Here's some life advice. Quit ingesting your philosophy uncritically from the shrill, hysterical talking heads and go out and try experiencing the real world for yourself.
There's this new thing out called a Per-son-al Com-put-er. Apparently, they're all the rage with the kids. Personally, I'd rather sit back with a good book and some Benny Goodman on the Victrola.
the "first" videogame generation is about 40 right now (people who had atari's in their teens). In another 20 years *THEY* will be the people in charge and this nonsense will go away.
That's right, because they will all realize that Yar's Revenge didn't mess them up, so there shouldn't be anything wrong with Grand Theft Auto... and in 20 years, GTA will probably look quaint.
I think it cost a little more than that. Plus there are thousands of volunteers. Ultimately, if you could really buy the election then all that money Soros, et al, were pumping in would have helped more.
Money greases the wheels, but it's not going to make radical changes.
I'm sure it didn't help when Ballmer said, "You got change for a billion?".
My college LAN parties were limited to runing "send" on VMS running on the Vaxen, which allowed you to chat with another person on campus over the blazing "LocalNet" that ran at 9600 baud.
You're absolutely right. Software development _is_ completely deterministic, things have gotten so far out of hand though that that's often not the case. I know I have spent an unreasonable amount of time over the years trying to figure out what Windows is doing rather than solving problems and writing code. That's why my strategy is to write my own code whenever possible rather than use some new bloated MS technology because it's often easier to write things from scratch (starting with a good class library of course) than to figure out some big Soviet-bureaucracy-style tool that was whipped out so the marketing guys could have another checkmark on their lists.
Plus, when you have the code, you can debug it, and more importantly, fix it.
Your experience sounds like mine. I _do_ have problems with Firefox on Windows, and it seems to have gotten a little worse in the last few releases.
The biggest problem I have is downloading files. Sometimes after I start a download, FF will stop responding for several seconds. This also usually happens when I try to open the download window while downloading. In fact, I stopped having the DL window come up automatically in case this was related to the problem. Anyhow, these problems still don't add up to the problems I'd had with IE on a daily basis for years.
That's OK, I worked for a financial firm on an app that generated an Excel spreadsheet with the output from the program, which at one point was being sent to Bangalore, printed out and keyed back in. Of course, maybe they printed it out and then shipped it... I wouldn't be surprised.
It seems to me that after 4 years of 16 hour days and all the responsibility and pressure, any person would want to resign.
It's often just a matter of needing to get back to their families.
No one is suprised that Powell quit, but it shouldn't be suprising or shocking that others haven't done so. Clinton did indeed change a lot of his cabinet between his first and second terms, as well as during.
I worked as a slave for the notorious Church of Scientology when I was "just out of college" and swore I'd never do that kind of thing again because I was just being used by the higher ups to make themselves rich.
I imagine that in this case there was plenty of psychological manipulation going on. However, in a free market, it takes two to exploit. One to exploit, and to allow himself to be exploited. Clearly you figured this out and got out of that awful situation.
I greatly respect true paragons in their field, but I despise cheaters. Richard Nixon won his election by cheating.
Yeah, but it's also generally accepted that he lost in 1960 because of cheating.
EA gets its massive profits by cheating also. Any corporation that worked its employees twice as long for the same pay is not really productive. It's cheating.
It's stupid. It's unhealthy in the long run. But I don't understand how it's cheating. You are free to quit and they are breaking laws, so I'm not sure how you can call it cheating.
The reason laws are necessary to prevent this sort of thing is because it gives bad management a way to "seem" good. Instead of using ingenuity (the American way) to increase production, they use pur brute force. This is pathetic, especially from a technology company.
You've never worked for a startup have you? The fact of the matter is, if you are working for a startup with only a frew people, you usually need both ingenuity and brute force. That's just the way it is. Of course, the potential payoff is much higher, too.
Limiting people to working 8 hours a day by law basically says, "If you cannot be profitable with people working 8 hours a day, don't go into business in the first place". This would require entrepreneurs to structure their ventures appropriately.
This is idiotic. "Whoops! Sorry, I can't finish this heart surgery because it's 5 o'clock and I started at 8 (with my government alloted hour for lunch). The night shift is here, but you'll die before I explain exactly what I've done and what I haven't. Good luck."
This would be the stupidest law passed since prohibition. First off, a lot of people want to work more than 8 hours. When I'm really into what I'm doing, I often work more than 8 hours without realizing it. Your law would probably put every family farm and half the startup companies in the country out of business and raise prices significantly for all of us. I'm a family guy, and do not want to work to the point where I don't see my kids and wife or not have much time with them, but I am more than happy to pull some 12- or 16-hour days once in a while when necessary. Working for a startup, I pulled a few 60 hour or so weeks in a row back in the late spring to help get some software out the door. I can tell you I've earned plenty of sweat equity and my boss's gratitude. However, I've told every employer I've ever worked for that I am willing to do overtime when necessary (every good employee is), as long as it's the exception, not the rule. No one forces you to work for EA. If enough people refused to do what they require, then they will have to find another solution. It doesn't take laws to change this, just a working free market. You can't legislate people to have a spine.
