Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours

The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time." Also, Google made the doodle permanent.

Comments

Yum, numbers are tasty

[masterwit]

Well it seems I skewed the statistic quite a bit..
Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?
Begs the question doesn't it?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Anonymous Coward]

start the game on the penultimate level, level 255 - so yo can experience your own kill screen

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[WrongSizeGlass]

These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work? I wasn't ... I guess I'm the only person who uses Google for non-work purposes? They really aught to try to break into the "home users who use search engine" market, who knows, they may be able to significantly expand their user base.

They're assuming 36 extra seconds per visit, too. If you "count to 11" like they suggest, counting to 47 will demonstrate that they're guestimating far too much time was spent on GoogleMan.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[PRMan]

I was on vacation also, and all 4 family members tried it.

How many kids played this?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Grishnakh]

These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work?

That's irrelevant if you're a salaried worker. Instead of playing Google Pac-Man at home, you could have spent that extra time at work getting work done for your employer. Wasting your time playing a game like that is like stealing from your employer!

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[dilvish_the_damned]

also you would need to assume these people were really going to do something worthwhile had they not been playing google pac-man.
Thats a big assumption, multiplied by 4.8 million.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested, please PM me.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Zephyr14z]

It doesn't beg the question. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[stonewallred]

how about the assumption of 25 bucks an hour for every user. I was not working when I played it, so there has to be some other dude getting paid 50 bucks an hour while playing to make up for that.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[marcansoft]

That's 36 extra seconds for the whole day, not per visit. That's about a 25% increase.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Anonymous Coward]

btq get it right

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been trolled. Relax.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Samah]

Begs the question doesn't it?

No, it doesn't!
http://begthequestion.info/

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[masterwit]

In order to stop wasting time :
Premise1: This discussion is wasting time by talking about wasting time.
Premise2: In order to stop wasting time one should discuss ways to stop wasting time.
Conclusion: Since we are wasting time, and we need to stop wasting time, by Premise2, lets waste more time talking about how not to waste this time. Since we are talking about wasting more time, this conversation is wasting time. (Premise1) We want to waste less time, so see In order to stop wasting time.
--
When you are finished parsing that argument, we will continue. Ah never-mind, I'm not in a recursive argument mood anyway :)

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Nazlfrag]

Yes because people are just like machines, you turn on at 9:00am and work until 5:30pm with a break for fuel. Spending thirty seconds distracted from your labour wil cost the company a QUARTER OF A HUNDRED DOLLARS!!! and will in no way lower stress levels and contribute to a happier, more convivial and productive workforce, that's simply impossible.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[donny77]

I played it, but it was a vacation day! Honest!

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?

Nope. The ultimate question is how many hours do you need to ponder the answer to the question how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[ArsonSmith]

You want happy? Go home and buy a monkey!!

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[ashitaka]

Yes, doing something worthwhile like, say, posting on Slashdot?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[hey!]

Numbers tasty? Not until you sauce them with dimensions.

I prefer to think of "4.8 million person-hours of productivity wasted," as "4.8 million person-hours of delight created."

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[commodore64_love]

For some of us it also "cost" us a job, due to dickhead bosses that don't understand that playing Pac-Man while eating our lunch is acceptable.

Not that I'm speaking from personal experience.

Nope.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Grumbleduke]

So, some people* essentially made up a load of numbers to generate a catchy headline, throwing in some "back of the envelope" calculations to make it look real. That's never happened before...

But, oh look, it worked. Even the BBC bought the story and they generally try to be factually accurate. So, before long it will probably be included as an amusing anecdote in every story about loss-of-productivity-at-work, or the dangers-of-being-on-the-Internet and that sort of rubbish.

It is amazing how far one made-up number can go. How long before some company sues Google for loss of productivity? That could be fun to watch.

*not just anyone, people from a company that specialises in "Time Management, Productivity & Project Tracking software"... but no, they can't have any ulterior motive in exaggerating the "time lost" due to a website...

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You want happy? Go home and buy a monkey!!

Yeah, right. You'll end up very happy. Me? I'll stick with my cats.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[2short]

Yes, it does! Language means what people mean when they use it. A phrase first coined to mean one thing in one context but widely used to also mean another thing in a different context may also means that other thing. You may specify that threshold as you like, and "Begs the question" will be well beyond it, as it nearly always means what you say it doesn't.

  If you hear someone say, "begs the question" outside a philosophy seminar, they mean "raises the question" every time. If you use "begs the question" to mean "assumes its conclusion", everyone who hears you will misunderstand. In the extremely unlikely case that one of your listeners knows the original meaning, they will misunderstand, assume you are misusing it, and pedantically correct you. Which will waste the time of everyone in your philosophy seminar.

But really, words and phrases can have multiple meanings, and often first acquire them through misapplication. These two meanings are not in conflict, as they cannot apply in similar contexts. Only a declarative statement can properly raise a question, whereas only a deductive inference may properly depend upon the assumption of its conclusion. Are capable of parsing closely enough to distinguish the two or not? Complaining that "begs the question" has multiple meanings is not only trying to sweep back the tide, it is lazy pedantry.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Samah]

Okay, I'll give you that, as long as you don't try to make the same argument for "would of" and "would have". ;)

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[shiftless]

I think the real question is actually how much productivity was GAINED from employees taking a few minutes to zone out on some pac-man while the subconscious continues working on problems?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Sirfrummel]

Wow! PAC-MAN *and* replica jerseys! it's like Slashdot reads my mind of what I want while I read!

Competition

[natehoy]

Still pales in comparison to the average Slashdot Idle story...

Re:Competition

[Ethanol-fueled]

The title

Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours

is also misleading. At first I shook my head in disbelief that it took 4.8 million of Google's man-hours to code the Pac-Man.

A better title would have been 4.8M hours of productivity lost to Google PAC-MAN

/pedantry

Re:Competition

[Xtravar]

Yeah, I think most people would have been faffing off at work regardless of Pac-Man. Plenty of good Flash games!

Re:Competition

[XanC]

Not only that, "person-hours" is one of the stupidest phrases I've run across in a while.

Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!

Re:Competition

[natehoy]

While I don't disagree with the sentiment...

What the hell was wrong with "x hours of productivity" which came long before "man-hour"? Why do we even need a term that refers to gender at all?

Now get off my lawn. :)

Re:Competition

[clarkkent09]

I still think it's worth going an extra mile to please our politically correct and feminist colleagues. After all it's not like it takes much effort and it does help create a happier and more harmonious workplace. That's why I prefer using the term bitch-hours. I hope it catches on.

Re:Competition

[DragonWriter]

What the hell was wrong with "x hours of productivity" which came long before "man-hour"?

It fails simple dimensional analysis. N hours of operation of a facility employing M persons obviously is NM person-hours of work, not NM hours of work.

Re:Competition

[nofx_3]

The poster above you was making that point that "man" in man-hour DOESN'T refer to gender. Man in that context refers to human, as in our species.

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!

Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of evidence that small differences in wording can have a lot of impact. For example, if little children are asked to draw a picture of a "firefighter" they will be more likely to draw a female than if they are asked to draw a picture of a "fireman." So even if "man" can be used to mean person, subtle human irrationality still has an impact.

Re:Competition

[retchdog]

Maybe it should fail simple dimensional analysis because, hey, smashing people and hours together doesn't always generate productivity, unlike how force and distance always generate work.

It's more subtle, needs certain assumptions, and it's not at all clear what the scaling law should be. Kind of like how in some cases but not all, the effective distance travelled is proportional to the square root of time spent travelling.

Re:Competition

[XanC]

I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.

You are missing the point. Sometimes the kids draw an obviously female or obviously male individual. The ratio of that changes when one uses "firefighter" as opposed to "fireman." This occurs for a variety of similar examples (police officer v. policeman for example). So the use of the man ending substantially alters thinking about sex and gender at a very subtle level.

Re:Competition

[pookemon]

I agree - especially given that these "People" wasting "Person-Hours" are not playing "Pac-Person".

Pac-person - a gender neutral abstract object of a neutral colour moves around a maze not eating vegan dots (or stripes) while not antagonising the neutral "ghosts" (or any ethereal creature) who wish only to have lunch with Pac-person and not harm them in any way. Game does not include a "score" function as scores are considered "competitive" and detract from the non-judgmental attitude of the Pac-person game.

Re:Competition

[KeensMustard]

Pac-Man is a male.

Re:Competition

[twostix]

I've got an idea, how about you get the hell out of other peoples children's heads.

They'll draw whatever reality looks like to them, not what some creep wants to manipulate them into thinking to suit said creeps cult like political agenda / religion.

In boring old reality 90% of firefighters are men, ergo drawing firefighters as men is the rational thing for a child to do. If a child draws a female firefighter purely because of mental manipulation from adults they have been indoctrinated against reality and then we end up with more people like you....

Oh, I get it.

Re:Competition

[twostix]

You fall into the tired old trap of the left in thinking that children are mindless automatons that will do whatever adults program them to do.

I have three robust defiant boys with opposing personalities and beliefs that proves you wrong. If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it (who incidentally will more than likely also be a man, perhaps you could give us the gender neutral term for clown..or your argument is a bit of BS).

Children aren't computers to be manipulated to your own creepy ends of making them not see reality- that firemen are 90% men - into what you want them to see - that you wish fire fighters were equal parts men and women (not reality). Something that is of course never going to happen as there's simply not an equal number of physically strong females on planet (oops there's that reality thing again).

So what if they draw a firefighter as a man...90% of firefighters in the world ARE MEN and no, it's not because of the tired old "oppression/inequality" drek trotted out day in day out by academia, it's simply because of boring old physics: women don't have as much muscle as men.

No amount of manipulation of the language and childrens minds is ever going to change that. Also there was a time where if your political beliefs required messing with kids heads your beliefs were seen as evil.

Cheers
Twostix

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

Um, what? You seem to be claiming that it is manipulative to use the term "firefighter." If so, please explain how this is at all manipulative. The point is that subtle cues exist for making people think about sex and gender. This is an example where we can demonstrate such a cue in a controlled setting. Because you know, science likes to do that. There's no largescale manipulation here. Simply an observation that children are more gender neutral when they are not primed with gendered words.

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

No one is requiring anyone's political beliefs to mess with kids' minds. You are utterly missing the point and seem to be claiming that psychological studies are somehow evil if they use clever ways to see how children are primed by words. The point of this sort of study is that it shows that language use can have subtle impacts on how people think. In those studies, even when you change the wording, pictures of males are still much more likely to be drawn than females. The point that I am making, is that language use can impact how people think, even in subtle ways, so it makes sense to try to use language that distorts that as little as possible.

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people just have higher regard for personal anecdotes than actual statistics.

Re:Competition

[sonicmerlin]

Lol. You win the internets!

Re:Competition

[perryizgr8]

For example, if little children are asked to draw a picture of a "firefighter" they will be more likely to draw a female than if they are asked to draw a picture of a "fireman."

