I realized that there are now two kinds of classes in Python for instance.
True, but only for backwards compatibility. There's no reason to ever use old-style classes, and they are slated for removal in a future version of Python.
If a newbie writes something that can be re-written with a list comprehension for instance,
If that newbie was using map/reduce/etc, it's a good idea to rewrite it--part of the point of introducing generator expressions and list comprehensions is so they can get rid of all those confusing map/reduce/zip/etc functions and simplify things. Like old-style classes, map/reduce/etc are slated for removal in a future version.
I do not see "Extensions API" anywhere on the list of improvements. Last I tried, creating one's own object type or even a simple command was a rather tedious task, unlike in TCL
Are you serious? The first time I created a C extension, it took about 45 minutes to have the base code up and running. It was an SQL driver; supporting all of the Python DBI took several more hours, but in 45 minutes I had basic connect-to-DB/query/get results stuff working.
And unlike my experiences with TCL, it ran fine in concert with other 3rd-party extensions without having to rebuild the interpreter.
> GPLv2 says I can distribute your software under the terms of GPLv3.
As I said in the post you were replying to, GPLv2 says no such thing--that was, indeed, the point of my post.
There is a recommended way of releasing your software under the GPL which includes the statement
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Note, though that this statement is NOT part of the GPL. It is merely a common way of legally releasing software under the GPL, and is recommended in Appendix A of the FSF's COPYING--but is clearly after the uppercase "END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS", in a section called "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs" that includes a number of other recommendations that are not part of the GPL (e.g. recommended disclaimers of warranty, program startup messages, etc).
The GPL itself says the following (in section 8):
If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
Clearly implying that the "any later version" wording is NOT the only way to release under the GPL.
Among the programs that DO NOT use the "any later version" clause is the Linux kernel; the COPYING file from the Linux source tree says:
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
As another poster pointed out, Alan Cox is not one of the developers who avoids "any later version", but Linus is.
The GPL provides for redistribution under that version of the GPL, or any later version.
No, it doesn't. The recommended language for using the GPL suggests that you allow that, but the license itself doesn't require it.
A number of prominent authors (I believe Alan Cox is one) release only under v2 for precisely this reason.
Note, too, that the standard copyright disclaimer you sign if you're releasing software to the FSF has language in it that terminates those rights if they distribute under a non-free license (see the disclaimer form for exact wording).
Games such as Nethack, where death is permanent and final, scare me into not putting too much commitment into a character because the next key I hit could berieve me of my character.
I'm personally partial to the Nethack way, but I'd rather see a compromise that made more sense--e.g. if your 14th level character dies, you have to wait 5 minutes and can roll up a new character, but the new character starts just a level or two lower than the old one (and with some okay equipment for whatever level that character is).
Kind of like an experience penalty, but makes sense (you're DEAD) and gives you a nifty bonus: you can now try out a 12th level character in some other class, so you at least get some variety. And it's severe enough to make you think.
That's correct but it's rarely enforced unless there's overwhelming evidence that the patent holder knew of the infringement by that particular party and intentionally sat on it. In a Unisys-style case where it was obvious that Unisys knew their patent was being widely infringed but tough to prove that they knew about any particular instance, the doctrine of laches rarely applies.
In the example I was responding to, there's really nothing that says you have to pursue violations by A if you know about them or you'll lose your ability to go after violations by B.
Of course, I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.
Sell them exclusinve use, but don't enforce for whatever you belive in. Now technically you're supposed to enforce, but how much and with what vigor is up in the air.
You're under no obligation to enforce patents. Submarining a la Unisys is perfectly legal.
Trademark law is different; there, you DO have to protect your trademark for it to remain valid.
It's not often talked about, but in my book systematic gerrymandering is one of the single worst things that has happened to the American political process in the last 50 years
It sucks, yes. It's not nearly that recent. Wikipedia says:
The term is named for early Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry. In 1812, the Massachusetts legislature redrew legislative district lines to favor the Jeffersonian Republican party candidates.
Also, since my first name is spelled and pronounced the same as his last name I feel compelled to note that:
jerrymandering
Elbridge Gerry's last name is pronounced with a hard 'G'--the proper mispelling would be "garymandering". Though popular usage has a soft g ("j") sound in the word.
