You're being a tad too literal with your critique (if I may). The whole point is to take you into a realm that's utterly absurd from the male perspective -- which is entirely my point in writing this.
Yes, male nurses face weird moments in life - but as you say it's mostly from other men. That has nothing to do with being a woman in the tech industry who get to listen to cracks about "being on the rag" or PMSing when they're aggressive.
Next time you're with a female coworker, notice how often you and the other men in the group look at her chest. Notice how often she ignores this and how completely oblivious the other men are that she's overlooking their behavior. If you don't believe me - and if you know this woman well enough - ask her.
A few employees in particularly security-sensitive positions don't have full root, and have to use "sudo" with a whitelist of commands, allowed packages, and so on. It's fairly easy to get packages added to the whitelist, by filing a request with the security team.
Users who need to run insecure operating systems, or need to install arbitrary packages, use heavily sandboxed VMs.
Two members of my current team used xmonad before I got here, and I've helped two more to convert. I anticipate there will be more conversions after Precise comes along and forces everyone off GNOME 2. To my knowledge, none of them know anything about Haskell.
In other news, former German president Roman Herzog, member of the (for now) largest party, the Christian Democratical Union CDU, suggested that having new parties like the Pirates entering parliaments is bad for overall democracy because it is increasing political diversity, and should be combated by again increasing the election threshold, which is now at 5%. According to the interview he gave recently, increasing political diversity in the parliament decreases support of a goverment and the chancellor, which could destabilize a country, meaning less dissent in the parliament, more stable country.
The two big parties are basically getting threatened by the internet and are obviously ready to go nuclear by threatening to simply team up, get supermajority required for a constitutional change, and "optimize" the political diversity down to 2 or 3, US style, maybe even 1, by simply throwing the annoying emerging competition out of the parliaments.
This is the correct answer. Talk to a lawyer. Consider having that lawyer negotiate on your behalf.
Lawyer != lawsuit and it doesn't have to make things confrontational. It is just smart. If they are smart they talked to a lawyer about how to let you go.
What's more interesting is that he got HBO to release their content in a DRM-free format. (HBO is the network that previously wouldn't let you buy their online video service unless you already had cable and an HBO subscription, rather defeating the purpose of buying the content online.)
I don't think this article could have made rms look better. He increased attendance to an educational event, while protesting a piece of immoral legislation. Everybody wins!
StackOverflow is a watershed website. There are very few websites I can go without and StackOverflow is, without a doubt, one of them.
It is difficult to remember the dark ages where every question I typed into Google would link to Expert Exchange and it was a coin flip on whether you'd find your answer.
Very much like GitHub was the tipping point for social coding, StackOverflow was the tipping point for social problem solving about programming.
StackOverflow and GitHub weren't the first websites of their kind but they were the ones that executed it almost flawlessly.
Interestingly enough - I can see both sides of the argument. When I was building the IT infrastructure for SSN, I ran the company's IT and it's dozen employees on a $75 linksys (and a half-dozen Poweredge Dell Server) for the first 5-6 months. Eventually, we grew to around 20 employees, picked up a data center colo-cabinet for our customer apps and needed a bit more robustness, so I purchased a $300 used Cisco 2621xm, a couple T1 WICs for $500, and ran the company for the next year on that 3 mbit pipe - the company got to around 50 employees before we moved. For the first two years of its life I spent a grand total of $875 on routing hardware and 50 employees were able to get their work done (including code pushes to our data center) over that 3 mbit pipe.
When I handed over network engineering, though, our last purchase order for networking equipment (with around 500 employees) - was north of $500K (including very hefty Cisco Discounts) (This isn't including the Data Center infrastructure - by then we had colo space in three data centers - just the corporate infrastructure for three buildings)
It's hard to explain without living through it - but the decisions that make sense when you are small, and you aren't paying your network engineers $150K/year (fully loaded), and you aren't trying to figure out how to handle pager duty, and warehouse and deal with RMAs, and support various types of hardware, and worry about rotating inventory, and dealing with upgrade cycles, and manage security, and patch levels, and remote administrations - not even considering future feature enhancements and performance (75 mbits sounds great today - but what about the future?) - when you get to scale, the CapEx (the capital cost of the hardware) starts to have fewer consequences on a technology investment (particularly over 10 years) than the other elements. Not to mention that there are also political issues (Layer 8) associated with differing levels of services/features for small population centers versus large population centers.
Yes - this does result in seemingly ludicrous situations like a 4 computer library being run on a ISR capable of running 350 mbits/second without breaking a sweat - but in 5-8 years from now, some technology administrator for the state will take over that infrastructure, and I can guarantee you that they won't be thinking "My God, we're over provisioned on our networking equipment" - but instead, "Thank goodness I have a few more years of runway before we have to replace all this gear."
I realize I haven't fully fleshed out the argument as to why it might make sense to put these hefty branch routers into smaller locales, but hopefully it doesn't sound silly.
Hey - at least they didn't roll out 6509s in all these libraries. Now that would be something I could rant against. :-)
In short, Apple is becoming an MNVO. With Mobile Network Virtual Operators, you don't know which carrier your connection is actually going over.
Apple is signaling to the rest of us that the "dumb pipe" future which carriers are facing is quickly approaching.
None of us will care who provides the future 4G/5G/6G connection; we'll just go with the cheapest carrier at the time. Apple here is just streamlining this process so their customers won't have to waste their time and money figuring it out, and they probably won't be alone in offering this type of service to the public.
---
Edit: The article makes a big deal about not being able to remove the SIM card from your phone. CDMA phones have never had SIM cards - to switch phones with Verizon or Sprint, you have to update which MEID or IMEI (number from the phone) is attached to your account. For many years, we were locked into brand-only phones because they were the only ones in the "allowed" database.