Can you get productive work out of people after they have worked a full 8 hours?
Absolutely. I'm good for 12-16 hours on most days. I don't like to work this way, and I wouldn't be able to do it for weeks on end, but with some Mountain Dew, a pile of good tunes and a stack of MST3K tapes, I can code well for a really long time. Over a long weekend or work week, I've done that kind of thing several times.
Ask yourself this, "Would you want a surgeon operating on you after he'd just perform
Yes, it is. My brother-in-law married a young lady from Russia and she's really good-looking.
That's my wife's brother, BTW. I'm not saying my sister is from Russia.
Unfortunately, it's not working out too well yet because Natalya has had some unreasonably high expectations with regard to material wealth, but she's a nice person, and did I mention, she's HOT. We're all hoping things improve.
Actually it didn't. I had a prototype, but when they admitted they were just yanking my chain, I suggested that I convert the code for my screens back to the old-fashioned (i.e., 80's style C code, even though it was in VC++). You'd think they would have not let this go on for four months, because I wasn't hiding the fact that I was doing things differently.
Anyhow, I took a couple hours and wrote a program to convert my screens code to the format the others were using, which made it about 5 times as much code and about 10 times more opportunity for typos, because of the hard-coded array sizes, absurd amounts of redundancy, etc.
Gee, sounds like a good example the Double-Bind ("You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."), which is a tactic used effectively by cults.
EA is hyped so much, but so much is required of the employees that they are stuck. If stay, you are worked until you drop, if you quit, you're a quitter who couldn't cut, and won't succeed in the game industry.
I'm sure they don't brainwash people like the cults do, but it's still definitely an environment I would never want to be in.
Slashdot Mirror
You're free to leave any time you want.
Here's some life advice. Quit ingesting your philosophy uncritically from the shrill, hysterical talking heads and go out and try experiencing the real world for yourself.
mmmm chick in holland is definitely preaching something else...
I'm going have to agree with that. Definitely not the same message... and not having crude pencil-drawn pictures is probably a plus.
You have no idea what you are talking about. This statement is no less bigoted (and ignorant) than "All blacks are lazy." or "All Jews are greedy."
So tell me, how do you get the bloodstains out of your pillowcase?
There's this new thing out called a Per-son-al Com-put-er. Apparently, they're all the rage with the kids. Personally, I'd rather sit back with a good book and some Benny Goodman on the Victrola.
Jack Chick reflects Christianity the way Weekly World News reflects journalism.
(I was going to say Dan Rather, but some people might not have caught the irony.)
the "first" videogame generation is about 40 right now (people who had atari's in their teens). In another 20 years *THEY* will be the people in charge and this nonsense will go away.
That's right, because they will all realize that Yar's Revenge didn't mess them up, so there shouldn't be anything wrong with Grand Theft Auto... and in 20 years, GTA will probably look quaint.
Not to get to OT:
I think it cost a little more than that. Plus there are thousands of volunteers. Ultimately, if you could really buy the election then all that money Soros, et al, were pumping in would have helped more.
Money greases the wheels, but it's not going to make radical changes.
I'm sure it didn't help when Ballmer said, "You got change for a billion?".
My college LAN parties were limited to runing "send" on VMS running on the Vaxen, which allowed you to chat with another person on campus over the blazing "LocalNet" that ran at 9600 baud.
It was awesome!
You're absolutely right. Software development _is_ completely deterministic, things have gotten so far out of hand though that that's often not the case. I know I have spent an unreasonable amount of time over the years trying to figure out what Windows is doing rather than solving problems and writing code. That's why my strategy is to write my own code whenever possible rather than use some new bloated MS technology because it's often easier to write things from scratch (starting with a good class library of course) than to figure out some big Soviet-bureaucracy-style tool that was whipped out so the marketing guys could have another checkmark on their lists.
Plus, when you have the code, you can debug it, and more importantly, fix it.
Where MS has to donate $10,000,000 to the EFF for every security exploit in IE that gets used in the wild...
Your experience sounds like mine. I _do_ have problems with Firefox on Windows, and it seems to have gotten a little worse in the last few releases.
The biggest problem I have is downloading files. Sometimes after I start a download, FF will stop responding for several seconds. This also usually happens when I try to open the download window while downloading. In fact, I stopped having the DL window come up automatically in case this was related to the problem. Anyhow, these problems still don't add up to the problems I'd had with IE on a daily basis for years.
That's OK, I worked for a financial firm on an app that generated an Excel spreadsheet with the output from the program, which at one point was being sent to Bangalore, printed out and keyed back in. Of course, maybe they printed it out and then shipped it... I wouldn't be surprised.
This was for real.
And he couldn't do either.
And I'm sure that if this fails, the next Netscape will just be a skinned version of IE.
They only wrote the Powertoys 6 years ago... they haven't had time to test them.