On TV and movies investigators frequently take a photograph or video image, scan it in, then blow it up and sharpen it several times to get perfect pictures of the suspect's face. If the data's not there, the data's not there
There's your problem (in bold). You'll never recover 100 times the data by "sharpening" the image. You have to "enhance." Duh.
They cut out the online portion and already stated that they'd release an online version sometime early next year. Why buy the initial version when another one is coming out soon with more features?
To a lot of players (most?) those features are useless, why make us wait for them? If you want online play, don't buy this version--wait for the online version. If you don't want online play, you can buy it now.
I personally have yet to see a game with online play that I really like. Of course, I also prefer turn-based strategy (or tactical) games over realtime strategy games (XCom: UFO defense is among my favorite games ever, along with Civilization, starflight, autoduel, GTA3 and San Andreas, nethack, Doom, Wolfenstein 3d).
But fundamentally, I have yet to see a good GUI constructor to build the same kinds of data flow pipelines that the Unix command line offers. There's no inherent technical barrier, but it's a pretty hard UI problem. I would love to see a good solution.
Sure, I was just refuting the statement "You decide, work like the Japanese and die an early death from the stress, or live and love longer and enjoy yourself along the way.", which seems like it requires a high level of proof in the face of the fact that the Japanese work shorter hours than Americans and live longer.
I'm not saying that there is any causation, merely disputing that sentence.
Of course you knew that. It _is_ a stupid example. Both examples here demonstrate part of the point: the strength of the command line isn't in wc, it's in being able to chain together simple commands easily to accomplish complex tasks.
And the strength of the GUI is in making the simple tasks trivial.
(catdoc is at http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/ ; I used to use it successfully to read Word documents I got as attachments from people, but I haven't gotten one in years).
Well, when 99 out of 100 employers are bad and you have to eat...
That would suck. But either it's not the case, or I've been incredibly lucky. Having worked 7 different jobs, I've only had 1 bad employer--and that was one of the 2 summer high school jobs I've worked.
The college programming job and the 4 serious programming jobs I've held over the last 7 years have all been for basically good employers--one of them was overseas (for 4 months--I left to return stateside), the others were multi-year jobs in the US. They may have been hard-nosed or stupid in some areas, but nothing unreasonable.
I HAVE turned down jobs where the working conditions didn't look good, but that's 2 jobs total (and I can't really say for sure that they would have been bad employers, but enough flags were raised that I turned them down).
You decide, work like the Japanese and die an early death from the stress, or live and love longer and enjoy yourself along the way.
United States: Average number of hours worked yearly, 2001: 1979 Female life expectancy: 79 years Male life expectancy: 73 years Japan: Average number of hours worked yearly, 2001: 1842 Female Life expectancy: 84 years Male Life expectancy: 77 years
In fact, the Japanese have the highest life expectancy of any nationality according to all the figures I've seen.
Here's a free clue: people can't quit their jobs until they find a job to replace it... Ever heard of Wage Slavery? So unless they plan on fighting management, the poor schmucks who work at EA are forced to tough it out until they find a better job.
BS on several levels. I've quit my job without a replacement before. It's not hard.
The wages EA pays are rather good. Great, in fact. That's what draws people there from smaller, more sane companies and keeps some of them working there. Unless you've massive bungled your finances and lived WAY, WAY outside your considerable means, it doesn't take very long to amass enough money to spend a couple months job hunting at the wages they pay.
The only wage slavery here is what that wiki page describes as "In colloquial terms, this may refer to people that make a cult of work...or those who require one to work in order to be socially acceptable"
It's not hard to find programming jobs with good conditions that pay far more than a living wage. But if you make a cult of demanding a certain type of game programming work at extremely high rates of pay, and you're not outstanding at what you do, you're going to have a much harder time finding more relaxed working conditions.
It's not something limited to the computer world. If you're a doctor, you're going to get far fewer perks, work longer hours, and get less pay if you go into a popular field like pediatrics or family practice than if you work in a less popular niche. If you're a good photographer you can make a living doing portraits , wedding shots, etc but it's far harder to choose what kind of work you want to do and you have to be great to do so and make a lot of money.
