I then took a scroll through my Facebook feed, where every fourth item was an advertisement urging me to take some sort of drug to increase my muscle mass.
If I understand feminism correctly, men and women react differently to advertisements and media promoting impossible-to-achieve body image. Feminism tells us that when a woman sees such imagery, she'll start starving herself and purging after every meal in order to achieve that ideal. On the other hand, feminism tells that when men see well-muscled male imagery, we look at it and say, "Oh, that looks like effort. Fuck that. I'll go get my woman to make me a sammich."
Sure, but you can verify that the ANI (originating number) belongs to a block that the customer is allowed to use.
Not sure how far you want to go with that or where it should be enforced. But it probably would have prevented a use case that I used a few months ago. When I transferred my phone number from Verizon to a VoIP provider, Verizon was taking its sweet time authorizing the port. While Verizon sat on it, my VoIP provider spoofed my Verizon number on CID so that I could at least have my outgoing calls appear to come from my correct number, and I forwarded my Verizon calls to my temporary VoIP number.
If that made any sense. Anyway, there was no real way for my VoIP provider to prove that it was authorized to set that number as CID. But they did it, and it made my life easier during the switch.
Oh yes, God forbid you little princesses should ever see the masses up close
I'm not the OP, but I can say that I'm fine with 99.9% of the masses. But that one passenger out of 1000 that stinks up the whole bus is not a pleasant experience. And if you ride a bus round trip every day, you'll have that negative experience, what, once every week or two?
People fucking hate riding the bus, but they love the train, for whatever reason.
I ride the train, so I can fill in the "whatever" for you:
1. The train doesn't have any traffic lights and it doesn't get stuck in traffic. 2. The train doesn't stop every 500-1000 ft. 3. The train comes every 3-5 minutes instead of every 15-20 minutes for the bus. 4. The train doesn't get jam-packed like sardines because it's way bigger than a bus and it comes more often. 5. The train stations are often enclosed in some way, so you don't have to wait for the train in the rain/cold/wind/snow/etc. (e.g. the train station by my house is outdoors, but it is covered and protected somewhat from the wind)
Of course, if the weather is truly shitty, I'll just drive. But most of the time, I take the train. No way in hell I'd take the bus.
I don't know anyone who takes public transportation if they don't have to.
It really depends on the individual situation.
For me, I live near a suburban train station and my office is near a downtown station on the same line. My commute is about 5 minutes shorter if I drive, but traffic can be frustrating in the city. On the train, I can relax and read and let someone else do the driving. So while I can perfectly well afford to commute by car, I typically take the train because it's less stressful.
If I truly had to spend 3 hours on a smelly bus, then you'd be right, there is no way in hell that I would tolerate that shit at my age. All I'm saying is that if the public transport option is reasonably pleasant, people will use it even if they can afford to drive.
I used the Interwebs and had a choice of 3 or 4 perfectly good functions within about a minute.
How could you know that they were any good if you hadn't banged your head against the wall a few thousand times back in college when you had to implement from scratch?
If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!
What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?
From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.
It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!
If you have a consumer connection, blocking some ports (e.g outgoing port 25) is pretty standard. I think they block a few incoming ports due to Windows security flaws, as well. If you want to ditch the hand-holding, then get a business connection.
Personally, I think that the RedShift suggestion is perfect for OP. Judging by the vague requirements ("the big boss wants to get on the Big Data bandwagon!"), OP's company has no clue what it wants to do with its Big Data yet. So why throw down a ton of cash on a solution without having a good idea of what problem needs solving?
Playing around with RedShift a bit and seeing what value they can extract from their data would be a great pilot program. Later, once they know what they're doing, they can implement their "real" solution.
Most teams I've worked on, I've been the only white male or one of only two or three white males. The rest are all other combinations. We've never had any of the issues that the author complains about. Methinks the problem is the common denominator: her.
Exactly. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.
Former Minnesotan here. Anyone who says the above has never left the comfort MN.
Down here in the south, we have this scourge called "frozen mix". Nothing makes you colder than having 32 degree water/sleet/ice pouring down on your head. The only clothing that can protect you against this plague is a climate-controlled building.
