Almost everyone can speak, read and write at least tolerable english
That may be the case on/. , because english is the primary language of the site's main audience - stands to reason that english speakers would look at an english language site. On top of that, most people here are geeks, and english is (as far as I know) the human langauge most programming langauges are related to.
I think it more likely that we'll end up with a lingua franca for the net combining useful bits from any language that has something useful to offer. Look at 'english' as it is now; it's heavily laden with words borrowed from the latin group, nordic languages, even chinese and japanese. And where would we be if you couldn't say karaoke?;)
Personally, I think it'd be a terrible loss to for the whole species if we all spoke the same language. There are ideas and concepts you just can't express in english that appear naturally in other languages, and I'm sure english has much to offer people who don't speak it as their first language.
I reckon the explosion in the number of p2p users out there just goes to show that the majority of people aren't going to pay for media they can get for free. Adding drm to software and media isn't going to help - can you really imagine someone about to infringe copyright (ooh - +1 correct/. terminology;) adding restrictions to the cd they're ripping? Or building it into kazaa?
So whilst I agree that there's no reason whatsoever that a content provider has to release their stuff without drm - it DOES belong to them, after all - people are going to either find it cracked on the net, or not take it with drm (any iTunes users wanna tell me different? I'm in the UK).
I guess what I'm saying is that the end user will always be able to get what they want in the format they want, and eventually, the content providers may have to compromise or go bust.
The massive popularity of peer-to-peer networks also needs to be urgently addressed
Why do they make this sound like such a negative? The comment makes it seem like anything popular MUST be illegal (or immoral,or fattening...). Surely the correct capitalist pigdog way to approach this would be to gratuitously exploit the popularity for profit - if it's that good, someone's gotta be able to make a fortune out of it.
Back in my day (haha, like i'm that old), if you had something marketable that someone wanted, you found a way to deliver it and made cash from it. If you didn't, you added to the unemployment statistics. Maybe this is just the content providers not realising that net users don't find DRM'd content a decent delivery.
Ah well, more stats are always good...
Not for long...
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think that's a good point that's often overlooked - I'm geeky enough to be able to customise windows as much as I like, but I've found linux much more complicated to set up. It never occured to me before that it was just the comparison between fiddling with an OS I know and one I don't. I guess for a user who doesn't really know windows OR linux, and isn't likely to have to do much config anyway, there's not going to be too much difference, especially since all they'll want to do is turn up and have it work.
Now that I think of it, I'm crap with MacOS too. Note to self - must spend more time with linux:)
One big difference tho; there's a lot more novice-friendly documentation out there for windows than linux. Linux docs tend to be written by geeks for geeks, and it gets pretty terse. Windows does have the advantage that most of the time, it works, and when it doesn't, there's an faq just a google away that'll tell me what I'm doing wrong. Man pages and LUGs are much harder to find relevant info from.
Opera 7. It's fast, you get that nice warm feeling when you block an adserver cookie, and it's got the nice zoom in/zoom out texty rollover thing on the buttons.
And I keep getting the "What's that browser?" question and seeing it appear on other people's kits, so it's not just me (and RobertB-DC's mum;)
There's some pretty cool skins out there for it too:)
That's part of it, but IE is also the better browser... IE passed NN/Mozilla/etc in quality around IE 3 which was...1997?
I'm a front-end web developer, so I usually have a range of browsers on my kit, and use them all on a regular basis.
Personally, my browser of choice is Opera, but I'm finding more and more that my second choice is becoming Netscape - and this from someone who remembers well the nightmare that was NS4.x (it still makes me shudder). Mozilla's pretty good too, I like it, I just have to use NS6 and 7 as part of my job (and cos I'll get bitch-slapped by/. for not testing my pages) so I'm more familiar with them.
I'd agree that IE3 was probably better than NS3, and that IE4 kicked the crap out of NS4, but lately, I'm finding IE to be slow and buggy, and it's literally the last browser I start when nothing else will do (hotmail, anyone?).
