Feds Spend $345,019 To Make Computers With ‘Gender Sensitive Designs’

It's # like this that adds to the list of things that are classified as the "stones and pieces tossed into the cogs and gears of progress."

originally posted by: Night Star

originally posted by: Gothmog
Well , I guess I see everyone's point. I have to have everything black. System board , memory and memory heat shields,cables , case , well you get the point. Black , I dont think, is a really feminine color.

Mine is black too. I suppose purple would have been cool or one with faeries and flowers on it, but hey my black one works for me.

I plan on buying a white tower case for my next build. Then, I want to paint the solid side with an hombre effect - white shading to silver gray. Then I want to design a stencil that has the words "Power" on top and "Tower" down below curving around the Powercat with flames painted in royal purple.

Then, there are cooling fans that have LEDs in them that are purple, and I want to replace the standard fans with those.

I think such a customized tower would be plenty gender appropriate for me.

Honestly, I think the secret is to teach people how easy it is to simply build and customize their own. Then it's like a big craft project. Women love that.

Gender neutral computers?

I have had Windows OS PC's and Apple products all my life. Sometimes I have considered the Windows machines more masculine and the Apple products more feminine, mostly due to looks and who seemed to buy them. PC's were mostly bought by guys and myself. Apples mostly by women and myself. I must be confused for buying both...lol.

If you go by color:
Some colors have been: Beige Apple II, Amiga's, white Commodore Vic20, PSII, Sony Vaio, gray and silver Toshiba's, silver and white Apple's.

I might be racist too since I have spray painted several l computers with black stove paint when taking them on mlitary operations too.

Operating system wise, well they all get Linux as they get too old to keep up, but start out Windows or Apple OS. (Except for the Vic20 for example.)

This mindset is crazy, and a waste of money. Our government, by the people needs a huge reset button pushed.

The idea of spending that much money to create computers with gender sensitive designs is just strange. I always looked at a computer as a tool. It served a purpose, like any other piece of equipment or machinery. Kitchens are full of specified tools and machinery. I don't recall seeing any that are gender sensitive. Same thing for the electronics in the family room. Even the vacuum cleaner looks pretty gender indeterminate. So why computers? It cant just be the science aspect of it.

I have never purchased an off the shelf computer. I spec'd them out and had them built and eventually learned to build my own. I can put together a hot rod with some impressive performance and looks. And while I was looking at my latest build I realized that there is an aspect of this I had not considered. My computers are a lot like my cars to me. I dress the outside up to look the way I want it to. I build the drive train to do what I want it to do. And when I open the hood, there is lots of shiny chrome and trick wiring. It really is a very masculine machine. The problem is, there really isn't much of a way to make it feminine. You need a big heat sink with cooing fins and bronze tubes and giant fans, or a trick water cooling system. Its like having either a supercharger or a turbo. And you need lots of ram with giant pointy heat spreaders the same way you need giant headers and chrome tipped exhaust pipes. Sure, you can paint it any color you want. Put decals and stripes on it. Custom wheels and window tint. But in the end, how feminine is it? Mopar painted muscle cars panther pink in the late 60"s and early 70"s and they were still muscle cars.

Being a builder its hard to admit, if a woman asked me to build her a feminine computer...I wouldn't know what to do. I could load it with scripts that would periodically ask her about her feelings and tell her that her boyfriend is a jerk and she can do better. I could try to group icons together based on associations women make as opposed to male logic. (someone would have to explain that part to me though)

How do you make a pc feminine or attractive to women as opposed to men?

Ladies - what would qualify as gender sensitive as far as computers are concerned? What quality would make you think that a certain computer was made specifically for a woman?