[citation needed]

Re:Competition

[houghi]

And a nurse would be drawn as a female. I am curious as to how old the kid is that you can see the difference in sex?

Re:Competition

[YourExperiment]

Not really, they only take half a second to delete from your RSS reader.

Re:Competition

[MoonBuggy]

Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human".

A little off topic, but do you have a link for that?

I was always under the impression that it meant 'male human', but past societal attitudes had allowed for the females to be referred to under the same collective term, as the males took precedence. I'd be interested to know if I was mistaken.

Re:Competition

[Gordonjcp]

If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it
... and will go on to explain that the clown *is* actually a fireman, but he's a clown as well and isn't on fireman duty today. Yeah, sounds a bit familiar.

Re:Competition

[VShael]

So the reason men get paid more is because man hours are worth more than woman hours.

Re:Competition

[chronosan]

Or you need to take Dumbo out of the DVD player and put in some good ol' Backdraft

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

it's simply because of boring old physics: women don't have as much muscle as men.

That's biology, not physics. Perhaps you should educate yourself on the difference between these two sciences.

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is requiring anyone's political beliefs to mess with kids' minds... The point that I am making, is that language use can impact how people think, even in subtle ways...

That's exactly the point he was making. Only his point goes on to say that it is wrong to subtly(sp?) manipulate how people think. That makes the manipulator... the thought police.

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

I don't have a citation for this study in particular, having heard about this in a cog sci class. Google searching doesn't turn it up directly (the signal to noise ratio for gender language issues is really poor since almost everyone just cases on ideological grounds). However, I can give citations for two other studies with similar results: The first is "Children's understanding of sexist language" Hyde, Janet S. Developmental Psychology. Vol 20(4), Jul 1984, 697-706. The second is "Automatic Stereotyping" Mahzarin R. Banaji and Curtis D. Hardin, 1996, Association for Psychological Science.

Re:Competition

[dumbunny]

This is a skewed study. If you ask kids to draw a picture of a fireman, some of them will end up drawing a picture of an erect penis, which you are probably counting as a male individual.

Re:Competition

[MoriT]

It referred to "human" when "human" meant "male human" because society was a patriarchy where women were considered the property of either their fathers, husbands or God. Women have since then acquired person-hood, the vote and the ability to work outside the home (thank you, industrial revolution!) Insisting on using archaic language will lead me, at least, to believe you're a chauvinistic asshole. Society has changed, language is changing with it: just live with it!

Re:Competition

[YttriumOxide]

Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human".

A little off topic, but do you have a link for that?

I was always under the impression that it meant 'male human', but past societal attitudes had allowed for the females to be referred to under the same collective term, as the males took precedence. I'd be interested to know if I was mistaken.

Etymologically, you're probably right in that most Germanic languages (of which English is one) seem to have this relationship between "man" (person) and "man" (male human) quite clearly. I can't see any reason for it other than the assumption that it comes from the belief that only males had any real "personhood" once upon a time. Some other indo-European languages outside of the Germanic group also seem to have it, but to a lesser extent (specifically the Celtic and Italic branches), but others (Balto-Slavic and Indic) don't appear to at all. This would lead me to believe it probably comes from around 100BC, sometime after the break-off of the Hellenic, Slavic, Indic, etc langauges, and after the beginnings of the separation of Italic and Germanic but before they were fully separated. It would've evolved in the Germanic side and influenced in to the Italic, leaving some traces there but most of the effects in Germanic.
As an example from a modern language: in German, the word for "man" (male human) is "Mann". The third-person gender neutral indeterminate is "man" (same as the usage of "one" in the English sentence, "One must do what one can to survive"). They're different words, and perceived differently, but there's little denying the close relationship between them (and for an additional note, the German word for "person" is "Mensch", which is also related).
You'll find similar things in most of the Germanic family including the Scandanavian languages, Dutch and even outliers like Frisian (which is pretty close to Old English compared to the rest of the family).

Despite all this, languages evolve, and meanings DO change no matter how much people (myself included) complain about it at times. "Man" definitely came to mean "people in general" at some point in the evolution of the English language. Indeed, even "men" in some cases (the statement "All men are created equal" definitely WAS intended to include females as well!)

Note: I am not a professional linguist, I just study the indo-European language families as a hobby (especially the Germanic branch), so I recommend you don't take any of my above opinions as anything other than just my opinion...

Re:Competition

[toooskies]

Pac-Man is just his last name. Thus "Ms. Pac-Man", not "Pac-Woman".

Re:Competition

[MoriT]

Well, in society we also assume that people are men and that women are special, different people. For example, at REI you can buy "sleeping bags" and then you can buy "women's sleeping bags". Swatch has "watches" and then there are "women's watches". It even influences what we consider appropriate behavior: women are rewarded for acting like men, whereas men are censored for acting like women, because women are acting like "people" and men are acting like "women". (citation: http://contexts.org/socimages/2010/05/24/male-as-the-neutral-default/ )

This was not always true; it used to be scandalous for women to wear pants, and "mankind" used to refer only to men. Now women can wear pants, and people argue that "mankind" is neutral, but men aren't allowed to wear dresses (citation: Barney Frank) and no one will accept that "womankind" is inclusive of men and women.

The same thing happens with other dynamics, too. The idea that "man" is an inclusive term is similar to the idea that a pale-skinned avatar is an inclusive default. It only works if you are willing to overlook the majority of people whom it does not resemble.

Re:Competition

[DragonWriter]

Maybe it should fail simple dimensional analysis because, hey, smashing people and hours together doesn't always generate productivity

First, that doesn't make sense: if it fails dimensional analysis, its a nonsense measure, not a "subtle" one that "needs certain assumptions".

Second, "Person-hours" isn't a unit of productivity, its a unit of labor.

$ (or some other value measure) is the usual unit of output, and $/person-hour (or $/person-year) is the usual unit of productivity.

Re:Competition

[Avalain]

Well, the whole point was that if you tell someone to draw a "something"-man, they will be more likely to draw a male than female. Perhaps "fireman" was a bad example. Mailman is maybe a better choice since it is a job performed much more often by women. In this case it makes sense to choose a name that is more politically correct. You know, like Personman.

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

No, all this shows is that kids have heard the term "firefighter" enough that they consider "man" specific.

If I go into a diner in certain parts of the South and order a Coke from the fridge, I'm likely to hear "what kind of Coke do you want? We have Pepsi, 7-Up, and Dr Pepper". "Coke" is a general term there. If everyone used "fireman" to refer to a person who fought fires, regardless of their gender, kids wouldn't make the same gender assumptions they now make about the word "fireman" since "firefighter" has been used.

Congratulations, you've managed to change the semantics of the labels. But there's zero evidence that you've accomplished anything of real value, such as whether a person is more likely to hire an equally capable female firefighter over a male for having been exposed to the new term (as opposed to being exposed to actual competent female firemen) . Every time I see Shapir-Whorf trotted out to justify PC replacement of one term for another, I never see anything but handwaving on this issue.

Besides, you picked an atrocious example. Gender bias in firefighters is a reflection of the fact that men have more lean muscle mass.

Re:Competition

[retchdog]

First, I gave you a counterexample in my post. I could give it away but I'd rather not. Suffice it to say, there are quite natural conditions (i.e. they are mathematically sound and model reality extremely well) where a measure on displacement and a measure of time are connected through a probability space. There was even an article on slashdot about it a few days ago... :)

Second, yes, that's my point. Productivity should be the actual desideratum for advancement and wealth generation. Labor is something else entirely; dependent on one's politics it can be viewed as an approximation of wealth-generation, or as a social ends in and of itself. an approximation of that, or a social ends.

Re:Competition

[XanC]

Thank you for telling me what you've been lead to believe. I'll tell you that somebody making an argument like that, or using words like "chairperson", "spokesperson", "person-hours", or "he/she", will lead me to believe that the speaker wets his bed every night fretting about supposed chauvinism.

Re:Competition

[WNight]

Because productivity was not lost, productive people weren't playing Pacman - pretty much by definition.

Now, how many net-Scrabble, WoW, facebook, etc hours were spent on Pacman instead - I'd guess somewhere over four million...

Re:Competition

[WNight]

You've chosen one word because you feel the other is manipulative and now you're dishonestly asking him to explain what he means when he suggests you're begin manipulative.

You obviously know what he means, but feel that your manipulation is justified because of the better world you feel it will produce.

He has a very valid point - more men than women are firefighters, not because of the term but because strength (until perhaps the near future) is important for the job. By choosing the less common but gender neutral term for this profession you are misleading girls(/everyone) to think that the job is as gender-neutral as doctoring, or retail sales, and manipulating them to feel that it should be.

It'd be nice if you were more up-front about your motives, or seemed to realize the means you'd justify.

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

That's stupid at multiple levels. There are a lot of jobs where there are differences in ratios of who has the jobs. But that doesn't mean we have to use language that absolutely reflects on those, especially as those can change from location or setting. This sort of study isn't a point about using specifically the word firefighter (and to think it is is borderline idiotic). The upshot is that these words do have subtle impact on how people think. That applies to many different settings. It simply happens to be that this sort of example is one that it is easy to test for. You can do the same thing with other words where there isn't nearly as much the same disparity in who has the professions and you get the same result. Focusing so much on firefighters is utterly missing the point.

Re:Competition

[IICV]

Makes sense - every person-hour of normal work generates at least one bitch-hour of whining, which has to be vented before it builds up to a critical mass with the help of friends, spouses, beer or Slashdot.

Left on its own, a bitch-hour generally has a half-life of thirty minutes; however, lack of proper venting leads to the breakdown of bitch-hours into heavy feelings, and is to be avoided.

So yeah boss, that's why I have to spend ten minutes posting on Slashdot every hour!

Re:Competition

[Reziac]

I know a woman who was a firefighter. When she got divorced, her ex used that in court to take the kids. He was a lousy father, she's a good mom, but that wasn't relevant, all that counted was that she was in a high-risk job. She had to give up her job to get her kids back, even part time.

Goes to show how this equality thing can bite you in the ass.

Re:Competition

[WNight]

No, the point was you dodging the label of manipulative. If you were honest you'd have said "Yes, but while my word choice is designed to manipulate someone I believe it is for the better." Or at least not flat-out denied it.

And firefighters was 50% of your examples, it's hardly cherry-picked.

You have a point - in general - about not using gender-specific words where they aren't warranted. But I didn't see anyone disagree with you over that. The disagreement was over the actual gender-neutrality of firefighting.

Where we're using a more accurate word, I'm all for this. For air-hosts the term steward is (I think) seen as gender neutral, and the job is easily doable by either gender, so it's needlessly confusing to say stewardess - it implies it can only be done by women. This is one we should try to correct. As does policeman, because police-work tends to be more social than physical - the gun provides the strength. Police officer is more accurate.

But as long as firefighting is a male dominated job, often by having requirements the average woman can't train to meet, and fireman is the more common term, it seems pointless and a bit incorrect to socially engineer a different term. Newspeak much?