Just my 2p, but imho the only reason IE's still the most commonly used browser is that it's what comes on most people's kits. It used to be the best browser out there - it's not any more. Gimme cookie controls, popup blocking, tabbed browsing every time...
Funny, but I thought amazon, dell and IBM all had hungarian branches.
Looks like the poster hasn't even looked for non-USian versions of the sites he mentions. I'm English, and I never look at amazon.com - amazon.co.uk is what you need for UK deliveries. amazon.co.hu was my first guess for the hungarian version, and Bingo...
...I'm fairly sure some of this is clearly illegal under UK law. What happens when a system in the UK (or elsewhere) is infected with an RIAA trojan or a "freeze"? Surely that's identical to a black-hat taking over your system? Or this "silence" thing - a program that scans your HD? I haven't read up on my law books recently, but that's got to be wrong.
As I said, IANAL, but if I remember correctly, extradition just requires equivalent criminality, so if some RIAA code infects my kit, can I extradite an RIAA exec over here and have them thrown in jail?
Come on, I know there must be some lawyers out there, even if you're just reading/. for inspiration...
How can a range nearly equal to that of one of the factors itself be considered scientific?
It's called error analysis. You essentially add up all the error factors in all the things you measured and it gives you a measure of how accurate your result is. Having margins this big isn't really that uncommon - last I looked, the hubble constant range was between 50 and 100 km s-1/Mpc.
What is "95" percent level of confidence" based on?
A 95% confidence interval is a standard statistical test to see if a set of data could be part of another, larger set of data. Again, it's a measure of the accuracy of their answer.
How do we know we're looking at "old" star clusters?
They're a long way away. The light from them has to have taken a long time to get here (speed of light being constant) so the picture we see of them is the one made up of light that left a long time ago. You can also tell they're old because of their composition, which brings us to your next question...
Couldn't they have been reformed once or twice in the expanding and collapsing process?
They might have been, but it's a simple thing to check. The early universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen, which they converted to helium. When they died, their helium was scattered and helped form younger stars, which started converting the helium into heavier stuff. If you check the light coming from a star, and it has heavy (ie heavier than helium) element absorption lines, it's formed at least from the matter of an older, dead star, and so has to be a second or later generation star. If it doesn't, it's an original.
How will we ever guarantee that we can see enough of the picture to know we have a statistically representative sample?
We can't. It's the basis of science. You make your best guess based on what you've got, and you defend it until someone proves it wrong. Then you take their best guess and try to come up with something better...
Might be a silly question, but is this supposed to be serious? It's right on the line between parody and paranoid freakism.
I particularly liked the "Gray goo may or may not appear gray or gooey, but this tiny robot, constructed one atom at a time, is capable of tearing apart the entire biosphere of a planet." quote in the faq. Don't get too worried about it tho, because the fantastic new green solar-powered throbnosticator I'm building is equally capable of rebuilding the torn-apart biosphere of a planet...
Nice idea about the lifeboat, though. Count me in on that one.
If you hold a pin/needle flat against the match with the pointy end touching the head when you wrap the foil round it, you can remove the pin to leave a small exhaust hole.
That way you get the whole match flying across the room:)
Think of all the furnaces and landfills this could replace. I always thought the gas burners over a landfill were wasted energy.
Dump the waste into a industrial version (ok, might take a few years to develop), and hook it up to the power grid. Even if it doesn't provide a whole lot of energy, it's more energy we have to play with that doesn't come from fossil fuels.
Of course, there's still the problem of what to do with the leftover waste. And someone's going to have to sort the organic stuff from the plastics (I had some bad jobs in college, but...)
Good idea tho. Turns useless waste into useful energy. I'd buy that for a dollar.
I think the issue here is the way the changes are portrayed.
