with calling Hydrogen "renewable fuel"? It still has to be generated - and most of the energy we use to extract Hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels... But it's still lossy as fuck making hydrogen.
That is true today. However various universities are researching the generation of hydrogen using biological processes, organism + water + sunlight --> H.
One problem I've had with showing some people (especially older folks, or folks who are very set in their ways) a linux desktop is that they get bogged down fairly quick when they see something that doesn't look "right." Having a Windows-esque desktop could be helpful in transitioning people over.
I'm not sure. Once they get past the initial superficial impression of "looking right" they may quickly fall into this "acts wrong". Acting wrong is probably a greater negative than looking wrong. Especially since the words "right" and "wrong" are being overloaded here. Looking wrong is more synonymous with looking different but acting wrong is more synonymous with being defective.
There is also a "false advertising" aspect, the look gave the expectation of certain behavior. With a different look the different behavior is far more acceptable.
When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first...
No. Greedo shooting first is far more hated. Enhanced explosion effects and cgi starfighters are the sort of thing expected not a major character personality rewrite.
Adding ridiculous numbers of storm troopers to corridors is probably far more hated. The death star explosion is most likely pretty far down the list.
Rotting food is not pollution. The problem isn't the smell, the problem is the number of people moving in closer and closer to the landfill. Wow! this house is only $150k! Whats that smell?!? We should complain!! Darn landfills making me not want to live in my cheap house that's right by the landfill!!!
I've seen similar issues in California. Homes gets nearer and nearer to Air Force and Navy bases and then the new residents complain about planes flying around at 3am. The Air Force and Navy bases were explicitly acknowledged in their signed disclosures but people have literally been quoted in the newspapers saying things like: I knew about the base but I never imagined they would be flying around in the middle of the night.
Because a lot of the state is actually quite nice. Woods, rivers, lakes, trails, beaches... Small/medium sized towns and suburbs filled with trees or on the coast... The run down industrial areas that you see on the Sopranos and the tourist oriented areas you see on Jersey Shore are the exceptions, not the rule. There are lots of jokes about the industrial and tourist areas, many from New Jersey residents, but there are also some pretty nice areas that ex-presidents retire to, executives working out of NYC live in, etc. There are also a lot of nice places for middle class budgets.
Voice recognition might be an option, but I think it's more likely that they'll get their revenue from charging for non-Gmail-to-Gmail calls (calling "real" phones) and attracting more users to Gmail (and thus Gmail's targeted advertising) with the new feature.
I generally agree with respect to the short term. However I think it has less to do with "creepiness" and more to do with the current state of voice recognition software and the hardware requirements of such software. Things that time and money can overcome. Like personal phone conversations, personal email is generally considered private. Scanning an email for ad keywords has a creepy component to it also and they have shown a willingness to cross that line.
The real question is how will they tie this into targeted advertising (their real business)? Is it just a screen where they can display ads based on the personal profile they have already developed or do/will they use voice recognition to do keyword searches based on conversation content? This is not necessarily tinfoil hat territory, the already do this with gmail. The text of a gmail message is scanned(*) for keywords so that they can do contextual (targeted) ads on your gmail page. Voice recognition is a difficult but interesting and fun research area that might appeal to some at google. It might be interesting to keep an eye on the end user agreement.
"Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information. This type of automated scanning is how many email services, not just Gmail, provide features like spam filtering and spell checking. Ads are selected for relevance and served by Google computers using the same contextual advertising technology that powers Google's AdSense program."
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6603
A big problem is that production has to be halted from the start of making the backup until the restore is complete. And no, you can't use replicating hot standby machines to avoid this, because you can't trust the replication software.
A system may or may not need to be halted during the backup process. Since the originals are unmodified they can be restarted if some problems or delays occur during the restore so the down time seems manageable. Also some of the work on the replacements can be done in advance, for example installing operating systems, applications and local tools/scripts under version control. It seems that data is largely what needs to be restored during the downtime, maybe. It may be that the data is from network storage outside the system(s) in question so restoring the data may not even be an issue. YMMV, It all depends on the overall architecture of the environment.
Then, repeat for each system. With just a few dozen boxes, this can become very expensive.
Never mind all that will break because of custom executables and scripts that the systems depend on, and which won't survive a data-only restore. And that's the good case, where the former employee hasn't done anything wrong.
