Slashdot Mirror
All Work And No Play ...
Clifton Forlines writes: "Jupiter Media Metrix released a report on Monday about PC gaming - here's one of the more interesting tidbits: 'Similar to past years, Microsoft Windows-bundled games dominated the top rankings in October 2001: Solitaire was number one, with 21.3 million users.' A little math tells us that americans spent about 24 million man-hours in October on Solitarie (estimating that each user spent a little more than an hour over the whole month) That corresponds to about 1 million man-days, or around 2740 man-years! For comparison, I looked up these numbers...
Empire State Building: 7 million man-hours (a mere 9 days of Solitaire), Panama Canal: 20 million man-hours (a mere 26 days of Solitaire), Apollo project: 15.5 billion man-hours (or a mere 52 years of Solitaire) Think about it!"
Hmmmm. That's amazing. I wonder how many billions of Solitaires go into a single Slashdot?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
no mention of freecell? that takes as much playing time, so double those stats
There has been a lot of research done that shows that playing games not only improves critical thinking skills (like with games like Myst, etc), but also can improve hand-eye coordination with the fast paced shooter type games. (Quake3, etc).
And they said zombies weren't real!
I can't think about the implications of this right now, I'm supposed to be re-engineering software systems but I'm just about to win my Solitaire game.
--Charlie
Come on, we need to make a concerted effort to get Minesweeper up to number 1! I mean, it's available on many different platforms (Minus the Microsoft copyright, at least) so there's got to be more than 21 million users of Minesweeper!
Minesweeper forever!!!
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Solitaire? No I've spent many a man hour on minesweeper, I swear if that site that lets you play minesweeper for money online would allow florida based credit cards, I'd be rackig in the dough :)
Ever stop to think how much *MORE* time Americans spend watching TV than playing solitaire (etc).?
Beats working!
The solution to people wasting time on games is to spend more valuable time figuring out how the wasted time scales to modern achievements.
On that note, why am I replying..
If we could just convince all the women that they really don't need orgasms, we could cut down the hours needed for sex to about 5 minutes each time.
Of course they'll lead the pack. Since most businesses still use Windows, there are more copies in every office.
I have no admin rights, so I can't install everything else.
Just because more play it does not necessarily mean it's the best game!
The difference here is that most skyscrapers and canals require _actual physical labor_, not just moving a mouse. Plus, most people play Solitaire as a break, so their potential productivity during Solitaire-playing hours is low.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
I've spent many an hour on bubblet for my palm III. It's the most addictive game I've ever played. Good way to look like you're doing work while you're not, as with all palm games.
It is truly inspiring that one of the tallest buildings in the world, the Empire State Building, was built in under a year. I was just there last weekend and visited the tower for the first time.
It was both a humbling experience and encouraging. People can do both great and horrible things when working in concert. We just need good ideas to rally around, rather than sitting idly by or doing repetitive tasks.
Anyone want to help me with my spaceship?
To keep the mind safe. Just think about all the
work you could do while you sleep. But if you
don't sleep the next day you can't work.
doctor-what-about-my-gamboling-addiction
And your lack of grammar skills. I thought techies were supposed to have a mind like a steel cage.
Apparently the cages of the Slashdot crew weren't galvanized.
heh.. seeing Minesweeper on the list reminded me of WinFlower and the ICBW (International Campaign to Ban Winmine)... anybody try out that game? you can find it here. btw, it's java-based
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Linux will continue to be an afterthought in the OS world without a solid bundle of games that come pre-installed. Hearts, Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. have all become classics and are many users' introduction to computers. Can you think of one Linux game as imaginative or innovative as Minesweeper or Freecell? I sure can't.
Until Linux distros wake up and realize that packaging high quality games with their installations will guarantee their success, Linux will remain a minor thorn in Microsoft's side.
Microsoft knows what's important when bundling their OS: games and entertainment. Redhat, Debian, etc. just need to wake up and follow their lead.
http://www.davebrenninslaw.org
dave@davebrenninslaw.org
Consider the man hours needed to produce Hoyle's Poker vs. Quake3. Its glamorous to do the latter, but I bet the former makes a lot more profit.
I've always avoided game programming simply because I know it would require me to give up virtually everything else I enjoy doing with computers(databases, web programming, sysadminning). You have to be pretty dedicated to be any good at it. However, if I was to start a game company, it would definitely start out producing simpler games for older customers, then perhaps move to making bigger 3D action games once I made enough to hire more people.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Pong or Pac Man, maybe.