When I RTFA, it seemed to suggest that Microsoft has made major concessions to the world's anti-monopoly bodies by removing a few icons from the desktop and start menu, and that MS is now a much nicer company, having given in to the little people.
The problem there is that most people assume that if the icon's not there, neither is the program. Not everyone's as tech-savvy as the average/. reader - if they can't see it, how do they tell the difference? If the BBC says it's an improvement, surely it must be?
Mainstream media educates the public, and it'd be good to get mainstream media to understand the issues and technology involved (don't forget, the writers at the BBC are professional _writers_, not coders).
If you think this 'change' has been misrepresented to Joe Public, mail the BBC and let them know what's up. You can't fault them for not knowing everything, but you can let them know where _you_ think they've got it wrong.
btw, please be nice - this bunch are usually good enough to have a real person reply to your comments. Show a little respect for people doing something right;)
A troll, surely, if you post a message saying "Bill Gates sucks".../.ers are going to jump on that.
I see your point, but while I do think Gaiman's books are more in touch with popular culture, and therefore a better choice than Harry Potter (I liked the book, didn't think it was worth a prize), I personally think his work in the art+literature (I'd say graphic novel, but the last one was...wonderful...and not comic-like at all).
Not even Gaiman-like. Not what I'd expected, anyway. But a lovely portrayal of Japanese folk-lore.
_I_ think Neil Gaiman's contribution to the world of sci-fi, fantasy, mythology, whatever you want to call it, has been exceptional, and best expressed in <opinion>the story telling realm of graphic novels.</opinion>
<-- echo $newOpinion -->
Troll 1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames
Lotsa people have read or seen his work - I'm guessing there's as many opinions here as there are people, about whether he deserves it or not, or what his best work is.
Predictable responses? Good luck. I reckon there are as many responses here as there are people.
I thought it needful to give some respect to the guy who first thought up the sprung-metal contact.
Think about it; from the wall socket your kit's in, to the kettle lead into the psu, to the power cables into the devices, the socket your cpu's in, the connectors on the cards etc - the same basic engineering goes into every point. Sprung copper/brass/gold contacts at every point.
It's the little things that change the world. Praise to those men.
For those with maths, Messers Wolfram tell all. I like this one.
This experiment shows off wave/partical duality (it even has cool terminology). The cool bit about physics (yeah, it has cool bits) is the things it takes your head a while to get around.
OK, background: waves spread round corners. Think of a wave at a harbour mouth. The closer the gap is to the wavelength of the wave, the better it spreads (look up diffraction) (troll me, I know this is a gross over-simplification) - ever think about how you can hear but not see round corners? Light == really short wavelengths (nanometres), not like door width lengths (m) (doesn't bend well round the corner), sound == long wavelengths, kinda door-width like (m/cm ish) (bends very well round the corner).
So you get two bits of card with a light behind them, and a screen to shine light through them onto. The first card has one slit, so it shines a little line of light onto the second.
The second has two parallel slits in it, within range of the spread of light, and the light that gets through the first card onto a slit in the second card makes it to the screen.
Now the cool bit.
You get a ripple of light on the screen. Not a black screen. Not two lines showing up the second card shape. Ripples.
Now, modern physics can explain this. It's the wavefront from the first slit (think ripple hitting a harbour mouth) that spreads out in a circle and hits the next two slots, starting another ripple on the other side of both.
At the far wall, you get points where the peak of a wave from one slit hits the peak of a wave from the other, and you get a really tall peak. Or a trough and a trough, and get a really low trough.
Amen. Long hours over long periods of time do not help. But sometimes, 12 hours now and four hours tomorrow gets sooooooo much more done than 8 today, 8 tomorrow...
I think there's a level of creativity (inspiration?) that's long been ignored in the coding world, by which I mean that sometimes you're _on_, and sometimes you're not. Kinda like writer's block.
I'm a front-end web dev. There are days that I _cannot_ get netscape 4 (or ie4, or mozilla) to do what I need it to do, and there are days when I can make them all dance to my tune with no effort.