In a worse case, you may have encrypted data, and a heavily obfuscated front-end binary that contains both the on-the-fly encryption/decryption as well as a dead man's switch.
The problems you describe justify the expense of replicating a working environment on different hardware. A data recovery process needs to be debugged just like anything else. The point of the test is to make sure that you can recover from backups *when* the day comes that hardware does fail and the restore is the real thing rather than a test. If custom software and scripts exist this needs to be discovered and the source code and scripts need to be under version control and be part of the backup.
Golden parachutes can be effective if reasonably written.
For example, cutting all the legalese out of mine it waters down to "your non-compete is as long as your severance package of normal salary". Thus, they give me a year's pay of severance, I don't show up at my competitors door for a year. If the checks bounce, I'm there, and the NDAs say I can do it free and clear.
A no-compete clause is one thing but disclosure of trade secrets and other material confidential information is something quite different. The no-compete addresses your experience and the skills you have developed. Many states don't allow no-competes below the executive level, hence the severance pay tie-in to get you to do so voluntarily. However the proprietary knowledge you have in your head is never disclosable.
One of many reasons CEOs are given golden parachutes are to keep them quiet about trade secrets and certain contacts. Whether or not that happens is debatable, but discretion is basically paid for.
Why not give similar parachutes to IT admins to follow these unwritten practices?
Since golden parachutes have been a source of abuse and unintended consequences maybe the concept should not be more widely used?
FWIW golden parachutes are not really about keeping quiet regarding trade secrets, contracts and other material non-public information. Contracts, non-disclosure agreements and other legal tools already cover this area.
If you're seriously considering this as a possibility, I'd say treat it like a DR drill. Burn everything down to bare metal and restore only the data. It's the only way to be sure...
To elaborate on this idea I would emphasize that the existing and working hardware is not touched, ideally at least. Use a new/different system (your backup/spare hardware - which should be tested anyway and isn't this a good test?) or maybe a new virtual machine. Once the OS and apps are restored from trusted sources, the data is restored, and its verified that all is well then replace the original hardware. Maybe the original hardware now becomes the back/spare for the next machine to go through this process.
Apple trying to dumb down the computer and to vertically integrate the entire experience to lock everyone in will probably fail... i like my iphone and think it's the right experience for a mobile device, but not the computer.
I believe it is far more plausible that iOS will supplement Mac OS X, not replace it, and be used for specialized applications where a Mac is used in a kiosk or some other embedded environment where an extremely simplified and touch based interface is desirable.
He was wrong. For instance, if we want to know how well a football coach is doing, we often measure something about the team he's coaching. It's the same when measuring many managerial and executive positions. Teaching seems to me to be another area where that makes perfect sense.
Coaches are often measured by team success but many variables contribute to that success. Also a coach may be involved in more variables than those involving the techniques and tactics of the sport, for example things from a players personal life. Teachers do not have such latitude.
I expect that the professor is arguing something like it is insufficient to say that the outcome is x, we must also know to what degree teacher quality is a factor - it is likely not 100%. Even with the example of two classrooms at the same school there *may* be other factors, I recall some classrooms being more comfortable when I was a kid. To what degree is comfort (glare from sunlight, outside noise, heating, air conditioning,...) a factor? Is the subject taught at different times of the day in the two classrooms? It was college but for me 7:30am calculus was a lot harder than 2:00pm calculus. Are the students comparable in the two classrooms? When I was in elementary school I recall that for math and reading our regular classrooms got reshuffled and some kids had to swap rooms for these particular lessons. The school was regrouping us according to their estimation of who would be on the college prep track and who would be on the vocational track.
Perhaps more colleges are requiring certain software that's Windows- and/or Mac-only.
Or perhaps MacOS X is a better UNIX / FOSS platform for many who would otherwise be interested in Linux? There is a pretty powerful BSD environment hiding behind that friendly GUI. I think the decision to go Linux over Mac OS X would be largely philosophical. I hear the cost argument but I don't think it applies that often and its possibly overstated given that its hard to find FOSS software that is available for Linux and not MacOS X.
In short, MacOS X is competitive on Linux's home turf: a unix-like environment. I believe that many historical Linux users where not into FOSS philosophy/religion as much as they just wanted a good unix-like environment.