Just how much does it cost to 'play' Empire State Building or Panama Canal? It costs me more to just visit those places then to sit and let my mind waste away watching cards flip over on my monitor... ;^]
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
Those people should be playing Freecell.
-- "Never call your girlfriend 'Butterball'. Not even once."
Ask yourself this: do you really want the type of person who finds fulfillment playing Solitaire and Minesweeper to divert his/her attention to building the next skyscraper or hydroelectric project? Please, no!
I thought about, and it it hurts, but it points to an interesting thought, is solitare a good game on the PC.
It just isn't but for some stupid reason I keep playing it.
The interesting thing about the article is that it shows more than ever that graphics and speed are unimportant to the quality of the game. Right after the bundled games were and I quote
October 2001were (Electronic Arts) Maxis' The Sims, with 1.6 million users; Microsoft's Age of Empires, with 805,000 users; (Vivendi Universal) Blizzard's Diablo II with 624,000 users; and (Electronic Arts) Westwood's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun with 563,000 users.
none of these are visualy very impressive, but they all share one common theme anyone can play them with ease.
conclusion gameplay over style every time
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
This is a disgrace, the way people waste their time at work. It's cheating their employer, too.
I'd write more, but i don't want my boss to see me on Slashdot.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Here's what I really want to know:
- How many man-hours are spent by people reading/posting to SlashDot?
You gotta figure there's millions of hours spent by young smart programmer's minds reading this stuff instead of writing code. Think of all the great improvements that could have been made to the world's software if we hadn't been wasting time on this website!?
Maybe Slashdot can add some rough time-calculating scripts to slashcode for tracking user hours spent.
www.Beyond7.com Insane modern art water sculpture.
But not that amazing. It just means that if 23 million people each spend one hour digging, the Panama canal could have been finished in less then a month. There would be some elbowing ofcourse, and maybe Panama would have sunk by itself with al those people standing in spot...
The point is, if you choose the statistics that you compare to carefully, you can make anything seem amazing. Compare hours spent playing solitaire to hours spent while brushing teeth, and suddenly he numbers don't seem so amazing anymore.
karma capped
If you assume a lifespan of 76 years than that programmer has robbed the world of the equivalent of 36 lives. Worse than Jeffery Dahmer.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
I think when you measure man-hours, you have to measure the quality of the person. The Empire State building was built by 7 million man-hours put in by some of American's finest citizens and workers. Men died building that building. And don't even get me started on the Apollo project. To compare the work that these men did quantitatively with the the work of millions of unproductive Windows-bound office drones wasting their employers money goofing off at work is a disrespect to the qualitative difference between these groups of people.
My grandfather worked on the Apollo project; granted his role was small, he helped to turn down the radio stations operating in Apollo 13's band when it was operating under power due to difficulty. But without even his minor contribution men could have died. To compare the work of brave men in the same tally as lazy overpriveleged goof-offs is a damned insult.
Sorry if I come of as irate; it's because I am.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
If Solitaire was not bundled any more with Windows:
Hours lost due to nervous breakdown by people not being able to relax and let off some steam using solitaire at work: 21.3 * 1 day * 3% ~ 5 million man-hours (60 floors of the Empire State Building?). Hours lost frantically searching the internet and trying to bypass the company firewall to get the darn game back: 21.2 * 2 = 42.4 million man-hours (2 Panama Canals). Damage provoqued by irrate postal workers deprived of their favorite game: 852285 * 0.001 * 20 years ~ 27 million man-hours (one more Panama Canal and an Empire State Building, we're starting to run out of Panama to dig new canals...).
As they say, 87.3% of all statistics are made up.
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
For contributing to the health problems of
millions of people in the United States of
America.
Here's the one I can't believe:
#30 Deer Hunter 364,000 unique users.
I'm going to give away the secret to winning right here:
1) Be sure to get at least three six-packs on the way to the stand. You can't win without them.
2) Make sure Bubba drinks more of them than you.
3) Piss into Bubba's box of ammo to prevent him from getting a deer.
4) Tell Bubba you're headed into town for more beer.
5) Drive on Rt. 17
6) Hit the deer that jumps out near mile marker 248.