When they're dancing, I think that without his whole artificial you-will-stop-at-six mentality, I could happily sit and build pages until I get bored, and that usually takes hours. From that point of view, I think yeah, I DO work long hours compared to some of my friends, but hey, I'm getting really into this, and it''l be _cool_ when I'm done (tell me you haven't kept code snippets from previous projects).
I guess what I'm saying is that, as long as you set aside the specific times to meet with the rest of your team, and you're there to cover emergencies (being on-call isn't _that_ bad), wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to work something out where the coder (or for that matter, the designer) does what they need to do at the time that's best for them, provided that this satisfies the needs of the rest of the project team? Get in early, or stay late on a whim without having to get sign-off on overtime?
Views from PM's, designers, coders, business people etc. very welcome. You know that most of the time, we don't all need to be there. Haven't you got stuff to be getting on with that you don't need the coders for? Single those things out, and think of things they don't need you for, dude...
For me, it does still have some passion. I don't work places that demand you work overtime, but most of them ask nicely, and I do it anyway, 'cos I still like doing it. But it'd be nice if I could do it when it was convenient for me.
Long hours aren't a problem. Just let me tell you when they'll help.
And you REALLY need this beauty on your intranet. Every company you ever work at.
I dare you to tell me it doesn't irritate the hell out of you too (especially after your client's just pointed out how many you got wrong). Frickin' content bugs...
Slashdot Mirror
Almost everyone can speak, read and write at least tolerable english
/. , because english is the primary language of the site's main audience - stands to reason that english speakers would look at an english language site. On top of that, most people here are geeks, and english is (as far as I know) the human langauge most programming langauges are related to.
;)
:)
That may be the case on
I think it more likely that we'll end up with a lingua franca for the net combining useful bits from any language that has something useful to offer. Look at 'english' as it is now; it's heavily laden with words borrowed from the latin group, nordic languages, even chinese and japanese. And where would we be if you couldn't say karaoke?
Personally, I think it'd be a terrible loss to for the whole species if we all spoke the same language. There are ideas and concepts you just can't express in english that appear naturally in other languages, and I'm sure english has much to offer people who don't speak it as their first language.
Variety in all things...
...sort of.
/. terminology ;) adding restrictions to the cd they're ripping? Or building it into kazaa?
I reckon the explosion in the number of p2p users out there just goes to show that the majority of people aren't going to pay for media they can get for free. Adding drm to software and media isn't going to help - can you really imagine someone about to infringe copyright (ooh - +1 correct
So whilst I agree that there's no reason whatsoever that a content provider has to release their stuff without drm - it DOES belong to them, after all - people are going to either find it cracked on the net, or not take it with drm (any iTunes users wanna tell me different? I'm in the UK).
I guess what I'm saying is that the end user will always be able to get what they want in the format they want, and eventually, the content providers may have to compromise or go bust.
The massive popularity of peer-to-peer networks also needs to be urgently addressed
Why do they make this sound like such a negative? The comment makes it seem like anything popular MUST be illegal (or immoral,or fattening...). Surely the correct capitalist pigdog way to approach this would be to gratuitously exploit the popularity for profit - if it's that good, someone's gotta be able to make a fortune out of it.
Back in my day (haha, like i'm that old), if you had something marketable that someone wanted, you found a way to deliver it and made cash from it. If you didn't, you added to the unemployment statistics. Maybe this is just the content providers not realising that net users don't find DRM'd content a decent delivery.
Ah well, more stats are always good...
Apparently Orrin Hatch is trying to change that.
About time too. Who needs to send troops to 'liberate' a foreign country when you can just send the Pres to kick some ass?
Most of my users can barely use Windows anyway
:)
I think that's a good point that's often overlooked - I'm geeky enough to be able to customise windows as much as I like, but I've found linux much more complicated to set up. It never occured to me before that it was just the comparison between fiddling with an OS I know and one I don't. I guess for a user who doesn't really know windows OR linux, and isn't likely to have to do much config anyway, there's not going to be too much difference, especially since all they'll want to do is turn up and have it work.
