles we could have relative silence; I've had to invest in some noise-canceling headphones so I can concentrate on my code.
I find it nice for all the stuff I usually fish out my phone for, except now I don't have to do that. I use the custom face, so I've got temperature, my exercise goals, all that jazz on it. Got it synced to my home & work calendars too, so I always see my next appointment.
The killer app for me is basically Siri. I use it all the time to look things up, get directions, and set timers/alarms (I do a lot of craft/prop building, which means timing glue and paint). Haven't really had too much trouble with battery life: I put it on around 7ish, take it off about midnight, usually got >30% juice left, usually closer to 40%. Occasionally use the Wallet app, but not on any sort of regular basis.
Things I don't like: Siri doesn't always come when I call. The history feature is more in the way than anything, and the screen doesn't fire up every time I turn my wrist like ti's suposta. I tend to wiggle it a couple times, then give up and just tap the screen :P
Still, I like it for the most part. Still use it every day. It makes a nice sort of 80/20 remote terminal for my phone, if you see what I mean. For that, it does a good job.
Yeah, and we're not just saying that because we're on to a good thing here and don't want it getting around!
I deny that completely!
Just think: before too long, online dating will have removed actual people from the process altogether! You'll just sign up, roll a character, and two weeks later get an email letting you know your algorithm has hooked up with another algorithm and they're having lots of little subroutines together. Think of the convenience!
Well, therein lies the paradox, you know? I mean, I for one am interested in machine learning, though admittedly I don't know much about the nuts and bolts of it. In the abstract, I would love to see how the software actually works, how it improves over time, etc. In the concrete, however, the fact he's using it for this is mashing my "eugh" button pretty hard.
That being said, a "would probably be into you" filter would be awesome as hell. I wonder how that could be implemented.
Let's see if he can use deep learning to filter only the women that would have anything to do with someone who would do this.
...it was a couple years back. Met this girl online, real nice, pretty photo, all that jazz. She got real close real quick--quick enough that I started doing a little research on the side. Like when she said her brother had died of cancer, and the only person I could find with that name had died in a drive-by. Then she lowered the boom: she was stuck in a hotel in London, her finances from the family business had some sort of snarl-up, and she couldn't leave until she got money to pay the bill.
A-ha.
I played ignorant at first, not quite taking the hint when she asked for help. When she gave up on subtlety, I plead poverty, but wished her all the luck in the world and told her to get in touch once she got out of there.
Never heard back. Funny thing, that.
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~ha...
(Since there doesn't seem to be a link).
Basically, the table on page 3 is probably where you want to start looking. TorGuard, PrivateInternetAccess, VyperVPN & Mullvad are proof against IPv6 leakage, so it's actually 10 of 14 that aren't.
Also, they found Astrill is proof against OpenVPN and PPTP/L2TP DNS hijacking. Interesting read.
So, does this mean that somewhere out there is someone who wanted to join Al-Qaeda and become a terrorist and blow themselves up and all that jazz but got rejected for poor penmanship?
"Well, Ahmed, you scored high in fanaticism and lack of moral scruples, but this application is frankly a mess. I could barely read the thing. I'm afraid you're just not what we're looking for, sorry. Have you tried Amway?"
"They sent me here."
Yeah, they do seem to have been run through a legal/marketing filter, don't they? Certainly don't sound like engineer's answers. I have a sneaking suspicion that her actual answers were swooped upon by serious people in serious suits until we got the above. Frankly, I kept expecting the phrase:
"Thank you for asking. Your question is very important to us. Unfortunately we cannot answer your question at this time. Please ask again later. Thank you. [BEEP]"
To pop up.
Still, the few little nuggets of info we did get were pretty neat. I like about getting more recharge stations in new home building, and standardizing the charger plugs. Hopefully those will have spread a bit more by the time these suckers get down to my price level.
Yes! I was hoping somebody would mention this :) I read it when I was a kid in school, and it chilled me to the bone. I wasn't really into sci-fi at the time, but Bradbury always knocked me out with his stories. He really got into the human side of things in a way a lot of the "space opera" types never did. This particular story is very haunting, and I think comes very close to how it will be--heck, come back and read this thing now, and see how plausible most of it is as our homes get smarter and smarter.
Phone's quiet all day, I step away from my desk for five minutes, and some idiot calls and doesn't bother to leave a message. I freaking HATE that.
In short, I think it makes for an interesting thought experiment, kind of evaluate where you and your team/department/company stand. I'm sure people will get all defensive, yell about quotas and all that jazz, but really it just asks you to think about it for a moment. Not at all unreasonable I think.
Now, if you'll excuse me, build's done.
Anyway, as someone up there said, this sucks. Now I'm thinking about that book, and how it was, reading it for the first time... I think I'm going to have to reread it again.
The "Embuggerance" was his name for Alzheimer's. It wasn't a euphemism so much as his using his gift for language to very concisely convey what it was like having this happen to him.