If you simply abandoned every company that treated you badly, the cause of the problem - poorly managed comapnies - would never go away.
That's not necessarily true. If a company can't get people to work for it, they'll either change conditions until they can or they'll go under. It's not a black/white issue; if a company has some problems but is strong in other areas, complaining or trying to change it makes sense. If it is hopeless all around, or if complaints or refusal to do unreasonable things are usually met with firing, then quitting (or looking for another job while you wait to be fired for only putting in 50 hour weeks) makes a lot of sense.
Companies use job outsourcing to strike fear into employees
Alarmist, much? Job outsourcing isn't really realistic for most dev positions, and even if you're working a job where it's a possiblity you shouldn't we working for a company that tries to "strike fear" into you.
You'll hear this a lot on this thread, but this is NOT just in the game industry. This is a problem with software jobs everywhere and it is only getting worse...A lot of people still think it is the booming place of the mid-late 90's when you did your 40-50 hours of work and came home a rich and happy man.
This is exactly backwards in my experience. The boom era of the mid-late 90s was the era of long hours, "gotta make those options count"--even though for most people the options never amounted to anything. Nowadays companies are more realistic about their tech needs, and there is much less overtime and long hours. Pretty much every coder I know now has a 40-hour week, and a lot of us were doing the 65+ hour deal in 1999.
A lot of this has to do with better focus and more management familiarity with programming staff and how to not kill them; during the boom, there was often a sense of "man this Web thing is important, we have to have 5 9's of uptime even though we don't know why, we need triple-admin coverage in the office 24x7". Deadlines were immovable even for features where a delivery date wasn't really important to the business.
Now it's more business focused; there's less interest in whizzbang, be the PREMIER TECH LEADER! and more interest in doing dev work that has real revenue prospects and only worrying about uptime to the extent that's realistic. Deadlines for revenue-generating features are still held, but "gee wouldn't this be nice" stuff is prioritized more appropriately.
That said, IMHO, anything over 72 hrs/week is inhuman
72 hours a week is over 10 hours every day with no weekends, or 6 12-hour days. That can happen once or twice a year but more than that and you're killing your employees.
IMHO, anything over 5 10-hour days will lead to burnout quickly. I'd put the breaking point even lower, maybe 48 hours a week as the maximum that's sustainable (10 hour days but take off "early" on Fri). Though I personally opt for companies where I can work 40 hours most weeks with maybe a couple late nights a month and a crunch week or two a year.
I do work in the US. The workforce is only as abusable as it lets itself be. I can't understand why any reasonable programmer would put themselves through this at EA; I'm willing to work overtime occasionally, but not on a regular basis.
Even the "slow crunch" of 6 8-hour days is way too much on a regular basis. I might work a weekend before a major launch once or twice a year, and I'll stay late a few nights a week, but no way in hell would I put up with no weekends 2 weeks in a row, let alone on a regular basis.
For those who choose to do so, I have little sympathy when they complain about it afterward. Quit. The job sucks. It's not like it's that hard for a good programmer to find a decent job even today.
Having been through a house fire and several moves on and off campus and to South America and back, and having had several hard drives crash on my personal machines, I can safely say that I have a much higher percentage of my documents from over 10 years ago that were on the computer (the vast majority) than I do of the physical ones (almost none from before the fire and only the most important or recent ones since then).
I'm not even all that careful with my machine; the drive is copied nightly to a spare drive and backed up weekly to my parent's machine (physically distant). That leaves large theoretical windows for document loss, but in real life over those timescales documents are almost always recoverable (still on the CF card for the camera, still sitting on the mail server, whatever).
So what's going to happen a few years down the road:
Assuming you you kept your disks well, you'll end up with fine very fine disks of historical value which you won't be able to attach to any computer of the day
But I don't give a crap about the disks, I want to preserve the DOCUMENTS. Having lost a lot of photos in a house fire I can tell you paper isn't near indestructible. And...