Now that I think of it, I'm crap with MacOS too. Note to self - must spend more time with linux
One big difference tho; there's a lot more novice-friendly documentation out there for windows than linux. Linux docs tend to be written by geeks for geeks, and it gets pretty terse. Windows does have the advantage that most of the time, it works, and when it doesn't, there's an faq just a google away that'll tell me what I'm doing wrong. Man pages and LUGs are much harder to find relevant info from.
Hey, waddaya know, my first post using mozilla...
Opera 7. It's fast, you get that nice warm feeling when you block an adserver cookie, and it's got the nice zoom in/zoom out texty rollover thing on the buttons.
;)
:)
And I keep getting the "What's that browser?" question and seeing it appear on other people's kits, so it's not just me (and RobertB-DC's mum
There's some pretty cool skins out there for it too
That's part of it, but IE is also the better browser... IE passed NN/Mozilla/etc in quality around IE 3 which was...1997?
/. for not testing my pages) so I'm more familiar with them.
I'm a front-end web developer, so I usually have a range of browsers on my kit, and use them all on a regular basis.
Personally, my browser of choice is Opera, but I'm finding more and more that my second choice is becoming Netscape - and this from someone who remembers well the nightmare that was NS4.x (it still makes me shudder). Mozilla's pretty good too, I like it, I just have to use NS6 and 7 as part of my job (and cos I'll get bitch-slapped by
I'd agree that IE3 was probably better than NS3, and that IE4 kicked the crap out of NS4, but lately, I'm finding IE to be slow and buggy, and it's literally the last browser I start when nothing else will do (hotmail, anyone?).
Just my 2p, but imho the only reason IE's still the most commonly used browser is that it's what comes on most people's kits. It used to be the best browser out there - it's not any more. Gimme cookie controls, popup blocking, tabbed browsing every time...
Funny, but I thought amazon, dell and IBM all had hungarian branches.
Looks like the poster hasn't even looked for non-USian versions of the sites he mentions. I'm English, and I never look at amazon.com - amazon.co.uk is what you need for UK deliveries. amazon.co.hu was my first guess for the hungarian version, and Bingo...
Wow, I must be getting it all wrong. My girlfriend's 20, and I have a real hard time getting out of bed in the morning...
...I'm fairly sure some of this is clearly illegal under UK law. What happens when a system in the UK (or elsewhere) is infected with an RIAA trojan or a "freeze"? Surely that's identical to a black-hat taking over your system? Or this "silence" thing - a program that scans your HD? I haven't read up on my law books recently, but that's got to be wrong.
/. for inspiration...
As I said, IANAL, but if I remember correctly, extradition just requires equivalent criminality, so if some RIAA code infects my kit, can I extradite an RIAA exec over here and have them thrown in jail?
Come on, I know there must be some lawyers out there, even if you're just reading
...the free player is the blue link in the middle of the page saying "Free RealOne Player".
Fair enough, it's not the most obvious thing on the page, but it's not exactly hard to find, and you can't blame them for pushing the pay version.
- How can a range nearly equal to that of one of the factors itself be considered scientific?
It's called error analysis. You essentially add up all the error factors in all the things you measured and it gives you a measure of how accurate your result is. Having margins this big isn't really that uncommon - last I looked, the hubble constant range was between 50 and 100 km s-1/Mpc.A 95% confidence interval is a standard statistical test to see if a set of data could be part of another, larger set of data. Again, it's a measure of the accuracy of their answer.
They're a long way away. The light from them has to have taken a long time to get here (speed of light being constant) so the picture we see of them is the one made up of light that left a long time ago. You can also tell they're old because of their composition, which brings us to your next question...
