Day: July 13, 2007

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Reason #2 Why There Aren’t More Women in Technology [Updated]

These mousepads were reason number one, this is reason number 2…

QSOL ad with a beautiful woman: “Don’t feel bad. Our servers won’t go down on you either”
Click the ad to see it on its original page at full size.

Update

I did a little Googling and found that Qsol ran this ad back in 2000 in Linux Journal. After receiving complaints (and increased sales), Qsol’s president Joe Safai apologizes and promised not to run it again.

After finding out that the ad originally ran in 2000, I decided to give the copyright notice at the bottom of the ad. I could’ve sworn it said “Copyright 2007”. It does.

More Googling led me to Elizabeth Bevilacqua’s LiveJournal, where she wrote:

My employer recently footed the bill for a subscription to Linux Journal for me (how cool is that?). I received my first issue this week, dove into it, and was floored by the 5th page.

No, not by some fantastic article, not by the ToC, by an advertisement. An advertisement by QSOL.com Server Appliances. WARNING, implied sexual content: see it here.

I sighed and figured this was going to be par for the course for a tech magazine. I mentioned it to the LinuxChix and that’s when someone said “Isn’t that ad really old?” Nope, August 2007 Linux Journal!

Elizabeth has sent letters to Qsol and Linux Journal. Perhaps I’ll drop my good buddy Doc Searls — he’s their senior editor — a line.

[via Reddit]

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Dead Languages: 12 That Never Took Off

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog]

Old illustration of Death with a scythe claiming a man in his bedchamber

I suppose it’s fitting that this article is being published on Friday the 13th: it’s SoftwareDeveloper.com’s Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off. The 12 languages covered in the article are:

  1. ALGOL 68
  2. brainfuck
  3. befunge
  4. REBOL
  5. CFML (as in ColdFusion)
  6. Java2k
  7. INTERCAL
  8. VRML
  9. SMIL
  10. Haskell
  11. Delphi
  12. PowerBuilder

Some of the languages in this list were never meant to take off. Only a total sadist, masochist or Perl programmer would ever want languages like brainfuck or befunge to take off; the first two for obvious reason, the last one because then s/he’d be able to say “You think Perl looks like line noise? I’ll show you line noise!”

Some still have loyal aficionados: I know a few PowerBuilder and Delphi developers, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting David Intersimone, who’s got the world’s toughest developer relations job: he works for CodeGear, the company that took over all of Borland’s developer tools. I’m certain that there are PowerBuilder and Delphi apps running today, performing yeoman service in small and enterprise businesses. Still, they’ve been eclipsed by Java, and .NET.

The one inclusion in the list that might draw some ire is the inclusion of Haskell, one of the current darlings of the Reddit set. I myself wonder about this choice — five years ago, a little-talked-about language named Ruby occupied the same mindshare niche where Haskell is today.

It’s an interesting list. Check it out!