People who don't think companies have a moral duty have been brainwashed by those very same companies. This amoral corporation hogwash is a recent, self-serving invention by those companies who do things like changing their names from WorldCom to MCI to try to escape their immorality.
No, thats not true. Theres a book out recently called "The Corporation". I suggest you read it. Early on the author establishes precisely where companies stand on morality; they are LEGALLY OBLIGED to have nothing to do with it. If it can be shown a company made any form of decision for moral rather than financial reasons, its an offense and the directors of the company can be sued by its shareholders. This was established in the Ford vs. Dodge (1917) case. Ford had some moral theories about business and thought he should pay his people more and charge customers less. The Dodges (then shareholders) saw the issue somewhat differently. They won. And so was the modern corporation defined.
For this reason even Noam Chomsky is on the record as saying that for corporations to take a moral action is in itself immoral. See, the board's duty is to look after someone else's money, not express their moral and ethical personalities. That they can do on their own time and with their own money, not someone else's. Thats how it works.
I share your sentiment on a personal basis but its in the very nature of the corporation, not in any decision anyone makes. The real brain washing is that people could think something other than that was even legally possible, much less practically possible.
I don't think that would be the idea, more that a personalised approach could be made. If someone is known to be into target shooting for example then an approach along that line can be made; "We hear you are into target shooting and pretty good at it. Your hobby could be part of your new job. We're looking for people just like you." Y'know, make people feel good about whats on offer. Nothing too evil about that, its just targeted (hehe, pun) marketing I guess. Its not different from the way credit card companies and other direct marketers suck up to you with an initial bout of ego polishing about being in an 'exclusive' group of discerning successful people with 'special requirements' outside the ken of Joe Sixpack.
Cheating is a minor irritant and its been around as long as multiplayer games have been in one form or another. What I find more of a problem is imbalance in games because it denatures the whole experience. For example, in BF:Vietnam the helicopter has a massive advantage. Hard to shoot down with the relatively limited anti-air units on the maps, its a veritable death machine exposing the pilot to relatively little risk of being hit. All the top ranked players exclusively helicopter about the maps. I got to about 300 in the ranking and couldn't move, its just impossible to get a high enough kill ratio on foot. This leads to a good proportion of open server play being about whinging, queueing and TKing to get control of a helicopter. Personally I don't really enjoy flying around so I don't get involved but that game imbalance means that my game experience is wrecked anyway. Coming to attack? I constantly ask only to turn around to see my entire side queuing on the landing pad. Cheating is a minor problem by comparison. An infantryman using, say, a radar and wall hack doesn't have anything like the capricious how-the-hell-did-I-die-then effect as a player legitimately buzzing around in the helicopter pouring lead upon me for the dozenth time that game seconds after I've respawned once more.
I'd much rather games developers spent more time ensuring the game experience they originally designed through play testing and level design than worrying about the cheats who will find ways to get an unfair advantage whatever happens frankly. And as an aside, Punkbuster has caused me far more grief than any amount of cheats ever have. The cheat might shoot me, but good old PB will reduce my system to crawling along or outright crashing on a regular basis.
In general I get this "death of the small retailer" thing, its an argument thats been around across all retailing as long as I can remember. Probably before I was born given the long standing existence of super markets.
But for video games, I don't see what an independent retailer offers. Its different for say, butchers vs. supermarket slop (its about sourcing) or bookshops and recordshops (indie retailers buy from indie niche publishers). But for video games, the indie studios hardly exist any more much less indie game publishers. Its not even like a hardware store/butcher/fish munger etc. where the product is generic but one is happy to pay a modest premium for expertise and advice of the owner. In the early days (early to mid 1980s) this was probably the case with computer software but not anymore.
Video games are the same wherever you get them and the inventory just isn't that diverse and the bigger names probably stock more because they can afford the shelf space. Its sad for people directly involved but as a consumer it leaves me a little cold to be honest.
The specifics of how Ford managed people are not important in this case since all we are debating are ludicrous work hours...Why should the gaming industry be any different?
I've just told you why the gaming industry is different, because software development in general is a poorly specified process unlike industrial processes which are incredibly accurately specified; thus people can't plan accurately just how long a widget is going to take to produce (This is actually stated in the article but they don't seem to draw any connection between special difficulties in the measurement of IT productivity and the special nature of IT working hours; I'm saying they are closely related). As a businessman this causes you to enter into a world of trouble because your core process is unpredictable. This is worse for gaming than most programming because they are a retail business, you don't earn money for games that haven't shipped yet. Put it this way, if you say a project will take 40 hours of productivity to produce and you give your workers a 40 hour week, but half way through you discover your project has changed and you need 50 hours of productivity, then you've missed your deadline.
