• Dark (unregistered)

    "impossible with the way email works"? WTF.

    It's just a client-side change to the way mail is presented. Mutt even does it by default. If it recognizes the sender as being you (and you can configure this if it gets it wrong) then it'll show "To other professor" in the sender column instead of "From you".

  • mctaz (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    "def" (current?)

    Nope.

  • Dennis (unregistered)

    So what does this little story have to do with age?

    I've always wanted the copy of the "sent" message to go into the folder that I store his messages in. But that's not the way my email program works.

    I guess that makes me old.

  • Joseph Newton (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:
    I'll admit I've never figured out why some people I work with CC themselves on every single email to me. I guess I can understand the argument of having everything in your inbox, but to me it seems ridiculous to get a copy of the email you just sent, followed by a response by me which is going to have the history in the email anyway.

    I just figured everyone used the Sent folder.

    Well, I'd say that you have a bit of learning to do concerning netiquette. On a Perl list, they would jump all over you if you continually failed to trim stale quotes from your replies. Some environments are a bit more tolerant, but it still doesn't make sense to do this on an e-mail listserv or newsgroup, since the clients for both have thread views available.

    On this site, it makes a bit more sense to retain at least of enough of the post you are responding to as reference, since Alex uses shitware for presentation and all posts just get slopped out sequentially. On a real web-board, replies would be properly threaded, thus obviating the need for over-quoting.

  • (cs) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    It may not have seemed ridiculous to his collegues. Think of the slang words that mean "good": "rad" (1980's), "fresh" (1990's), "def" (current?). They're only "cool" to the teenagers who use them.
    Fresh and def? I assure you, these boorish lollygaggers would not bestow one whit of reverence on such antiquated colloquialisms!

    Now, the word "sick"-- that's the shizzle!

    All three of those are from the 80's. Guess you're a wee bit older than I, eh Gramps? ;-)

  • (cs) in reply to Freddy Bob
    Freddy Bob:
    At the time, his professor was 84 years young.
    Off the topic and beside the point I know and concede (not that that seems to matter much these days) but this little construction has got to be one of the most patronising and infuriating in the entire English language. I am 36 years of age, I am 36, I am 36 years old and 36 year have passed since I was born. If anyone ever directs the phrase "X year young" at me, I am going to kick them in the nuts or in the ovaries if they don't have nuts. No matter how advenced my state of decrepitude, I would do my absolute utmost to neuter anyone who tried.

    Your attitude to and criteria for gene pool adjustment may be as they may ... but you not 36, you are 29g.

  • (cs)

    Outlook has several ways of doing it. A previous poster mentioned one, but another is to "view all related messages," which will brind up all messages you or the other contact sent which have the same subject or thread id (a header).

    Outlook adds that nifty header to track things for you to make features like this possible - completely eliminating the "need" to BCC stuff to yourself, which just wastes space and bandwidth (and administrators' sanity, when profile backups are several hundred MB per user, due to crap like this).

  • franksands (unregistered) in reply to xLeitix

    You want to use Gmail. It groups together all messages with the same subject, and you won't have to bcc yourself anymore ;-)

  • (cs) in reply to mnature
    mnature:
    I think it is much more appropriate to specify which "age" a person is talking about. My chronological age is quite a bit different than my emotional age, and is also different from the age that I feel I am physically (which varies all over the place, depending on what I've been doing).

    However, referring back to the original posting: I always wonder if I should be offended by people just assuming that someone's chronological age is a good determining factor for how much they know about computers. If I mentioned that I play World of Warcraft and build the computers which are used to play it, what assumptions would you be making about my age? If I mentioned that I built three computers for the use of my husband and I for playing such game, would you be surprised that I am female? And if I mentioned that they all have four SATA hard drives configured for RAID-10, would that give you some idea of my minimum level of expertise with computers?

    Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.

    See you in Outlands, boys . . .

    WTF?

