Did everyone miss the point of that comment? Most of the names on my list are not women.
447 karma · joined May 10, 2011
I'm just saying, education has been improving steadily over the last century yet the wealth gap has increased. It's clearly only one element of the solution.
I agree that education is a must, but it's also about addressing the social structures we currently have in place and recognising that they will fight tooth and nail to keep things the way they currently are.
Whoa, let's not go overboard here.
If it's inherent then why are there examples of societies which lack it?
Hal Abelson – intersection of computing and teaching
Serge Abiteboul – database theory
Samson Abramsky – game semantics
Leonard Adleman – RSA, DNA computing
Manindra Agrawal – polynomial-time primality testing
Luis von Ahn – human-based computation
Alfred Aho – compilers book, the 'a' in AWK
Amos Nuwasiima – PHP Programming book
Frances E. Allen – compiler optimization
Alexander Scaranti – Image Processing, Image Retrieval
Gene Amdahl – supercomputer developer, founder of Amdahl Corporation
A. Annerl – multidimensional processing, computational complexity theory
Andrew Appel – compilers text books
Bruce Arden - programming language compilers (GAT, MAD), virtual memory architecture, MTS
Sanjeev Arora – PCP theorem (Hahaha. Right, I want to see who came up with Ketamine theorem.)
A. E. Hugo - parallel computing on heterogeneous multicore architectures[citation needed]
John Vincent Atanasoff – computer pioneer
Ali Aydar - computer scientist and CEO of Sporcle
Leonard Ayunar - Computer Programming Enthusiast, 1997 - At Present Software Developer
That's just surnames beginning with A. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
Let's pull our collective heads out of our asses, admit that we're not identical and learn to respect each others' differences, the fact that those differences are based averages and that exceptions occur both ways.
Not to mention that we're on the fucking internet. There is no gender, race, colour or creed here. Everybody pick a neutral username and, hey, presto! Problem solved.
I'm a woman. Or am I... Ooooh! Who gives a shit.
What she's completely wrong about is that it's their morality that makes it so.
We, the rich, the middle and upper classes, are the ones who fund prisons, we are the ones who do not share our food with our neighbors, we are the ones who refuse to mix with them and share our culture.
It's like Terrence McKenna said - "Culture is not your friend". Culture is a tribal way of life - it's a gang sign, whether that sign be dressing in red or blue or wearing a suit. It's our culture which judges that those who perform certain jobs are more deserving of comfort than others. Yet without that farmer growing his crops how would you eat? Without that garbage collector removing waste, how would you stay healthy? Without that secretary, how would your business function properly? It's these value judgements which really hurt us. Someone will always need to do those jobs (until our machinery is smart enough, anyway) and, as it stands, they will always be deemed by the rest of us to be undeserving of the comfort that we have just because we do something essentially far less fundamental.
Just as power corrupts, so inequality breeds resentment and poisons society. There's a word for the solution I'm hinting at but it's too dangerous to even mention.
There should be a formalised standard for keyboard based navigation. In fact, two standards might be a better approach - vi-like and emacs-like, since each of them caters to one of the major ways that people think. Having said that, with a little bit of work, you can get most of your daily applications to use vi keybindings (plugins for FF, Thunderbird and Chrome, Vim itself, custom keybindings for the WM, vi-mode for Zsh - in combination they create a programmer's version of Zen).
Thinking about it, I wonder if peoples' preference for these things might come down to their personality type - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator I'm not aware of any studies attempting to draw correlations between these things but, given how predictable people can be, it wouldn't surprise me if they existed.
>You can fix those issues by modifying the configs, but that's an even further level of learning that most people have no chance of ever doing.
When it comes down to it, the current generation of hardcore tiling WM's are experimental prototypes paving the way for the desktops of tomorrow. Just as many aspects of functional programming are seeping into popular languages, so tiling window management is seeping into popular desktops. I don't know about OS X but Windows 7, Gnome and KDE all support dragging a window's titlebar to the left-most or right-most edge of the screen to vertically tile it. It's extremely basic but it's an obvious influence.
You can open and close programs, change their layout, move between and resize them. All with, what, 7 shortcuts?
With mouse-based WM's there's click to focus, click and drag, right click, lots of buttons and icons everywhere and you have to constantly work to make the relevant information visible.
There's a reason why people don't go back after using tiling WM's - they're easier and more efficient to use than their mouse-based counterparts.