7) Put the deer in the back of the truck.
8) Return home, leaving Bubba on the stand.
9) Victory!! You bagged more deer than Bubba!
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I've found Solitare a great way to introduce the idea of double click, single click, and drag for those who really don't know beans about this computer thing. That app was the moment of zen for my Mom, and I hear others with similar stories.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
It runs on more platforms than minesweeper, there are even forms of solitaire which run without an computer or any electric power !
Why should we even consider playing minesweeper ?
It's obviously much worse.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Hahah. This is certainly an amusing post. Send me an e-mail (n1tr0g3n=at=gmx.net) some time and I'll send you a screen shot of all the games I've got that came with my Linux distribution. You know what? I even have Solitaire, Freecell, and Minesweeper (probably two different versions of each, one for Gnome and one for KDE).
/. a little while back). My brother won't touch it because it doesn't have blood, and the interface isn't in 3D, but I'd take Uplink over Quake 2 any day.
Gaming is certainly an addiction. I recommend Uplink (posted here on
If anything, Linux comes with too much bundled software, causing it to load more slowly as the icons are drawn in the K menu (which is why I predominantly use Blackbox).
A solution to the problem with music today
Perhaps you have read The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition : Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks... The peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups means that such comparisons are amusing, at most. If it takes 1 boy 60 minutes to mow a lawn, does it take 60 boys 1 minute?
Now do the math for television. I imagine the average in the US is at least an hour a day of television viewing. Truly a waste.
-josh
Give me an NT server w/ 3D pinball in the backoffice anyday. That's the reason they put video drivers in kernel space you know.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You don't need the Apollo project. Why, you can get five or six kick-ass spaceships from Galaga alone!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Perhaps there is a question to ask: What was it people were doing that they had that kind of time to play solitary?
Cumulative hours waited for internet to download this year
I was just using mapquest and it seems that IE wants to download everything, even what you have already downloaded once.
Geee, I suppose I do have time to play solitary.
If mind-numbing games like Solitaire, FreeCell, and Minesweeper are all that's keeping Linux off the desktop of millions of users, why doesn't KDE and Gnome just start including a quick link to Entertainment -> FreeCell, Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Pinball on thier desktop systems too?! Forget about office productivity suites, set us up the minesweeper! ;)
No mention of Q3A???
Actually, quite lacking in FPS's...
The real scourge of productivity has once again been left out. Billions of man-hours are lost each month in the US alone. A company with ten employees is losing, on average, over 1000 man-hours per month. That is over 40 Man-days!
Please, let's eliminate this awful practice of "sleeping." Those 6 hours a day should be spent working!
rooooar
junk@brc2.com
I saw this:
:(
37 HALF-LIFE
BLASPHEMY!! How is Half-Life after games like:
11 ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON
12 STARCRAFT
13 GOLF
14 ULTIMATE YAHTZEE
15 AGE OF EMPIRES
16 DIABLO II
17 COMMAND & CONQUER: TIBERIAN SUN
18 MAH JONGG FOR WINDOWS
I can see starcraft, but Tiberian Sun?? That game is aweful. Where do they get their data from? Online play? I though CS by itself had everyone else beat. Oh well
-Bucky
I mean, seriously. A Beowulf cluster of solitaire players is not going to build the next Big Blue.
OTOH, maybe they'll give us the Ultimate Question...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
>>doctor-what-about-my-gamboling-addiction
>And your lack of grammar skills.
The grammar is correct:gambol (g m b l)
intr.v. gamboled, or gambolled gamboling, or gambolling gambols or gambols
To leap about playfully; frolic.
In short, "doctor-what-about-my-game-playing-addiction." It said exactly what it was meant to say. Don't blame them because you missed the clever play on the traditional phrase.
It's kinda ironic that the subject of the post is "All work and no play...". If anyone remembers the end of that saying, its "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". In other words, people need some time to play, or else they become dull. The funny thing is, the poster rambles on about how much more could have been done for the world if people didn't play. But would the world be worth living in if everyone was dull?
IF people could be just ALITTLE more serious, perhaps we wouldnt be having economy trouble, terrorist attacks, problems with virii, hackers, worms.
Instead of using your computer to play stupid games, use your computer to do stuff thats important and play a game no more than a half hour to an hour per week.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
* watching TV
* masturbating
* sitting around thinking of ways to avoid doing something
* bowling
* watching bowling on TV
* reading Danielle Steel novels
ad nauseum...