  • DOA (unregistered) in reply to mnature
    mnature:
    Freddy Bob:
    At the time, his professor was 84 years young.
    Off the topic and beside the point I know and concede (not that that seems to matter much these days) but this little construction has got to be one of the most patronising and infuriating in the entire English language. I am 36 years of age, I am 36, I am 36 years old and 36 year have passed since I was born. If anyone ever directs the phrase "X year young" at me, I am going to kick them in the nuts or in the ovaries if they don't have nuts. No matter how advenced my state of decrepitude, I would do my absolute utmost to neuter anyone who tried.

    I think it is much more appropriate to specify which "age" a person is talking about. My chronological age is quite a bit different than my emotional age, and is also different from the age that I feel I am physically (which varies all over the place, depending on what I've been doing).

    However, referring back to the original posting: I always wonder if I should be offended by people just assuming that someone's chronological age is a good determining factor for how much they know about computers. If I mentioned that I play World of Warcraft and build the computers which are used to play it, what assumptions would you be making about my age? If I mentioned that I built three computers for the use of my husband and I for playing such game, would you be surprised that I am female? And if I mentioned that they all have four SATA hard drives configured for RAID-10, would that give you some idea of my minimum level of expertise with computers?

    Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.

    See you in Outlands, boys . . .

    Problem is there's one of you and millions of women in your age group who can't figure out an alarm clock. So if assume that a woman know little about computers there's at least a 90% chance I'm right. This might be patronizing to the remaining 10%, but at least I don't get blank stares when I explain what RAID is and why it's good for them.

  • Sam (unregistered)

    I don't think it's stupid at all. I send mail from a variety of machines, including in offline mode, and synchronize my various computers via "offlineimap". By Bcc:ing me from every machine I send mail from, I can keep my sent email centralized in one place, my imap server, in a special folder (thanks procmail), and it shows up on my various machines in the imap-synchronized "sent" folder.

  • (cs) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    Rank Amateur:
    The user sees emails as exchanges with a participant, thus wants to search and sort by participant, whether sent from or sent to (as well as threads within a participant). My personal email folders are organized by who I send to, but why can't it be done automatically to save me the trouble of sifting through my inbox and sent folders?
    ...Open outlook, right click on category title bar, arrange by, conversation. Also, options, E-mail options, Advanced E-mail options, "In folders other than the Inbox, save replies with original message"
    Sorting and filtering by subject/thread is great (Opie suggested another way), but it really doesn't address the user's problem, especially if it doesn't include messages in the inbox and sent folders.

    It seems to me our elder professor is looking for the ability to just click the From column header and have all correspondence with each individual be grouped together. Making the user set up separate folders by correspondent or add a Sent column or relying on subject lines (or having to use bcc with every letter for that matter) are all clumsy work-arounds that don't really accomplish the user's goal of easy or default organizing/sorting/filtering by correspondent (both received from and sent to). Wouldn't it be better for most users if email worked that way?

    --RA

  • (cs) in reply to K
    K:
    Alternately, you can use a mail client that supports that kind of thing, like Gmail.

    At the risk of getting bashed by the "I hate Notes" slash-dotters lurking here:

    Lotus Notes has done this for ages too. Just open the "Mail Threads" view. Voilà. No fidgeting with bcc to yourself and other assorted crap.

  • (cs) in reply to Taz

    i hate notes.

    but it does have a lot of features.

    i still hate notes.

  • Eduardo Habkost (unregistered) in reply to Dark
    Dark:
    "impossible with the way email works"? WTF.

    This was The Real WTF, because the professor was just asking for a client-side change and told it was impossible. The old professor was just asking Victor to contact the people responsible for the e-mail client software, and request this feature. It shouldn't be too hard to implement, right? :)

  • Troy Mclure (unregistered) in reply to Joseph Newton
    Joseph Newton:
    Troy Mclure:
    I'll admit I've never figured out why some people I work with CC themselves on every single email to me. I guess I can understand the argument of having everything in your inbox, but to me it seems ridiculous to get a copy of the email you just sent, followed by a response by me which is going to have the history in the email anyway.

    I just figured everyone used the Sent folder.