Even as a CS major the University offered a major advantage over self-study in terms of the equipment I had access to. I worked during both my BS and MS in CS and the equipment at a state university was far ahead of what most in industry had access to. Open source has greatly narrowed the gap in terms of software, programming languages in particular, but the hardware deficit still exists for the home schooled. Now add having a good project/lab partner sitting next to you staring at the same screen, the same circuit on the lab bench, etc...
Take it further and consider even the general education chemistry, physics and biology classes. Universities still have a place, but as is usually the case you get what you put into it. There will certainly be home schooled who are more skilled than university trained. However if that capable, curious and hard working home schooled individual had the benefit of a University they may have been able to progress a little farther IMHO.
FWIW, I learned a lot from the University and in parallel I learned a lot from self-study and peers at home. Similar story after graduation, I learned a lot from coworkers and more senior engineers and again from self-study and friends on our own time.
The astronauts do not go to do science or explore, robots can do that better more reliably, cheaper, and we don't need to get them back, astronauts go to experience it...
That's true to a degree, the astronauts largely accept the science and the more mundane work as the price of their experience. Although Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt is the counterexample where the science is a major motivation. Schmitt was the first scientist, as opposed to military pilot(*), to walk on the moon and his expertise led to significant discoveries.
However the astronaut's motivation for volunteering is not very relevant. The more important point is why does/will NASA send astronauts rather than robots. Sure there is the inspirational factor, a generation or two of children were inspired to study math and science because of Apollo, but frankly a human can do more. Today robots cannot match human judgement and more importantly human improvisation. The various Mars probes are amazing technological achievements but they get stuck on things that humans will not, for example the soil being clumpier than expected and not falling through a grate. Robots excel at performing the expected under expected conditions. Humans excel at working around problems when things do not go as expected.
I agree that robots are far more cost effective and we should continue to use them to a large degree. However we will make faster progress if we also send the occasional manned mission to handle the more challenging things.
(*) Yes other astronauts had scientific and engineering backgrounds and went on to accomplished careers in those fields but they were originally selected for the astronaut program due to their military pilot backgrounds. The science / engineering backgrounds were valuable but secondary factors.
You're assuming games developers are writing their own engines and everything from the ground up... Programmers are using existing tools and libraries, and are mostly writing glue.
I make no such assumption. Even when licensing a graphics engine, physics engine, etc there is much work to do on graphics, physics, etc. And that is not even considering going into the source of these engines to fix bugs, customize things, or add enhancements. (IMHO a project that has a binary license rather than a source license is in trouble from day 1). Now add the enormous amount of work that goes into the logic that is specific to a particular game.
Your statement regarding programming is as erroneous as someone who might say that artists and animators are merely buying off-the-shelf assets from stock libraries and tweaking some models and textures. Even with off-the-shelf code engines and art assets there is a tremendous amount of work to be done by programmers and artists in a modern game.
Why do you think there are more asset types involved, those creating the artwork and sound, and theatrics than there are actual programmers?
I focus on programming because that is my personal experience, I can't speak for how an artist feels. Well not beyond the frustration of being limited by low end consumer hardware.
The reason some games need so many artists is because of the expansiveness of some gaming worlds. These worlds need to be populated with unique and varying content. Its an area where adding more people can make things go a little faster. Of course more people includes more lead artists acting as "managers" to keep all these people on a common visual/thematic style.
Now, if you treat your employees from the bottom to the top like they are a vital part of the team, and you encourage them in a POSITIVE way by showing how vital they are to getting the product out the door, they will WANT to work a bit harder to get things done right, without needing to force them. If you treat employees as just "resources" to be used, they will feel your lack of understanding, and will not want to work there. Now, how many of these business classes teach how to motivate employees in a positive way, because not a single person with a business degree I have ever seen seems to understand that basic idea.
Your idea that business schools teach managers to abuse employees is even more erroneous than the meme that game development is somehow as fun as playing games. I recently earned an MBA. One of the core classes was Organization Behavior (OB) and it focuses on motivating individuals and groups. It is heavy on psychology, interpersonal interaction, and covers some of the points you raise and more. Throughout the rest of the program there were occasional references back to OB, some in case studies where companies/projects failed due to a lack of understanding of how to lead, motivate and incentivize people.
I think we are decades past management being taught to stand around with a stop watch and treat people like parts in a machine. Does it happen, yes, but not because that is what people are learning in business school.