I think it'd be best to give children an idea of which industries are dominated by which gender (and race, age group, etc) - not to imply that they should be that way, simply that they are. Perhaps even explicitly that they shouldn't, or at least needn't be. You'd want photos of firefighters in gear to give an example of why you literally can't do this at home. They'd obviously contain more men than women under the gear, and the reasons for the gender disparity would either be clear or could be discussed.

That way a young girl wanting to be a firefighter would know she'd need (and probably he too, in a world that had these) an exo-skeleton rig or other device that would overcome potentially fatal human limitations - much like SCBA are required now (and are much of the reason for the require to be able to carry so much). Perhaps she'd see the real money was in robotics and obsolete the entire thing...

I'm for updating language to reflect reality, not to obfuscate it. That you lump fireman with policeman suggested you felt otherwise.

Re:Competition

[stjobe]

man
noun, plural men, verb, manned, manning, interjection
–noun
1. an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or a woman.
2. a member of the species Homo sapiens or all the members of this species collectively, without regard to sex: prehistoric man.
3. the human individual as representing the species, without reference to sex; the human race; humankind: Man hopes for peace, but prepares for war.

(emphasis mine)

Hah!

[Space cowboy]

... don't be evil, indeed...

Simon.

Re:Hah!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I can't believe they're discriminating against ghosts like that. I mean, they were people, too!

What about the 10% unemployment?

[chrisj_0]

I have a job and I played about 30sec before I got bored and surfed other sites aimlessly

Re:What about the 10% unemployment?

[binarylarry]

So you're saying pacman turns you on.

And it wasn't Mrs. Pacman.

It was Mr. Pacman.

Re:What about the 10% unemployment?

[gangien]

player 2 was ms. pacman.

Re:What about the 10% unemployment?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasted why more time than their reported average. I was not happy playing on the small java interface but it peaked my interest. My last laptop went back on lease about 2 months ago. I have a bunch of game roms on a truecrypt volume that I always copy from my old laptops to my new ones (easier to keep my personal stuff like resumes, games, pics etc with me as I get new hardware at work plus I dual boot and want secure access from Windows and Ubuntu). Since I had not yet installed Mame, a frontend or Truecrypt on my new laptop running Ubuntu. I spent about 30 minutes getting all of that going and then another 2 hours playing random roms including Pac-Man. In fact I played Punch-Out through mame today for about 30 minutes so I'm still wasting time because of Google's Pac Man stunt.

Re:What about the 10% unemployment?

[JackieBrown]

The average Google user get $25 an hour?

Wow. I feel so underpaid now.

Re:What about the 10% unemployment?

[Anonymous Coward]

The average Google user get $25 an hour?

Wow. I feel so underpaid now.

Oh dear... I consider myself to have a fairly "average" income (certainly FAR off from being rich, but hardly living in the gutter either). Let's do some quick maths...
I make 6000 euro a month before tax/insurance/etc, which comes out roughly to 3000 euro after tax where I live. That's paid 13 months in a year (standard system here), so it's 39000 a year after tax/insurance/etc. I get 30 days annual leave per year and there's 9 days of public holidays in the area I live in. Calling it 52 weekends in a year (for simplicity's sake), that means I work a total of 222 days (365-30-9-(52*2)). I work an average of 8 hours a day, so that's 1776 hours. 39000 euro, divided by 1776 hours = 22 euro an hour. 22 euro at current exchange rates is a bit over $26.

So, the average Google user making $25 an hour sounds pretty right to me (assuming they're talking after tax) and you probably ARE underpaid...

Slashdot manages that every day

[Qzukk]

You should be ashamed of yourselves for reading my post when you should be off curing cancer or saving orphans or something useful!

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[JWSmythe]

    Well, the fix for both is to kill them all. That's already been handled by the fine corporations around the world. It'll just take a little while for it to finish the job.

    Come on, if one company can single handedly set up to kill all life in the Gulf of Mexico with a single event, what'll happen when more of them have "accidents"?

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[antirelic]

Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution. Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that). Such simple minded focus strips the mind of creativity; creativity which has dramatically advanced and improved the human condition.

I am a hard core capitalist and stalwart industrialist, but I am also a pragmatist. Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources. I forget what the name of the study was, but it took three sports teams and show the level of performance improvements over a team that 1) vacationed for a week, thinking about the upcoming game, 2) team that unceasingly trained for the upcoming game, 3) team that sporadically trained for the upcoming game. turns out the vacationing team that spent some time visualizing the upcoming game, produced the greatest results, with the team that trained too hard had the smallest improvements.

Long story short, expecting factory worker performance from skilled workers, is as foolish as expecting a successful heart transplant surgery from a line backer.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying orphans aren't useful?

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[ArcadeNut]

I was doing the responsible thing by reading your post to make sure you hadn't already found the cure for cancer or saved the orphans. I don't want to duplicate work, now that would be wasteful!

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[timmarhy]

agree 100%. i'm having this exact arguement with my manager right now. i'm writing a justification for new pc's to run various high end applications, he's saying he'll only approve it if I convert the saved hours into dollars. i'm countering with examples of him not being willing to wait for the data or expecting rerun's of the calculations these application perform in unrealistic times frames, which he just ignores and goes right back to asking for dollars. I think my next gambit will be calculating the amount of time he spends waiting for our teams calculations to finish and multiplying it by his rediculously large hourly rate.

I've also had several idea's will idlely chatting with co workers over coffee that have turned into multimillion dollar idea's for the company, no wonder they supply us with premium java. pumping out code isn't the only value employee's provide....

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[izomiac]

Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that).

The human body just isn't built for it either. Hunter-gathers that were able to survive to the modern era (i.e. in infertile lands where agriculture isn't possible) only spent about 15 - 25 hours per week gathering food. That's what our ancestors did for probably 100,000 years, and a contributing factor to why life expectancy dropped with agriculture (~100 hours per week). Unsurprisingly, it turns out we're almost all deficient in Vitamin D (lack of sunlight), get sub-optimal sleep (ditto sunlight), and even if you go home and exercise like a maniac, sitting for 8 hours a day is still bad for your health. It wouldn't really surprise me if the average office worker's 40 hours per week is really only 20 hours of real work. (At least for the average worker, if you stress yourself out, do mindless work, or really love your job I could see doing more.)

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to cure cancer or save orphans. Neither is worthwhile or necessary.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[blackraven14250]

Not to their biological parents.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[antirelic]

I can speak for this. I know people who have saved their project over 100,000 dollars in hardware alone (not to mention the associated procurement costs) by networking with other IT people in the hyper-mega-global corporation. Simply put, his small project was beginning to blossom with a limited budget, and they needed a relative small SAN in order to expand. A friend he had made in another department was upgrading to a faster, larger SAN, and selling off the old SAN. Over a cup of coffee the two admins quickly figured out that the old SAN would work perfectly for their needs, and cost a fraction of buying a new, but similar SAN.

I'm sure many stories like this can be exchanged. As parent stated,

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Dirtside]

I'm incapable of curing cancer, and the only thing I do with orphans is sacrifice them to Cthulhu, so do you really want me to stop reading your post?

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[sonicmerlin]

Well then how do you explain the amount of studying graduate level or medical school students do every day?

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[KlausBreuer]

Depends.

Joe at Normal job certainly doesn't work for 8 hours straight over five days a week, obviously. Looking at some bureaucrazies, I wonder if they even work five minutes a week.
However, I come from the crazy world of Teaching Artificial Brains How To Think (yeah, also known as Computer Programming) and - if we're not disturbed - we can work for way over eight hours non-stop on an interesting project.

Has this never happened to you? A cow-orker says it's 11:30, inviting you to come along to lunch later. You nod, looking forward, and sink back into the code. Next time you look up it's because you feel a little tired - and it's 11:30 again, pm.

However, if we're disturbed by managers often enough (we all know that a 20 second interruption will cost you about 15 minutes to sink all the way back into work) we surely won't make 8 hours either...

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[timmarhy]

sorry but just, no. life expectancy did not drop because we learnt to farm our own food. I'd love to see some proof of that. hunter gathering might sound all romantic, but it's hard and dangerous, and your constantly at risk of starvation.

on a fundamental level most people are just lazy, and would rather do something other then work. can't say i blame them, i'd rather be drinking a beer on the beach while getting a topless massage from all the victora's secret models, but the real world isn't like that.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Anonymous Coward]

line backer

Considering the type of crowd that frequents this site, we do encourage you to let this one slide, despite your best (and utterly sincere) intentions. Parent surely must have hit the spacebar by mistake.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Anonymous Coward]

Having lived this myself, I know firsthand how foolish it is to expect sustained productivity from people working not just 8, but more like 12, hours a day, with a manager standing behind them with a whip^H^H^H^Hspreadsheet comparing their output to the best of their just-hired peers and beating on them for requiring a bit more time to do trivial but detailed process steps than a peer who hasn't done nearly 3 years of 75 hour weeks, largely consisting of the same trivial but very detailed clerical factory work.

My PMQ (PacMan Quantum) was several minutes. And I was delighted to see it two days in a row (or was that just one day, but I'd just picked a strange set of hours to sleep?).

By the way, best boss I ever had walked in on me when I was playing a game of Bejeweled as a way of stepping back from a problem for a few minutes, saw this, and noted, "Oh, nevermind, I'll be back in a few," and it wasn't with a letter of termination for me. Some people hit the loo as a break, wash their hands, check their teeth for the remains of lunch, etc. Some people do the tobacco thing under an awning outside. And some of us play casual or classic arcade games. Scientific studies show that our brain changes state multiple times an hour. I believe that we "know" when we are in our more productive, and less productive, states, and adjust our activities accordingly. And that we also know when the best way to solve a problem is to let our brain take a break for a while.

Just the other day, I was in a situation where I was asked for my opinion on something. I immediately knew that my opinion was not in favor, and I stated that, but added, "But I don't know exactly why, right now, I'm sure that that is the right answer. Can I get back to you tomorrow with my rationale?". I slept on it and literally woke up (as in, before my feet hit the floor) knowing what the issue was with going forward with what had been proposed. At 10pm, after a long day working on various IT/programming stuff, my brain was full and things weren't connecting. 8am the next morning, I was fresh again and just "knew" the answer that had escaped me 10 hours earlier.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[dzfoo]

They make good soup!

        -dZ.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[mpeskett]

The development of agriculture, in the short term, meant large numbers of people living in a relatively small permanent settlement (as compared to living sparsely spread and being able to move about a lot). The cramped conditions, poor sanitation, and living so close to domesticated animals, all made the first cities into giant petri dishes of disease.

In the long term it improved life expectancy, but not at first.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor are you.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[dkleinsc]

Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that). ... Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources.