Consider that mobile phones use a similar approach by getting rid of the concept of windows and they are, by a long shot, easier for most people to get to grips with. Tiling is a similar concept except that more than one application is visible at the same time. The lack of a window stack helps. Navigating a big physical table covered with pieces of paper (i.e. all applications on the same layer, where the table split into segments - aka desktops) is infinitely easier for a human than a stack of paper (i.e. finding something in a binder or book is more annoying and slower).
You're missing the point of what assertiveness is. It's about creating opportunity, not sitting on your ass and waiting for the world to cater to your needs. Life is what you make it and one has nobody to blame but themselves for where they go. True, we don't choose the starting point, but we do choose the destination.
So why do lawyers, politicians, lawmakers and managers get the most money even though they do nothing useful? Because we do not reward what we do not understand. Engineering, the sciences and the arts are esoteric enough that only a small collection of people 'get' them. Arguing a criminal case, promising to fix society for the billionth time, drawing up a law or telling people that they should do what you say because everyone says that you're the person to listen to is something that everybody can understand. Every person on this planet understands that a new law will affect them just as they appreciate that the country going in a different direction will do the same. In comparison, few people know what goes into making the world tick and how much of their lives are supported by IT infrastructure.
Ofcourse, everybody can understand cleaning, cooking and chopping wood too, so why do those professions pay so badly? This is where supply and demand come in - one needs higher education to perform bureaucratic functions; this is not so for cleaning and cooking. Since getting that education costs money, motivation and time, most people cannot afford it, hence it is in comparatively low supply and therefore more expensive.
In other words, it's a combination of how easy it is to understand and relate to the profession coupled with the barrier to entry.
In my not-so-humble opinion, the fact that we live in a society which values talking over walking is completely and utterly idiotic. We've all been had and we're having ourselves for doing so little about it. However, I feel no resentment towards people in these professions - the game is broken, the players are only doing what they can. The best we can do to fix this situation is to educate ourselves and each other. When the older generation dies out, the ideas in our heads will become the status quo.
I think that a distinction must be drawn between being assertive and being abusive. Assertiveness is, in my opinion, nudging your way forward and reacting to people's objections by talking to them then taking their opinions into account and, if they lack assertiveness, representing their opinions. If someone else is also fighting for that spot, team up with them and work together.
In contrast, abusiveness is nudging your way forward at the expense of peoples' well-being and not respecting others' right to assert themselves.
In other words, it's the difference between fighting for yourself and fighting for everyone including yourself.
I intended to communicate that it's crap in general.
>It's not like badly made food with lots of additives, preservatives, second rate ingredients, sodium and saturated fats is a constitutional right.
I believe that it is everyone's right to do what they want to their own bodies. Education lets people make the right decisions. Rules take away a person's right to make decisions. Maybe it's a constitutional right where you live or maybe not, but the law is not in line with common sense much of the time anyway.
>Also consider all the code needed to implement the "fluid GUI" you mention, with menus that can be shown as ribbons, regular toolbars or what have you by user choice. More code: more bugs, more costs, more complexity.
We're on the same page with more code being more costly but I'd argue that that's exactly what we're doing with the current customized UI's! By implementing this stuff at the library level instead of tens of thousands of implementations of custom UI's at the application level, we, in effect, reduce the amount of code. Since the population using the implementation increases, there is more testing and any bugs get squashed more quickly.
>There are, and they are very real --telephone support costs from people accidentally switching their UI to some other style is an obvious example.
That's the issue I have with this approach - everything comes down to business costs. In other words, the utility that something has to a small segment of society (the company) becomes more important than the utility it has to everyone else. This, to me, suggests an organizational structure which is broken by design.
>This again implies that only the programmer's job has thinking involved in it.
I'll concede this point and rephrase it - programmers are good at abstraction and saving work in the long run. This needs to be utilised more often than it currently is, particularly in terms of design.
I'm quitting smoking so I apologise for the tone of some of these posts.
http://www.straferight.com/photopost/data/500/medium/double-...
Whoopdeedoo, you've got a degree! Congratulations! I got a C in German when I was 16 but I don't brag about it.
>That you "know what you want" doesn't mean what what you want is also right for you. For example, every obese person that craves for McDonalds also, er, "knows what he wants". But it would be better for him, in the long term, if he was denied that.
Where's that triple facepalm jpeg...