It feels like an organisation such as NASA, which is hopefully respected for its scientific contributions across the world, could set an example by moving towards the metric system in its press releases.
If it will make your life easier, I can tell you that NASA is launching 2267.96185 kilograms worth of supplies and experiments to the ISS this evening.
I'd have to ask her why she felt so strongly about it. I really don't know, and I didn't ask at the time. Now I'm curious.
Personally, I've always viewed programming in a positive light. After all, computers can solve problems much more quickly than I can--especially repetitive problems. So why shouldn't I embrace programming? It helps me to do my work much more efficiently.
The funny thing is, my wife spent several years as a financial analyst, and wouldn't you know it? She created financial models in Excel to help her solve complex problems--especially repetitive problems. Go figure!
That said, given your wife hated programming, why did she gravitate toward pre-med (and then finance) instead of, say, Mathematics or Physics?
Given her success in high school, she felt like it just made sense to take the "hard" road, so she always seeked "hard". That's not to say that Mathematics and Physics are easy! It's just that going into medicine or finance commands a lot of respect in certain circles.
And yes, I suppose that respect factor generally gets back to money. However, the common thread here is that she always wanted to impress people. That's why she worked so hard in school, and when she told people what she studied, she liked when they were impressed. Vain? Of course! But what teenager isn't?
In the specific case of engineering, I can tell you what made her not do that: her high school guidance counselor told her that she should apply to colleges' engineering schools because the standards were much lower for women in engineering and that she'd stand a much better chance of getting in due to affirmative action. That idea sounded like the exact opposite of "hard" to her, so that ended any potential of her applying to engineering school!
She's obviously matured a lot since she was a teenager, as we all do. She certainly no longer so transparently seeks the validation of others! But anyway, that's what was driving her decisions back in the day.
Credit cards are never a good idea, and only makes sense if you live in a country where they are required. Which means the US.
Perhaps this is true in Canada, but this is simply false in the US, sorry.
As has been discussed elsewhere, in the US, we have strong consumer protections for credit card transactions, but this is not the case for debit card transactions. Also, there are no interest charges on credit cards if you use them like a debit card (i.e. don't buy stuff you can't afford).
Perhaps it would be better if we structured consumer purchase transactions around debit cards instead of credit cards, but that is simply not how it works in the US right now.
When we graduated college, my then-girlfriend and I both received offers from the same company. I rejected that offer and worked someplace else specifically so that we did not both have the same employer. Dating a colleague is a stupid idea. Sometimes you can't get around it, but you shouldn't actively seek it out.
I can answer your questions from my wife's perspective:
1. Did you consider a career with computers?
No, she did not.
2. Why or why not?
She hates computer programming. During her first job search out of college, she summarily rejected any potential career that might somehow involve computer programming, even a little bit.
That would definitely be an interesting study. Sample size of one and all, but I can answer this for my wife:
met a certain SAT/ACT threshold, with a higher threshold in math, and who also took at least one C.S. or Calculus course in high school.
She'd exceed any standard that you set. She was her high school valedictorian, got a 5 on the AP BC Calc exam. She slayed anything you put in front of her, academically. She was the one that you did not want to have in your class if it was graded on a curve.
take the subset of the women from this set who did not earn a C.S., Math, Engineering or Physics degree, and ask them why they didn't pursue one of those fields.
Because she was busy taking chemistry courses in preparation for med school and she despised computer programming. About midway through college, she realized that she was only planning to go to med school because it was "hard" and she always liked to do things that were considered hard, but that she really had more of a passion for finance, so she changed her focus midway through undergrad from premed to finance.
Engineering and computer science never made the short list of potential careers for her. It wasn't due to sexism, "brogrammers", job opportunities, nor any of the other usual suspects. She just did what she enjoyed. No more, and no less.
Any reason given for the low rate of women in C.S. must explain why the trend shifted around the mid 1980s.
I'm going to say it was the moon landings.
No, really. The 1960s were really a gilded age for science, and why shouldn't girls who were born in the 60s also get caught up in the excitement? Seems as likely as any reason, to me. After the excitement wore off, I guess that was the end of that.
