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Comment Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Women (Score 5, Insightful) 847

by eldavojohn (#23808851) Attached to: Do Women Write Better Code?

"They try to obfuscate things in the code, and don't leave clear directions for people using it later."
Excuse me? "Try to?" Like, it's on purpose?

I've seen all genders write obfuscated code--but it worked. And every single time it was because we were under the gun for a deadline or there was simply no other way to do it. It's preposterous to even try to sound like you have empirical data supporting this blanket assessment.

There's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres ...
Even in my state of extreme naivete about what is going on at Ingres, I would suggest you first dump efforts into your supporting teams to help your developers out ... like your systems engineers, test teams, database teams, etc. What McGrattan is accusing men of is just bad documentation. Anyone can suffer from this and anyone can do it expertly.

I could combat her anecdotal subjective statements (probably describing herself) with my own anecdotes or go on a rant about how many of the great programmers are men (like Donald Knuth and his 'literate programming') but what's the point? Men can be just as meticulous as women can at providing good documentation and women can be just as sloppy.

It's good to have a healthy mix of diversity and I wish that programmers were 50/50 split on gender (trust me, I really really do) but it's not because women are better than men at coding. Prime example of American sexism in one of the few forms it exists today.

Feed The Register: Nvidia to purchase Ageia (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Physics chip maker gobbled by GPU giant

Graphics chip giant Nvidia is to purchase the last major independent physics house, Ageia. The price and many details of the acquisition aren't being disclosed, but Nvidia said more information will come during the company's quarterly earnings call on February 13.
Data Storage

Submission + - Amazon offers SimpleDB - for-pay web data storage

Submitted by
firepoet
firepoet writes: "Amazon has released a new web-services based storage engine that looks an awful lot like a directory service: SimpleDB. While not supporting SQL per se, they offer several Simple operations:
  • CREATE — to make a new domain,
  • GET, PUT, DELETE — to manipulate your domain, and
  • QUERY — to find things within the domain
Data is stored in cells, that contain multiple attributes. A single attribute may contain multiple values, for example: (name, bob), (favoriteFruit, apple), (favoriteFruit, banana).

Another interesting tidbit is the cost structure — you pay for how much data you store, how much you transfer, and how much CPU the database uses while manipulating your data. While I'm not convinced it'd be practical for systems that store lots of data and manipulate it constantly, one might imagine small apps that can cache their data effectively taking advantage of the service."
Windows

Submission + - The pros of upgrading from Vista to XP! (dotnet.org.za) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A reviewer takes on the daunting task of upgrading [sic] from Vista to XP, and gives a very nice breakdown of the Pros and Cons (yes, there are a couple...;)

Feed Engadget: House overwhelmingly passes SAFE Act on obscene images -- Ron Paul dissents to s (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed
Look, kiddie porn and terrorism are bad. Obvious. But what better way for a government to push through controversial legislation quickly than to harness their emotive properties? After all, what self-respecting member of the US House of Representatives would vote against legislation called Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online, or SAFE? Only 2 it turns out (Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia and Rep. presidential candidate, Ron Paul) with 409 members voting yesterday in favor. The new bill requires everyone (that includes you and Starbucks) offering an open WiFi connection to the public to be on the lookout for "illegal images" and "obscene" cartoons and drawings which you must report. The reporting requirement extends to cover social networking sites, ISPs, and email providers. Failing to dutifully report what you've seen (or haven't seen but are unwittingly complicit in) could leave your data seized and in debt from fines of up to $300,000. As is the custom of our elected representatives, we also haven't read the Act in full so this isn't a call to arms. However...

Continue reading House overwhelmingly passes SAFE Act on obscene images -- Ron Paul dissents to save us from ourselves?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Techdirt: Canadian Passport Website Falls For Oldest Privacy Breach On The Web (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Back in the early days of the web, there were plenty of stories about a rather simple security breach on various sites. Basically, many sites would simply pass a user's account number through as a part of the URL. If a user simply changed the URL, her or she could see the account info of that other issue associated with the new number. After a few such cases came to light, most web app designers quickly realized to plug that hole, and it's been quite some time since we've heard of a site with such a security hole. However, it appears that there are still a few. The site for Passport Canada, where people can apply for a Canadian passport apparently had exactly that security vulnerability, allowing the guy who discovered it to see the passport application data of other applicants simply by adjusting the URL. It's never nice to hear about a security flaw (especially on a gov't website with all sorts of private info), but it actually induces a bit of nostalgia to hear of such a basic security flaw showing up in the wild yet again.

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Biotech

Submission + - Gene Study Supports Single Bering Strait Migration (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "One of the most comprehensive analyses of genetic variation ever undertaken supports the theory that the ancestors of modern native peoples throughout the Americas came from a single source in East Asia across a northwest land bridge some 12,000 years ago. One particular discovery is of a 'unique genetic variant widespread in natives across both continents — suggesting that the first humans in the Americas came in a single migration or multiple waves from a single source, not in waves of migrations from different sources. The variant, which is not part of a gene and has no biological function, has not been found in genetic studies of people anywhere else except eastern Siberia. The researchers say the variant likely occurred shortly prior to migration to the Americas, or immediately afterwards.' The full article is available online from PLoS."
Security

Submission + - Anonymity of Netflix Prize dataset broken (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "The anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset has been broken by a pair of computer scientists from the University of Texas, according to a report from the physics arXivblog. It turns out that an individual's set of ratings and the dates on which they were made are pretty unique, particularly if the ratings involve films outside the most popular 100 movies. So it's straightforward to find a match by comparing the anonymized data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) (abstract on the physics arxiv). The researchers used this method to find how individuals on the IMDb privately rated films on Netflix, in the process working out their political affiliation, sexual preferences and a number of other personal details"

Feed Engadget: Google gDisk to become official service? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Storage

We've all toyed around with those gDisk exploits in the past right? You know, those programs which turned the left-over storage from your Google GMail account into a remote hard drive. Good, because The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google plans to launch a remote storage service as early as "a few months from now." Or so say "people familiar with the matter." While a Google spokeswoman refused to comment on specific storage plans, she did say, "storage is an important component of making Web [applications] fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives." The service would be free (GMail already tops 5GB of free storage) with additional storage available for a fee. Interesting when you consider the launch of Android, Google's possible bid for a chunk of 700MHz spectrum and rumored interest in Sprint's WiMax infrastructure. Hell, perhaps this might even kickoff that rumored .Mac overhaul you faithful subscribers have been waiting (and waiting) for.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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