Microsoft's ill-chosen magic constants

[mjg59]

Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135". That one got removed when the Xen support code was ripped out.

At the most basic level it's just straightforward childish humour, and the use of vaguely-English strings in magic hex constants is hardly uncommon. But it's also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren't welcome. It's especially irritating in this case because Azure may depend on this constant, so changing it will break things.

So, full marks, Microsoft. You've managed to make the kernel more offensive to half the population and you've made it awkward for us to rectify it.

Comments

Re: nice

[marahmarie]

There is no power struggle. It's more like being locked out or laughed out if or when we ever get in.

We get 1) paid less than men by considerable amounts no matter the depth of our experience, education and excitement for the tasks at hand, 2) have to work harder than men and keep our emotions strictly in check in order to prove we're nearly "good enough" but of course, just by virtue of being women we always fall short somehow even if our performance and behavior are essentially perfect, 3) don't get raises and promotions as easily as men do - and don't get "as good" raises or promotions when those do come along, no matter how outstanding our work is and 4) have to put up with men's misogynistic bs ("Hey beautiful, run and get me a coffee, would ya, you got the legs for it..." *drool*") and 5) be afraid for our safety and even our very lives if we don't give into your so-called "flirting and harmless compliments" aka unwanted sexual attention and harassment.

You guys try it sometime. We ought to have "Take a Man to Work as A Woman Week" in which it's federally required for all of you to spend one work week a year taking all the crap from women that we normally take from you just to 1) make less money and 2) have less prestige all while being treated like 3) merely decorative and easily disposed of gophers, servants and sexual objects.

No it's not. It's dead right. It's a biologically ingrained fact of life. Desperate girls will settle, but that doesn't change much.

It's also a straw man that I didn't start that has nothing to do with trying to achieve gender equality in the workplace, which women, being roughly half of the human population and *not* lesser than men, clearly deserve and are long overdue for. I have no further comment besides that.

(I will say this, though: I'm not a feminist in the classic sense: I didn't make this mess, and neither did the men; the feminists of many decades ago started all this "women should be able to do it all" crap, not me nor most of the women from my generation going onward.

In doing so, our US economy eventually got so flooded with both men and women that it drove salaries down across the board - for the men, too. I can't turn back the clock now but if I could, I wouldn't work, I would stay home, and I would raise children - many of them - and tend the house and let the guy handle whatever it is he does outside the home - and no, this is not a good viewpoint to let loose on this of all pages, but that's honestly the life I think I would've preferred.

Because that's not the world I'm in now, my inner pragmatist takes over - and this pragmatist is the closest thing to a "feminist" I'll ever have - and tells me that us women should at least have equal, and respectfully given, footing with men since we have no choice anymore - now we have to go in the workplace and do as well as possible - because now almost all women, despite their actual wishes whatever they may be, must work outside the home to keep their families and themselves adequately fed and sheltered, even if there is a man in the house who's gainfully employed.

Thanks, Gloria - but I guess no one ever suggested she was a great economist, nor did anyone back in the day take the ruination of yearly income once the market got flooded with so many workers into account.)