It's not like my documents aren't the very FIRST thing I copy over to every new computer I get. I still have source code I wrote on the VIC 20 in 1983 and all my old school papers from junior high (when I started using a word processor) on; I have no way to read the tape drive it used, but I did copy it over to the C64, then an 8088 (which probably had MFM drives), then at least 5 more machines on to the current one. On top of which there are various copies sitting on my parent's machine, various CD-ROMs, and a hosting account.
There was some mild formatting degredation when I converted old Word documents to a more stable format, but I stopped using Word in 1991 and have been with a format (TeX) that places future ability to render it identically as a high-priority goal--even barring that, the content is generally easy to see in a text editor. But complex math documents I created over a decade ago render identically (plus I have the postscript output alongside the source)
Anyway, for much of my stuff the original medium has degraded beyond belief. So what? Digital is trivial to copy, and my documents travel with me. Pretty much the only time I lose something is if there's a power outage as I'm creating it, and even that tends to be pretty limited since my autosave interval isn't that big.
[Replying to 2 parent posts in one here because I'm lazy-grandparent in bold, parent in italics]
we inherited from our pagan ancestors a healthy separation of church and state
You could make a good case for "deist" here, but many pagan religions were absolute theocracies and there aren't any particularly strong pagan influences in this respect.
Is it your suposition that Atheist students are so unsure of their quote faith that whitnessing others expressing this will shake it.
No, but suppose that the school suggested everyone should worship Zeus, or had a student lead such a service? That is essentially what you're doing (not only to Atheists, but to those of other religions) by having school prayer.
School prayer should be banned
Replace that with "school-sponsored or sanctioned prayer". Individual students should be allowed to pray non-intrusively so long as the school isn't encouraging it (overtly or tacitly). And I have no problem with a moment of silence at the start of the day--our elementary school had one, and it did NOT feel like prayer was expected or encouraged (or discouraged) during it. I would be for restoring the pledge of allegiance to its original form.
Slashdot Mirror
I realized that there are now two kinds of classes in Python for instance.
True, but only for backwards compatibility. There's no reason to ever use old-style classes, and they are slated for removal in a future version of Python.
If a newbie writes something that can be re-written with a list comprehension for instance,
If that newbie was using map/reduce/etc, it's a good idea to rewrite it--part of the point of introducing generator expressions and list comprehensions is so they can get rid of all those confusing map/reduce/zip/etc functions and simplify things. Like old-style classes, map/reduce/etc are slated for removal in a future version.
I do not see "Extensions API" anywhere on the list of improvements. Last I tried, creating one's own object type or even a simple command was a rather tedious task, unlike in TCL
Are you serious? The first time I created a C extension, it took about 45 minutes to have the base code up and running. It was an SQL driver; supporting all of the Python DBI took several more hours, but in 45 minutes I had basic connect-to-DB/query/get results stuff working.
And unlike my experiences with TCL, it ran fine in concert with other 3rd-party extensions without having to rebuild the interpreter.
As I said in the post you were replying to, GPLv2 says no such thing--that was, indeed, the point of my post.
There is a recommended way of releasing your software under the GPL which includes the statement
Note, though that this statement is NOT part of the GPL. It is merely a common way of legally releasing software under the GPL, and is recommended in Appendix A of the FSF's COPYING--but is clearly after the uppercase "END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS", in a section called "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs" that includes a number of other recommendations that are not part of the GPL (e.g. recommended disclaimers of warranty, program startup messages, etc).
The GPL itself says the following (in section 8):
Clearly implying that the "any later version" wording is NOT the only way to release under the GPL.
Among the programs that DO NOT use the "any later version" clause is the Linux kernel; the COPYING file from the Linux source tree says:
As another poster pointed out, Alan Cox is not one of the developers who avoids "any later version", but Linus is.
The GPL provides for redistribution under that version of the GPL, or any later version.
No, it doesn't. The recommended language for using the GPL suggests that you allow that, but the license itself doesn't require it.
A number of prominent authors (I believe Alan Cox is one) release only under v2 for precisely this reason.
Note, too, that the standard copyright disclaimer you sign if you're releasing software to the FSF has language in it that terminates those rights if they distribute under a non-free license (see the disclaimer form for exact wording).
for strategy oriented games, PBEM is the only way to go - otherwise all you are ultimately testing is your reflexes and mental quickness
Or you could play turn-based strategy games (anything from chess to freeciv). I loath RTS games.