See, the real kicker is that before unions developed real clout the most common factory work day was about 12 hours a day 6 days a week. Even the 8-hour shifts are a difficult if not grueling pace for factory workers, and overtime is frequently involved as well because it's currently cheaper to pay 2 workers to work 60 hours than 3 workers to work 40 hours. I'm getting the impression you're saying "8-12 hours non-stop is fine for those Deltas and Epsilons, but I'm a Beta and I can't handle it." Well, it turns out it's not fine for the Deltas and Epsilons, but because their other options are even worse they do their best to do the job.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[Shinobi]

They are also highly overrepresented in psychiatry wards, being treated for various stress-related disorders.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[izomiac]

Well, I happen to be the latter, and I browse Slashdot when I'm incapable of studying anymore in a sitting. The ability to do more is due to three reasons. First, graduate and medical students are not a random group, so generalizations might not apply. Second, a lot of people include time spend staring out the window in their study time, it's not really possible to study all-day everyday, albeit they probably aren't doing things they enjoy either. Third, medical/graduate students generally like what they're studying, and it's self-directed.

All that said, and as another poster pointed out, burnout and mental illness are tragically common.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[izomiac]

While child mortality is rather high for hunter-gatherers, adult life expectancy is 72 (Range: 68-78), although it obvious varies quite a bit. That figure shouldn't really surprise anyone, menopause is an adaptation so clearly a lot of women were living into their 60s and 70s. Accidental deaths are fairly common (20%), but infectious diseases are less common due to lowered exposure. Carbohydrate intake is also responsible for the timing of puberty. A farmer will go through puberty in their early teens, while someone who eats almost exclusively animal products will go through puberty closer to their twenties. So the cave-man living to age 30 is kind of a myth.

Now, an early farmer's life isn't as easy as you're portraying it. For one, relying on a small number of crops puts them at risk of crop failure and subsequent starvation. The limited number of crops also all-but ensures they have a vitamin deficiency in something (conversely, animal entrails have a complete set of vitamins & minerals, and hunter-gathers ate ~200 types of plants). Hunter-gathers didn't really suffer from food shortages like you describe. A human can kill basically anything with endurance hunting, and plants are abundant in most places.

Now, you're probably wondering why people would switch to farming at all. It turns out farming is the only way to get enough hops to brew beer in any significant quantities, so our ancestors were likely the drunks. (Which probably explains why we adapted to low beer consumption being optimal for life-expectancy, rather than drinking no alcohol at all.) The other advantage of farming is that it supports much larger (albeit less healthy) populations, and grants higher reproductive rates, so guess who got kicked out of the fertile lands... From there, the high population density worsened infectious diseases, so when a farmer happened to encounter a hunter-gatherer, and you can imagine what the hunter-gatherer took home.

Now I'm not saying that we should go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor do I advocate a paleolithic diet or similar. But I think it is important to understand that high population density comes at a great cost (which technology can reduce), and to separate fact from stereotype. Our ancestors were the farmers, so obviously they painted a rosy picture of agriculture and branded the hunter-gatherers as primitives living a harsh life. OTOH, there are competing theories where that view is supported, but realistically our species hunted and gathered easily ten times longer than we've had agriculture, so evolutionarily it makes more sense for us to be better adapted to that lifestyle. Ten thousand years allows for some adaptation to farming, but it's very far from complete.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[PingPongBoy]

Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution ... Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources

Or maybe something really is broken.

In the movies, you do see unrelenting brainy types that produce results like clockwork. The education system doesn't really help people live up to their heroes. Is this because teachers themselves lack the ability? Is it because breakneck learning tends to create more accidents than knowledge? Are students uninspired? Do people believe they are fighting the economic law of marginal returns, and therefore will never make a real difference? Are workers uninspired, by having their roles bounded while given access to technology with global reach?

These are easy questions to answer so it won't cost the economy too much for many of you to post your CORRECT responses.

Totally not evil

[Daetrin]

Sucking up $120 million of employee time is _totally_ not doing evil! (Well i don't think so as an employee anyways, the employers may disagree.)

Re:Totally not evil

[Dthief]

Tony Wright Says:

May 24, 2010 at 10:12 am

Just to be pre-emptive. No, we don’t REALLY think it’s tragic. Leisure surfing is critical to productivity (strangely enough). There are quite a few studies out there to back this up. We just thought it was interesting number-play!

It was probably time you would otherwise be using surfing /., so in the end net neutral

Pac Man

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/pacman/

In other words

[aztektum]

People spent 4.8 million hours enjoying life rather than slaving away for the man :P

Re:In other words

[ink]

The free market frowns upon enjoying life.

Re:In other words

[ink]

The free market can't exist without government regulations.

You earned your +1 Indignant mod though. Congrats! :-)

Re:In other words

[Darkness404]

Other than government regulations of force and fraud (which, count under the "harming others" I mentioned in my post) the free market can, and will exist.

Re:In other words

[CRCulver]

No it doesn't. The free market lets you enjoy life as much as you want it. Government regulated economies don't let you enjoy life.

Then why is the standard of living higher in certain states which distrust the market than in states which seek as free a market as possible?

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one way to look at it. Similarly, one evil-bent google employee can put a useless instruction that wastes a few milliseconds... to KILL someone---or rather, uses up an entire lifetime of aggregated milliseconds.

I'd imagine Microsoft and Apple already do this in their OS. That's why while computers are getting faster, their software isn't... it's mostly those disgruntled employees taking more and more human lives with their bloatware.

There's a whole lot of dead kittens and puppies in there too...

Re:In other words

[GlowinOrb]

I like slaving for the man. Where else can I get paid to play Pac-Man?

Re:In other words

[Darkness404]

Such as?

A lot of it is due to the government pushing for more control in other areas, or where irrationality has taken hold or because the government has taken upon themselves to print worthless money.

With hard currency, low regulation and a rational population you have a recipe for economic sustainability and wealth.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

The set of regulations is finite. The set of activities is infinite. Either regulations are prescriptive (defining everything you are allowed to do) or they are proscriptive (defining everything you are not allowed to do). The 10th amendment to the US Constitution makes clear that US regulations, at least, are proscriptive, and since the set of proscribed activities is necessarily finite, the set of permitted activities remains infinite, even though there are some activities which are not permitted. (OK, the actual set of possible activities is technically finite, but we're talking on the order of like 2^1000000 here, so forget about this nonsense of not being able to do something if there is any regulation!

Re:In other words

[pspahn]

Wait, isn't a fundamental of the free market that each individual does what is best for themselves, which in turn benefits society?

Mod parent -1 Jaded.

Re:In other words

[Darkness404]

The problem is things are banned that don't affect others. Things that don't affect others other than yourself should never be legislated or even put to a vote. If you don't like smoking pot, then don't. It doesn't matter if your neighbor does or not. Same with violent video games, porn, etc.

The problem is these laws that do not involve fraud and force are violating the sovereignty of the individual: to do whatever they want so long as it doesn't harm others. By definition, this is freedom without resorting to utopian, unsustainable ideas about having no laws whatsoever.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's fashionable to knock the markets but what other system has lead to the most happiness. It's hard to argue against the free market. Life was so happy under soviet communism? Feudalism? You have it so good and you can't even see it.

Re:In other words

[retchdog]

Now if we could only find two libertarians who agree on a coherent system or theory of what constitutes fraud...

Re:In other words

[retchdog]

and a rational population

well, fuck. any other ideas?

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, study your history.

Completely unregulated economies always become monopoly-dominated, inescapably resulting in:

1) High prices
2) Low quality
3) Low variety
4) No alternatives
5) Low pay
6) High unemployment
7) worker exploitation of every variety
8) dirty tactics of every variety to destroy any potential competition before it gets a foothold

I hate government intervention in my personal life (mostly restriction of civil liberties), but I recognize that without government intervention in business, a free market will always devolve to its own form of exploitave totalitarian government.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as?

A lot of it is due to the government pushing for more control in other areas, or where irrationality has taken hold or because the government has taken upon themselves to print worthless money.

With hard currency, low regulation and a rational population you have a recipe for economic sustainability and wealth.

China.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

and a rational population

well, fuck. any other ideas?

The problem of lack of rationality of people is not solved by state control, since that government is made up of those same irrational people.

If a population has a serious degree of irrationality it is a good cause to change the eduction system or content. It is not an argument for any particular financial or political system since no political system is ideal if it is badly run.

In addition, you can have rational actions which work towards irrational values. Some people desire drunkenness above financial stability, family, home, etc. That is considered irrational by most of us, but purchasing a bottle of whiskey at the cheaper of two outlets and drinking it is a rational action towards that goal. So people can be (justifiably) considered irrational, yet be rational actors from an economic perspective.

Re:In other words

[MindlessAutomata]

I've yet to see any human being thing of a coherent moral or political system. John Rawls should've been a comedian...

Re:In other words

[twostix]

Insane the mindless sound bites that go for +5 around here these days.

The "free market" is just two people exchanging one thing for another thing so of course it can exist outside of government regulation. Unless you're going to try and say it requires laws to compel people to trade. In which case I cite the last 20,000 years of human history.

The problem with the free market is that it's just that it's too rough and ready so some government regulation can smooth it out (or completely ruin it, or be used to kill competition or new entries as is often the case).

I think you mean government *protection* which is of course what governments were created for in the first place, not to *make* a free market as you confusingly infer, but to protect the people in it.

Re:In other words

[ink]

So, your hypothetical (utopian?) free market can't exist without the regulatory _protection_ of a government? Talk about mindless sound bites... Let me know when you found your perfect country where anarchy rules, and everyone sings in harmony with their side-arms at the ready.

Re:In other words

[wunderbus]

I was about to disagree with you, but Wikipedia tells me I'm confusing "free market" with "perfect market". A free market is defined by having no government regulation, while a perfect market has qualities that seem to necessitate regulation to prevent monopolies.

I guess I shouldn't use the phrase "free market" positively any more, since it's the exact opposite of what I want.

Re:In other words

[dangitman]

Chances are, unless it involves harming others, the free market will let you do it.

Why would a free market draw the line at harming people? If it was profitable to hunt people down and kill them for sport, a completely free market would allow that. Hell, that's why we have regulations - companies can and do harm people in the pursuit of profit unless they are punished or restricted from those harmful activities.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

What we like about capitalism is that it forces competition which means that, instead of companies doing the bare minimum so they can make a quick buck, they are forced to compete with better goods and services or go out of business. The only way that will continue to happen is if there are government regulations that protect consumers from anti-competitive behavior. The minute you let a group of companies start colluding with each other is when you get 10 different companies make the exact same shitty overpriced TV for the exact same overpriced price.

Re:In other words

[martin-boundary]

Unless you're going to try and say it requires laws to compel people to trade. In which case I cite the last 20,000 years of human history.

That's exactly what it means. Without enforcement of trading laws, all you get is people taking goods (and slaves) by force. It's really quite obvious you don't know any human history, let alone 20,000 years of it (hint: there aren't any recorded histories that you can cite that are anywhere near that old by about a factor of ten).

Re:In other words

[martin-boundary]

The problem with your principles is that they don't work in a world where resources are finite. They only make sense when resources are infinite.