People will "waste time" because humans can't work 24/7. We're primates, for Chrissakes.. have you ever seen primates in a zoo? "Wasting time" is all they do!
Video games are just a way of wasting the same amount of time in a different way.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Now what we need is some game that provides a playable veneer over an actual problem that benefits from human judgement. Kind of like Seti@Home benefits from all the idle computer power out there. Humans are capable of inuition and pattern discrimination that computers are not, and a game would be an excellent way to apply massive amounts of distributed human analysis to an appropriate problem.
Has anyone got an appropriate problem? I'm thinking that somewhere in the vast field of genetics there's got to be some problem that humans can work on better than computers, next step is to turn it into a game and getting it bundled with your favorite (or least favorite ;>) operating system...
That's why humanity won't build no more major wonders anymore. We'll spend our lives playing games.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Though those statistics may seem somewhat intriguing, one must remember that in actuality it is highly unlikely that the people playing solitaire would rather spend their time building a large building or monumental structure.
This is not off-topic. Just listen and understand.
In general, computer gaming in the adult realm is the result of hours of boredom (Unlike teenagers/kids/some young adults who simply play the games as a hobby or a past time). And this boredom is usually a result of not having something to do at a job, or perhaps at home. People who spend hours playing solitaire generally wouldn't take it upon themselves to work on an Empire State Building or a Panama Canal.
Let's see this article for what it really is: "Lot's of people who have a lot of time on their hands spend hours achieving nothing." Or less cynically: "People, unaided by their jobs, find other routes to circumvent boredom."
I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't taken advantage of the popularity of Solitaire to inflate the number of Passport users by requiring players to get a Passport account :)
"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania or teria." - H. Simpson
First off, those stats are pretty amazing.
But comparing man-hours wasted playing Solitaire to the man-hours required to complete large construction projects is not really a valid comparison. In the realm of software engineering, anyway, Brooks tells us in The Mythical Man-Month that men and months (or men and hours) are not interchangeable. So although it's easy for 23.1 million people to waste their time independently, in parallel, it would require tremendous overhead to get them to work together on anything constructive. Of course you can't build an Empire State Building in 9 days if you just get 23.1 million people to work on it.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
While its not pre-installed, for years it was the first shareware Mac users would come in contact with - Klondike! The mac equivilant of solitare for windows. I believe MS may have even copied Klondike, as it was originally created on a Mac Lisa in 1984.
Anyways, this past week I discovered that not only has Klondike been ported to Mac OS X, but that it still runs on a Mac Plus with System 6! Thats right, the same binary can be run on a Motorola 68000 processor running an operating system without multitasking (unless you count MultiFinder) AND run on a machine with a total of 1.6 gigaherts with a fuly modern operating system, including protected memory.
Perhaps some day my mom will be ready to switch to Mac OS X.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
My downloaded version of Mandrake 8.1 came with 30+ games installed by default. They include minesweeper, about 15 arcade games, KPatience (solitaire), XPat2 (which has 16 card games in it, including Freecell), and a handful of puzzle games. And to clarify, Freecell was not invented by Microsoft, it's been around 20 years.
Games are not the deciding factor in Linux's sucess in the Desktop market. The thing that keeps Linux off most people's desktop is that it's not ready for many of them, and they're scared of it. Regardless of the leaps in terms of usability in the past couple years, Windows is still much easier to use. I love to use Linux and avoid a Windows machine whenever possible, but I don't expect a large % of my friends or my parents to be able to use it at this point.
Hoyle should be suing Microsoft for a virtual monopoly on the card game Solitare! How can other card game software publishers compete with Microsoft when Microsoft bundles their Solitare game with every copy of the operating system!
Someone should report Microsoft to the Department of Justice immediately!
Often numbers and stats deceive as they don't tell the whole story. You are comparing building empire state bldg and panama canal which is like comparing oranges to apples. People play solitaire for fun as a relaxation not to earn some money or satisfy intellectual thirst. So it might actually would have increased the productivity (we don't know). If you comapre this, then you have compare hours wasted in sleeping, eating and in rest rooms.