Games such as Nethack, where death is permanent and final, scare me into not putting too much commitment into a character because the next key I hit could berieve me of my character.
I'm personally partial to the Nethack way, but I'd rather see a compromise that made more sense--e.g. if your 14th level character dies, you have to wait 5 minutes and can roll up a new character, but the new character starts just a level or two lower than the old one (and with some okay equipment for whatever level that character is).
Kind of like an experience penalty, but makes sense (you're DEAD) and gives you a nifty bonus: you can now try out a 12th level character in some other class, so you at least get some variety. And it's severe enough to make you think.
That's correct but it's rarely enforced unless there's overwhelming evidence that the patent holder knew of the infringement by that particular party and intentionally sat on it. In a Unisys-style case where it was obvious that Unisys knew their patent was being widely infringed but tough to prove that they knew about any particular instance, the doctrine of laches rarely applies.
In the example I was responding to, there's really nothing that says you have to pursue violations by A if you know about them or you'll lose your ability to go after violations by B.
Of course, I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.
Sell them exclusinve use, but don't enforce for whatever you belive in. Now technically you're supposed to enforce, but how much and with what vigor is up in the air.
You're under no obligation to enforce patents. Submarining a la Unisys is perfectly legal.
Trademark law is different; there, you DO have to protect your trademark for it to remain valid.
It sucks, yes. It's not nearly that recent. Wikipedia says:
Also, since my first name is spelled and pronounced the same as his last name I feel compelled to note that:
jerrymandering
Elbridge Gerry's last name is pronounced with a hard 'G'--the proper mispelling would be "garymandering". Though popular usage has a soft g ("j") sound in the word.
On TV and movies investigators frequently take a photograph or video image, scan it in, then blow it up and sharpen it several times to get perfect pictures of the suspect's face. If the data's not there, the data's not there
There's your problem (in bold). You'll never recover 100 times the data by "sharpening" the image. You have to "enhance." Duh.
Obligatory Super Troopers reference:
Enhance.....sadl;kjfl;ksadjf
Enhance.....lqewrkhtl;hgs;dal
Enhance.....q';lwertlkjerqwer
Enhance.....qw'eirqewurjkl;asd
JUST PRINT THE DAMN THING!!!
Something tells me that with the release of an online version, which is what just about everyone interested in this game was waiting for
There's a huge segment of gamers who have no interest in online play (I'm among them). Why make them wait for useless features?
They cut out the online portion and already stated that they'd release an online version sometime early next year. Why buy the initial version when another one is coming out soon with more features?
To a lot of players (most?) those features are useless, why make us wait for them? If you want online play, don't buy this version--wait for the online version. If you don't want online play, you can buy it now.
I personally have yet to see a game with online play that I really like. Of course, I also prefer turn-based strategy (or tactical) games over realtime strategy games (XCom: UFO defense is among my favorite games ever, along with Civilization, starflight, autoduel, GTA3 and San Andreas, nethack, Doom, Wolfenstein 3d).
Definitely. His example sucked.
But fundamentally, I have yet to see a good GUI constructor to build the same kinds of data flow pipelines that the Unix command line offers. There's no inherent technical barrier, but it's a pretty hard UI problem. I would love to see a good solution.
Sure, I was just refuting the statement "You decide, work like the Japanese and die an early death from the stress, or live and love longer and enjoy yourself along the way.", which seems like it requires a high level of proof in the face of the fact that the Japanese work shorter hours than Americans and live longer.
I'm not saying that there is any causation, merely disputing that sentence.
Hi Geoff, long time no see.
catdoc filename.doc | wc -l
(or lynx -dump filename.html | wc -l)
Of course you knew that. It _is_ a stupid example. Both examples here demonstrate part of the point: the strength of the command line isn't in wc, it's in being able to chain together simple commands easily to accomplish complex tasks.
And the strength of the GUI is in making the simple tasks trivial.
(catdoc is at http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/ ; I used to use it successfully to read Word documents I got as attachments from people, but I haven't gotten one in years).