    Well, I'd say that you have a bit of learning to do concerning netiquette. On a Perl list, they would jump all over you if you continually failed to trim stale quotes from your replies. Some environments are a bit more tolerant, but it still doesn't make sense to do this on an e-mail listserv or newsgroup, since the clients for both have thread views available.

    On this site, it makes a bit more sense to retain at least of enough of the post you are responding to as reference, since Alex uses shitware for presentation and all posts just get slopped out sequentially. On a real web-board, replies would be properly threaded, thus obviating the need for over-quoting.

    I meant corporate email - I dont recall saying anythign about posting on the interweb. We all use the same mail client since we work for the same company, and it formats it nicely. I was just remarking that I never understood why people do it.

  • dave (unregistered) in reply to The Bard

    I think he thought it meant "Regarding" but I would always get it and think he was replying (...)

    Indeed it does mean "regarding". Use of "re:" did not originate with email systems. See also "in re:", which is a slightly more long-winded way of writing the same thing.

    On the other hand, I think one only uses "re:" if there has been a previous discussion of the same topic, so it's maybe not appropriate to use it in an opening missive, unless perhaps it's in follow-up to a phone conversation.

  • Critter (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    mnature:
    Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.

    See you in Outlands, boys . . .

    Problem is there's one of you and millions of women in your age group who can't figure out an alarm clock. So if assume that a woman know little about computers there's at least a 90% chance I'm right. This might be patronizing to the remaining 10%, but at least I don't get blank stares when I explain what RAID is and why it's good for them.

    Oooh! A "most women can't use technology and most men can" thread! Can I join? As a middle aged mother with her Master's degree in CS working as a senior level programmer/software architect, I feel I am qualified to jump all over this one.

    DOA, you need to socialize in different circles. There are a HUGE number of excellent technical female engineers out there. And some of the ones who aren't engineers are smart too ;)

  • (cs) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    And some of the ones who aren't engineers are smart too ;)
    On that topic, may I suggest Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, for those who have not seen it yet. Don't be misled by the title of the talk on the TED website : it is very engaging and most humorous.
  • Internet (unregistered) in reply to Email
    Email:
    Jake Vinson:
    So, Email, if you're out there reading this, please change how your BCC functionality works.
    I'll look into it.

    Don't you have real work to be doing?

  • roffles (unregistered) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    DOA:
    mnature:
    Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.

    See you in Outlands, boys . . .

    Problem is there's one of you and millions of women in your age group who can't figure out an alarm clock. So if assume that a woman know little about computers there's at least a 90% chance I'm right. This might be patronizing to the remaining 10%, but at least I don't get blank stares when I explain what RAID is and why it's good for them.

    Oooh! A "most women can't use technology and most men can" thread! Can I join? As a middle aged mother with her Master's degree in CS working as a senior level programmer/software architect, I feel I am qualified to jump all over this one.

    DOA, you need to socialize in different circles. There are a HUGE number of excellent technical female engineers out there. And some of the ones who aren't engineers are smart too ;)

    I'd bet money your code is crap.

  • Mr Obvious (unregistered) in reply to xLeitix
    xLeitix:
    I also BCC me all my sent emails. You can set up Thunderbird very easy to do this. The reason why I do it is simple - I want to keep entire email discussions all at one place (see also "threaded view"). Except from that - this WTF is kinda lame. OK, so we know how email works, but I would say at least 95% of all email users don't.

    Go use GMail!

    CAPTCHA: Smile ...it confuses people!

  • Critter (unregistered) in reply to roffles
    roffles:

    I'd bet money your code is crap.

    Did I forget to mention that part? I name all my variables after my favorite hair stylists.

  • (cs) in reply to Freddy Bob
    Freddy Bob:
    At the time, his professor was 84 years young.
    Off the topic and beside the point I know and concede (not that that seems to matter much these days) but this little construction has got to be one of the most patronising and infuriating in the entire English language. I am 36 years of age, I am 36, I am 36 years old and 36 year have passed since I was born. If anyone ever directs the phrase "X year young" at me, I am going to kick them in the nuts or in the ovaries if they don't have nuts. No matter how advenced my state of decrepitude, I would do my absolute utmost to neuter anyone who tried.