You miss the role that management has on the overall feeling at a workplace. A bad supervisor, manager, or executive can suck the fun out of ANYTHING, and a good boss can make a bad job at least not seem to be all that bad.
I'm not missing that point, I think it is tangential to a degree. I am merely debunking the general idea that game development is "fun", in reality it is very hard work. Again, despite being very hard it can be personally rewarding and satisfying.
Let me backtrack a bit to be clear. I'm not implying game development is devoid of "fun". To elaborate I would say game development is not inherently more fun than other areas of software development. It is fun to see something that you create work and be accepted by its users, game or not. There are fun moments in molecular modeling and visualization, say when you see your code rendering and rotating a DNA molecule for the first time, or when a visitor at a trade shows says he didn't expect this sort of performance on a PC, that he though a Sun workstation would be necessary. The feeling is not terribly different than when watching someone play your game and get into it, to see them lose awareness of what is going on around them as their focus intensifies.
My objection is to the meme that developing games is somehow like playing games. Programmers quickly lose any such illusions as they see their first 1,000 entry bug list, testers quickly lose any such illusions as they see their first 100 page test script,...
Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun?
The focus is fun for the gamers. For the developers its work and/or business. While the products can be fun the development side can be some of the most technically difficult and challenging. I've worked on software for embedded devices, telecommunications, molecular modeling and visualization, and games. Modern games are far more difficult than most outsiders imagine.
There is hardly a traditional area of computer science where in depth knowledge and proficiency is not required. Architecture, data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, database, graphics, numerical methods,... Add to this the competitive pressures where you have to maximize performance for a given hardware platform. There is little room for error in any of the areas.
That said, the greater the challenge the greater the satisfaction upon success.
If its being kept around just for the look then gut it and put a PC motherboard inside? From what I heard it may take a little more than a phillips screwdriver to accomplish this.
Slashdot Mirror
What else would someone do upon hearing an alarm at a fueling station?
I'm sure some would reach for their phone/ipod to begin recording video.
I was under the impression that when people talking about "Hydrogen" as a renewable fuel source they normally meant Methane ...
I believe that is natural gas not hydrogen.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?.
Well about half the world is below average. ;-)
with calling Hydrogen "renewable fuel"? It still has to be generated - and most of the energy we use to extract Hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels ... But it's still lossy as fuck making hydrogen.
That is true today. However various universities are researching the generation of hydrogen using biological processes, organism + water + sunlight --> H.
One problem I've had with showing some people (especially older folks, or folks who are very set in their ways) a linux desktop is that they get bogged down fairly quick when they see something that doesn't look "right." Having a Windows-esque desktop could be helpful in transitioning people over.
I'm not sure. Once they get past the initial superficial impression of "looking right" they may quickly fall into this "acts wrong". Acting wrong is probably a greater negative than looking wrong. Especially since the words "right" and "wrong" are being overloaded here. Looking wrong is more synonymous with looking different but acting wrong is more synonymous with being defective.
There is also a "false advertising" aspect, the look gave the expectation of certain behavior. With a different look the different behavior is far more acceptable.
When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first ...
No. Greedo shooting first is far more hated. Enhanced explosion effects and cgi starfighters are the sort of thing expected not a major character personality rewrite.
Adding ridiculous numbers of storm troopers to corridors is probably far more hated. The death star explosion is most likely pretty far down the list.
Rotting food is not pollution. The problem isn't the smell, the problem is the number of people moving in closer and closer to the landfill. Wow! this house is only $150k! Whats that smell?!? We should complain!! Darn landfills making me not want to live in my cheap house that's right by the landfill!!!
I've seen similar issues in California. Homes gets nearer and nearer to Air Force and Navy bases and then the new residents complain about planes flying around at 3am. The Air Force and Navy bases were explicitly acknowledged in their signed disclosures but people have literally been quoted in the newspapers saying things like: I knew about the base but I never imagined they would be flying around in the middle of the night.
Why not the whole state?
Because a lot of the state is actually quite nice. Woods, rivers, lakes, trails, beaches ... Small/medium sized towns and suburbs filled with trees or on the coast ... The run down industrial areas that you see on the Sopranos and the tourist oriented areas you see on Jersey Shore are the exceptions, not the rule. There are lots of jokes about the industrial and tourist areas, many from New Jersey residents, but there are also some pretty nice areas that ex-presidents retire to, executives working out of NYC live in, etc. There are also a lot of nice places for middle class budgets.