Well, when 99 out of 100 employers are bad and you have to eat...
That would suck. But either it's not the case, or I've been incredibly lucky. Having worked 7 different jobs, I've only had 1 bad employer--and that was one of the 2 summer high school jobs I've worked.
The college programming job and the 4 serious programming jobs I've held over the last 7 years have all been for basically good employers--one of them was overseas (for 4 months--I left to return stateside), the others were multi-year jobs in the US. They may have been hard-nosed or stupid in some areas, but nothing unreasonable.
I HAVE turned down jobs where the working conditions didn't look good, but that's 2 jobs total (and I can't really say for sure that they would have been bad employers, but enough flags were raised that I turned them down).
You decide, work like the Japanese and die an early death from the stress, or live and love longer and enjoy yourself along the way.
United States:
Average number of hours worked yearly, 2001: 1979
Female life expectancy: 79 years
Male life expectancy: 73 years
Japan:
Average number of hours worked yearly, 2001: 1842
Female Life expectancy: 84 years
Male Life expectancy: 77 years
In fact, the Japanese have the highest life expectancy of any nationality according to all the figures I've seen.
Here's a free clue: people can't quit their jobs until they find a job to replace it... Ever heard of Wage Slavery? So unless they plan on fighting management, the poor schmucks who work at EA are forced to tough it out until they find a better job.
BS on several levels. I've quit my job without a replacement before. It's not hard.
The wages EA pays are rather good. Great, in fact. That's what draws people there from smaller, more sane companies and keeps some of them working there. Unless you've massive bungled your finances and lived WAY, WAY outside your considerable means, it doesn't take very long to amass enough money to spend a couple months job hunting at the wages they pay.
The only wage slavery here is what that wiki page describes as "In colloquial terms, this may refer to people that make a cult of work...or those who require one to work in order to be socially acceptable"
It's not hard to find programming jobs with good conditions that pay far more than a living wage. But if you make a cult of demanding a certain type of game programming work at extremely high rates of pay, and you're not outstanding at what you do, you're going to have a much harder time finding more relaxed working conditions.
It's not something limited to the computer world. If you're a doctor, you're going to get far fewer perks, work longer hours, and get less pay if you go into a popular field like pediatrics or family practice than if you work in a less popular niche. If you're a good photographer you can make a living doing portraits , wedding shots, etc but it's far harder to choose what kind of work you want to do and you have to be great to do so and make a lot of money.
If you simply abandoned every company that treated you badly, the cause of the problem - poorly managed comapnies - would never go away.
That's not necessarily true. If a company can't get people to work for it, they'll either change conditions until they can or they'll go under. It's not a black/white issue; if a company has some problems but is strong in other areas, complaining or trying to change it makes sense. If it is hopeless all around, or if complaints or refusal to do unreasonable things are usually met with firing, then quitting (or looking for another job while you wait to be fired for only putting in 50 hour weeks) makes a lot of sense.
Companies use job outsourcing to strike fear into employees
Alarmist, much? Job outsourcing isn't really realistic for most dev positions, and even if you're working a job where it's a possiblity you shouldn't we working for a company that tries to "strike fear" into you.
You'll hear this a lot on this thread, but this is NOT just in the game industry. This is a problem with software jobs everywhere and it is only getting worse...A lot of people still think it is the booming place of the mid-late 90's when you did your 40-50 hours of work and came home a rich and happy man.
This is exactly backwards in my experience. The boom era of the mid-late 90s was the era of long hours, "gotta make those options count"--even though for most people the options never amounted to anything. Nowadays companies are more realistic about their tech needs, and there is much less overtime and long hours. Pretty much every coder I know now has a 40-hour week, and a lot of us were doing the 65+ hour deal in 1999.
A lot of this has to do with better focus and more management familiarity with programming staff and how to not kill them; during the boom, there was often a sense of "man this Web thing is important, we have to have 5 9's of uptime even though we don't know why, we need triple-admin coverage in the office 24x7". Deadlines were immovable even for features where a delivery date wasn't really important to the business.