    When I was writing this one up I initially had a joke about "X years young" being stupid, but the editorial team (Alex) said that the joke I had bordered on ageism. So for what it's worth, I'm with you on this one.

  • (cs) in reply to zip
    zip:
    I've seen this before -- people who bcc themselves on most emails. Now that I think about it, I guess it was older folks mostly. Anyone know what's the logic behind this -- "I want to make sure it went through?"

    I used to do this when I was using Thunderbird (now we're forced to use Outlook in the office!). It allowed be to track conversation threads much much easier. It's a hassle to switch between Inbox/Sent to analyze a past conversation thread.

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Alex
    Alex:
    The Bard:
    I had a boss (manager of computing department at a college) who would put "Re:" at the beginning of the subject line of EVERY email he sent out. I think he thought it meant "Regarding" but I would always get it and think he was replying to something I had sent. 2 years working for him and I never had the guts to tell him it made him seem ridiculous.

    In fairness, "RE:" does mean "Regarding:", as in "Regarding this email you sent me..."

    Mmm...waffles with rofflesauce...

    Don't you really use "Ref:" though. That's like theose people who say development "in process" instead of "in progress". All "in process" means is that its been identifed as a project. It doesn't mean that actual work is being done. (i.e. Even beeing slated as a year 2010 project puts it in the development process, but no progress is being made.)

  • (cs) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    roffles:

    I'd bet money your code is crap.

    Did I forget to mention that part? I name all my variables after my favorite hair stylists.

    Oh shit. Owned.

  • JohnB (unregistered) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    roffles:

    I'd bet money your code is crap.

    Did I forget to mention that part? I name all my variables after my favorite hair stylists.

    Rubbish! Every woman I know has a single favourite hair stylist and won't see *anyone* else. So, if you really do have a favourite stylist then your programs have a single variable. And, while we're on the subject, is the logic in your programs um, er, "hairy"? ;-)

    Not first; no wooden tables; no CAPTCHA reference.

  • (cs) in reply to roffles
    roffles:
    Critter:
    DOA:
    mnature:
    Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.

    See you in Outlands, boys . . .

    Problem is there's one of you and millions of women in your age group who can't figure out an alarm clock. So if assume that a woman know little about computers there's at least a 90% chance I'm right. This might be patronizing to the remaining 10%, but at least I don't get blank stares when I explain what RAID is and why it's good for them.

    Oooh! A "most women can't use technology and most men can" thread! Can I join? As a middle aged mother with her Master's degree in CS working as a senior level programmer/software architect, I feel I am qualified to jump all over this one.

    DOA, you need to socialize in different circles. There are a HUGE number of excellent technical female engineers out there. And some of the ones who aren't engineers are smart too ;)

    I'd bet money your code is crap.

    I have read a fair amount of gender and computing research. Generally, women perform better and have lower self-estimates of their performance. One study (that I'm too lazy to dig up) found something like that most male CS students with C averages rated themselves good or very good programmers. Most women with better grades rated themselves average or below.

    So odds are that a boys-club mentality, a social expectation that women will not perform well, and even outright hostility are the main reason that women tend to avoid programming careers.

    A sample quote from related research: "The pattern of higher grades for women prevails in science and engineering fields as well as overall. For example, nearly two-thirds of female mathematics or computer science majors achieved a GPA of B or higher, compared with fewer than half of the men who majored in those fields. In engineering, a higher percentage of women (63 percent) than men (49 percent) had GPA's of B or better."

  • tag (unregistered)

    I always BCC everything I send from my computer. Because I may want to see emails I sent on GMX online and I have more than one computer with complete mailboxes. It is astaunishing to me that noone else mentioned/considered this as cause for BCC to have complete mailboxes online/on other computers.

    CAPTCHA: darwin yes, I am a Mac user :)

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    DOA:
    mnature:
    Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.