I can vouch for this. Google was VERY active in the east and south sides of KCMO during the various rollout waves, going out to community gathering places, knocking on doors, the whole bit. And these are not nice neighborhoods I'm talking about either. I was doing voter registration at the time in some of the same areas, and we did tend to bump into each other. They really wanted to get demand sufficient for all the neighborhoods they could, particularly those with schools in. I gotta say they did a pretty good job, too: in our neck of the woods, I think only 3 out of the 70-odd "fiberhoods" didn't qualify.
Personally, I think they should do like camera sensors, and go by megapixels. 1080p? 2 megapixels? Got it. 4K? 8 megapixels? Spiffy.
Anyway. I reckon 1080p will hold me just fine for a good while. I'm in no hurry to upgrade. And I doubt many people are.
Great fun for while you're waiting on the build server.
So I just tried it (it's digitalshadow.com if you are having trouble digging it up), and it's not great shakes. Mostly I got "Insufficient Data", but what few things it worked out it got mostly--even comically--wrong.
Okay, kiddies, gather round. Auntie is going to explain to you little soandsos why this is a good thing and not TEH EVUL REVARSE DISCIRMINASHUNZ like about 85 people have already cried. And I think I do mean cried.
Let me lay you down some truths about being a woman in IT: I love programming, me. Been programming since I got my hands on a TRS-80 during a summer gifted program. I've moved from BASIC to Pascal to C / C++ to .net and java and javascript and lately Python, with god alone knows how many steps in between. I hope to be able to spend the rest of my life doing this. And in all that time, I have *never* worked in a place where the women weren't outnumbered 2 to 1. Every dang time. Now, why is that? Is it because girls aren't interested in this stuff? Well, more like girls are *told* we aren't interested in this stuff, and we have to find out to the contrary ourselves. The same old 19th century B.S. about how our brains would overheat if exposed to math and such is still in there today, vestigially steering us away from STEM in general and computers in particular. And that sucks.
See, the thing is, sexism is like racism--you get the big ugly obvious kind, everyone can see that, but then as well you get much more the subtle kind, where the person doing it doesn't even realize it. Like that friend of yours in college who went and did blackface for Halloween that one year (and yet swore up and down that he, like, totally wasn't a racist, dude) vs the hiring manager who is more likely to hire someone their own color, not out of malice or anything, just because human beings tend to take a shine to people that resemble them. It's built in to us. And it goes out into the culture we live in, and we soak it up like radiation. And the cycle just keeps on going.
So. Enter things like Affirmative Action, and this here bounty thingie. The idea behind these things is not to discriminate, rather it is to *compensate for the discrimination that is already there*. We already know the bias rolls in favor of men over women, or whites over blacks. We know this. We don't like it. We wish it would go away. But it's there. No matter how nice it feels to pretend we are above that sort of thing, if we are honest we know it's in there. Lurking. Lurrrrrrrking. And so we throw these things into the mix to try to tilt the needle back toward the middle.
Look: I would love to live in a world where these things were not necessary. That would be great. But this ain't that world. If it makes you feel any better, know that no amount of things like this will ever push you from your top slot in computer classes. You'll *always* be the teacher's pets. You got it made. Seriously. We ain't looking to displace you: we're just trying to give our sisters a boost-up. That first rung on the IT ladder is rather higher up there when you're a girl (and they're spaced farther apart as you go up, I might add). There's a lot of potential tech talent lurking on the distaff side, and it takes a hell of an initial push to get it moving against the flow of how we've been raised.
And I'll just leave you with one more thing: to those who say that girls who come through a system like this--be it teacher bounties, be it special scholarships, whatever--don't have what it takes to be a coder, or are just in it for the money or whatever, I want you to understand that we go to work every day outnumbered. We're in a field--and have been since the beginning--where no matter what we do, how much we build or accomplish, some people still can't quite believe we're here. We have to fight like mama bears for every bit of respect we got. And any woman who plows through all of this B.S. and is still there, doing it every day, kicking code and stomping bugs, you better BELIEVE they love what they're doing. And that's why we get up and go every single damn day, putting up with all of it. And if you know what that is say amen, and if you don't well you never well. And I wish you success in management.
I've never worked in a startup type company, but I've been in IT my entire professional life and have never seen ageism in any of the places I've worked. Mind you, they've mostly been medium-to-large corporations that have been around for a while. But there's always been a good spread from 20s up to 60s in terms of who you had running around in the shop. At 40, I have yet to have a boss younger than me. It's been weighing on my mind, though--I've seen the same news items as everyone else--and I'm trying to get a realistic assessment of how bad it is outside the west coast/startup kinda zones. Anyone got any experience to share?
Agreed. If we ditch Texas we're totally keeping Austin. Been down there several times and love it.
Maybe one day we'll stop worshipping the constitution, burn it, and become 50 separate countries with our own currency and economic robustness
Tried that already. Called the Articles of Confederation. It didn't go well.
South KCMO here. Got to my polling place at 6:30, got out right around 7. We had one of the electronic ones, and everyone else was using the Scantrons. Place was packed! Little church fellowship hall, with both A-L and M-Z lines stretching back and going around on themselves.
Well yeah, but there's other people in KY you know. My poor family, for one. I'm the only one who escaped; they're all still stuck there. C'mon, do it for them; don't they have it bad enough already? ;)