Voice recognition might be an option, but I think it's more likely that they'll get their revenue from charging for non-Gmail-to-Gmail calls (calling "real" phones) and attracting more users to Gmail (and thus Gmail's targeted advertising) with the new feature.
I generally agree with respect to the short term. However I think it has less to do with "creepiness" and more to do with the current state of voice recognition software and the hardware requirements of such software. Things that time and money can overcome. Like personal phone conversations, personal email is generally considered private. Scanning an email for ad keywords has a creepy component to it also and they have shown a willingness to cross that line.
The real question is how will they tie this into targeted advertising (their real business)? Is it just a screen where they can display ads based on the personal profile they have already developed or do/will they use voice recognition to do keyword searches based on conversation content? This is not necessarily tinfoil hat territory, the already do this with gmail. The text of a gmail message is scanned(*) for keywords so that they can do contextual (targeted) ads on your gmail page. Voice recognition is a difficult but interesting and fun research area that might appeal to some at google. It might be interesting to keep an eye on the end user agreement.
"Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information. This type of automated scanning is how many email services, not just Gmail, provide features like spam filtering and spell checking. Ads are selected for relevance and served by Google computers using the same contextual advertising technology that powers Google's AdSense program." http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6603
A big problem is that production has to be halted from the start of making the backup until the restore is complete. And no, you can't use replicating hot standby machines to avoid this, because you can't trust the replication software.
A system may or may not need to be halted during the backup process. Since the originals are unmodified they can be restarted if some problems or delays occur during the restore so the down time seems manageable. Also some of the work on the replacements can be done in advance, for example installing operating systems, applications and local tools/scripts under version control. It seems that data is largely what needs to be restored during the downtime, maybe. It may be that the data is from network storage outside the system(s) in question so restoring the data may not even be an issue. YMMV, It all depends on the overall architecture of the environment.
Then, repeat for each system. With just a few dozen boxes, this can become very expensive.
Never mind all that will break because of custom executables and scripts that the systems depend on, and which won't survive a data-only restore. And that's the good case, where the former employee hasn't done anything wrong. In a worse case, you may have encrypted data, and a heavily obfuscated front-end binary that contains both the on-the-fly encryption/decryption as well as a dead man's switch.
The problems you describe justify the expense of replicating a working environment on different hardware. A data recovery process needs to be debugged just like anything else. The point of the test is to make sure that you can recover from backups *when* the day comes that hardware does fail and the restore is the real thing rather than a test. If custom software and scripts exist this needs to be discovered and the source code and scripts need to be under version control and be part of the backup.
Golden parachutes can be effective if reasonably written.
For example, cutting all the legalese out of mine it waters down to "your non-compete is as long as your severance package of normal salary". Thus, they give me a year's pay of severance, I don't show up at my competitors door for a year. If the checks bounce, I'm there, and the NDAs say I can do it free and clear.
A no-compete clause is one thing but disclosure of trade secrets and other material confidential information is something quite different. The no-compete addresses your experience and the skills you have developed. Many states don't allow no-competes below the executive level, hence the severance pay tie-in to get you to do so voluntarily. However the proprietary knowledge you have in your head is never disclosable.
One of many reasons CEOs are given golden parachutes are to keep them quiet about trade secrets and certain contacts. Whether or not that happens is debatable, but discretion is basically paid for.
Why not give similar parachutes to IT admins to follow these unwritten practices?
Since golden parachutes have been a source of abuse and unintended consequences maybe the concept should not be more widely used?
FWIW golden parachutes are not really about keeping quiet regarding trade secrets, contracts and other material non-public information. Contracts, non-disclosure agreements and other legal tools already cover this area.
If you're seriously considering this as a possibility, I'd say treat it like a DR drill. Burn everything down to bare metal and restore only the data. It's the only way to be sure...
To elaborate on this idea I would emphasize that the existing and working hardware is not touched, ideally at least. Use a new/different system (your backup/spare hardware - which should be tested anyway and isn't this a good test?) or maybe a new virtual machine. Once the OS and apps are restored from trusted sources, the data is restored, and its verified that all is well then replace the original hardware. Maybe the original hardware now becomes the back/spare for the next machine to go through this process.