    See you in Outlands, boys . . .

    Problem is there's one of you and millions of women in your age group who can't figure out an alarm clock. So if assume that a woman know little about computers there's at least a 90% chance I'm right. This might be patronizing to the remaining 10%, but at least I don't get blank stares when I explain what RAID is and why it's good for them.

    Oooh! A "most women can't use technology and most men can" thread! Can I join? As a middle aged mother with her Master's degree in CS working as a senior level programmer/software architect, I feel I am qualified to jump all over this one.

    DOA, you need to socialize in different circles. There are a HUGE number of excellent technical female engineers out there. And some of the ones who aren't engineers are smart too ;)

    I've met more bad programmers holding Masters Degrees then just Bachelors. I bet you add 10,000 lines to your code just to support some fancy pattern that you've seen. Have you ever told someone that you've "forgotten more about programming than you'll ever know?"

    I personally never forget.

  • Critter (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    I've met more bad programmers holding Masters Degrees then just Bachelors. I bet you add 10,000 lines to your code just to support some fancy pattern that you've seen. Have you ever told someone that you've "forgotten more about programming than you'll ever know?"

    I personally never forget.

    Hey! More generalizations based on anecdotal evidence! This ought to get all the MSCS folks out there to pile on as well. Good Job!

    Wait, can I play too? It's not the Masters degreed programmers that really botch the job, it's the PhDs.

    //Trolling, trolling, trolling...

    Bad programmers, they come in all shapes and sizes.

  • MeMe (unregistered)

    Another gosh-dang user, whom upon using a particular software for the first time, thinks they should determine how it interacts with them and does not blindly accept how it appears to work.

    Now the 'younger' person sounds like a typical 'older' person who says: "That's the way we've always done it."

    Its amazing how easily the 'status quo' people give up, no matter what their age.

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Dirty Davey
    Dirty Davey:
    What the professor REALLY wants is a feature that I've only found on one email client, Mulberry. It's called the "smart address" column.

    One of the preferences in Mulberry allows you to specify a list of email addresses to consider as yours. What the "smart address" column displays is the "From" address, UNLESS that address is yours in which case it displays the "To" address. (There's also a little arrow icon at the left, the direction of which indicates whether the message is TO or FROM the address displayed.)

    It is a wonderful feature for grouping messages to/from the same person together when browsing a mailbox.

    I thought all mail clients did this...

    I suspect the professor's using some old or just braindead client that is missing a feature that's been standard in user-facing email software for decades.

  • Jerry Kindall (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo

    Of course, if you forget to put the tilde over the n, it's easy to accidentally say "I have 27 anuses" instead.

  • Troy Mclure (unregistered) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    roffles:

    I'd bet money your code is crap.

    Did I forget to mention that part? I name all my variables after my favorite hair stylists.

    I think I love you.

    I name mine after pet names for my penis. Of course you get the occassional question of why you named a variable Peacemaker or Magilla Gorilla, but all in all its a good system

  • Ubersoldat (unregistered) in reply to -gary
    -gary:
    My wife odes it all the time and it bugs the hell out of me. She does it to keep her reponses mixed in with others responses in her inbox.

    She also forgets where her keys are at least 5 times a week. Not suprising that she can't remember what she wrote five minutes ago.

    Man that's great, my wife remembers every single thing I have and haven't done, for example, stupid lamp fell and I didn't fix it in six months... been vicious at GoW of course... every time im on into something she brings that one out.

    CAPTCHA: dubya... don't know, should I?

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:
    I'll admit I've never figured out why some people I work with CC themselves on every single email to me. I guess I can understand the argument of having everything in your inbox, but to me it seems ridiculous to get a copy of the email you just sent, followed by a response by me which is going to have the history in the email anyway.

    Not everyone copies the entire message while replying (maybe I'm showing my age here, but I was brought up to believe that it was actually quite rude to copy an entire message while replying). Some people take this policy to extremes, sending me a message containing the single word "Yes" to me through their cell phone and leaving me to track down what they're agreeing to by the "In-Reply-To" header.