The problem for software development is that this potential for change is constant, its as true in the first week as it is in the last week. Furthermore, you don't really know what form of work the change will engender, it may be donkeywork, it made need great creativity to come up with new concepts, it may be tracking a bug. A huge amount of money is spent to make sure industrial processes don't change in either their nature or their duration. Ford was the leader in this and when he'd managed to make things so predictable then he could measure productivity accurately and thus could adjust working hours safe in the knowledge of what the outcome would be. He spent 12 years experimenting on this, the gaming industry hasn't been at its current strength for anything like 12 years. Making people work crazy hours even though their productivity will vary widely as a result is a response to this uncertainty and planning difficulty. Your EAian 60 hours gives you considerable slack. Some 60 hour periods will be easier on the workforce than other 60 hour periods though. The only thing that makes the gaming industry different is that they seem to be able to hire people prepared to do this for whatever reason.
I particularly object to the "what management wants" paragraph. Unfortuantely I detect a coder's tendency to try to over-rationalise the world here. Their analysis does not provide the "essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity". I don't believe the cruch is what management wants at all, the problem is simply poor planning. All they want is the software to specification by the deadline. If you can do this without the crunch then obviously this is a Good Thing, but if you can't, thats business.
The cruch is a response to a problem (that may be flawed) but its not the real problem. This is somewhat different from the issues that people like Abbe and Ford were discussing which was the simple problem of extracting sustained and predictable productivity from their workforces.
The difficulty is that the work processes surrounding the writing software appear to be still relatively poorly specified, which is why there are many methodologies -- which attempt to produce sustained and predictable patterns of productivity -- but no silver bullet as yet. A hint to this is that of course Ford was in the vanguard of people who went out of their way, at considerable expense, to enforce a well-specified process behind their output. He had to have that in place before his adjustments to working hours made any sense; the author's analysis of Ford's management style misses this vital aspect out.
I don't know if he's going to get back to you but I think possibly what means is that in Norse mythology the characters are more powerful than us (stronger, mightier, immortal etc) but aren't actually "better" in a moral sense, they make terrible errors of judgement almost constantly. There is not necessarily that much to be emulated or otherwise learned from. I seem to recall the perennial bad-boy Loki incurs practically everyone's wrath but always ends up surviving the fallout right up until Ragnarok, the Norse apocalypse myth. The only moral message available appears to be that its only a crime if you get caught.
The Christian God's influence on the world however is usually to lead people toward being very much our 'superiors' in the moral sense or to punish them for bad judgement and from these different object lessons the reader could learn to live in a Godly and morally upright manner. Even in the case of Jesus my reading of the New Testament is that his 'super powers' as it were play second fiddle to his moral and ethical judgement, which is something we are encouraged to emulate as far as possible. He can raise the dead and feed the five thousand but its the bravery, humility, kindness and love that are the important part.
I take your point. Although being pro-EU isn't as far as I can see coherent with anything to do with religious criticism; what I'm trying to say is I don't think there is a "master" agenda (as there is with, say, FOX). Certainly there are individual failings though; the Glasgow media group was very critical of coverage of the Falklands for example where the language used in reports changed starkly once operations were underway.
As regards the EU issue, I think that has a lot to do with the raw material (in terms of spokespersons and events) they had to work with. The government itself is always going to get more time because its the government, the importance of a minister saying something because he is both politician and the holder of a public office is going to be more important than when a "mere" opposition MP says something. But you have to balance that with the fact that when the government buggers something up thats also a massive story but when an opposition MP makes a wrong call its not screamed from the rooftops in the same way. Its kind of a structural problem I guess so whilst it doesn't excuse poor journalism its going to be a problem even for the most even handed 'objective' journalism because they have force balance on something that by its nature isn't really balanced in the first place.
