Comments (2)

By Rebecca, April 1, 2010 4:38 pm

Another moment of geeking out, to highlight how important small differences in wording can be.

About an hour ago, a coworker of mine has said she was unable to “get on the Internet.” Everyone else had fine connectivity, and she is able to open network documents (meaning she can connect to the office server) so I figured the problem would quickly resolve itself. Just now, thought, she said she still couldn’t “get on to the Internet.”

That seemed odd to me, so I went to her computer and attempted to open Firefox. It wouldn’t open. I opened the Process Explorer and saw that there were about a dozen instances of firefox.exe, and clearly none of them were opening. I force-exited them all, and was then able to open Firefox just fine.

Because my coworker had said she couldn’t “get on the Internet” rather than couldn’t “open Firefox,” I had a completely different (and incorrect) understanding of what her problem was. I’m definitely not blaming her – I don’t know the proper language to refer to problems with my car – just highlighting a minor miscommunication.

Comments (0)

By Rebecca, October 14, 2009 12:06 am

There’s a post over at Slashdot, FOSS Sexism Claims Met with Ire and Denial (warning: the discussion has gotten large, which means the page takes a while to load) that’s prompted some interesting discussion.  (FOSS = Free, Open Source Software) Basically, someone wrote an article about sexism within the FOSS movement, as well as a followup article about the responses to his first article, and was met with a…less than enthousiastic reaction:

Raise the subject of sexism, and you are met with illogic that I can only compare to that of the tobacco companies trying to deny the link between their products and cancer. Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.

As Slashdot is a mostly-male discussion site, I expected resistance to any claims of sexism, and wasn’t disappointed. To be fair, some of them were totally legit, indicating that the examples given in the article weren’t representative of the community as a whole:

If I haven’t seen it, and no around me has seen it, isn’t the onus on you to give some more proof other than, “Really, guys! Sexism in OSS is real!”

At the same time, there were a lot of people who missed the point, and trying to find examples of tactics listed at Derailing for Dummies quickly got old – there were just too many of them.

However, there were also some great comments in support of the idea that maybe, just maybe, the highly educated and libertarian individuals who tend toward FOSS can also be sexist, and that simply dismissing cries of sexism isn’t really helpful.

Continue reading 'La la la, I can’t hear you!'»