What would help an obese person, and anyone else trying to break a habit in the long term is education, not taking away their free will. If an obese person understands what causes his sugar cravings, why eating sugary food makes him fat and that eating sugar will spike his blood sugar levels and then cause them to crash which will then cause yet another craving, he will stop eating it and lose weight. If that same person is educated about amino acids and how L-Glutamine, a non-essential amino acid, can stop cravings dead in their tracks when taken as a supplement, he will take a spoonful of that instead of reaching for the junk food when a craving hits him. If, through experience, he learns that exercise makes you feel awesome and has that little side effect of bringing weight down, he'll be sold for life. Denying people their right to make choices is a weak attempt to control what is not ours. Education is the way forward.
To address the other points you made, programmers do not like customized UI's. That's something which designers come up with because they are a) not aware of standards and the implications of breaking them and b) take orders from management who are advised by marketing on how to make the product memorable. To quote those crazy Asian rappers, the Wu-Tang Clan - "Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M. - get the money, dollar dollar bills y'all!"
> but if your OS vendor comes up with designs you don't like you have no recourse except some basic customizations (which might not even apply, e.g you cannot change how the menubar works or where it is placed on OS X)
I agree that this is exactly what's wrong with the current GUI toolkits - those kinds of customizations should be implemented at the library level, not the application level. I.E. have a widget for a menu which a theme can render however the hell it wants. Hell, make themes applicable on a per-application basis since you might want a different style for, say, music production software or an IDE.
Besides, OS X is possibly the worst example of a customizable UI, save Gnome/GTK. Almost none of it is customizable by design. I swear, Apple products are completely brain damaged.
> The implication that designers don't know how to think is as idiotic as is preposterous.
Just as the implication that programmers can't design is idiotic and preposterous, not that anyone would ever claim such a thing. Nonetheless, they completely suck at it - http://www.davelgil.com/BC_placeholder.png Just as designers can think but completely suck at that. If they would just combine forces and form into a bigger and better machine...
> And the insinuation that non-designer "thinker" can just "tell 'em what needs prettying up" and we'll get good GUIs (as if design work is mere "prettying up"...) is even more laughable.
But that's exactly what happens even with web UI's - the programmers define the structural elements - e.g. this is a button, this is a list - and the designers skin those widgets. You can't paint a structure which doesn't exist!
Auf Wiedersehen.
Bam!
Now we have powerful desktops and extremely powerful servers because we want to be more connected to each other and don't have the resources to replicate the full set of data on every desktop (i.e. space and processing power (performing operations on that set of data) limitations). Give it some more time and the whole internet will become a peer-to-peer network (Diaspora, who the fuck knows what else). Give it even more time and we'll have huge servers again for unforseen reasons (oh how I wish I was a prophet).
Or maybe we'll realise that we're repeating the same pattern and come up with a completely novel concept upon one of the iterations terminating. It's not really a cyclic universe, it's more like a spiral. I guess that this is where the singularity occurs.
My computer is my computer. Not Apple's computer when I'm using iTunes (hah, as if I'd ever use that piece of crap, but stay with me here), not Microsoft's when I'm using Windows Media Player, not Google's when I'm using Chrome and not Mozilla's when I'm using Thunderbird.
I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I want things to be. All in exactly the same way that I know what colour I want the walls to be painted in my home and where I want my furniture.
By breaking UI conventions because some idiot thinks that he knows what colours and shapes my monitor should display, I am unable to dictate what my own things should look like. Instead of a designer spending his time on designing a theme for a GUI toolkit and skinning all of the applications on my computer at once, he wastes time on coming up with a visual theme for just one of them.
Intelligence 101 - tend towards abstraction as much as possible. This recent trend clearly has it's roots in the idiot depart... ahem, sorry, I mean marketing department where the thinking went something like "but we need to solidify our brand experience by making our application stand out!". Yeah, buddy, yours and everybody elses. Give me my shit back, provide the functionality I'm buying from you and design a nice theme for KDE or Windows if you feel so inclined.
To hammer the point in further with another example, CSS was designed with, err, designers in mind and look at what a head-fuck that turned out to be. Leave the thinking to people who know how to think - we'll tell you what needs prettying up and how to do it right.
To throw out an idea of how things could be better - why can't GUI toolkits support fluid designs which can be manipulated by central themes? Why can't some people opt for ribbon menus while others use the old drop down menus just by changing a theme? What about if I want all my menus to be ribbon style but in a vertical fashion? Or if I want that list of porn actresses names' to be on the right rather than on the left of the porn database application I use to track my stalking habits? GUI's should adapt to how the individual thinks as opposed to the other way round as it currently is. That is the smart way to do it. This recent trend in UI's and, frankly, many other things, is taking the stupid approach to the problem.