They might have been, but it's a simple thing to check. The early universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen, which they converted to helium. When they died, their helium was scattered and helped form younger stars, which started converting the helium into heavier stuff. If you check the light coming from a star, and it has heavy (ie heavier than helium) element absorption lines, it's formed at least from the matter of an older, dead star, and so has to be a second or later generation star. If it doesn't, it's an original.
We can't. It's the basis of science. You make your best guess based on what you've got, and you defend it until someone proves it wrong. Then you take their best guess and try to come up with something better...
Might be a silly question, but is this supposed to be serious? It's right on the line between parody and paranoid freakism.
I particularly liked the "Gray goo may or may not appear gray or gooey, but this tiny robot, constructed one atom at a time, is capable of tearing apart the entire biosphere of a planet." quote in the faq. Don't get too worried about it tho, because the fantastic new green solar-powered throbnosticator I'm building is equally capable of rebuilding the torn-apart biosphere of a planet...
Nice idea about the lifeboat, though. Count me in on that one.
If you hold a pin/needle flat against the match with the pointy end touching the head when you wrap the foil round it, you can remove the pin to leave a small exhaust hole.
:)
That way you get the whole match flying across the room
See http://www.freecell.com/rockets/howto.html for more detail...
Are you really going to go out and buy a new x-box just to put mandrake on it, or are you going to go to the pawn shop and pick one up cheap?
Microsoft aren't going to make any more money from people modding them to put linux on it, so there's no reason for them to encourage it.
OTOH, they've already sold the box, they've made their profit (hahaha, should really say loss), so why should they care?
Mixed feelings on this one.
Think of all the furnaces and landfills this could replace. I always thought the gas burners over a landfill were wasted energy.
Dump the waste into a industrial version (ok, might take a few years to develop), and hook it up to the power grid. Even if it doesn't provide a whole lot of energy, it's more energy we have to play with that doesn't come from fossil fuels.
Of course, there's still the problem of what to do with the leftover waste. And someone's going to have to sort the organic stuff from the plastics (I had some bad jobs in college, but...)
Good idea tho. Turns useless waste into useful energy. I'd buy that for a dollar.
I think the issue here is the way the changes are portrayed.
/. reader - if they can't see it, how do they tell the difference? If the BBC says it's an improvement, surely it must be?
;)
When I RTFA, it seemed to suggest that Microsoft has made major concessions to the world's anti-monopoly bodies by removing a few icons from the desktop and start menu, and that MS is now a much nicer company, having given in to the little people.
The problem there is that most people assume that if the icon's not there, neither is the program. Not everyone's as tech-savvy as the average
Mainstream media educates the public, and it'd be good to get mainstream media to understand the issues and technology involved (don't forget, the writers at the BBC are professional _writers_, not coders).
If you think this 'change' has been misrepresented to Joe Public, mail the BBC and let them know what's up. You can't fault them for not knowing everything, but you can let them know where _you_ think they've got it wrong.
btw, please be nice - this bunch are usually good enough to have a real person reply to your comments. Show a little respect for people doing something right
A troll, surely, if you post a message saying "Bill Gates sucks"... /.ers are going to jump on that.
...wonderful...and not comic-like at all).
I see your point, but while I do think Gaiman's books are more in touch with popular culture, and therefore a better choice than Harry Potter (I liked the book, didn't think it was worth a prize), I personally think his work in the art+literature (I'd say graphic novel, but the last one was
Not even Gaiman-like. Not what I'd expected, anyway. But a lovely portrayal of Japanese folk-lore.
_I_ think Neil Gaiman's contribution to the world of sci-fi, fantasy, mythology, whatever you want to call it, has been exceptional, and best expressed in <opinion>the story telling realm of graphic novels.</opinion>
<-- echo $newOpinion -->
Troll 1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames
Lotsa people have read or seen his work - I'm guessing there's as many opinions here as there are people, about whether he deserves it or not, or what his best work is.
Predictable responses? Good luck. I reckon there are as many responses here as there are people.