When resources are finite, regulations are needed to share those resources. For example, when food is limited, one person's right to eat actually harms another person, since that other person will go hungry. Those who can impose their will by force (which is usually the state) get to decide who eats, and who doesn't.

Re:In other words

[SolitaryMan]

If government workers did play that PAC-MAN, then it was the most useful thing they did in a week.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

As an evil female CEO from I'm offended by that. "Slaving away for the person" is the phrase preferred nowadays.

Re:In other words

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

let alone 20,000 years of it (hint: there aren't any recorded histories that you can cite that are anywhere near that old by about a factor of ten).

From article cited oldest writing 5500 yrs ago. 20,000 divided by 10 equals 2,000. You fail math!

Re:In other words

[sorak]

What makes you happy? Chances are, unless it involves harming others, the free market will let you do it.

The free market doesn't care who you harm. It's government regulation that prohibits that.

Re:In other words

[SleazyRidr]

Does that writing say anything about the free market?

I think you may fail reading comprehension...

Re:In other words

[Cytotoxic]

Wrong.... we have strong evidence of trade going back well before the advent of written histories. Stone age societies were trading amongst each other. We know this not because of things that were written down, but because of the artifacts that they left behind. Stone implements that were manufactured hundreds of miles away, pottery that was manufactured in a different style from the local culture using materials not available locally, etc. Trade long predates government, laws, writing and recorded history.

A quick Google turned up a reference to trade routes in the east involving japan and Papua New Guinea trading in Obsidian tools and art over 20,000 years ago. This was established via radio-isotope dating and sourcing the quarry locations. They also cite references to trade on the Mediterranean and in the British isles in similar time frames. So maybe you don't know quite as much as you think you do about trade and human history.

Really, it doesn't take that much imagination or insight to understand that trade would pre-exist any organized political structure. Trade exists in non-human primate societies for crying out loud, so it definitely pre-exists anything of human creation.

Re:In other words

[ady1]

In other news, freedom cannot exist without slavery.

Excellent...

[Jhyrryl]

...and I really mean that. How many of those persons had never played that great game before? I don't consider educating people about modern culture "lost" productivity.

Re:Excellent...

[Stormwatch]

Honestly, I never thought the original Pac-Man was all that great... on the other hand, Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness was quite enjoyable.

Woulda wasted the time anyway -nt-

[Anonymous Coward]

Woulda wasted the time anyway -nt-

Ah yes, Rescue Time...

[yttrstein]

...monetizing bad math and improperly understood statistics since 2006.

Re:Ah yes, Rescue Time...

[BikeHelmet]

A little bit of down time boosts productivity!

Re:Ah yes, Rescue Time...

[carlzum]

That's true, you can't monetize person-hours unless you know the opportunity cost of that time. If those hours would have been spent watching TV, it's cost neutral (1 hour of leisure time either way.) Were executives and sales reps playing it work? That's a cost benefit. It saved the hours spent removing viruses and malware they would have downloaded surfing porn sites instead.

hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[_Sprocket_]

This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.

Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[DerekLyons]

This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.

And you know that to be a fact... how exactly?

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[Evtim]

I know it by simply being alive and working. The ones that do not play Pacman, browse the news. Or chat for a while next to the coffee machine. Or go out for a smoke. Go out for a minute of sunshine. Take a walk around the building. The list is endless.

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[Dthief]

Tony Wright Says:

May 24, 2010 at 10:12 am

Just to be pre-emptive. No, we don’t REALLY think it’s tragic. Leisure surfing is critical to productivity (strangely enough). There are quite a few studies out there to back this up. We just thought it was interesting number-play!

It was probably time you would otherwise be using surfing /., so in the end net neutral

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[DerekLyons]

Or, in other words, you made it up - but lack the wit to tell the difference between your assumptions and facts.

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[Dragoniz3r]

What are you? Some 16-year old who's never worked a job? If someone's willing to screw around at work and play PAC-MAN, they're sure as hell willing to chit-chat with a coworker for awhile.

To answer the inevitable question, yes, I do work a real job, at a real company, and no, I don't work 8 hours straight every day without looking up from my keyboard to talk to a coworker about the baseball game.

Probably true.

[exasperation]

But who cares? Sometimes you just have to stop being so serious and laugh a little.

Re:Probably true.

[dzfoo]

Are you laughing at Pac-Man?? You know, he doesn't like that.

      -dZ.

If your company is concerned with this...

[dmomo]

Ban the use of Google at work.

Because, I'm sure Google doesn't give back in terms of productivity.

But really. This is hard to quantify. Half of my dev team was looking under the hood to see how it worked. Directly lost productivity? Maybe, but I think over-all it netted positive for the team. I would argue that this sort of thing is good for productivity.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Darkness404]

Because, I'm sure Google doesn't give back in terms of productivity.

I'm sure it does. Just think about everything that would need to be looked up without Google. Want to know the currency conversion between US and Canadian dollars for an estimate? Need to know Pound to Kilogram conversions? Etc.

Google lets you make much more accurate decisions without wasting time.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, I think today I noticed them banning https: google... one minute it was working fine, then bang, https google just forwards to regular google... bam.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[twidarkling]

WOOSH.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everyone needs to just know that 2.2 pounds is 1 kg and 2.54 cm is 1 inch. Once people learn the basic conversions between imperial and metric units they will be able to understand values given to them in either system. Maybe this is just me showing bias from an Engineering background.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Darkness404]

Why would they need to though? The point is, the internet allows people to get information they need instantly. If you are an engineer, you need to convert things on a daily basis so of course those things are committed to memory, just like a historian might know that the First Battle of St. Albans took place on 22 May 1455. Everyone else though, could just Google the date.

All a human -really- needs to know is how to read/speak a popular language and critical thinking skills. The rest, in the 21st century will fall into place.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sarcasm detector is broken.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Grishnakh]

Quick, how many grams in an ounce, or how many mL in a fluid ounce?

I know the kg/pound and inch/cm conversions offhand, but I certainly don't have all the other ones memorized.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[dmomo]

Oh. I see what you did there.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking pacman, how does it work?

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[tecnico.hitos]

I think everyone needs to just know that 2.2 pounds is 1 kg and 2.54 cm is 1 inch.

Only a few countries still use imperial units. The others don't have to deal with such conversions most of the time. It is not realistic to expect most people will know this off the top of their heads.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Bertie]

Don't ever try to join my pub quiz team with that attitude...

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[McGruber]

Ban the use of Google at work.

"We already do!" - Steve Balmer

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[AthanasiusKircher]

All a human -really- needs to know is how to read/speak a popular language and critical thinking skills. The rest, in the 21st century will fall into place.

Yeah, except that true understanding generally comes from actually knowing something. Just because I can look up atomic facts in Google doesn't mean that I can actually understand anything about them, or know whether they're important, or even be able to detect whether someone is BS'ing.

I love Google and instant access to facts nowadays just as much as the next person. But I run into more and more people these days who read one or two articles or blogs on the internet and think they know everything there is to know about a topic or issue. This isn't a new trend -- it used to be the guy who read some magazine article, but while there was always junk in magazines as well, a lot of crap got filtered out by publishers. Stuff on the internet, on the other hand, can be insightful but can also be free-range idiocy. In particular, it's much easier for someone to come up with half a dozen sources that seem to support their crazy-ass theory of something, no matter what that preconceived theory is.

There's a reason why we should still pay attention to the engineer or the historian (in your examples) beyond the fact that they may have memorized certain facts they use every day -- "critical thinking skills" are great, but the ability to map them onto unfamiliar topics well is pretty rare, in my experience. Most people gradually develop specific critical thinking skills needed to do their profession over time, and part of that process is assimilating a lot of knowledge about that profession.

In essence, the reason to know something is because it means you've gone beyond the basic recitation of facts sorted by some vague "critical thinking" filter that doesn't understand the subject matter.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nasa didnt

Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

How much would the person-hour cost of all yawning last Friday buy of Google employees' time? This may be slightly clever advertising, but it's a waste of time as anything else. (Of course, they can help tell us how much time they managed to inspire people to waste.)

Who cares?

[MrEricSir]

It was on a Friday, it's not like anything gets done on Fridays anyway.

Re:Who cares?

[Dunbal]

It was on a Friday, it's not like anything gets done on Fridays anyway.

      You need to hang around my hospital's ER a little more on a Friday night. You will see that quite a lot gets done. I usually find myself wondering why people don't just stay home... there's never a rush during the football game.

Re:Who cares?

[beakerMeep]

Depends if you're wearing your optional Hawaiian shirt.

And Jeans.

Re:Who cares?

[Killjoy_NL]

Maybe the only good thing about football then :P

Humans are not engines

[Darkness404]

Humans are not engines. You can't just give us caffeine and sugar and expect us to work all that time. We require mental stimulation or else our work suffers.

What HR departments don't seem to understand is that we are not robots or programs. Put anyone and have them do a repetitive task, they will quickly get mental numbness and their productivity will suffer. Now take the person and give them some mental stimulation now and then and they won't make those errors.

If you want something that will turn out the same quality of work 24/7, get a robot or program. Humans aren't like that. And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.

Re:Humans are not engines

[bfree]

And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.

It says 4.8 million hours and $120 million. Not that I think there can be any real validity to their guesstimate, but they could well be closer then 25x out.

Re:Humans are not engines

[bug1]

"... but they could well be closer then 25x out."

And apples could well be closer than 25x better than oranges ?

The criticism isnt on the result of the measurement, its on the premise underlying it.

If the 4.8 million hours where all time that employee and worked themselves to exhaustion (mental or physical), then 4.8 million hours weren't lost, the workers had already given 100%.

Some employers in the IT field at least say to take a 5min break every hour to relax and help keep them fresh, thats not a wasted 5 minutes as it allows people to work more productively in the next hour or whatever.

It could well be that playing pacman booster productivity...

Re:Humans are not engines

[Charliemopps]

You could have made this post 2/3rds shorter and gotten the same affect. That's just not productive enough, so we're sorry but we're going to have to let you go.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Grishnakh]

Even worse, the HR departments are the biggest offenders at wasting time. Those people don't do anything productive all day. They just sit around talking to people, contracting for inane "training" courses about workplace harassment and other common-sense stuff, putting up roadblocks for hiring managers trying to find good employees, etc. Most companies would be better off if they eliminated HR departments altogether. W. Edwards Deming was a fan of this idea.

Re:Humans are not engines

[farble1670]

And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.

and applying this to you, you have been reading /. too long and are also making errors.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Anonymous Coward]

What HR departments don't seem to understand is that we are not robots or programs.

Oh, HR departments understand that very well. What HR departments believe is that if you show up, cap in hand, to beg for a job to pay for your pathetic little mortgage, then you can't be very important to start with, so treating you like a replaceable robot is ok.

And mostly this is true, as nearly all people will bend over and take it time and again.

But HR do not treat upper management like that.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Backward Z]

I agree 100% with everything you say here.

But I still think it's an interesting statistic. Can't say I care for the spin, though.