...its to do with time when most of the famous characters were created I think, there was a great deal of interest, and post 1945, collosal anxiety about radiation. I expect to see more modern creations having something to do with genetic modification and perhaps nanotechnology in their origin stories. These things don't necessarily happen by accident, I understand Stan Lee was thinking of issues of race and prejudice when he came up with idea of the X-men as being mutants persecuted for being who and what they were born as. Professor Xavier can be seen as a sort of Martin Luther King to Mangento's Malcolm X. In more recent times I've had the suspicion that this form has been reworked slightly to have more resonances with regard to society's treatment of homosexuality (I definitely got that feeling in the second film in the scene where, was it Iceman(?), goes home and his parents get upset when they find out what he is. Would appear to mirror many a "coming out" story).
This reflection of anxieties in popular art forms as a way of exploring or dealing with them is fairly well noted; for example, Bram Stoker's Dracula has an underlying theme of fear of supressed female sexuality, whereas Frankenstein is clearly all about fear of science. Its all the same thing really.
As an aside another reason Batman wins over his only DC rival, Superman, for readers internationally is that Superman is a little overly wrapped in the stars and stripes (of course "Red Son" had much fun playing with that aspect the strip) to the extent where his popularity waxes and wanes with regard to how people feel about the USA. He was big in the 1980s when American culture was at its zenith of being "cool" in Europe. Right now nobody wants to know really. He's always been and still is popular in countries that target the USA as a migration destination.
On closer examination though I think Superman is very symbolic but I think that Bruce Wayne/Batman is probably nearer the American dream ultimately. By day he's an enlightened capitalist in the modern American mould (rigorous businessman but very charitable etc) who still finds time to be a 'self made man' and act in a sort of "Wild West" state of mind by night.
Hang on, inherited wealth, wild west mentality, hangs out in a technologically advanced underground bunker...Batman=GWB? Holy known unknowns and unknown unknowns Batman! Makes you wonder if Wayne Industries had the contract for repairing the damage to Gotham done by the Batmobile and the Joker blowing stuff up. Meh, politics.
No, communism wouldn't, according to Marx, arise from anyone telling anyone else to do anything. It would be a natural (and via Hegel, he really does mean natural, as in the driver is the nature of human psychology) response to an exaggerated degree of inequality. The worker is left with no other choice. Impossible? But then, what choice will the people of the USA be left with when 99.99999% of all wealth (and a commensurate sum of all income) is in the hands of less than 1%? Its the inevitable progression of the present situation and even the rabid Adam Smithite must agree that this going to be the case. If one doesn't believe this could be the case then one doesn't believe in the promise of capitalism; time to liquidate those shares and buy gold or something.
This looks like a contradiction but it isn't. Its often seen that Marx was the enemy of capitalism. Well, indeed he was, but this didn't mean he didn't understand capitalism or didn't think capitalism would make some people rich. That he understood very clearly; it was the consequence of this he was looking toward. I.e., Marx was as much a believer in the nature of capital as Adam Smith, he was a moral rather than an academic opponent of capitalism.
I would also add that capitalism is often viewed by Americans as the perfect system as contrasted with the "failed" communist system. However, for a lot of people in the world its capitalism thats the fucked-beyond-belief-are-you-people-mad unworkable impossible fairy-tale system. There are people in ostensibly capitalist countries in Africa starving to death. How would explain to them that capitalism is the best way of doing things? In the USSR they had bread queues. Imagine that, all you had to do is stand in line, and somebody would agree to sell you some bread...surely its the promised land?
Personally I view Marx as the great diagnostician but an utterly lousy medic; he'd kill the patient to cure him. I hope a better way will be found.
Thats somewhat unfair. The Hegelian model adopted by Marx is quite clear, before you become a socialist state you must first be a mature capitalist state. Its yet to be tried therefore. Both Mao and Trotsky amongst others were well aware of this (thats what the five year plans were about, hothousing development up to where they should have been before hand). However you wanted to know who was conforming to the spirit of Marxism, well, the USA is doing excellently. Would you disagree? Everything he said about the nature of capital itself appears to be true and increasingly wealth is at some pace becoming increasingly unequal in its distribution within society (in 1997, the top 1% held 84% of all wealth in the USA and 47% of total income; note from this the distinctive charater of capital...what do you imagine the numbers are today and what will they be ten years from now?).
Also, who said anything about government? Why throw off the shackles of the capitalist class only to give away your labour to an unaccountable government? I think you are confusing communism with Leninism. Most libertarians are basically communists who don't understand what the word means as far as I can tell.