    I happen to use a lot of email client systems which either have no local storage capability, or I won't want to use it. Since it takes less than 30 seconds to configure some random machine to be an SMTP client, and I quite often do this when I need to send an email and I'm not near one of my own machines, this is actually a very real problem.

    I also send all of my outgoing mail into my spam filter to train as ham. If I just feed the "sent" folder into the spam filter, then all it learns is that mail which has all the weird headers my ISP tacks on is probably spam, and mail that doesn't is probably ham--not a very practical result.

    Troy Mclure:
    I just figured everyone used the Sent folder.

    I actually use both when both are available; however, I have no less than three sent folders (one at home, one at work, one on my laptop which is a mix of both), and since I have the BCC's anyway I never bother with the folders except to make an archive of them once a year. The sent folders are incomplete anyway since they don't contain any messages that weren't sent from one of my three primary mail client machines.

  • wwwrat (unregistered)

    IMO email clients have a long way to go as far as effectively organizing and searching through your correspondences, so I can understand the BCC trick. Things have improved with "virtual folders" aka "search folders" -- you you can merge the Sent folder with the Inbox.

    Years ago, I had many frustrations with Outlook (required at work). I tried some commercial add-ons to help organize it, but was never satisfied. Sure, I'd like to see all email between myself and, say, "Melissa" and "John R." -- but the centralized LDAP address book means I can't have these simple nicknames and instead, I'm looking for:

    "Ratzenburgermeister, John (XYZZY/AAA/BBB/CCC) [Contractor]"

    You get the idea. Subject lines get all kinds of listserv and issue tracking-types of junk added:

    "RE: [LIST] RE: [LIST] Re: [LIST] {ratzenbugermeister} [LIST] RE: Let's talk [LIST tracking system #12345]".

    It makes it really hard to skim my hundred daily emails like that.

    So the real WTF is that I ended up writing my own 3,000-line 'macro' (in Visual Basic) to process email in a way that I can keep my sanity. Besides filing my email and pulling out keywords, it adds custom headers (Outlook lets you do that!) to replace the From, To and Subject columns -- I called them Sender, People, and Topic. So I see "Me", "Melissa, John R.", and "Let's talk". Color-coded too, of course. :-)

  • Single Male (unregistered) in reply to mnature
    mnature:
    If I mentioned that I built three computers for the use of my

    Hmmm?

    mnature:
    husband

    DAMNIT!

    ;-)

  • Single Male (unregistered) in reply to roffles
    roffles:
    I'd bet money your code is crap.

    That's a pretty safe bet, regardless of gender. Give me a thousand people at random, and as long as the payoff is less than 1000:1 I'll bet the same way for all of them...

  • The wife (unregistered) in reply to -gary

    You bastard!! It's all the effect of the drugs that I have to take to forget what an asshole I married!

    The Wife..

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    Problem is there's one of you and millions of women in your age group who can't figure out an alarm clock. So if assume that a woman know little about computers there's at least a 90% chance I'm right. This might be patronizing to the remaining 10%, but at least I don't get blank stares when I explain what RAID is and why it's good for them.

    Quite true. Of course, there are millions of women who have no access to electricity at all (and millions of men in the same boat) so this really isn't odd.

    And why would you want to explain what RAID is unless you're hoping they'll assume you're referring to an insecticide? If you're talking about a redundant array of independent disks, which unlike Raid is not a proper noun, you would probably want to use an article such as "a" to avoid such confusion.

    That said, randomly choose a person off the street and ask them what a RAID is and regardless of their gender, I suspect very few will know what you're talking about. We geeks like to think we're the majority, but we are not. Most people neither need nor care to know the technical details of computer hardware that they will never personally own.

  • (cs) in reply to antonrojo
    antonrojo:
    Generally, women perform better and have lower self-estimates of their performance...In engineering, a higher percentage of women (63 percent) than men (49 percent) had GPA's of B or better."
    Well, where are they all? I'm in Dallas. Over the past year we increased the size of our corporate development team from six to 15. There are two women on it; one was a member of the original six. We interviewed about 30 applicants, of which three were women. One got a position; two didn't have the right skill sets.