This comment stood out for me as well, and strikes me as extremely disingenuous.
Another that caught my eye was "Free Software is
like Free Love, a hippie pipe dream in which computing is free from venality, commercial interests, even capitalism"
I was upset that Pike could write such things in 2006 as this is demonstrably untrue -- contrary to being a pipe dream, Free Software has completely replaced the space previously occupied by ATT unix. But, then I realized this piece was authored in 1991, which makes this opinion merely lacking in foresight.
I see a danger here. It isn't with this child and his problems, but with the continued progress of the media and other political groups in co-opting psychological diagnoses for their own ends. The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are already bywords for "doesn't share my politics or worldview". You can see this clearly in the article and the comments. The article mentions "financiers and business people", and the first comment covers explicitly naming the opposing political party. In fact, how many articles from the last few years manage to bring up the subject without casually slipping in a reference to businessmen? I am guessing not many.
The problem is made worse by the highly subjective nature of psychiatry. When practiced in good faith, it seems to be beneficial for some people. Of course, as a science, it is particularly soft. It has a long history of shifting its positions, and a long history of debunked and discredited bodies of theory. (Why do we continue to teach Freud and Jung in college English departments?) Psychology is the sort of thing that works only when you can trust the person employing it, and sometimes not even then.
I am not a psychologist, I am more of a computer scientist. Using leeway in statistics and figures, I can show you any result I want to. For instance, I could present a compelling argument that Facebook will expand extraordinarily over the next decade. I could also present an argument damning the possibility of Facebook expanding at all. Don't you think that, with a few weeks of study, I could apply any subset of mental disorders from the DSM-IV to any person I wished?
Would you trust a court-ordered psychologist to make an accurate appraisal of your psyche? I don't know that such an appraisal is even possible. And I am worried about the increasing confidence in these sorts of appraisals. It sounds like, very soon, anyone interested in furthering American business aims will be suspect for mental disorders. The pretext is already here in America's paper of record. How long before this movement grows to having real influence in our judicial system?
When Tom Cruise begins to sound more sane than the psychology he criticizes, you know something is wrong.
I think this is largely the expression of terrible, terrible social skills. I've seen appalling things toward women and men alike from young, socially inept Bay Area tech males.
Also, for what it's worth, I've received a lot of crap from women over the course of my working life. In college, I worked in a deli where I was the only male. There was outright sexual harassment, and regular dismissal of me solely because I'm a man. Even in tech roles, I've had problems with female bosses who were horrible, socially incompetent worker bees who got promoted out of what they should have been doing (implementation instead of management).
IMO, the reason Linus is where he is today as an icon and at least some part of the reason we have a rock solid Linux to use across all our commercial and non-commercial projects is because Linus has strong opinions about how things should be.
Somehow, I don't know or have read about that many (if any) world-changing people, who also happen to be "so nice and understanding of others opinions" or "agrees to disagree".
I'm sorry, but there are indeed few ways to design a BMW and many ways to design a glob of metal that can't even move.
Actually apologizing admits to wrongdoing, which opens one up to liability and other consequences. Not apologizing at all is seen as callous and only incites the mob against you. A non-apology apology is still enough to settle the mob but not enough to open one up to liability. The only downside is that it upsets intelligent people like you and I who are capable of actually parsing and understanding these kinds of statements. Most people are content with something that sounds like an apology.
Heh - if you were in charge of marketing and didn't know who your clients were, your CEO's out of his tree and your stock's never going to be worth anything anyway.
I'd take the 3.5 months worth of equity just in case and start looking for another job.
(Oh, and next time do your expenses and take a sustainable salary! Early-stage employee doesn't equal martyr.)
No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange or quora, in the sense that's a much better implementation of a concept, but I believe there's just very little value in that concept.
I'll keep an open mind about the company for now, because I've not found their side of the story (this occurred a few weeks ago), but Michael Dell should personally and sincerely apologize for his company. This doesn't match at all what I have long understood to be their internal culture.
I participate in the SO community a lot (I'm top answer-er for the Canvas tag and HTML5 tag). It's not quite a "community", though, because while I have a lot of respect for the other answer-ers I don't really get to interact with them very much, aside from complimenting a novel solution and the like. I sort of wish there were more methods for interaction (the chat channels don't help that much for niche tags).
And while my interaction with askers is always fleeting, I'd really like to thank them for all their support. At the end of the day their words are the only encouragement I need:
I really don't like the message of this post. I think the arbitrary expectations people in the startup world place on themselves do a great deal of harm.
I actually regret being exposed to the startup world at such a young age of 17/18. I became totally obsessed with everything startups, especially the stories of newly christened millionaires at ages not much older than mine. I eventually began setting some ridiculously lofty goals for myself that I've failed to meet time and time again, and it's contributed heavily to my often feelings of failure and low self-worth.
So how about this: Instead of rushing to do something before a completely fabricated deadline, chase opportunities with the intent of trying your best and the understanding that no one event or missed deadline renders you a failure or means that you've missed out on life.
I work in the FDA, and it almost takes an act of congress to get root on developer workstations. Also we can't install software unless it's on the the MAT (master approved technologies) list. Which is pretty ironic, because we create software ourselves, which is of course not on that centrally maintained, slow to change list. So we're not sure if we're actually allowed to ever run the results of our compiles. Nobody wants to ask because we might not like the answer...
Yes, male nurses face weird moments in life - but as you say it's mostly from other men. That has nothing to do with being a woman in the tech industry who get to listen to cracks about "being on the rag" or PMSing when they're aggressive.
Next time you're with a female coworker, notice how often you and the other men in the group look at her chest. Notice how often she ignores this and how completely oblivious the other men are that she's overlooking their behavior. If you don't believe me - and if you know this woman well enough - ask her.
You'd be surprised the shit women deal with.