Apple trying to dumb down the computer and to vertically integrate the entire experience to lock everyone in will probably fail ... i like my iphone and think it's the right experience for a mobile device, but not the computer.
I believe it is far more plausible that iOS will supplement Mac OS X, not replace it, and be used for specialized applications where a Mac is used in a kiosk or some other embedded environment where an extremely simplified and touch based interface is desirable.
He was wrong. For instance, if we want to know how well a football coach is doing, we often measure something about the team he's coaching. It's the same when measuring many managerial and executive positions. Teaching seems to me to be another area where that makes perfect sense.
Coaches are often measured by team success but many variables contribute to that success. Also a coach may be involved in more variables than those involving the techniques and tactics of the sport, for example things from a players personal life. Teachers do not have such latitude.
...) a factor? Is the subject taught at different times of the day in the two classrooms? It was college but for me 7:30am calculus was a lot harder than 2:00pm calculus. Are the students comparable in the two classrooms? When I was in elementary school I recall that for math and reading our regular classrooms got reshuffled and some kids had to swap rooms for these particular lessons. The school was regrouping us according to their estimation of who would be on the college prep track and who would be on the vocational track.
I expect that the professor is arguing something like it is insufficient to say that the outcome is x, we must also know to what degree teacher quality is a factor - it is likely not 100%. Even with the example of two classrooms at the same school there *may* be other factors, I recall some classrooms being more comfortable when I was a kid. To what degree is comfort (glare from sunlight, outside noise, heating, air conditioning,
Perhaps more colleges are requiring certain software that's Windows- and/or Mac-only.
Or perhaps MacOS X is a better UNIX / FOSS platform for many who would otherwise be interested in Linux? There is a pretty powerful BSD environment hiding behind that friendly GUI. I think the decision to go Linux over Mac OS X would be largely philosophical. I hear the cost argument but I don't think it applies that often and its possibly overstated given that its hard to find FOSS software that is available for Linux and not MacOS X.
In short, MacOS X is competitive on Linux's home turf: a unix-like environment. I believe that many historical Linux users where not into FOSS philosophy/religion as much as they just wanted a good unix-like environment.
Even as a CS major the University offered a major advantage over self-study in terms of the equipment I had access to. I worked during both my BS and MS in CS and the equipment at a state university was far ahead of what most in industry had access to. Open source has greatly narrowed the gap in terms of software, programming languages in particular, but the hardware deficit still exists for the home schooled. Now add having a good project/lab partner sitting next to you staring at the same screen, the same circuit on the lab bench, etc ...
Take it further and consider even the general education chemistry, physics and biology classes. Universities still have a place, but as is usually the case you get what you put into it. There will certainly be home schooled who are more skilled than university trained. However if that capable, curious and hard working home schooled individual had the benefit of a University they may have been able to progress a little farther IMHO.
FWIW, I learned a lot from the University and in parallel I learned a lot from self-study and peers at home. Similar story after graduation, I learned a lot from coworkers and more senior engineers and again from self-study and friends on our own time.
I'm surprised the article has the more accurate title:
;-)
"Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure"
rather than the more sensationalist:
"Superman Saves Family"
The astronauts do not go to do science or explore, robots can do that better more reliably, cheaper, and we don't need to get them back, astronauts go to experience it ...
That's true to a degree, the astronauts largely accept the science and the more mundane work as the price of their experience. Although Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt is the counterexample where the science is a major motivation. Schmitt was the first scientist, as opposed to military pilot(*), to walk on the moon and his expertise led to significant discoveries.
However the astronaut's motivation for volunteering is not very relevant. The more important point is why does/will NASA send astronauts rather than robots. Sure there is the inspirational factor, a generation or two of children were inspired to study math and science because of Apollo, but frankly a human can do more. Today robots cannot match human judgement and more importantly human improvisation. The various Mars probes are amazing technological achievements but they get stuck on things that humans will not, for example the soil being clumpier than expected and not falling through a grate. Robots excel at performing the expected under expected conditions. Humans excel at working around problems when things do not go as expected.
I agree that robots are far more cost effective and we should continue to use them to a large degree. However we will make faster progress if we also send the occasional manned mission to handle the more challenging things.