Were you happy to be taught by your father while you were growing up? Do you think that you would have developed an interest in computers or engineering without the influence of your father?
It depends on if you're trying to learn the language well enough to get by or if you're trying to master the language.
Obtaining basic functional English is very easy, and English speakers are accustomed to understanding non-native speakers. If someone messes up on one of the finer points of English grammar, he'll obviously reveal himself as a non-native speaker, but the listener will still easily understand him. I feel like this is not the case in Mandarin, nor in any of the other tonal languages. It is just too easy to flub a tone and completely alter the meaning of the sentence.
Of course, attaining the English language proficiency of, say, a high school graduate, is very difficult for a non-native speaker. Maybe it's easier in Mandarin. I have no idea. But it's a huge undertaking in English, and most people don't even bother. Hell, most Americans don't even bother!
I know someone will now point out that a lot of Chinese can't distinguish between r and l, so learning Chinese first is not any better. But I want to point out that's because they were taught incorrectly and they think it's the correct pronunciation. Both the r and l sounds exist in mandarin so there is really no reason to get them wrong except if they weren't taught correctly.
I work with several Chinese people, each of whom have lived in the US for over a decade. None of them can even approximate pronouncing their Rs and Ls correctly. About half of them have earned PhDs, so I don't think that there's an education gap, and even if there were an education gap, their many years spent in the US speaking with English speakers and watching Western media should have long-since done the job.
But it hasn't. Either they can't hear it, or they can't say it, but anyway, the issue persists. When they speak, the letters R and L come out as the exact same sound, and it's somewhere in the middle of an R and an L. I still remember trying to assist one of my Chinese coworkers in learning to pronounce the word "electricity". He eventually had to cry uncle because it just wasn't gonna happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I then took a scroll through my Facebook feed, where every fourth item was an advertisement urging me to take some sort of drug to increase my muscle mass.
If I understand feminism correctly, men and women react differently to advertisements and media promoting impossible-to-achieve body image. Feminism tells us that when a woman sees such imagery, she'll start starving herself and purging after every meal in order to achieve that ideal. On the other hand, feminism tells that when men see well-muscled male imagery, we look at it and say, "Oh, that looks like effort. Fuck that. I'll go get my woman to make me a sammich."
Sure, but you can verify that the ANI (originating number) belongs to a block that the customer is allowed to use.
Not sure how far you want to go with that or where it should be enforced. But it probably would have prevented a use case that I used a few months ago. When I transferred my phone number from Verizon to a VoIP provider, Verizon was taking its sweet time authorizing the port. While Verizon sat on it, my VoIP provider spoofed my Verizon number on CID so that I could at least have my outgoing calls appear to come from my correct number, and I forwarded my Verizon calls to my temporary VoIP number.
If that made any sense. Anyway, there was no real way for my VoIP provider to prove that it was authorized to set that number as CID. But they did it, and it made my life easier during the switch.
Oh yes, God forbid you little princesses should ever see the masses up close
I'm not the OP, but I can say that I'm fine with 99.9% of the masses. But that one passenger out of 1000 that stinks up the whole bus is not a pleasant experience. And if you ride a bus round trip every day, you'll have that negative experience, what, once every week or two?
People fucking hate riding the bus, but they love the train, for whatever reason.
I ride the train, so I can fill in the "whatever" for you:
1. The train doesn't have any traffic lights and it doesn't get stuck in traffic.
2. The train doesn't stop every 500-1000 ft.
3. The train comes every 3-5 minutes instead of every 15-20 minutes for the bus.
4. The train doesn't get jam-packed like sardines because it's way bigger than a bus and it comes more often.
5. The train stations are often enclosed in some way, so you don't have to wait for the train in the rain/cold/wind/snow/etc. (e.g. the train station by my house is outdoors, but it is covered and protected somewhat from the wind)
Of course, if the weather is truly shitty, I'll just drive. But most of the time, I take the train. No way in hell I'd take the bus.
I don't know anyone who takes public transportation if they don't have to.
