1. Have you asked any women who aren't in these specialist areas why they aren't or have you read the arguments by the politicians and (I hate using the word) extremists? I have listened to both sides. Women aren't in tech because as a general rule, it's not interesting to them. Both sexes have different motivations. It doesn't mean they cant do it.
2. Yes you're probably right. All out engineers bar two are male. All our QA team bar two are female. QA get paid less than engineering because the role demands less, not because they are women. I'll say that the women have a better memory and attention to detail and the programmers have more patience and work better together.
3. No he wasn't. He was representing himself.
Fed up of this argument. Its horse shit propagated by a few people.
Throwing some science into it, if we weren't specialised into genders we would be hermaphrodites. We're not equal and that's why the majority of us form couples and step forward together.
Everyone offended with everything and everyone reading about what they should be offended about in a media outlet using one liners suggesting that they should be remembered for a clothing choice rather a scientific achievement all so that in future some groups can maintain moral superiority via public humiliation for their own agendas.
Edit: Oh diddums I upset the PC squad.
Edit 2: Oh the maturity. Some of my other posts have been downvoted at the same time.
One thing has for me: people are spending lots of money on them. Top slicing that is pretty easy.
Oh and most problems are solved or canned so all we're doing is gluing things together and making it look pretty (which is what programming via abstractions is all about).
As someone who is old enough to have written "programs" and sees the instant relationship to "apps", I vigorously disagree. Lets consider these points:
1. Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs. This means there is little common ground between the three major sectors of the market. You either have to pick one and lose market share or pick all and increase cost. Nothing (yet) has solved this problem adequately without increasing cost or decreasing agility and/or quality and consistency.
2. Each of these platforms has many barriers to entry from subscription fees, having to buy specific hardware and learn how to use it, distribution and vendor costs, QA cost and the risks of rejection and having your product closed suddenly.
3. All of the markets are primarily consumer oriented which makes deploying things to corporate entities a pain in the backside requiring more hoops to jump through.
4. None of the programs have longevity, a stable platform to run on, security guarantees or predictable security evolution.
So at the end of the day, you're pitching programs sold behind a walled garden by someone who wants a slice of your cash and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold it versus a platform with zero entry cost, total ubiquity and importantly absolutely no distribution or sales model at all so you can build your own?
Nope.
People take apps because they're cheap, free or the vendor is pushing them. That's it. If it wasn't the case, the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook. Which we don't do.
That's not going to happen any time soon. Not because they don't want to but because the whole process would be monumentally complicated and expensive.
I suspect we'll see a new 100% managed code IDE in the next 3-5 years that will fit this area nicely. It'll have bits of Visual Studio in it and it may even be called Visual Studio but it won't be what we have now.
I think to be honest that some of the stuff Microsoft have been working on behind the scenes is probably scaring the crap out of Apple and Google. There's not been a platform as holistic and complete as Microsoft's offerings so far and they are adding REAL value daily rather than just moving the chess pieces to great fanfare.
This. to quote my father (who is actually a professional photographer): Pissy lens; pissy photo.
You need chunks of glass at the moment regardless of sensor size. I carry a basic DSLR around with me (D3100) and a decent but cheap lens (AF-S DX 18-55) and a shit smartphone. They cost less than a good smartphone and the results are amazing.
Definitely. I've got a centos 6.5 VM that is a master svn server for a multinational with a 22Gb repo and 190 users and does front end http and ssl for 45 requests/second (average with peaks of 200/sec) and it barely touches the CPU (single 3.2 GHz xeon e5 core) and has only 1Gb of RAM.
That's of absolutely no use when the box is under heavy load. Perf counters just stop working.
We had a system wide thrashing problem with ReaderWriterLockSlim which doesn't work properly under load. Took 15 mins to log into the box to blast the process. Couldn't even get any performance info out of it. Happens on a JVM on Unix; no problem.
For ref the concurrent collections should not be trusted under heavy load in processes with more threads than CPUs. Its to be honest piss poor quality.
I'll add something here. The CLR is a PITA when it goes wrong. Its a total bastard to debug. JVM on the other hand has wonderful instrumentation capabilities at runtime.
At best you get a minidump out of a CLR process that is misbehaving and take it to bits inside VS. You may or may not catch it doing bad things. Most likely you'll find yourself with half the threads inside win32 and an 20 mins wait for symbol server to snag the symbols.
2. Yes you're probably right. All out engineers bar two are male. All our QA team bar two are female. QA get paid less than engineering because the role demands less, not because they are women. I'll say that the women have a better memory and attention to detail and the programmers have more patience and work better together.
3. No he wasn't. He was representing himself.
Fed up of this argument. Its horse shit propagated by a few people.
Throwing some science into it, if we weren't specialised into genders we would be hermaphrodites. We're not equal and that's why the majority of us form couples and step forward together.