I thought it needful to give some respect to the guy who first thought up the sprung-metal contact.
Think about it; from the wall socket your kit's in, to the kettle lead into the psu, to the power cables into the devices, the socket your cpu's in, the connectors on the cards etc - the same basic engineering goes into every point. Sprung copper/brass/gold contacts at every point.
It's the little things that change the world. Praise to those men.
Just so all you know, that one's bitten the /. too.
A 45MB download is going to kill anything - I suggest coming back tomorrow...
It does apply. You get the same thing with sound - noisy spots and quiet spots as you walk round the far wall if you do the same thing with sound.
Same physics. Still is a gross generalisation, tho.
For those with maths, Messers Wolfram tell all. I like this one.
This experiment shows off wave/partical duality (it even has cool terminology). The cool bit about physics (yeah, it has cool bits) is the things it takes your head a while to get around.
OK, background: waves spread round corners. Think of a wave at a harbour mouth. The closer the gap is to the wavelength of the wave, the better it spreads (look up diffraction) (troll me, I know this is a gross over-simplification) - ever think about how you can hear but not see round corners? Light == really short wavelengths (nanometres), not like door width lengths (m) (doesn't bend well round the corner), sound == long wavelengths, kinda door-width like (m/cm ish) (bends very well round the corner).
So you get two bits of card with a light behind them, and a screen to shine light through them onto. The first card has one slit, so it shines a little line of light onto the second.
The second has two parallel slits in it, within range of the spread of light, and the light that gets through the first card onto a slit in the second card makes it to the screen.
Now the cool bit.
You get a ripple of light on the screen. Not a black screen. Not two lines showing up the second card shape. Ripples.
Now, modern physics can explain this. It's the wavefront from the first slit (think ripple hitting a harbour mouth) that spreads out in a circle and hits the next two slots, starting another ripple on the other side of both.
At the far wall, you get points where the peak of a wave from one slit hits the peak of a wave from the other, and you get a really tall peak. Or a trough and a trough, and get a really low trough.
Amen. Long hours over long periods of time do not help. But sometimes, 12 hours now and four hours tomorrow gets sooooooo much more done than 8 today, 8 tomorrow...
I think there's a level of creativity (inspiration?) that's long been ignored in the coding world, by which I mean that sometimes you're _on_, and sometimes you're not. Kinda like writer's block.
I'm a front-end web dev. There are days that I _cannot_ get netscape 4 (or ie4, or mozilla) to do what I need it to do, and there are days when I can make them all dance to my tune with no effort.
When they're dancing, I think that without his whole artificial you-will-stop-at-six mentality, I could happily sit and build pages until I get bored, and that usually takes hours. From that point of view, I think yeah, I DO work long hours compared to some of my friends, but hey, I'm getting really into this, and it''l be _cool_ when I'm done (tell me you haven't kept code snippets from previous projects).
I guess what I'm saying is that, as long as you set aside the specific times to meet with the rest of your team, and you're there to cover emergencies (being on-call isn't _that_ bad), wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to work something out where the coder (or for that matter, the designer) does what they need to do at the time that's best for them, provided that this satisfies the needs of the rest of the project team? Get in early, or stay late on a whim without having to get sign-off on overtime?
Views from PM's, designers, coders, business people etc. very welcome. You know that most of the time, we don't all need to be there. Haven't you got stuff to be getting on with that you don't need the coders for? Single those things out, and think of things they don't need you for, dude...
For me, it does still have some passion. I don't work places that demand you work overtime, but most of them ask nicely, and I do it anyway, 'cos I still like doing it. But it'd be nice if I could do it when it was convenient for me.
Long hours aren't a problem. Just let me tell you when they'll help.
And you REALLY need this beauty on your intranet. Every company you ever work at.
I dare you to tell me it doesn't irritate the hell out of you too (especially after your client's just pointed out how many you got wrong). Frickin' content bugs...