As a father of two daughters, this makes me sick. I'm not a feminist, but I can't stand when people make "things for girls" that are pastel-ly and have ribbons. That does not help them, unless it is clothing or accessories.
To make girls want to play with tinkertoys, you make... tinkertoys. My youngest- she loves guns and trucks. I don't even own a gun or a truck!
Unfortunately, McDonalds sells "girl toys" and "boy toys". That makes me sick too. But they know their market. So- I think it is a good thing. There is a place for almost every toy. Just not with my daughters.
The solution isn't to expect girls to play with toys that were designed and marketed specifically for boys, as tinker toys were and are. At least, not without putting the same onus on little boys. If boys were eager to play with pink tinker toys, after all, they would already exist.
Younger me was in the same boat as your youngest daughter. It's almost as if girls don't get to have individual personalities and tastes; they have to be a Marketed Monolithic Girl Consumer.
No programming language that I have encountered so far is wrong. It is only different.
What is "really wrong with Java", not the language but part of the "culture", is a tendency for writing excessive code and xml, abstraction, mocking, etc. but overdoing things happens everywhere.
And a ridiculous "Ruby culture" thing was a DSL used for BDD called Cucumber. It promised tests that look like English so that analysts could write the tests, but then you had to write backing code so that would work. But a lot of people still use it.
And a ridiculous Javascript thing is Node. Javascript on the server? You have to be fucking kidding me. But now you can get a nice job in SF with JS experience.
Pointing these things out is useless. I make a lot of mistakes. Many publicly and online. People grasp onto "bad ideas", but really they are just ideas later proven to be not as good as some other idea. So, write your "everything that is wrong with Java" classes, SpringSource/VMWare/EMC employees. Nothing wrong with that.
Cucumber has some flaws in my opinion, but I think saying its intent was to allow non-developers to write tests is mistaken.
It's more a straightjacket that ensures a minimum of mutual intelligibility, particularly when a developer and domain expert are collaborating. Trying to make a tool that non developers can use to write tests is nearly pointless (selenium remote control for example). But adopting an approach where an analyst can look at what's on the screen and say "Hey, no, that's not right. We have to get the foo form in the file before it goes to bar department, not after." It's also nice in the context of CI, where non developers can look at a status webpage and see the state of an app is without drowning in technical details.
As an aside, my criticisms:
I hate how favors a specific BDD template (As A, In Order, Given, When, Then etc) rather than letting people pick their own language sensible for their project. The product/business people I've put in front of cucumber generally disklike that language, and often feel resentful for it being forced on them.
And secondly, I think the way statements are matched to step definitions via regex is awkward. Regexes in general tend toward frustrating abstraction. Do I want $1 or $2 or $3 or wtf was $7 supposed to be again? They also don't compose well. In my experience this choice ends up making the step definitions a cluttered dumping ground that takes more effort to organize than I'd like.
I think both of these would be solved by using a more proper grammar mechanism, probably PEGs, and keeping the rest of the tooling ignorant about its specific definitions.
Does anyone remember when Mapquest and then Google Maps first started? Bad directions, etc. was the norm.
The only thing that is wrong with Apple doing this is that they didn't release as "beta" and make a big deal about how users can turn on the "beta" switch to test the cool new things, or the "alpha" switch and get shit that might break their phone but gives them superpowers no other geek has.
#1: How many times is too much when replying with #1 and #2?
#2: Answer: this many times.
So anyway, everyone change your Pandora password and be done with it. You can't buy anything with a Pandora account except to be able to listen to Pandora. That is not worth stealing, even if it is a great service. I pay for it, and I'm not going to stop because of Apple. They may have the library, but they don't have the years of experience that Pandora has in its market. I do think Apple will own the high-end home entertainment market eventually.
Two recent things come to mind, Ouya and the Tesla museum. Both offered items with purchase, but the Ouya items included the Ouya itself. That presents a problem that I didn't realize until now, which is that a store has to do a lot of things relating to paying taxes, etc., when being a store was not the intent of kickstarter, so... I get it. They are not a store.
However, with the Tesla thing and related projects, I think that this gets into a really grey area- and from past experience with helping with a large site that took donations- you have to subtract the items that have value from the donation, so they have to do this if anything is given away, or at least the recipient does if they are a charity/non-profit. Was the Tesla thing a non-profit?
And not allowing 3D renderings of hardware is a bad idea. For example, if you have a valid design for something and need the money to have it fabricated, then the sponsor should be able to see the design. Not being able to do so is lame. Sometimes the design is the hard part. That is a valuable asset. It should be rewarded with money to see it through. Why place someone with no design and someone with a design on equal footing. They aren't. It's not just about fairness, it is about being able to invest in something with a future. No design- no future. Good design- possible future.
The kickstarter rules only limit the content on the kickstarter website. I don't see anything that precludes them from showing design concepts on a different website.
So if you want to impress people with your project on the kickstarter website, you'll have to stick to actual content.
As a father of two daughters, this makes me sick. I'm not a feminist, but I can't stand when people make "things for girls" that are pastel-ly and have ribbons. That does not help them, unless it is clothing or accessories.
To make girls want to play with tinkertoys, you make... tinkertoys. My youngest- she loves guns and trucks. I don't even own a gun or a truck!
Unfortunately, McDonalds sells "girl toys" and "boy toys". That makes me sick too. But they know their market. So- I think it is a good thing. There is a place for almost every toy. Just not with my daughters.