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Follow-up on Qsol’s “Our Servers Won’t Go Down” Ad

The “Our Servers Won’t Go Down” Ad

Old tasteless Qsol “Our servers won’t go down” ad(You might want to read the previous post for some background first.)

The ad pictured to the right is the original “Don’t feel bad. Our servers won’t go down on you either” ad that got Qsol into trouble in back in 2000. The ad has received some much-deserved derision with a DisGraceful Award from GraceNet (a group that promotes the contributions of women in technology) and a place in the In Search of Stupidity Museum (the companion site for Rick Chapman’s book bearing the same title).

The ad ran in Linux Journal in late 2000, and after a number of complaints, Qsol responded in the “Letters to the Editor” section saying:

We sincerely apologize to all those who have expressed concern about our advertisement recently featured in Linux Journal (November 2000). It was certainly not our intention to be offensive and we wish to again express our regret to anyone who was displeased by the ad. We understand that this has angered some readers and have therefore reacted immediately by pulling this artwork from all future issues of the magazine. Again, we extend our sincerest apologies.

Something must’ve changed their minds, because they ran an updated version of the ad in the August 2007 Linux Journal (and presumably other tech magazines from their publisher).

The Reaction So Far

The ad got a link in Reddit titled Who says Linux geeks don’t have a sense of humor?. The usual jokes were made (“rm -rf clothes”, for example), but not a single commenter suggested that the ad might just be a little bit sexist and possibly a cause of women’s avoidance of high tech. Elizabeth Bevilacqua wrote about the ad in her LiveJournal, and a couple of male commenters did the usual hand-wringing.

I’m hardly someone you could accuse of being politically correct; I have some issues with the way that society currently treats perfectly natural male behaviours as suspect.

However, I think that stuff like the Qsol doesn’t help the high-tech gender balance. I think it “breaks” rather than “bends” (from the expression “If it bends, it’s comedy; if it breaks, it’s not”). Once again, what Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash about sexism in geekdom still holds true. In the novel, the men belived that Juanita Marquez’s work on faces and facial expressions for a VR interface was relatively unimportant, and Stephenson wrote:

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

I think that the ad does the tech industry a double disservice. It sends a message to women that they might want to look to another field for a career and it makes men in high tech look like dolts.

Doc Searls Helps Out

I sent an email expressing my concerns to the man I like to refer to as “the adult supervision of the blogosphere”, Doc Searls, who’s Linux Journal’s senior editor. He responded quickly, saying that he’d have a word with the publisher and asked me to please pass his apolgies along.

Thanks, Doc! You’re the best.

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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!

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Web 2.0 is Built on Open Source

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog]

In his 2005 essay What Business Can Learn from Open Source, Paul Graham wrote:

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

If VentureCake’s survey is any indication, it seems that many “Web 2.0” companies have taken this lesson to heart. Using a simple Unix script which in turn makes use of the nmap port-scanning utility, they scanned 17 popular sites deemed “Web 2.0” to see what server and operating systems they ran on. With one notable exception — MySpace — they all ran on an open-source server and operating system.

The table below shows the results they got from the scan:

Site Webserver Operating System
Apache httpd Linux
Blip TV Apache httpd Linux
Trumors Apache httpd 1.3.33 Linux
Reddit lighttpd 1.4.13 Linux
PopSugar lighttpd 1.4.11 Linux
Twitter Unknown Linux
MobiTV Apache httpd 2.0.52 ((Red Hat)) Linux
Technorati Apache httpd Linux
del.icio.us Unknown Linux
Flickr Apache httpd 2.0.52 Linux
MySpace Microsoft IIS webserver 6.0 Windows (although OS responding is Linux, this is a caching service).
TechCrunch lighttpd 1.4.15 Linux
YouTube Apache httpd Linux
Revver Apache httpd 2.0.55 ((Ubuntu) DAV/2 PHP/5.1.2) Linux
Scribd Mongrel 201.0.1 Linux
Photobucket Apache httpd Linux
Wikipedia Squid webproxy 2.6.STABLE12 Unknown (while OS responding is Linux, this is likely a caching service).
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XBox 360’s New Controllers

XBox 360

It Just Feels Right

I’ve had my XBox 360 for nearly a year now (having won one in a trivia game at last October’s Ajax Experience conference), and it’s been the best experience I’ve ever had with any Microsoft product…because it doesn’t feel like a Microsoft product. Where most Microsoft “consumer” products make you feel as if they were designed by the “B-team” — the ones who didn’t make the cut for the stuff aimed at corporate customers — the XBox 360 feels right. I don’t, as Danny O’Brien puts it, “feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm”.