Re:Humans are not engines

[El_Oscuro]

I thought we were. We reliably convert coffee and donuts into Powerpoint slides and meetings.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Anonymous Coward]

My HR department removed all the water coolers because it cost them $4,000 per year. Now I have to walk an extra 3 minutes round trip to get water from the coffee maker. And so do the other thirty members of our team. We have to buy bottled water for our customers. Something tells me it is costing them a lot more than $4,000 per year now, considering we have potential customers and existing customers on site at least twice per week.

Re:Humans are not engines

[BJ_Covert_Action]

W. Edwards Deming was a fan of this idea.

I have no idea who that is, but his opinion must be important because he represents his first name as an initial.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Grishnakh]

Maybe you should try Wikipedia. He's the guy who invented statistical process control, and is largely responsible for Japan's economic boom after WWII.

From Wikipedia:

William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 - December 20, 1993) was an American statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant. Deming is widely credited with improving production in the United States during the Cold War, although he is perhaps best known for his work in Japan. There, from 1950 onward he taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods.

Deming made a significant contribution to Japan's later reputation for innovative high-quality products and its economic power. He is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. Despite being considered something of a hero in Japan, he was only just beginning to win widespread recognition in the U.S. at the time of his death.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Anonymous Coward]

W. Edwards Deming was a fan of this idea.

His was a wheely good idea.
I'll get my coat.

Re:Humans are not engines

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Well yeah, I could have, but I was more interested in making a joke than actually learning about the man you mentioned. I have no doubt in my mind that he was a very intelligent/capable man. However, giving myself something to laugh about had more bearing on my life than learning about him did at the time I made the joke. I figured someone else might get a snicker at my terrible attempts at humor too. Then again, maybe not. /shrug

Wasted?

[SilverHatHacker]

Time that isn't spent productively is not necessarily wasted.

cost calculation?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so I'm just a really dumb C programmer, but I'm having a hard time parsing "cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate" and coming up with a value of $25/hr for any value of "pay rate". And I've wasted more time on this than I did futzing with Google's PacMan...

Re:cost calculation?

[Hatta]

c=1.3-2.0*r
c-1.3=-2.0*r
(c-1.3)/-2.0=r
c=25
(25-1.3)/-2.0=r
-11.85=r

They pay $11.85 per hour to work at google.

To be serious though, I suspect they meant "1.3-2.0" to be a range.

Re:cost calculation?

[kalidasa]

(1.3*R)C(2.0*R), where C = O(25*h)

60 seconds

[imerso]

I spent 60 seconds on that, good to know that I contributed so much!

Nonsense figure

[JustNiz]

There's all sorts of incorrect presumptions by the original article author, like all the time spent playing Google pac-man was necessarily at work. Like nobody is playing it in their own time.

Another one is that people would do work if it wasn't for pac-man. Hell I'd just find a different distraction to avoid work if the pac-man game wasn't around.

Re:Nonsense figure

[scamper_22]

Indeed, I simply cannot believe how much of lag there is in human resource and management education.

Yes, we came from an industrial age where if you were play pacman, taking a piss, chatting in the coffee room.... then you weren't screwing the bolts on the car or sewing tshirts.
You were definitely losing productivity.

Yet, when it comes to 'thinking' jobs, there is little to measure in terms of productivity. Most of what you pay for is the person being in the job, knowing the environment...
I'm not programming 8 hours a day I tell you that. There really isn't that much programming to do.

But suppose I left ... how many man hour would it take for them to find someone, train someone on the system to work on... to learn all the code... to know what to change...

How do you measure productivity, work done...
The business management sector needs completely new metrics.

I play the game too. I'll slow down my work. File 2 bugs instead of fixing it right in 1. This way it shows I'm working on bugs and fixing them or doing new features....

Re:Nonsense figure

[mjwalshe]

and wtf is some shill peice for one of thease monitoring companies doing on slashdot!

Wait...

[Foozy]

it was PLAYABLE?? Oh Damn!

Re:Wait...

[gnud]

http://www.google.com/pacman

Re:Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

still is in http://www.google.com/pacman/ ;)

What about urination?

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

How much did people urinating cost?

Re:What about urination?

[Mr 44]

Well, the folks at http://www.workpoop.com/ will calculate how much your company pays you to poop

Re:What about urination?

[bmo]

How long before toilets are installed at workstations?

All time not doing work is wasted time, don'tchaknow.

--
BMO

Re:What about urination?

[thegarbz]

Yes but what is the result of not playing Pacman, vs the result of not going to the toilet? Death by exploded bladder is a painful way to go, not to mention it would register as a workplace injury.

Re:What about urination?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much did people urinating cost?

I'd say it cost R Kelly a great deal.

Re:What about urination?

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> How much did people urinating cost?

That's just money pissed away.

Re:What about urination?

[Dirtside]

I think we might want to pay more attention to how much not urinating will cost...

Re:What about urination?

[syousef]

How much did people urinating cost?

In general or just on this story?

Political Correctness

[Anonymous Coward]

Google PAC-PERSON Cost 4.8M Man-Hours.

What about "Lost"?

[Namarrgon]

How much of our collective lives did that piss away?

BREAKING NEWS!!!! MICROSOFT FIGHT BACK...

[Anonymous Coward]

BREAKING: Microsoft to make Daikatana playable on Bing.com webpage for 10th anniversary

Re:BREAKING NEWS!!!! MICROSOFT FIGHT BACK...

[oatworm]

Well, at least it'll finally be playable somewhere.

Re:BREAKING NEWS!!!! MICROSOFT FIGHT BACK...

[Grishnakh]

I thought, knowing Microsoft, that they would instead make a unique game featuring Clippy or Bob or that little dog. And the object of the game would be to defeat the evil free-software hordes.

10 significant digits.

[linuxwrangler]

I suggest that Mr. Tony Wright learn a thing or two about significant digits. What a glorious heap of bull to take input like "if we assume our userbase is representative", "if we take Wolfram Alpha at its word","approximate cost of", "about 11,000" and then assert a figure like $298,803,988. 10 significant digits?!? Right.

Re:10 significant digits.

[dbIII]

It is the salescrap idea where you get extra crunchy "truthiness" by having your invented number look more precise than a real derived value.
We can't cure it because the perception of 10^8 plus or minus about fifty percent sounds very unsure versus the marketing lies of picking a number in that range and doubling it unless you've had at least a basic level of education in maths, which the majority is not going to get until funding improves.

Re:10 significant digits.

[YourExperiment]

Yeah, but when you see a number like $298,803,988, it seems a shame to just round it off to the nearest hundred million or so, what with the vast loss of accuracy that would entail.

Re:10 significant digits.

[Mr. McGibby]

Significant digits are crap. If you want to know what the error is in a calculation, then figure it out and state it. Implying what the error is by selectively using zeros or not using zeros is a pretty piss poor way of doing that. There are a number of problems with the whole system. One is granularity. Two is the use of zero, which is possibly a significant digit itself, but there's no way to know that. Three is that even if everyone who used them, used them properly, it wouldn't matter because nobody but high school science teachers and grad students know how they work. Seriously, the public doesn't even know the slightest thing about numerical error in the first place. NOBODY CARES ABOUT SIGNIFICANT DIGITS.

I don't think so.

[Flammon]

If it wasn't Pac Man, they would have been playing around with something else. No extra time was lost.

Fortunately

[Dunbal]

Life isn't all about productivity, or it would be boring as shit.

Re:Fortunately

[beakerMeep]

Dunno, you should see my shits -- they're pretty exciting!

Re:Fortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Youtube links are acceptable.

Re:Fortunately

[Grishnakh]

It doesn't matter if your life is boring. Wasting time on games, or anything non-work-related, is stealing from your employer. Get back to work!

-- Management

Re:Fortunately

[Spatial]

The best shits resemble the game of Pac-Man. Small dots with the occasional bit of fruit.

Re:Fortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

How much does shitting cost?

Re:Fortunately

[Dirtside]

Look, just because you orcs don't know how to have fun doesn't mean the rest of us should have to suffer! Why don't you go play with a palantir or something?

Updated Synopsis

[meatpan]

"The desperate marketing team at Rescue-Time, who spread FUD about how you spend your online time, did a flawed calculation based on wild speculation and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle is the reason why we haven't cured cancer."

Value

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm honored they think my time is worth $25/hr! Try convincing my employer of that...

The first thing I said

[rxan]

The first thing I said after wasting 15 minutes on Pac-Man was "I wonder if you could calculate how much money this game cost corporations around the world in wasted time?"

Re:The first thing I said

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a little fun like that probably increased productivity overall. Constantly working drastically reduces your ability to get things done.

Re:The first thing I said

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? The first thing I said after wasting 15 minutes on Pac-Man was "Google is fucking awesome!"

Re:The first thing I said

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing compared to all the hours staff are made one way or another to supply for free.

Re:Wasted? - RTFA

[Omnifarious]

If you read the article, the person who wrote it preemptively replies to the assessment with exactly that observation, except even better since it's backed up by data.

whoah $25/h, hold on there charlie.

[chibiace]

I wish i was getting paid US$25 dollars an hour.
Anyway what would these people have been doing to waste their time if they were not playing it.

what twit wasted game time writing a report on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they also work out how much time was wasted writing-and-discussing their anti-pac-man report.

I'm sure the're just pissed that everyone else played the game while they had to waste their time writeing a report on it - oh, wait maybe they think that the report was something productive to do!

If they'd just played pac-man instead, I am sure we and they would all be happier.

Cheers - Mark

proxy block FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad I blocked it at the proxy... no hours of productivity lost here. i am sure they just assumed that anyone browsing a google site was using the game.

Re:proxy block FTW

[Darkness404]

Um, oddly enough humans are not robots. Do a repetitive task over and over again, you tend to make mistakes. Now take a small break, you tend to regain your focus. Mistakes cost far more money than "wasted productivity" ever will because mistakes require redundancy, someone to look at and correct jobs that have already been completed.

Stop being a dick and let people access whatever sites they please, if they don't keep up with the work load, have management fire them. But seriously, don't think you know "productivity" because if I'm doing the same task for an hour or more without a break, I'm not going to be productive. After a few minutes doing another task like checking Facebook, playing a game of Pac-man, etc. I'm back to productivity. Without those breaks, mental numbness sets in and productivity fails.

Wish somebody told me earlier

[EdIII]

I kept wondering how the fuck a Google banner could be responsible for lost productivity. I am on Google all the time searching for stuff and saw it once and thought cool and moved on....

Till today when I found out it was fucking playable.

So yeah, there is going to be some lost productivity due to this, but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire.

Re:Wish somebody told me earlier

[dingen]

but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire

Don't forget Hearts. As a kid, I used to work during the summer at the office where my dad used to work. Every single time I launched MS Hearts, I could easily find a few people on the network to play with without ever inviting anyone. Actually, now that I think about it, because it was the pre-YouTube days and all, I'm guessing Hearts was probably a considerable portion of daily network traffic.

That was predictable, wasn't it?