It must be said I don't blame people who make that mistake. I did a quick google search and here are some contradictory highlights:
In its ideal form, social classes cease to exist, there is no coercive governmental structures, and everyone lives in abundance without supervision from a ruling class. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels popularized this theory in their 1848 Communist Manifesto.
yet...
A system of government in which a single, totalitarian, party holds power. It is characterized by state control of the economy, and restriction on personal freedoms. It was first proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto.
but then again...
An economic system in which the people control the means of production (capital and land) directly, without intervention of a government or state.
All I'll add by way of commentary that its pretty clear when you visit the various sites whose actually cracked the cover on Das Capital and who is channeling Joe McCarthy. Universities tend to get it correct. Worryingly the middle entry came from an American grade school's webpage.
I'm by no means a communist or a socialist myself but I do think people should investigate their terms of reference before talking about these topics. It appears in the US that people have been left deliberately clueless.
The CEO of our company tried to get us to work more hours, we just laughed, and continued to work just over 40/week.
You got your way as a result of collective action. You already have a de facto union. Thats all trades unionism is. Lucky you, but some people aren't in that position. Some companies run things to deliberately isolate and divide employees so that situation could never happen (c.f. Walmart). The problem arises when the boss hints he's looking to "free up" a dozen or so positions. All it takes is a few worried family men to comply and thats that. What are you going to do then?
Yeah, you need an geek permanently on hand (well, glued to the back of it) to get anything done. That said, R2D2 is clearly the king of the command line.
TBH the millenium falcon looked more a candidate for running Linux to me:
LUKE: What a piece of junk. HAN: She'll make point five beyond the speed of light. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. I recompiled the kernel myself.
Well I didn't really want to get into that but its done both by themselves and by others like the School of Journalism in Cardiff and the Glasgow Media group. Although even then they don't always agree in their assessments (but even then its only very slight biases and depends whether you think showing footage of warfare is itself pro or anti for example).
I'll put it to you the other way: what is the sound argument for the BBC having any degree of partiality beyond its remitt to educate and entertain the British public?
My MSI K8N Platinum NForce 4 runs "Cool & Quiet" as a feature. Thus my AMD64 is running at 1000MHz as I type this but will dynamically crank up the mulitiplier should increased grunt be required. Commensurate with this the fans pretty much shut the fuck up and I guess if I fixed those settings passive cooling would be fine.
Given this technology has been around for sometime now I'm not really sure what the point of the article is.
Heh, well thanks for clearing that up. Bizarre indeed. If you get the chance, treat yourself to watching a current affairs show the BBC do called "Newsnight". I have no idea if its broadcast overseas but I imagine it might. Put it this way, remember George Galloway gave some American politicians a bloody nose recently? He, like every other politician on hte face of the plant, is scared of Paxman as you can see from this transcript (Note the trademark determination that his question is answered fully whatever the attempt at evasion). Its in my view the best thing they put out on the TV. Glorious stuff. What you won't get from that clip is that about ten minutes later he was doing the same thing to memebers of the (ostensibly) pro-war British cabinet, which would probably better illustrate my point about bias. Thats what politicians hate about the BBC in general, its actually their integrity thats the problem for a lot of people.
I'm astounded. Theres been a long debate about the BBC over its history that will probably never go away. Both Labour and the Conservatives have decided its against them and for their foes at different times. As have the Liberals, the Greens, the Scots Nationalists, the parties in Ulster and obviously the socialists and the fascists harbour their own grievances.
I can't think of a more compelling proof that the BBC does its best to put out the truth; after all its the only type of news that could be equipotential in its power to upset politicians of starkly varying political persuasions.
But I must say I'm amazed that the Beeb is selected as "anti-Bush" and the "anti-USA" thing is outrageous. What possible grounds could one have for thinking that?
Let me put it to you this way: when I was at University I never met a student who wasn't either a socialist or a progressive radical. We haven't had a revolution yet and SWP usually gets less than a hundred votes even in council elections. What happened? I don't know but I see some of those people today and they are civil servants, corporate officers and lawyers who don't take legal aid cases.
Seriously, the first sniff of a decent tuition-fee offesetting pay cheque and people change. Before your eyes almost. Lets see, Linux and a month's messing about whilst the boss glares at me or do I buy this shiny box of closed-source data-hoarding not-quite-optimum Corporateware for a couple of grand of corporate chump change? Its actually quite sad but its part of life. It'll happen to you too. I'm sorry to be the harbringer of bad news but we truly are never the same after graduating.