(According to Scoble, one of the reasons the XBox is a good gaming console is that their headquarters were purposely located miles away from the Microsoft campus.)

The XBox 360 now occupies a nice middle ground between the inexpensive casual/party-game oriented Wii and the overly expensive grind-away-for-hours PlayStation 3, and the two new controllers suggest that the XBox folks know this and are pressing this advantage.

For the Hardcore: The Chatpad

“Chatpad” controller for the XBox 360

The Chatpad marries the standard XBox 360 controller to a QWERTY thumb keyboard, which I assume will be used for in-game communications and IMing among the more hardcore XBox Live set. They’ve been talking about this for some time, and there’s been demand for this sort of thing, so this isn’t a surprise.

What I find more interesting is the other controller…

The “Big Button” Controller

“Big Button” controller for the XBox 360

The upcoming Scene It? game will be bundled with four of these controllers, which have the standard A/B/X/Y buttons and a different-coloured giant button for each one so you can tell them apart. Unlike the standard or Chatpad XBox controllers, whose design seems to be for the more serious gamer playing alone or as a twosome, these controllers’ design suggest that they’re for ther casual gamer in a more social setting. It’s apparent that the XBox team is learning lessons from the Wii.

When I first saw these controllers, I thought of two things:

  • First, I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to resurrect the game You Don’t Know Jack, one of the most fun computer games I’ve ever played. The game is simple enough for them to turn it into something you could download from XBox Live, and I think it would be a hit. I’m not the only one; check out the comments to this Engadget story on the Big Button controller.
  • I was also reminded of Microsoft’s trackball for kids, the Easyball:

    Microsoft Easyball

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Anime Video of “Code Monkey”

The machinima videos that people have made for Jonathan Coulton’s geek anthem Code Monkey haven’t impressed me; unlike the Red vs. Blue series of animations, the visuals feel poorly matched with the storyline.

Better by far is this video, which does an excellent job of repurposing clips from the Japanese animated TV series Black Heaven. If you watch only one fan-made video of Code Monkey, watch this one:

[via Amber Mac]

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Your Boss Has “Friended” You. Confirm or Ignore?

Would You Like to Confirm Your Boss as Your Friend?

Facebook friend request from “your boss” (played by transgender Jakon Nielsen)
Transgender Jakob Nielsen isn’t my boss, but he thinks he is.

If it’s not one boss, it’s another. If you’re not freaking out because your mom “friended” you on Facebook, there’s still the chance that your boss might, meaning that he or she may be privy to your extracurricular indiscretions. The Wall Street Journal looks at this dilemma in OMG — My Boss Wants to ‘Friend’ Me On My Online Profile.

What you may want to keep in mind if faced with the decision of whether or not to “friend” your boss is that the openness works both ways:

Paul Dyer was always able to hold off his boss’s invitations to party by employing that arms-length response: “We’ll have to do that sometime,” he’d say.

But when his boss, in his 30s, invited Mr. Dyer, 24 years old, to be friends on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, dodging wasn’t so easy. On the one hand, accepting a person’s request to be friends online grants them access to the kind of intimacy never meant for office consumption, such as recent photos of keggers and jibes from friends. (“Still wearing that lampshade?”)

But declining a “friend” request from a colleague or a boss is a slight. So, Mr. Dyer accepted the invitation, then removed any inappropriate or incriminating photos of himself — “I’d rather speak vaguely about them,” he says — and accepted the boss’s invitation.

Mr. Dyer, it turns out, wasn’t the one who had to be embarrassed. His boss had photos of himself attempting to imbibe two drinks at once, ostensibly, Mr. Dyer ventures, to send the message: “I’m a crazy, young party guy.” The boss also wore a denim suit (“I’d never seen anything like it,” Mr. Dyer says) and posed in a photo flashing a hip-hop backhand peace sign.

It was painful to watch. “I hurt for him,” says Mr. Dyer.

My Own Situation

My boss, Leona Hobbs, is my friend on a number of social networks, as is my old boss Ross Rader. The powers that be at Tucows are aware of my blog and read it every now and again; in fact, a lot of the credit to my getting hired has to go to a number of personal blog entries of mine at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. Everyone here is aware of my blogs and the goofy stuff I sometimes put in them.

I’m reminded of what someone at the DefCon conference back in 2000 told me. He was a guy who worked at a U.S. military site but whose major was in Marxist Studies. I asked if having how he managed to get a job like his with a degree like his, and he replied by saying that they hired him because he was open about it. Had he tried to keep it a secret, someone could use that secret to blackmail him. I suppose the moral of the story is that if you’ve got a reasonably open-minded boss (and proclivities that aren’t too far out there), openness might be the best policy.