It really depends on the individual situation.
For me, I live near a suburban train station and my office is near a downtown station on the same line. My commute is about 5 minutes shorter if I drive, but traffic can be frustrating in the city. On the train, I can relax and read and let someone else do the driving. So while I can perfectly well afford to commute by car, I typically take the train because it's less stressful.
If I truly had to spend 3 hours on a smelly bus, then you'd be right, there is no way in hell that I would tolerate that shit at my age. All I'm saying is that if the public transport option is reasonably pleasant, people will use it even if they can afford to drive.
I used the Interwebs and had a choice of 3 or 4 perfectly good functions within about a minute.
How could you know that they were any good if you hadn't banged your head against the wall a few thousand times back in college when you had to implement from scratch?
If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!
What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?
From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.
It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!
If you have a consumer connection, blocking some ports (e.g outgoing port 25) is pretty standard. I think they block a few incoming ports due to Windows security flaws, as well. If you want to ditch the hand-holding, then get a business connection.
Personally, I think that the RedShift suggestion is perfect for OP. Judging by the vague requirements ("the big boss wants to get on the Big Data bandwagon!"), OP's company has no clue what it wants to do with its Big Data yet. So why throw down a ton of cash on a solution without having a good idea of what problem needs solving?
Playing around with RedShift a bit and seeing what value they can extract from their data would be a great pilot program. Later, once they know what they're doing, they can implement their "real" solution.
Most teams I've worked on, I've been the only white male or one of only two or three white males. The rest are all other combinations. We've never had any of the issues that the author complains about. Methinks the problem is the common denominator: her.
I believe that even though it passed in DC...that congress can put the kibosh on this pretty quick?
Yes, Congress can put the kibosh on this, and at least one Congressman from Maryland has already vowed to put a stop to this.
Easy come, easy go.
Exactly. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.
Former Minnesotan here. Anyone who says the above has never left the comfort MN.
Down here in the south, we have this scourge called "frozen mix". Nothing makes you colder than having 32 degree water/sleet/ice pouring down on your head. The only clothing that can protect you against this plague is a climate-controlled building.
It feels like an organisation such as NASA, which is hopefully respected for its scientific contributions across the world, could set an example by moving towards the metric system in its press releases.
If it will make your life easier, I can tell you that NASA is launching 2267.96185 kilograms worth of supplies and experiments to the ISS this evening.
Cheers, mate!
I'd have to ask her why she felt so strongly about it. I really don't know, and I didn't ask at the time. Now I'm curious.
Personally, I've always viewed programming in a positive light. After all, computers can solve problems much more quickly than I can--especially repetitive problems. So why shouldn't I embrace programming? It helps me to do my work much more efficiently.
The funny thing is, my wife spent several years as a financial analyst, and wouldn't you know it? She created financial models in Excel to help her solve complex problems--especially repetitive problems. Go figure!
That said, given your wife hated programming, why did she gravitate toward pre-med (and then finance) instead of, say, Mathematics or Physics?
Given her success in high school, she felt like it just made sense to take the "hard" road, so she always seeked "hard". That's not to say that Mathematics and Physics are easy! It's just that going into medicine or finance commands a lot of respect in certain circles.
And yes, I suppose that respect factor generally gets back to money. However, the common thread here is that she always wanted to impress people. That's why she worked so hard in school, and when she told people what she studied, she liked when they were impressed. Vain? Of course! But what teenager isn't?
In the specific case of engineering, I can tell you what made her not do that: her high school guidance counselor told her that she should apply to colleges' engineering schools because the standards were much lower for women in engineering and that she'd stand a much better chance of getting in due to affirmative action. That idea sounded like the exact opposite of "hard" to her, so that ended any potential of her applying to engineering school!
She's obviously matured a lot since she was a teenager, as we all do. She certainly no longer so transparently seeks the validation of others! But anyway, that's what was driving her decisions back in the day.
In the US, debit cards are currently secured with a PIN only, but that will change soon once we (finally) get chip and PIN.
Most credit cards in the US do not charge an annual fee.