So, take it all with a pinch of salt. Perhaps the scenario you describe could have happened in the early 1990s when I was around but, unfortuantely, it didn't. Programmers fresh from college don't have the power they could exert in the mid stages of the dot com boom and probably never will have again either. The chance was missed frankly.
that we like to hark back to are when people had PCs primarily for work-from-home business reasons. But with a couple of grand's worth of hardware in the room, why not use it for something else? Infocom, Sierra, SSI etc. found people were quite keen on using them for something else.
I don't see anything has changed now, except a vast amount of people now have PCs at home for work and internet use and for a range of other hobbyist persuits of which gaming might be only one of many (e.g., digital art, digital audio, programming). And actually for many of those persuits you can't get by with a 286 running Slackware, one needs a modern spec machine. MS OSs only make this tendency more pronounced; the spec of a PC happy with Longhorn running its best UI scheme (Aero-something) will be high end. Kids and students might blink at the price, but really in the grand scheme of things people will just upgrade to meet the current standard.
Sure, if you are only buying a PC for gaming then you have some difficult decisions re: consoles, but OTOH I'm not aware titles like Civ, Hearts of Iron 2 and Total War are particularly suited to consoles. Its notable that the growing demographic in gaming isn't the kids, its far older people, the early retirement people and the stressed execs. They wouldn't be seen dead in front of a console and consoles can't offer the types of experience they want (immersive strategy games/simulations or simple card games using the same UI they know from using MS Office). But in reality who doesn't use their PC for a range of additional purposes? Its a false question really.
To put it another way, imagine an alternative reality where Atari never dropped the ball and their had been complete continuity from when the 2600 came out until the PSX3 arrives and the great console 'death' of the mid 80s never occured. Games for PCs never really happened. What do you think the industry would be panting in excitement about? The prospect that people might buy games to play on the near ubiquitous PC hardware they now have in their homes almost as a matter of course.
I think whats missing from the article is any consideration of the market penetration of PCs. Sure, an Xbox is "only" 400 dollars, but my PC as of the day I bought it 0 dollars, I've already got it for office stuff.
Three reasons why PC gaming will never die: 1. Ubiquity of hardware in the home. 2. Ease of piracy (sorry but its true). 3. The nature of PC games played by the demographic whose time is worth more than money to them.
My own peeve is that the majority of society believes that a factory approach to education is what works best.
No, society knows that the factory approach is the cheapest way of doing it. Any idea how much individualised attention would cost at market prices? Ten or twenty times what sticking 30 kids in a room with one teacher does. Thats in theory 2 minutes per student every hour. Given even that isn't funded properly in most countries, well I don't see how it could become possible. Even merely doubling resources would be a drop in the ocean. Unfortunately society has decided the education for other people's kids isn't as important to them as subsidising the production of cheap consumer goods or foreign invasions or what have you, and theres not a lot we can do to change that.
works now favours older more senior staff so its hardly surprising if they then scoop the plaudits. Funding is increasingly "targeted" making younger researchers fight against stacked odds. Of course when we are talking of public money its hard to argue against the position that money should go to long proven performers. Add to this that academic promotion is largely a matter of dead-mans shoes for anyone who isn't a genuine genius (ie. for people who are merely extremely good at what they do) and there is an aging workforce then I think that could quite easily add up to an average shift of six years. In short I can't access the full text but I think this is a result of policy more than anything else. There are a lot of big ideas floating about but having the means to make them stick is another matter.
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People who don't think companies have a moral duty have been brainwashed by those very same companies. This amoral corporation hogwash is a recent, self-serving invention by those companies who do things like changing their names from WorldCom to MCI to try to escape their immorality.
No, thats not true. Theres a book out recently called "The Corporation". I suggest you read it. Early on the author establishes precisely where companies stand on morality; they are LEGALLY OBLIGED to have nothing to do with it. If it can be shown a company made any form of decision for moral rather than financial reasons, its an offense and the directors of the company can be sued by its shareholders. This was established in the Ford vs. Dodge (1917) case. Ford had some moral theories about business and thought he should pay his people more and charge customers less. The Dodges (then shareholders) saw the issue somewhat differently. They won. And so was the modern corporation defined.
For this reason even Noam Chomsky is on the record as saying that for corporations to take a moral action is in itself immoral. See, the board's duty is to look after someone else's money, not express their moral and ethical personalities. That they can do on their own time and with their own money, not someone else's. Thats how it works.