If only people find some way to eliminate rest room time, we can build hundereds of empire state bldgs but the world would be stinking.....
pc
Though I'm anything but clever, I can write like that for ever. --Tom holt
Becuase it is the only damn application thaat is stable and does not crash the system
for supporting one of the top Windows applications, and especially allowing me to minimize without the evidence showing up on the task window.
If I was a publisher, theres no way in hell I'd take this "data" without the methodology to give it a proper window.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I was enjoying the stupid, makey-no-sense numbers. 99% of the people reading slashdot are quite aware the numbers are meaningless, and the other 5% are just stupid.
If we could apply something similar to the game of Solitaire, there could be millions to be made! After all, Solitaire is just a sorting problem.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So if everybody gave up the time that they spent showering, that could easily be like... well let's see:
Let's assume roughly 170 million people in the US who aren't too old or too young to be useful. Then let's assume they each shower for roughly 15 minutes a day on average. That is 42.5 million man hours per day spent showering. At that rate:
Emprie State Building: Under 4 hours
Panama Canal: Half a day
Apollo project: 36 days
So the empire state building and panama canal are easy. The apollo project is doable, but I doubt anybody would want to fly on it. Man would that thing smell bad.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Buildings also generally require a union. Imagine how powerful a union of Solitaire players would be? It would rule the world!
They make a big deal about all the many new users users of Ultimate Yahtzee and Boggle pretty high on the list of most popular games...Maybe it has something to do with that they were free with General Mills cereals for a while.
-Al-
You just think that yur playing Solitare. It is actually a giant distrbuted computing project. With that many hours complete, my estimate is that they are about 1/8 of the way to finding the question to 42.
Moderators, do your thing!
Which of course sounds completely unrealistic, but hey, IBM just made a Quantum Computer, right?
Did anyone else notice the bad math here-
24e6 man hours ~ 2740 man years for solitaire, but for the Appolo project
15.5e9 man hours ~ 52 man years.
hmmm..
"Assurons-nous bien du fait, avant de nous inquiter de la cause."- Fontenelle
"Assurons-nous bien du fait, avant de nous inquiter de la cause."- Fontenelle
15.5 billion man-hours for the Apollo project?
Let's see, if one man-year is 2000 hours, then we need 7,750,000 man-years of work. Assuming that 50,000 people worked on the project, it would take them 155 years to complete. Wait a minute, it couldn't possibly have taken more than 20 years to do the Apollo project, since NASA had only been around for a little while. So how many people would that be...387,500 people. Which was most of Houston back then. Can these numbers be for real? Or perhaps this is like AT&T saying that a publicly available 911 document is worth a couple million...
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
> A little math tells us that americans spent about 24 million man-hours .. That corresponds to about 1 million man-days, or around 2740 man-years!
> Panama Canal: 20 million man-hours (a mere 26 days of Solitaire), Apollo project: 15.5 billion man-hours (or a mere 52 years of Solitaire) Think about it!"
Yes, please think about it. The comparisons are way off.
http://www.austega.com/diversions/FreeCell/freecel l.htm
If you post it, they will read.
As noted time and time again by those opposed to game violence, just a casual glance reveals that the Most Popular games are also the Most Violent.
For example, just take a look at number 21 : HOYLE SOLITAIRE. HOYT SOLITAIRE has been comdemned by numerous game anti-violence activism groups, including The Lion and Lamb Project.
How many more children need to die before HOYT and other violent-game makers stand up and becomes accountable? How many more people will buy (and I'm getting ill at the thought of it) ... _Guns_, for 'self-protection' and 'hunting', before congress will take action against these code-writing purveyors of death?
As a bible-thumping christian, I am reviled by the thought of these violent games and guns, especially remembering the death of our savior, Jesus Christ, at the hands of Doom-playing gun-wielding members of the pharisees. Evil is no older than videogames and guns. Write to your congressman now! Stop the corruption of our children!
(and since I typically get mod'd down at least once before someone realizes my sarcasm, yes, this is sarcastic.)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Take these figures with an extremely large grain of salt. One of my English Profs maintains a webpagepage about Jupiter and their "research." Lots of links to other stuff on Jupiter too. They have a long and sordid history. At long last, Cosmic Banditos has been reprinted! Signed copies available Cheap.
and IF I get nine women pregnant, I'll have a baby in a month!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Minesweeper as a game is great. The mathematical properties of it are intriguing.