Credit cards are never a good idea, and only makes sense if you live in a country where they are required. Which means the US.
Perhaps this is true in Canada, but this is simply false in the US, sorry.
As has been discussed elsewhere, in the US, we have strong consumer protections for credit card transactions, but this is not the case for debit card transactions. Also, there are no interest charges on credit cards if you use them like a debit card (i.e. don't buy stuff you can't afford).
Perhaps it would be better if we structured consumer purchase transactions around debit cards instead of credit cards, but that is simply not how it works in the US right now.
When we graduated college, my then-girlfriend and I both received offers from the same company. I rejected that offer and worked someplace else specifically so that we did not both have the same employer. Dating a colleague is a stupid idea. Sometimes you can't get around it, but you shouldn't actively seek it out.
I can answer your questions from my wife's perspective:
1. Did you consider a career with computers?
No, she did not.
2. Why or why not?
She hates computer programming. During her first job search out of college, she summarily rejected any potential career that might somehow involve computer programming, even a little bit.
3. What would make you change your decision?
Nothing.
That would definitely be an interesting study. Sample size of one and all, but I can answer this for my wife:
met a certain SAT/ACT threshold, with a higher threshold in math, and who also took at least one C.S. or Calculus course in high school.
She'd exceed any standard that you set. She was her high school valedictorian, got a 5 on the AP BC Calc exam. She slayed anything you put in front of her, academically. She was the one that you did not want to have in your class if it was graded on a curve.
take the subset of the women from this set who did not earn a C.S., Math, Engineering or Physics degree, and ask them why they didn't pursue one of those fields.
Because she was busy taking chemistry courses in preparation for med school and she despised computer programming. About midway through college, she realized that she was only planning to go to med school because it was "hard" and she always liked to do things that were considered hard, but that she really had more of a passion for finance, so she changed her focus midway through undergrad from premed to finance.
Engineering and computer science never made the short list of potential careers for her. It wasn't due to sexism, "brogrammers", job opportunities, nor any of the other usual suspects. She just did what she enjoyed. No more, and no less.
Any reason given for the low rate of women in C.S. must explain why the trend shifted around the mid 1980s.
I'm going to say it was the moon landings.
No, really. The 1960s were really a gilded age for science, and why shouldn't girls who were born in the 60s also get caught up in the excitement? Seems as likely as any reason, to me. After the excitement wore off, I guess that was the end of that.
Were you happy to be taught by your father while you were growing up? Do you think that you would have developed an interest in computers or engineering without the influence of your father?
It depends on if you're trying to learn the language well enough to get by or if you're trying to master the language.
Obtaining basic functional English is very easy, and English speakers are accustomed to understanding non-native speakers. If someone messes up on one of the finer points of English grammar, he'll obviously reveal himself as a non-native speaker, but the listener will still easily understand him. I feel like this is not the case in Mandarin, nor in any of the other tonal languages. It is just too easy to flub a tone and completely alter the meaning of the sentence.
Of course, attaining the English language proficiency of, say, a high school graduate, is very difficult for a non-native speaker. Maybe it's easier in Mandarin. I have no idea. But it's a huge undertaking in English, and most people don't even bother. Hell, most Americans don't even bother!
I know someone will now point out that a lot of Chinese can't distinguish between r and l, so learning Chinese first is not any better. But I want to point out that's because they were taught incorrectly and they think it's the correct pronunciation. Both the r and l sounds exist in mandarin so there is really no reason to get them wrong except if they weren't taught correctly.
I work with several Chinese people, each of whom have lived in the US for over a decade. None of them can even approximate pronouncing their Rs and Ls correctly. About half of them have earned PhDs, so I don't think that there's an education gap, and even if there were an education gap, their many years spent in the US speaking with English speakers and watching Western media should have long-since done the job.
But it hasn't. Either they can't hear it, or they can't say it, but anyway, the issue persists. When they speak, the letters R and L come out as the exact same sound, and it's somewhere in the middle of an R and an L. I still remember trying to assist one of my Chinese coworkers in learning to pronounce the word "electricity". He eventually had to cry uncle because it just wasn't gonna happen.