I share your sentiment on a personal basis but its in the very nature of the corporation, not in any decision anyone makes. The real brain washing is that people could think something other than that was even legally possible, much less practically possible.
I don't think that would be the idea, more that a personalised approach could be made. If someone is known to be into target shooting for example then an approach along that line can be made; "We hear you are into target shooting and pretty good at it. Your hobby could be part of your new job. We're looking for people just like you." Y'know, make people feel good about whats on offer. Nothing too evil about that, its just targeted (hehe, pun) marketing I guess. Its not different from the way credit card companies and other direct marketers suck up to you with an initial bout of ego polishing about being in an 'exclusive' group of discerning successful people with 'special requirements' outside the ken of Joe Sixpack.
Cheating is a minor irritant and its been around as long as multiplayer games have been in one form or another. What I find more of a problem is imbalance in games because it denatures the whole experience. For example, in BF:Vietnam the helicopter has a massive advantage. Hard to shoot down with the relatively limited anti-air units on the maps, its a veritable death machine exposing the pilot to relatively little risk of being hit. All the top ranked players exclusively helicopter about the maps. I got to about 300 in the ranking and couldn't move, its just impossible to get a high enough kill ratio on foot. This leads to a good proportion of open server play being about whinging, queueing and TKing to get control of a helicopter. Personally I don't really enjoy flying around so I don't get involved but that game imbalance means that my game experience is wrecked anyway. Coming to attack? I constantly ask only to turn around to see my entire side queuing on the landing pad. Cheating is a minor problem by comparison. An infantryman using, say, a radar and wall hack doesn't have anything like the capricious how-the-hell-did-I-die-then effect as a player legitimately buzzing around in the helicopter pouring lead upon me for the dozenth time that game seconds after I've respawned once more.
I'd much rather games developers spent more time ensuring the game experience they originally designed through play testing and level design than worrying about the cheats who will find ways to get an unfair advantage whatever happens frankly. And as an aside, Punkbuster has caused me far more grief than any amount of cheats ever have. The cheat might shoot me, but good old PB will reduce my system to crawling along or outright crashing on a regular basis.
In general I get this "death of the small retailer" thing, its an argument thats been around across all retailing as long as I can remember. Probably before I was born given the long standing existence of super markets.
But for video games, I don't see what an independent retailer offers. Its different for say, butchers vs. supermarket slop (its about sourcing) or bookshops and recordshops (indie retailers buy from indie niche publishers). But for video games, the indie studios hardly exist any more much less indie game publishers. Its not even like a hardware store/butcher/fish munger etc. where the product is generic but one is happy to pay a modest premium for expertise and advice of the owner. In the early days (early to mid 1980s) this was probably the case with computer software but not anymore.
Video games are the same wherever you get them and the inventory just isn't that diverse and the bigger names probably stock more because they can afford the shelf space. Its sad for people directly involved but as a consumer it leaves me a little cold to be honest.
What a shock. I think this years Pulitzer is spoken for!
The specifics of how Ford managed people are not important in this case since all we are debating are ludicrous work hours...Why should the gaming industry be any different?
I've just told you why the gaming industry is different, because software development in general is a poorly specified process unlike industrial processes which are incredibly accurately specified; thus people can't plan accurately just how long a widget is going to take to produce (This is actually stated in the article but they don't seem to draw any connection between special difficulties in the measurement of IT productivity and the special nature of IT working hours; I'm saying they are closely related). As a businessman this causes you to enter into a world of trouble because your core process is unpredictable. This is worse for gaming than most programming because they are a retail business, you don't earn money for games that haven't shipped yet. Put it this way, if you say a project will take 40 hours of productivity to produce and you give your workers a 40 hour week, but half way through you discover your project has changed and you need 50 hours of productivity, then you've missed your deadline.
The problem for software development is that this potential for change is constant, its as true in the first week as it is in the last week. Furthermore, you don't really know what form of work the change will engender, it may be donkeywork, it made need great creativity to come up with new concepts, it may be tracking a bug. A huge amount of money is spent to make sure industrial processes don't change in either their nature or their duration. Ford was the leader in this and when he'd managed to make things so predictable then he could measure productivity accurately and thus could adjust working hours safe in the knowledge of what the outcome would be. He spent 12 years experimenting on this, the gaming industry hasn't been at its current strength for anything like 12 years. Making people work crazy hours even though their productivity will vary widely as a result is a response to this uncertainty and planning difficulty. Your EAian 60 hours gives you considerable slack. Some 60 hour periods will be easier on the workforce than other 60 hour periods though. The only thing that makes the gaming industry different is that they seem to be able to hire people prepared to do this for whatever reason.