I have a lot of fun with it on Linux as well...
Solitaire is a waste of time.
Hey, women can play Solitaire just as well as a man:
s/man-(\w*)/person-$1/gi;
[Personhole] is not an acceptable de-sexed word.
* Shirley Dean, explaining why the wording in a sewer equipment request was changed back to manhole cover
A friend of mine (A girl who can do expert on windows in under 80s consistently!!!) found the following bug... can you spot the error?
minesweeper-error.gif
Trust Micrsoft to fuck up something as simple as Minesweeper.
...have occurred to others.
;P
I swear to God, if I hear another person mention the "mythical man month," I'm going to pull my hair out... one strand at a time.
If I had mod points right now, it'd be -1 Redudant, across the board, reverse-chronologically
If someone is playing solitaire, they obviously aren't doing work or using the cpu heavily - so why not build-in a distributed computing client to perform work on a cure for cancer or some such in the background of these games?
http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html
man is machine
Go Crazy
....Don't mind if i do!
"Gravity cannot be held accountable for people falling in love." -Einstein
Solitaire was number one, with 21.3 million users.
how do they know that?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I found it interesting that the #1 non-bundled game(Not installed with an OS of any kind) is The Simms....
wouldn't this equate to more time spent on sex...?
Now if only there were banner ads at the top of every solitare game, you'd make at least a good $10/year in click-throughs!
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Interesting Note on the Panama Canal
Started in 1880
Finished in 1914
34 years!
Estimated that 80,000 persons took part and that 30,000 lives where lost in the construction.
If only 12 hours of work was done per day (it was much much higher but...) then in that 34 years there was 11913600000 hours of work.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
...when they put Internet enabled games on the Start menu? IIRC, those games connect you to the Zone, and IIRC the Zone now requires Passport.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
What one needs to do, to motivate people into education, is write a virus using the standard Virus protocal distrobution methods (Outlook) which does the whole self spreading thing. You know, the same ole' shit, different package.
Except with this one you have it delete solitare....hell you could have it delete the SHORTCUT to the exe and it would cause people to stop and realize what the hell is going on.
"Oh no, I can't play solitare any more because of the virus!"
Computational Madness in a round package.
...I pass through the Bali airport in Dempasar on a semi-regular basis and all the little over priced duty free shops run the same POS cash registars, which use windows as the underlying operating system. Anyway, the clerks have figured out how to play Solitare from their cash register keyboard and it's not at all uncommon to walk through the Bali airport and see every last clerk playing solitare... Since there are about 50 shops with store fronts spaced every 5 meters, it's very sureal and a good general commentary on the Human Race(tm) in general.
Didn't say whether they spent more time at Solitaire or at rebooting after a BSOD, or reinstalling their software.
Maybe if the BSOD was made to resemble Solitaire, it'd be less threatening?
Myst does not improve critical thinking skills.
The only critical thought one needs when playing Myst is 'where is the off button?'
all good tweakers maybe ;)
though i have coded for 30 hours straight before, i would not recommend it.
All of "us" with the skills and abilities to (right now) do those things correctly and efficiently [and not have "you" get in our way and mess up our work] could create, build, harvest, plant, whatever in a fraction of the time it currently takes to do those tasks.
But then when talking of the rate of efficiency the poster was probably talking in the "everyone" sense as "we". Though I know my personal efficiency can get F'd pretty badly by a couple bad interjects from a crappy supervisor.
Of course the Best People To Do The Work fluxuates over time. However if "doing a good job" qualification means you'll be attached semi-permanently to a task, few people would probably stand up and say "Yup, I'll devote the next X years of my life to doing the same thing because I do it a thousand times better than anyone near me."
Which brings up another point from the original reply said "Why shouldn't *we* reap some of those benefits? Because *you* would have prevented us from doing so?"
Too many cooks spoil the pot. Er, dinner? Production?
I routinely build many major wonders (and now minor wonders with Civ3). Not a week goes by where I don't build the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, the Sistine Chapel, the Manhattan Project etc.
You just have to know which games to play.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Claiming that Minesweeper is NP-complete would only help to support the claim that you would never have to guess, seeing as all NP problems are Turing decidable.
