I never willingly played with Barbies as a kid (I sold my last 6 at a yard sale my mom had when I was like 8 or 9), but I do believe I'll be buying this one--even if she just stays in the box.
Yeah, I thought it was a bit silly myself, but I realize it's a difficult thing to design for - we don't really have any instantly recognizable uniform they could use. I'm not sure what I could come up with that someone could guess what she is supposed to be just by looking at her and not be somewhat ridiculous.
Maybe the cargo pants. As for Thinkgeek t-shirts, they have sorta fallen from favor here in the engineering department--to start with, we've observed that the approach of such a shirt frequently proceeds the arrival of generally unpleasant body odors. They're still pretty big (XXXL in some cases) in the CS dept.
Not that I could come up with anything better, but is anyone else a little disappointed in what they've come up with? We need better accessorization to appeal to little girls, I guess.
Couldn't they have at least put some code on her laptop instead of 0's and 1's?
Agreed! Maybe we could lobby them to replace it with a DeCSS snippet.Or just be subversive and have some stickers printed up and leave them on shelves next to the Barbies.
Seriously, couldn't someone from the Barbie team wandered over to IT for more than 30 seconds? ... Stupid question. Of course they couldn't, you only talk to IT when your magic typing box doesn't work. -_-
"To create an authentic look, Barbie® designers worked closely with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to develop the wardrobe and accessories for Computer Engineer Barbie®. Wearing a binary code patterned tee and equipped with all the latest gadgets including a smart phone, Bluetooth headset, and laptop travel bag, Computer Engineer Barbie® is geek chic."
When I saw the headset on the doll, I immediately jumped to thinking it was some kind of "tech support Barbie", i.e. a demeaning job, not requiring a degree, barely above janitor at most IT firms, often staffed by people who found out they couldn't hack it in higher education.
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadEver since I never play with or thought about buying a Barbie until now.
I will for sure be getting this one.
However, we don't wear "binary code patterned t-shirts". I guess maybe conference shirts aren't as recognizably geeky.
Couldn't they have at least put some code on her laptop instead of 0's and 1's?
- Her notebook should never be pink
- There should be some stickers on the notebook stating her favourite OS and programming language
- And mocking all others
- The notebook should not run Windows. Neither OSX nor Linux. It should run some experimental OS she is busy writing
- Her t-shirt should be from Think Geek.
- Better: her t-shirt should have a haiku written in Haskell
Maybe they didn't think that grey-brown trousers, rolled up shirt sleeves and a pocket protector were going to clinch the market.
Could anybody actually find it on their site?
A swing, and a miss.
Of course, real-life business casual isn't going to work ("Hey, its J.Crew Barbie!") but they could have gone for:
- An edgy all-black mod look ala The Matrix.
- Slim-fitting jeans, and fitted t-shirt with 8-bit graphics motif; accessorized with a super-slick looking laptop running Gentoo.
- A cute Unix hippy look, with BSD or Linux t-shirt, and a bus analyzer/logic analyzer as the accessory.
haha, hopefully you're not referring to Trinity in that. Though I'd love to see Ken decked out like Neo when they stormed the building, guns and all.
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
(Not flames, just burning pain...)
Actually, Barbie® asked the internet. And it chose a computer career, which is about as surprising as moot winning the Time 100 poll.
(Edit: See the original Reddit thread for the call to action as well as various vote stuffing attempts. Apparently, this poll was more resistant than the Time one. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/aobsa/vote_for_... )
I wonder what this implies for "tail-end recursion" o_ô