I particularly object to the "what management wants" paragraph. Unfortuantely I detect a coder's tendency to try to over-rationalise the world here. Their analysis does not provide the "essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity". I don't believe the cruch is what management wants at all, the problem is simply poor planning. All they want is the software to specification by the deadline. If you can do this without the crunch then obviously this is a Good Thing, but if you can't, thats business.
The cruch is a response to a problem (that may be flawed) but its not the real problem. This is somewhat different from the issues that people like Abbe and Ford were discussing which was the simple problem of extracting sustained and predictable productivity from their workforces.
The difficulty is that the work processes surrounding the writing software appear to be still relatively poorly specified, which is why there are many methodologies -- which attempt to produce sustained and predictable patterns of productivity -- but no silver bullet as yet. A hint to this is that of course Ford was in the vanguard of people who went out of their way, at considerable expense, to enforce a well-specified process behind their output. He had to have that in place before his adjustments to working hours made any sense; the author's analysis of Ford's management style misses this vital aspect out.
I don't know if he's going to get back to you but I think possibly what means is that in Norse mythology the characters are more powerful than us (stronger, mightier, immortal etc) but aren't actually "better" in a moral sense, they make terrible errors of judgement almost constantly. There is not necessarily that much to be emulated or otherwise learned from. I seem to recall the perennial bad-boy Loki incurs practically everyone's wrath but always ends up surviving the fallout right up until Ragnarok, the Norse apocalypse myth. The only moral message available appears to be that its only a crime if you get caught.
The Christian God's influence on the world however is usually to lead people toward being very much our 'superiors' in the moral sense or to punish them for bad judgement and from these different object lessons the reader could learn to live in a Godly and morally upright manner. Even in the case of Jesus my reading of the New Testament is that his 'super powers' as it were play second fiddle to his moral and ethical judgement, which is something we are encouraged to emulate as far as possible. He can raise the dead and feed the five thousand but its the bravery, humility, kindness and love that are the important part.
I take your point. Although being pro-EU isn't as far as I can see coherent with anything to do with religious criticism; what I'm trying to say is I don't think there is a "master" agenda (as there is with, say, FOX). Certainly there are individual failings though; the Glasgow media group was very critical of coverage of the Falklands for example where the language used in reports changed starkly once operations were underway.
As regards the EU issue, I think that has a lot to do with the raw material (in terms of spokespersons and events) they had to work with. The government itself is always going to get more time because its the government, the importance of a minister saying something because he is both politician and the holder of a public office is going to be more important than when a "mere" opposition MP says something. But you have to balance that with the fact that when the government buggers something up thats also a massive story but when an opposition MP makes a wrong call its not screamed from the rooftops in the same way. Its kind of a structural problem I guess so whilst it doesn't excuse poor journalism its going to be a problem even for the most even handed 'objective' journalism because they have force balance on something that by its nature isn't really balanced in the first place.
...its to do with time when most of the famous characters were created I think, there was a great deal of interest, and post 1945, collosal anxiety about radiation. I expect to see more modern creations having something to do with genetic modification and perhaps nanotechnology in their origin stories. These things don't necessarily happen by accident, I understand Stan Lee was thinking of issues of race and prejudice when he came up with idea of the X-men as being mutants persecuted for being who and what they were born as. Professor Xavier can be seen as a sort of Martin Luther King to Mangento's Malcolm X. In more recent times I've had the suspicion that this form has been reworked slightly to have more resonances with regard to society's treatment of homosexuality (I definitely got that feeling in the second film in the scene where, was it Iceman(?), goes home and his parents get upset when they find out what he is. Would appear to mirror many a "coming out" story).
This reflection of anxieties in popular art forms as a way of exploring or dealing with them is fairly well noted; for example, Bram Stoker's Dracula has an underlying theme of fear of supressed female sexuality, whereas Frankenstein is clearly all about fear of science. Its all the same thing really.