[John Pfeiffer]

I have to imagine everyone saw that coming, since even an idiot in one of my IRC channels said "inb4 corporate firewalls block google for lost productivity!" when he first heard about it. Hehe.

While we're at it

[Anonymous Coward]

One word, Youtube.

Dammit, is that one or two words?

Muh-wah-hah-hah-hah...

[Jawnn]

[Dr. Evil voice] My most diabolical plan ever, wherein I will unleash on the world a computer program that will drain the world's productivity. Think of it. Meeleeyuns of hours of productivity sucked way by my marvelous creation... [/Dr. Evil voice]

Re:Muh-wah-hah-hah-hah...

[PPH]

Microsoft's legal team will be seeking an injunction, as this infringes on their prior art.

Thats nothing- how much time to dissasemble it?

[acomj]

Someone seems to have taken a pac man rom and figured out how the game works. How the different ghosts move and follow you to why you can sometimes "miss" a ghost.

Facinating read... oddly hosted on someone's personal comcast account.

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html

Take your time...

Re:Thats nothing- how much time to dissasemble it?

[Inda]

Why do you find it odd?

I still have random HTML stored on an old ISPs server. It was an easy place to get the information out there. I can even remember the old http://go.to/* address from the pre-millenium era.

Re:Thats nothing- how much time to dissasemble it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably didn't take 4.8M hours to disassemble it.

Ok, we brought this up...

[jra]

Can I just say that I *love* firefighting work, cause it's the last bastion of objective capability over affirmative action?

That unconscious guy in the burning building doesn't *care* that you're female, and can only drag 150 pounds; he still weighs 200.

And amazingly enough: the exams recognize this.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally offtopic. But let me also mention that firefighters who are of African descent, who scored higher than white counterparts, ended up not getting promotions despite their performance in certain areas of the country, thanks to the objectivity requirements.

Firefighting: The Last Bastion of Objectivity. (Except as related to factors not actually included in required characteristics of firefighters)

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, we are all of African descent...

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[dzfoo]

I think he's trying to avoid pointing out the fact that he noticed that--*gasp!*--their skin colour is different.

        -dZ.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[MartinSchou]

He also doesn't care if you're a guy, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, gay, straight, asexual, loves to fuck rabbits during the weekend or root against his favourite team.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[sFurbo]

Except in Sweden, where they lowered the physical requirements for becoming a firefighter to help even out the gender difference. So now, you can experience BOTH male AND female firefighters who are physically incapable helping you. But hey, gender equality is more important than making sure that people are qualified for their jobs, right?

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[songquo]

Median firefighter salary is about $40,000. Median nurse salary is about $55,000. Glad you can lift 200 pounds, see what it gets you.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[neurovish]

Median firefighter salary is about $40,000. Median nurse salary is about $55,000.

Glad you can lift 200 pounds, see what it gets you.

Median firefighters also "work" 3 days a week.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[AthanasiusKircher]

That unconscious guy in the burning building doesn't *care* that you're female, and can only drag 150 pounds; he still weighs 200.

Not to be pedantic, but there are women who can carry a 200-pound man, so, in way, your "female" descriptor is irrelevant. The unconscious man only needs you to get him out of the building; if you can, you should be able to be a firefighter. If you can't, whether because you're a small female, disabled in some way, or simply a scrawny guy with no muscle... well, you have no business on the job.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[arkane1234]

Being of African descent means your ancestry came from a continent named Africa at that time, not that it's called that NOW.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that was precisely his point. Some departments recognize this fact, others do not.

Some fail to recognize this fact due to sexist desires to keep women out of the workplace. Others fail to recognize this fact due to "progressive" desires to get equality of outcome and place women in the workplace. Both are equally sexist and deplorable.

The work doesn't care what you look like or who you sleep with, only if you can competently fulfill your duties. Sometimes those duties have a gender bias. Like strippers. You don't see a lot of calls for affirmative action for male strippers (or fat and old strippers for that matter). This is because it is patently obvious that the requirements of the job are inherently sexually biased. There are many other jobs that have inherent biases that cannot be avoided - professional football player, fashion model, actor, etc.

From time to time we have seen movements to abolish "gender bias" in the workplace that ran contrary to these manifest truths. This is what the poster was driving at. The point is to make judgments based on the ability to perform the task at hand.

Re:Ok, we brought this up...

[Anonymous Coward]

ohh i get this AC, he's talking about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

In Soviet Russia . . .

[cashman73]

PAC-MAN PLAYS YOU!

A better estimate: $0 person hours

[junglebeast]

This game only costs person hours if that time would have been spent towards labor if the game didn't exist.

People find distractions all throughout their daily lives, and it is silly to think that the existence of 1 more distraction is going to make a difference. Those people who felt like working kept working, and those people who were looking for a distraction found one, but they would have found one anyway.

Sorry to be pedantic

[Anonymous Coward]

Begs the question doesn't it?

No, it doesn't beg the question; however, it does raise the question. An example of begging the question would be: God exists because we can see the order in His creations. By starting with the premise that there is order in God's creations, we can prove that God exists. Another example is anti-abortionist signs stating "murder is wrong." By starting with the premise that abortion is murder, they conclude that abortion is wrong. When a conclusion relies on the validity of a premise set in the question or statement, it's said to be begging the question.

Raising the question is something else entirely.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[BriggsBU]

Yes, this meatloaf is shallow and pedantic.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[TouchAndGo]

Your own wikipedia link indicates that using it as a synonym for raising the question is increasingly common, and that there's debate over whether the usage should be considered correct or not.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[WNight]

Yes, idiots will debate anything.

But whatever the outcome, it's still incorrect usage and you'll look stupid to people who understand. Wouldn't you like to know before you made a fool of yourself, even if everyone else was doing it?

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[2short]

If you use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" everyone will understand what you meant, and a tiny few of them will think you a fool for not meaning "assumes its conclusion".

If you use "begs the question" to mean "assumes its conclusion" everyone will misunderstand what you meant, and a tiny few of them will think you a fool for not meaning "assumes its conclusion".

Which is only because people don't pay enough attention to each other, since (without really trying) you can't use "begs the question" in a way that is ambiguous between the two. So there isn't really any reason to mind it having two meanings unless you just enjoy telling people they are objectively wrong about things such as language that are not subject to objective standards.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[WNight]

If you use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" everyone will understand what you meant

Actually, no. When I first heard it I thought it was incoherence, I didn't recognize it actually meant anything.

If you want to be understood you need to say something direct like "But if that is so, isn't it incompatible with this evidence here?"

So as long as you're borrowing a phrase, why refuse to use it properly? If you don't mean what it means, stop using it. It's awkward and antiquated, it's not like you're using it because you think it's clearer or anything. Simply say what you're trying to say and make everyone's life easier.

things such as language that are not subject to objective standards.

Pfft, not at all. Tomato/Tomahto, sure, but if you point to a dog and say "financial derivative" it's more likely brain damage than useful new language.

The signal-to-noise ratio is an objective measure of the usefulness of your speech. With sloppy language (even if this example is commonly shared) you'd have more problems conveying a complex idea.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[TouchAndGo]

But if the point of speech is to convey an idea, isn't it counterproductive to refuse to use the most common meaning of a phrase because it's not "proper"? I understand wanting to prevent the english language from being reduced to meaningless nonsense, but sometimes you have to use a phrase the way it's more commonly understood if you want to get your point across without confusing people, whether it fits the original meaning or not.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[2short]

"When I first heard it I thought it was incoherence, I didn't recognize it actually meant anything."

Ah! Let me help you out then: When people say "begs the question", they mean "obviously raises the question". All the time, every time. We all understand each other fine. The only noise complicating the signal is an occasional person yammering on about how they refuse to admit they know exactly what we mean. If you refuse to understand modern English, as it is used by nearly all speakers and writers, it is not the fault of the speakers and writers.

This is not an example of commonly shared sloppy language, but of a perfectly clear and distinct meaning that has entirely supplanted the original.

"The signal-to-noise ratio is an objective measure of the usefulness of your speech"

If you declare common, well understood usage to be "noise" because it is not proper, your argument begs the question. I claim both meanings can coexist, because the one being used is always clear from context. You may claim I'm wrong, but that begs the question: Why don't you provide an example?

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[WNight]

If it didn't mean something else, sure. But the people who are misunderstanding it would just as easily get your point with other terminology - there's no reason to use it for their sakes. If you're misusing begs the question there are simpler and more useful things to say.

"Raises a point" or "prompts a question" for instance don't have the baggage to confuse people AND are more likely to actually mean - word for word, not colloquially - what you want to say.

Of course, I wouldn't use beg the question for its original meaning either because I think describing the circular logic involved would be clearer than simply using a name for it. Rather than say "you're guilty of affirming the consequent", just say "A doesn't imply B, and you sure they're connected?"

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[WNight]

This is not an example of commonly shared sloppy language, but of a perfectly clear and distinct meaning that has entirely supplanted the original.

No it isn't, "begs the question" isn't half as clear as "raises a point" or something else. Of course the original meaning isn't very clear either because it's an awkward translation. That's not an excuse to steal it though, it's a reason to totally abandon it.

It's pretentious to use a longer or more complex word or phrase where a simpler pone would do, often better. Quit trying to explain how language evolves and start trying to communicate, not make excuses for choosing less descriptive phrases.

Nobody who hasn't heard that phrase would think to say it - it's not intuitive.

Not mentioned in the statistics...

[Dahamma]

...is the additional 100 million hours of productivity lost from all of the imagination-less people posting, blogging, tweeting, and re-tweeting the same inane comment, "wow, Google's Pac-Man logo just ruined millions of dollars of productivity today."

"Do no eval"?????

[Stuntmonkey]

Google has really lost theyre way..."do no eval??" Hah! This "PAC MAN' waste everybody time and make big headachs for all users. First China, than this. Shame on you Google!!!

Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA

[swb]

The RIAA/MPAA/SPA make the assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and then complain loudly to government and in the media about their "lost revenue", even though they have no data (that they are willing to share...) that says those people with the pirated copies would have bought a legitimate copy if a pirated copy was not available.

This is the same problem with the Pac Man "lost productivity" argument; it assumes the time spent playing Pac Man would have otherwise been spent productively. At least as insane a judgment as the piracy claimants, if not more so, since it's easily reasonable to assume that people who fuck around, fuck around regardless and that some people may have played Pac Man instead of some other form of fucking off like 20 minute cigarette breaks, long lunches, bullshitting around the coffee maker, etc.

But it's a great publicity stunt on their part; there are a ton of companies out there with obsessive, micromanaging and dictatorial bosses who would love to hire them to help "find" all the unproductive employees and systems that they just know are costing them money.

Re:Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it one further. They've frightened content authors into NOT publishing on the web (JK Rowling for instance) so the only way to digitally download their works is to PIRATE! Stupidity at it's finest. And no, I won't lug the book around, that's why I have a kindle in the first place.