Now it's more business focused; there's less interest in whizzbang, be the PREMIER TECH LEADER! and more interest in doing dev work that has real revenue prospects and only worrying about uptime to the extent that's realistic. Deadlines for revenue-generating features are still held, but "gee wouldn't this be nice" stuff is prioritized more appropriately.
That said, IMHO, anything over 72 hrs/week is inhuman
72 hours a week is over 10 hours every day with no weekends, or 6 12-hour days. That can happen once or twice a year but more than that and you're killing your employees.
IMHO, anything over 5 10-hour days will lead to burnout quickly. I'd put the breaking point even lower, maybe 48 hours a week as the maximum that's sustainable (10 hour days but take off "early" on Fri). Though I personally opt for companies where I can work 40 hours most weeks with maybe a couple late nights a month and a crunch week or two a year.
I'll stay late a few nights a week
That should be "a few nights a month".
I do work in the US. The workforce is only as abusable as it lets itself be. I can't understand why any reasonable programmer would put themselves through this at EA; I'm willing to work overtime occasionally, but not on a regular basis.
Even the "slow crunch" of 6 8-hour days is way too much on a regular basis. I might work a weekend before a major launch once or twice a year, and I'll stay late a few nights a week, but no way in hell would I put up with no weekends 2 weeks in a row, let alone on a regular basis.
For those who choose to do so, I have little sympathy when they complain about it afterward. Quit. The job sucks. It's not like it's that hard for a good programmer to find a decent job even today.
Having been through a house fire and several moves on and off campus and to South America and back, and having had several hard drives crash on my personal machines, I can safely say that I have a much higher percentage of my documents from over 10 years ago that were on the computer (the vast majority) than I do of the physical ones (almost none from before the fire and only the most important or recent ones since then).
I'm not even all that careful with my machine; the drive is copied nightly to a spare drive and backed up weekly to my parent's machine (physically distant). That leaves large theoretical windows for document loss, but in real life over those timescales documents are almost always recoverable (still on the CF card for the camera, still sitting on the mail server, whatever).
So what's going to happen a few years down the road:
Assuming you you kept your disks well, you'll end up with fine very fine disks of historical value which you won't be able to attach to any computer of the day
But I don't give a crap about the disks, I want to preserve the DOCUMENTS. Having lost a lot of photos in a house fire I can tell you paper isn't near indestructible. And...
It's not like my documents aren't the very FIRST thing I copy over to every new computer I get. I still have source code I wrote on the VIC 20 in 1983 and all my old school papers from junior high (when I started using a word processor) on; I have no way to read the tape drive it used, but I did copy it over to the C64, then an 8088 (which probably had MFM drives), then at least 5 more machines on to the current one. On top of which there are various copies sitting on my parent's machine, various CD-ROMs, and a hosting account.
There was some mild formatting degredation when I converted old Word documents to a more stable format, but I stopped using Word in 1991 and have been with a format (TeX) that places future ability to render it identically as a high-priority goal--even barring that, the content is generally easy to see in a text editor. But complex math documents I created over a decade ago render identically (plus I have the postscript output alongside the source)
Anyway, for much of my stuff the original medium has degraded beyond belief. So what? Digital is trivial to copy, and my documents travel with me. Pretty much the only time I lose something is if there's a power outage as I'm creating it, and even that tends to be pretty limited since my autosave interval isn't that big.
[Replying to 2 parent posts in one here because I'm lazy-grandparent in bold, parent in italics]
we inherited from our pagan ancestors a healthy separation of church and state
You could make a good case for "deist" here, but many pagan religions were absolute theocracies and there aren't any particularly strong pagan influences in this respect.
Is it your suposition that Atheist students are so unsure of their quote faith that whitnessing others expressing this will shake it.
No, but suppose that the school suggested everyone should worship Zeus, or had a student lead such a service? That is essentially what you're doing (not only to Atheists, but to those of other religions) by having school prayer.
School prayer should be banned
Replace that with "school-sponsored or sanctioned prayer". Individual students should be allowed to pray non-intrusively so long as the school isn't encouraging it (overtly or tacitly). And I have no problem with a moment of silence at the start of the day--our elementary school had one, and it did NOT feel like prayer was expected or encouraged (or discouraged) during it. I would be for restoring the pledge of allegiance to its original form.