(*) Yes other astronauts had scientific and engineering backgrounds and went on to accomplished careers in those fields but they were originally selected for the astronaut program due to their military pilot backgrounds. The science / engineering backgrounds were valuable but secondary factors.
You're assuming games developers are writing their own engines and everything from the ground up ... Programmers are using existing tools and libraries, and are mostly writing glue.
I make no such assumption. Even when licensing a graphics engine, physics engine, etc there is much work to do on graphics, physics, etc. And that is not even considering going into the source of these engines to fix bugs, customize things, or add enhancements. (IMHO a project that has a binary license rather than a source license is in trouble from day 1). Now add the enormous amount of work that goes into the logic that is specific to a particular game.
Your statement regarding programming is as erroneous as someone who might say that artists and animators are merely buying off-the-shelf assets from stock libraries and tweaking some models and textures. Even with off-the-shelf code engines and art assets there is a tremendous amount of work to be done by programmers and artists in a modern game.
Why do you think there are more asset types involved, those creating the artwork and sound, and theatrics than there are actual programmers?
I focus on programming because that is my personal experience, I can't speak for how an artist feels. Well not beyond the frustration of being limited by low end consumer hardware.
The reason some games need so many artists is because of the expansiveness of some gaming worlds. These worlds need to be populated with unique and varying content. Its an area where adding more people can make things go a little faster. Of course more people includes more lead artists acting as "managers" to keep all these people on a common visual/thematic style.
Now, if you treat your employees from the bottom to the top like they are a vital part of the team, and you encourage them in a POSITIVE way by showing how vital they are to getting the product out the door, they will WANT to work a bit harder to get things done right, without needing to force them. If you treat employees as just "resources" to be used, they will feel your lack of understanding, and will not want to work there. Now, how many of these business classes teach how to motivate employees in a positive way, because not a single person with a business degree I have ever seen seems to understand that basic idea.
Your idea that business schools teach managers to abuse employees is even more erroneous than the meme that game development is somehow as fun as playing games. I recently earned an MBA. One of the core classes was Organization Behavior (OB) and it focuses on motivating individuals and groups. It is heavy on psychology, interpersonal interaction, and covers some of the points you raise and more. Throughout the rest of the program there were occasional references back to OB, some in case studies where companies/projects failed due to a lack of understanding of how to lead, motivate and incentivize people.
I think we are decades past management being taught to stand around with a stop watch and treat people like parts in a machine. Does it happen, yes, but not because that is what people are learning in business school.
You miss the role that management has on the overall feeling at a workplace. A bad supervisor, manager, or executive can suck the fun out of ANYTHING, and a good boss can make a bad job at least not seem to be all that bad.
I'm not missing that point, I think it is tangential to a degree. I am merely debunking the general idea that game development is "fun", in reality it is very hard work. Again, despite being very hard it can be personally rewarding and satisfying.
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Let me backtrack a bit to be clear. I'm not implying game development is devoid of "fun". To elaborate I would say game development is not inherently more fun than other areas of software development. It is fun to see something that you create work and be accepted by its users, game or not. There are fun moments in molecular modeling and visualization, say when you see your code rendering and rotating a DNA molecule for the first time, or when a visitor at a trade shows says he didn't expect this sort of performance on a PC, that he though a Sun workstation would be necessary. The feeling is not terribly different than when watching someone play your game and get into it, to see them lose awareness of what is going on around them as their focus intensifies.
My objection is to the meme that developing games is somehow like playing games. Programmers quickly lose any such illusions as they see their first 1,000 entry bug list, testers quickly lose any such illusions as they see their first 100 page test script,
Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun?
The focus is fun for the gamers. For the developers its work and/or business. While the products can be fun the development side can be some of the most technically difficult and challenging. I've worked on software for embedded devices, telecommunications, molecular modeling and visualization, and games. Modern games are far more difficult than most outsiders imagine.
... Add to this the competitive pressures where you have to maximize performance for a given hardware platform. There is little room for error in any of the areas.
There is hardly a traditional area of computer science where in depth knowledge and proficiency is not required. Architecture, data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, database, graphics, numerical methods,
That said, the greater the challenge the greater the satisfaction upon success.
Unless you just like the look of the G5 ...
If its being kept around just for the look then gut it and put a PC motherboard inside? From what I heard it may take a little more than a phillips screwdriver to accomplish this.