If I remember rightly, the Batman sequals are now done by a totally different crew to the first ones.
Yeah, but the Batman movies all sucked, so who cares.
Besides, wasn't there a traditionally animated TV show of Buzz Lightyear?
It seems to me that after 4 years of 16 hour days and all the responsibility and pressure, any person would want to resign.
It's often just a matter of needing to get back to their families.
No one is suprised that Powell quit, but it shouldn't be suprising or shocking that others haven't done so. Clinton did indeed change a lot of his cabinet between his first and second terms, as well as during.
I know. It would be OK if they would let me do the work well and then spend three months at home.
Old? He's only a few years older than me, and I am certainly not old.
I worked as a slave for the notorious Church of Scientology when I was "just out of college" and swore I'd never do that kind of thing again because I was just being used by the higher ups to make themselves rich.
I imagine that in this case there was plenty of psychological manipulation going on. However, in a free market, it takes two to exploit. One to exploit, and to allow himself to be exploited. Clearly you figured this out and got out of that awful situation.
I greatly respect true paragons in their field, but I despise cheaters. Richard Nixon won his election by cheating.
Yeah, but it's also generally accepted that he lost in 1960 because of cheating.
EA gets its massive profits by cheating also. Any corporation that worked its employees twice as long for the same pay is not really productive. It's cheating.
It's stupid. It's unhealthy in the long run. But I don't understand how it's cheating. You are free to quit and they are breaking laws, so I'm not sure how you can call it cheating.
The reason laws are necessary to prevent this sort of thing is because it gives bad management a way to "seem" good. Instead of using ingenuity (the American way) to increase production, they use pur brute force. This is pathetic, especially from a technology company.
You've never worked for a startup have you? The fact of the matter is, if you are working for a startup with only a frew people, you usually need both ingenuity and brute force. That's just the way it is. Of course, the potential payoff is much higher, too.
Limiting people to working 8 hours a day by law basically says, "If you cannot be profitable with people working 8 hours a day, don't go into business in the first place". This would require entrepreneurs to structure their ventures appropriately.
This is idiotic. "Whoops! Sorry, I can't finish this heart surgery because it's 5 o'clock and I started at 8 (with my government alloted hour for lunch). The night shift is here, but you'll die before I explain exactly what I've done and what I haven't. Good luck."
This would be the stupidest law passed since prohibition. First off, a lot of people want to work more than 8 hours. When I'm really into what I'm doing, I often work more than 8 hours without realizing it. Your law would probably put every family farm and half the startup companies in the country out of business and raise prices significantly for all of us. I'm a family guy, and do not want to work to the point where I don't see my kids and wife or not have much time with them, but I am more than happy to pull some 12- or 16-hour days once in a while when necessary. Working for a startup, I pulled a few 60 hour or so weeks in a row back in the late spring to help get some software out the door. I can tell you I've earned plenty of sweat equity and my boss's gratitude. However, I've told every employer I've ever worked for that I am willing to do overtime when necessary (every good employee is), as long as it's the exception, not the rule. No one forces you to work for EA. If enough people refused to do what they require, then they will have to find another solution. It doesn't take laws to change this, just a working free market. You can't legislate people to have a spine.
Can you get productive work out of people after they have worked a full 8 hours?
Absolutely. I'm good for 12-16 hours on most days. I don't like to work this way, and I wouldn't be able to do it for weeks on end, but with some Mountain Dew, a pile of good tunes and a stack of MST3K tapes, I can code well for a really long time. Over a long weekend or work week, I've done that kind of thing several times.
Ask yourself this, "Would you want a surgeon operating on you after he'd just perform
you can't patent Silly
Are you sure?
Yes, it is. My brother-in-law married a young lady from Russia and she's really good-looking.
That's my wife's brother, BTW. I'm not saying my sister is from Russia.
Unfortunately, it's not working out too well yet because Natalya has had some unreasonably high expectations with regard to material wealth, but she's a nice person, and did I mention, she's HOT. We're all hoping things improve.
Actually, it did go something like this except the fourth line was:
Boss: We don't care.
Actually it didn't. I had a prototype, but when they admitted they were just yanking my chain, I suggested that I convert the code for my screens back to the old-fashioned (i.e., 80's style C code, even though it was in VC++). You'd think they would have not let this go on for four months, because I wasn't hiding the fact that I was doing things differently.
Anyhow, I took a couple hours and wrote a program to convert my screens code to the format the others were using, which made it about 5 times as much code and about 10 times more opportunity for typos, because of the hard-coded array sizes, absurd amounts of redundancy, etc.
Gee, sounds like a good example the Double-Bind ("You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."), which is a tactic used effectively by cults.
EA is hyped so much, but so much is required of the employees that they are stuck. If stay, you are worked until you drop, if you quit, you're a quitter who couldn't cut, and won't succeed in the game industry.
I'm sure they don't brainwash people like the cults do, but it's still definitely an environment I would never want to be in.