Re:Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA

[Anonymous Coward]

If the pirate gets the product without having paid for it, it is a lost sale, plain and simple, and thus it is more than just copyright violation, it is theft. Without the pirated copy in existence, there would be no unpaid source to use to replicate the product without having to actually buy the product.

Similarly, anyone at work who played the Pac-man doodle used work time for a non-work task, plain and simple, and so it can be counted it as a potential loss of productivity as far as statistical aggregation. The reader can be the judge as to whether or not that is a significant lack of productivity based on how much time they actually spent playing at work vs. doing a work related task.

I thought the Pac-man doodle was interesting, but after playing and completing one screen I decided I'd rather play the actual Namco arcade version of the game.

Re:Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA

[houghi]

Perhaps they can even them out. People playing Pac-Man where not downloading illegal music and thus saving the music and movie industry 27.933.827.727 USD each day.

Re:Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA

[swb]

1) You have offered zero proof that a pirated copy would have been purchased were a pirated copy not been available. Many people will try or minimally use an expensive application (eg, Photoshop) for free but would never purchase it due to exorbitant cost.

2) While the time spent playing Pac Man was "lost" there's no conclusive proof that the time would have been used productively. A more meaningful measure would have been aggregate lost productivity before and after; the problem of course being that outside objectively measurable piecework, measuring productivity is guesswork at best and a totally misleading micromanager's obsession at worst.

3) I found the game cute, but the controls laggy and the playing field too small for a large screen.

I live @ +8 GMT

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you guys get lost work productivity on a Saturday morning?

Zap

[Anonymous Coward]

What i was wondering was if it beat any kind of record of the most played game in a single day, anyone knows?

I could hire them...

[Snaller]

...but why would I want them? Send over Yvonne Strahovski, Morena Baccarin and Megan Fox - seems like a more amusing party.

And what about the gains ?

[unity100]

what about the efficiency gains due to decreased stress levels of employees ? something that affects everything ranging from reducing in-office quarrels to better communication ?

that's not so easy to calculate is it.

Re:And what about the gains ?

[Anonymous Coward]

At first the thing automatically played unexpected noises with no user interaction. I'm willing to bet that raised some stress levels.

Re:And what about the gains ?

[arkane1234]

Any sane person sets their volume to MUTE to stop the dinging, and other asinine sounds that come from the other productivity destroyer... Windows.

How many lost hours?

[Midnight Thunder]

So if we consider lost hours playing Google Pac Man; lost hours reading the Rescue-Time article about lost time by Google Pac Man; lost hours reading and reacting to the /. post about the Rescue-Time article able lost time by Google Pac Man, how many hours have now been lost?

Oh, just to make things more fun, consider how much more lost time we could create by finding what the potential lost time not accounted for is and what the resulting lost time of that task is. Oh and is that time taxable and is the lost time, really lost?

Potential lost time we should be charging Google may tend to infinity if we aren't careful. Anyone for a class action suit ;)

that's an MPAA/RIAA/SPA assertion

[Stephen Samuel]

In the case of the RIAA/MPAA/SPA, it's an assertion, not an assumption. They really don't care if it's true or not. In fact, they are probably fully aware that the claims are false. They make the assertions because they're good PR and not obviously false in the eyes of Joe Public.
(kinda like BP's original 5000 barrels/day claim.)

Re:Wasted? - RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the article, the person who wrote it preemptively replies to the assessment with exactly that observation

I don't see that in the article. Do you mean "if you read the first response to the article"?

except even better since it's backed up by data.

You mean he claims it's backed up by data. I don't see any actual data, or even a link or reference.

Not valid for Linux users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Linux users time isn't worth anything, this only applies to productive Windows users.

How many Quarters played...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how many "Quarters" were played? How many times did someone hit insert coin.

History lesson

[ja1080zz]

It was worth it. People need to know about pac-man and their history. This shows those site filtering admins who's boss. FILTER THAT!!!

what about slashdot

[cangeceiro]

anyone have the math on how many man hours are lost reading slashdot each week?

Free play

[Anonymous Coward]

There are the standard time wasting statistics such as how many wasted hours of employers time and secondary effects on production and profit or how many quarters would have been spent had it actually cost a quarter to play.

My interest lies in the number of broken monitors, disk, sd and cdrom drives resulted from employees attempting to stick quarters into various slots and the aggregate cost of repairs.

just a taste

[tchdab1]

A mere glimpse at the power of GoogleStats.

Perspective needed

[xclay]

I think you'd get a fresh perspective on how little time that was compare to the amount of time young minds are spending on online FPS/RPG/MMORG games across the world. I once tried to tabulate it only for Counter Strike 'bout a decade ago or so, and I was simply blown away by the "mind-waste" that was going on, I'm sure it's even bigger now.

Just think about how many person-hours are lost

[nedlohs]

because people go to the bathroom instead of wearing diapers.

And don't think about those lazy workers who think they should sleep at night.

Because we live to work! Recreation is evil!

Re:Just think about how many person-hours are lost

[SharpFang]

Q: What does it mean if the person at cash register in Wal-mart is smiling to you?
A: She got a fresh diaper.

I want the same stats for facebook.

[miffo.swe]

n/t

Project Managers

[VTI9600]

The real story here is that project managers actually convinced someone (probably a lot of people) that their ideas about man-hours being measurable and having a specific cost are somehow grounded in reality. Bastards.

Whats PAC-MAN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it like Mac&Cheese?

Human psychology is strange...

[m.alessandrini]

Did you ever think of that? There surely are thousands of pac-man implementations on the net, but nobody would have cared to play it until Google put it there. It's like hearing an old song at the radio or watching an old movie on tv and being captured, when you have the CD or the tape dusting somewhere and you wouldn't even mind to play it.

Re:Human psychology is strange...

[arkane1234]

It was actively introduced, instead of passively.

That's the difference...
It's still an attractive thing, but requires stopping what you're doing to do that one other thing, by conscious thought.
With it being right there on the google site banner, it requires no change of action to be introduced to it.
It's why commercials, billboards, and product placement exists, as well.

Simpsons Nelson Voice:

[synnthetic]

Ha-Ha!!

Employee Cost vs Pay

[LordAzuzu]

"If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate)"
Wish my pay rate was $12/2, here in Italy...

Useless numbers....

[robinvanleeuwen]

Useless numbers.... Those numbers only say something if we express them in how many libraries of congress we could write in those 4,819,352 hours...

Time gained from Google Search

[cloudusb]

Well, but shouldn't we compute pros and cons: this PAC make persons waste tot time, but how much time do users gain using Google search tool? bye

I see this as happy time...

[advocate_one]

not lost productivity... people all over the world were happier as a result...

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Long story short, expecting factory worker performance from skilled workers, is as foolish as expecting a successful heart transplant surgery from a line backer.

I'm a hard-working, line backing heart surgeon, you insensitive clod! :p

surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

what was interesting to me about that the google pacman effort was that it wasn't put together in html5 - who would waste their time trying to use that mess for anything - but was made with good old javascript mixed in with flash.

worked very well actually

Study relies on false assumption..

[EmagGeek]

.. that the time spent google PacMan would have otherwise been spent working.

It's entirely possible that the time spent google PacMan would have otherwise been spent in some other non-productive way.

Also, most salaried employees work casual overtime that does not get reported, so the notion that all time spent playing Google Pacman was a productivity hit is just false.

Break time?

[smileyphase]

I take plenty of breaks throughout the day. I'm also not restricted to an 8 hr workday, since I own my consulting business. So I'm glad a lot of people took a 5 minute break, but I don't see the direct impact to the economy.

Did people preduce noticeably less during that day?

I think it's interesting, and makes an interesting form of marketing, providing something that captures interest as part of everyone's work habits.
Obviously, a classy advert like what we just saw from Google was a good example.

Wow. Very nice.

[SphericalCrusher]

I know I spent a solid hour playing this... it's amazing to hear other people did as well. =P

People actually use the Google home page?

[hcdejong]

I don't think I've gone there ever since I started to use Firefox.

Anyone successful using the two-player version?

[HikingStick]

When starting it up again yesterday (Google made it permanent at google.com/pacman), I hit the "Insert Coin" button before the first round started. When I did, Mrs. Pacman appeared as she did in the old (often) tabletop two-player version. Has anyone managed to play two-player mode?

In related news, Naps, Beers, Sex Cost 1 Trillion

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, Naps, Drinking Beer, and having Sex with yourself or another person(s) was found to cost more than 1 Trillion dollars a day in lost productivity. Analysts suggest replacing humans with cybernetic hybrids programmed to love work and never question authority to increase productivity.

I love riddles!

[BForrester]

That unconscious guy in the burning building doesn't *care* that you're female, and can only drag 150 pounds; he still weighs 200.

I know this one. He doesn't care because he's unconscious. What's my prize?

More time wasted on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't click the banner, but I wasted time looking at it.

Now I'm wasting even more time scrolling past this article on /.

And wasting even more time commenting on it.

This is almost as bad as tweeting.

Helpdesk

[FencingLion]

We actually fielded several helpdesk calls that day because the game would start playing and making noise in the background. "Why is my computer making a siren noise?"

Noticed something

[Binkleyz]

I don't know how (or IF) this would skew the numbers involved, but if you just navigate to the page and start it up, then switch tabs or whatever, PacMan moves one dot to the left and gets stuck on a wall.

I've had it running with this in the same position for several hours now, and the ghosts circle but NEVER kill it.

As opposed to...

[whitroth]

... the same hours they would have spent on solitaire?

                    mark

PR fluff

[cluke]

What a load of BS. Pure PR fluff, regurgitated whole by the BBC. A totally nonsense survey, with the sole aim of getting "Rescue Time" some publicity.

Re:PR fluff

[MoriT]

Rescue Time has been running on nothing but fluff and publicity. The cheap publicity stunt about how women were less productive convinced me that I'd happily quit my job rather than use their software. Hopefully these empty stunts nevertheless demonstrate to people why their software is so undesirable.

Person-Hours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, "Person-hours"? PC-silliness hogwash. Are women really offended when people say "manhours"? You know, I'm Polish, and when someone suspects me of alcoholism and excessive sausage intake, I don't throw a hissy fit.

Nethack

[us7892]

Minesweeper, sure.

NetHack. By my calculations, I've spent more than 1000 man-hours playing NetHack on various platforms.

What's the big deal?

[SoftwareArtist]

Reading comments like this one on Slashdot probably consumes that many hours every day. At least the time spent on Google was accomplishing something useful by teaching people how to play PacMan!

Doubt it

[Anonymous Coward]

According to my calculations (http://goo.gl/hwAt ), that would mean that the average Google employee makes about $6 per hour. Sounds a bit low, when including the top cats.

so

[slapout]

And how much extra work got done that day because people where a little happier?

Go back to the past where you belong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Terms like man-hour were coined when the expectation was that only men worked and women stayed at home.

Such terms are outdated, I would not go as far as to say they are sexist, but certainly the attitude of people complaining about their regular use is.

New words that reflect today's social reality should be welcomed, not derided aducing a dubious attention to detail.