Women’s No Pay Day

 

Today is Women’s No Pay Day. Its a day to make people aware that (as you see above) on average 17% of women are paid £4000 less than their male counterparts, thats the same as working for free from October 30th till the end of the year.

So please join in Fawcett and Unison’s campaign to make people aware, and fight the blatent sexism that still happens in some workplaces. If you can, print of flyers from the website, tell people about the day or just be aware of it. And be sure to sign the online petition.

Via Fawcett Society

Multiprocessor means more than one app at once?

I was just watching some TV and a PC World advert came on, advertising the latest cheap laptop.

Two things made me think. First, the man in the ad (selling to a woman…who obviously knows nothing about computers, I’m surprised she wasn’t scared to leave the kitchen(!) (please, lets break some stereotypes please?)) and stated how she didn’t have to buy anti-virus software because it was “pre-installed”. As a Mac user, I would say “oh no, you don’t need anti-virus. Its a Mac!”
Ok, this could start a whole debate on virus’ on mac. Yes I know its not impossible, but I do believe its harder to cause more damage thanks to the Unix/BSD backbone.

The second thing was, the salesman exclaimed at the Intel Core 2 Duo chip that let the user “run more than one application at once, so you can listen to music while surfing the internet”!!!!! WOW!!!! Thats completely amazing. Surely thats never been possible. Has it? Oh wait, thats why people spent years working on memory management in the kernel so that we can do this (names escape me but I’m looking at you, Macintosh developers).

What did I do to make a point? I opened every application I have in my dock. Thats 18 applications plus System Preferences. How well did my laptop run? Fine. So much so that I could even hit Expose and display all my open windows at once. And here’s how it looked.

Even more fun was running this in slow motion by holding Shift. I also noticed a neat feature, that Photobooth continues to update the camera view even in Expose!

Wow. Multiprocessors eh! Wow.

Tags: Expose, Macosx, core2duo, c2d, intel, pcworld

Its the most wonderful time of the year..for strange things

So I went shopping this afternoon for my girlfriend and came across two cards in two different shops. The first made me cringe and sigh dissapointedly, the second pointed out how far some companies and organisations go to be “PC”.

This first card spouts the wonderful heartwarming sentiment, “Tinsel Tits”. Now I’ve seen plenty of cards in my life, funny cards, slightly adult humour cards, innuendos with cartoon pictures and potentially rude comments, but then you get some that are just plain demeaning and disgraceful. This is the latter. I can’t think of anyone I know who would appreciate a card calling them Tinsel Tits, let alone appreciate the picture of the semi-naked surgically enhanced woman on the front. Can’t exactly put it on your mantle piece, unless you don’t get visitors. But then this is a card for a woman isn’t it? Would you call your footie mates Tinsel Tits? So why would yor girlfriend want a card calling them that, with a semi-naked woman on the front? Would she want you staring at it when you were at home?

The second card is less harmless, but makes me smile that they are beginning to make cards for all relationship situations. There’s boyfriend, girlfriend, sister and brother in law, sister and husband, and now, since divorce seems to be so high in this country, or single parenthood, there is now parent and partner, in this case, dad and girlfriend. How sweet. There was also brother and “partner”. Why not put boyfriend? I didn’t see any sister and partner so Hallmark obviously aren’t catering to the lesbian society yet. I worry that it might only be another year before we see “dad and mail-order-bride” appear, or for mormen, “For my wives at Christmas”. Why buy 6 when 1 will do?