    We were hiring for skills, experience and compatible personality, not for gender. No boys' club here. The women just didn't apply; hence the team ratio.

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to APH
    APH:
    If "RE" stands is for "in regards to" and not "reply", then what does "FW" mean when I forward an email?

    By common convention, e-mail clients will prepend "re:" and "fw:" to e-mail subject lines, as appropriate. However, this practice did not originate with e-mail and goes back a very long ways indeed. It really does mean "in regards to", which makes it a good choice to automatically prepend to an e-mail subject line when composing a reply. The results are typically grammatical nonsense, but the purpose is served: it lets the recipient know that this e-mail is not the beginning of the conversation and that there is a larger context that they need to be aware of.

    It is commonly used within message bodies and in other contexts to refer back to previous discussions or simply previous points in the same text, as it's usually much shorter and simpler than reiterating that other context. It is not generally appropriate in formal writing, but is enormously useful in memos. This is how it migrated into e-mail. It is interesting to see that it is apparently beginning to lose its usage as a synonym for "in regards to". People see nothing odd about "Re: what's the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" as the title for an e-mail which is actually about what to have for dinner, because we are now accustomed to the fact that the majority of the authors actually writing "re:" are now non-human.

    E-mail conventions started out as a duplication of dead-tree equivalents, but it is amusing when confusion arises between those who learned the older equivalents and those who only know the e-mail version and believe it to have begun with e-mail.

  • verisimilidude (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    No boys' club here. The women just didn't apply; hence the team ratio.
    Why would they consider applying. They get a call from your firm's headhunter who tells them that you aren't looking for women especially. So they talk to the firms that _are_ pro-actively looking for gender diversity. That way they hope to work in an atmosphere where the recently hired (male) Jr. Programmer doesn't explain RAID to the (female) Senior Developer with a master's degree.
  • (cs) in reply to verisimilidude
    verisimilidude:
    Why would they consider applying. They get a call from your firm's headhunter who tells them that you aren't looking for women especially.
    That makes sense. Actually, we don't have a headhunter, but if we did, I'm sure every time a dev position came up he'd consult his daily-updated list of master-degreed females looking for IT work, call them all up, and tell them not to bother to apply. Yeah.
  • Larry Sheldon (unregistered)

    There is a flip side to some of this. On the day the University canned me (for reasons I am not allowed to discuss, but which involved a state and a Federal complaint and a "settlement") I was talking to a faculty member about the use of technology it the professor;s work.

    As was very common, the professor with withering patience explained that there were traditions and yadayadayada and someday I would understand How Things Worked.

    The professors would typically have been born the year I left the Navy, or some of the older ones, when I graduated from highschool.

    I still use technology at 3 score and 8 that they can not conceive of.

    Oldfartism is an attitude, not an age.

  • Steve Wahl (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    You know, the reason he wanted it to show up as from the other professor was probably because he referenced (wanted to reference) the 'From' column in his email client to determine who an email was associated with (other than himself of course) without having to click on the message. I solved a similar problem for an older gentleman by showing him the magic of adding a "To" column to his Inbox display.

    Interesting. I use "mutt" for email. It's not a GUI based mailer, but it gets a lot of things right that most GUIs don't, and this is another example: in the summary display, if the message is from you, it displays "To Fred" in the from column.

  • Critter (unregistered) in reply to verisimilidude
    verisimilidude:
    FredSaw:
    No boys' club here. The women just didn't apply; hence the team ratio.
    Why would they consider applying. They get a call from your firm's headhunter who tells them that you aren't looking for women especially. So they talk to the firms that _are_ pro-actively looking for gender diversity. That way they hope to work in an atmosphere where the recently hired (male) Jr. Programmer doesn't explain RAID to the (female) Senior Developer with a master's degree.

    There is a preferred gender field on job postings? Silly me thinking I was just supposed to apply for the ones I was qualified for...

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