Secondly, didn't really molest or rape anyone (at least not that I can remember). AFAIK, the only non-consensual sex he had was with people he'd already killed (he had a bit of a death fetish). Generally, the routine was: pick up a guy, maybe have sex with him (or not), kill him, maybe have sex with him (or not), put in freezer, maybe eat parts of him (or not). Calling him a molestor or rapist is a bit unfair, really; he was really just more of a serial murderer.
Finally, what on earth is wrong with sodomy?!
I use REAL poo for what you others use your substandard Sham-poo. I eat is as well. My supply is unfortunately always very low, thanks to my ever-increasing appreciation for my wonderful turds.
And that's where YOU come in! If you have any spare turds for me to eat, bathe in or have intercourse with, please, please contact me.
And just think about how much time an average american spends in front of a television.
Humans don't care about productivity, but humanity does.
They're all just something to keep us feverishly busy until we die. And the whole time we don't notice that we're not doing anything worthwhile. If it doesn't involve eating, breathing, and breeding, it's a waste of time. One could argue that computer use that benefits medicine, farmers, and education are about the only real uses there are. (No, learning codes for games or downloading the latest wait-we-really-have-USB-working-this-time Linux kernel doesn't count as education.) Otherwise we're twiddling our fingers until... hey, they caught me, too!
I wonder what game (cough cough) that this woman is refering to? Computer Games Are Addictive
Will Malda ever learn to write English?
and that whole distributed.net fiasco down there? I bet the defense could use this solitaire thing to better their case - how many man-hours (or more importantly, computer-hours) are spent playing solitaire (+etc.) on university-owned computers?
Something to think about, anyway...
This bug is easily reproduced. Hold down the middle button (left+right doesn't work, if you have a 2-button mouse) to depress an area of squares and click the left button. The squares stay depressed.
Mind you, I'm using the Win2k version, and haven't tested this with other versions. The Win2k version also has a "feature" which I would call a bug: pressing Esc stops the clock but lets you play on, allowing you to fake any time you want! The help file describes a more complicated series of actions to do this, but pressing Esc is in fact sufficient. What drugs were M$ on when they implemented this??
Playing games stuns the frontal lobe...which leads to aggression.
Is there any service or program that will let me set the maximum activation of solitaire and freecell to 5 times per day? My dad spends way too much time using these useless programs when I could be coding.
I do not currently know if Win2k allows what I'm talking about, but limiting usage would be a plus and should be a feature of Windows
"Wireless : LAN
I hope that at least you thought this meant something useful.
And people in prison waste their time by playing solitaire. ;-)
(And they're doing it without the aid of the computer. Imagine if all those users playing Solitaire actually used real cards and played the same number of games in a session... Gosh, we'd be way past a million man-hours!)
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
As we all know, though (or those of us with even a few years of compatibility theory), all problems decidable by a non-deterministic Turing machine can be solved by a deterministic Turing machine, albeit very inefficiently (usually in exponential time). Thus, the Minesweeper problem is decidable by a deterministic Turing machine (it's trivial to come with an O(e^n) solution, in fact). The fact that it *is* decidable by a deterministic Turing machine proves undoubtedly that you will never *have* to guess (though if you happen to be a good guesser, you would want to guess in order to speed things up a bit).
BTW, usually I wouldn't use such an offensive tone. IMHO, however, anyone who uses the non-word "bzzt" deserves death (seriously). Consider yourself fortunate.
First of all, "playing games" can't be categorized as doing anything, since there are too many types of games out there to consider. Does scrabble lead to aggression? I'd say probably not. What about Risk? There you're getting into a war-oriented game, however there is no direct violence.
That leads me to Doom/Quake/etc. Those games are full of violence, blood, killing, etc., however the problem that might occur with children playing these games is when/if they have no ability to distinguish between what is "fake" (the games), and reality.
There's another factor, and that's called predisposition. The "trenchcoat mafia" incident in Colombine brought up the issue of the music that they were listening to. People made the connection that the music had an effect on them, when in fact it is just the reverse. People who are predisposed to commit violent acts like that probably listen to the music because it contains violence.
Aggression is a trait that has many, many causes. Much research has been done, but it just boils down to an individuals ability to deal with life and certain situations. I know people who were beaten by parents as children. Some of them are agressive, and some of them are not. The ones that aren't, have successful lives, loving families, etc., because they were able to deal with their childhood tradegies.
Next time, do a little research before making such a vague, incorrect comment.
And they said zombies weren't real!