As an aside another reason Batman wins over his only DC rival, Superman, for readers internationally is that Superman is a little overly wrapped in the stars and stripes (of course "Red Son" had much fun playing with that aspect the strip) to the extent where his popularity waxes and wanes with regard to how people feel about the USA. He was big in the 1980s when American culture was at its zenith of being "cool" in Europe. Right now nobody wants to know really. He's always been and still is popular in countries that target the USA as a migration destination.
On closer examination though I think Superman is very symbolic but I think that Bruce Wayne/Batman is probably nearer the American dream ultimately. By day he's an enlightened capitalist in the modern American mould (rigorous businessman but very charitable etc) who still finds time to be a 'self made man' and act in a sort of "Wild West" state of mind by night.
Hang on, inherited wealth, wild west mentality, hangs out in a technologically advanced underground bunker...Batman=GWB? Holy known unknowns and unknown unknowns Batman! Makes you wonder if Wayne Industries had the contract for repairing the damage to Gotham done by the Batmobile and the Joker blowing stuff up. Meh, politics.
Heh, well I know you're trolling but heh.
No, communism wouldn't, according to Marx, arise from anyone telling anyone else to do anything. It would be a natural (and via Hegel, he really does mean natural, as in the driver is the nature of human psychology) response to an exaggerated degree of inequality. The worker is left with no other choice. Impossible? But then, what choice will the people of the USA be left with when 99.99999% of all wealth (and a commensurate sum of all income) is in the hands of less than 1%? Its the inevitable progression of the present situation and even the rabid Adam Smithite must agree that this going to be the case. If one doesn't believe this could be the case then one doesn't believe in the promise of capitalism; time to liquidate those shares and buy gold or something.
This looks like a contradiction but it isn't. Its often seen that Marx was the enemy of capitalism. Well, indeed he was, but this didn't mean he didn't understand capitalism or didn't think capitalism would make some people rich. That he understood very clearly; it was the consequence of this he was looking toward. I.e., Marx was as much a believer in the nature of capital as Adam Smith, he was a moral rather than an academic opponent of capitalism.
I would also add that capitalism is often viewed by Americans as the perfect system as contrasted with the "failed" communist system. However, for a lot of people in the world its capitalism thats the fucked-beyond-belief-are-you-people-mad unworkable impossible fairy-tale system. There are people in ostensibly capitalist countries in Africa starving to death. How would explain to them that capitalism is the best way of doing things? In the USSR they had bread queues. Imagine that, all you had to do is stand in line, and somebody would agree to sell you some bread...surely its the promised land?
Personally I view Marx as the great diagnostician but an utterly lousy medic; he'd kill the patient to cure him. I hope a better way will be found.
Thats somewhat unfair. The Hegelian model adopted by Marx is quite clear, before you become a socialist state you must first be a mature capitalist state. Its yet to be tried therefore. Both Mao and Trotsky amongst others were well aware of this (thats what the five year plans were about, hothousing development up to where they should have been before hand). However you wanted to know who was conforming to the spirit of Marxism, well, the USA is doing excellently. Would you disagree? Everything he said about the nature of capital itself appears to be true and increasingly wealth is at some pace becoming increasingly unequal in its distribution within society (in 1997, the top 1% held 84% of all wealth in the USA and 47% of total income; note from this the distinctive charater of capital...what do you imagine the numbers are today and what will they be ten years from now?).
Also, who said anything about government? Why throw off the shackles of the capitalist class only to give away your labour to an unaccountable government? I think you are confusing communism with Leninism. Most libertarians are basically communists who don't understand what the word means as far as I can tell.
It must be said I don't blame people who make that mistake. I did a quick google search and here are some contradictory highlights:
In its ideal form, social classes cease to exist, there is no coercive governmental structures, and everyone lives in abundance without supervision from a ruling class. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels popularized this theory in their 1848 Communist Manifesto.
yet...
A system of government in which a single, totalitarian, party holds power. It is characterized by state control of the economy, and restriction on personal freedoms. It was first proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto.
but then again...
An economic system in which the people control the means of production (capital and land) directly, without intervention of a government or state.
Have a look yourself here.
All I'll add by way of commentary that its pretty clear when you visit the various sites whose actually cracked the cover on Das Capital and who is channeling Joe McCarthy. Universities tend to get it correct. Worryingly the middle entry came from an American grade school's webpage.
I'm by no means a communist or a socialist myself but I do think people should investigate their terms of reference before talking about these topics. It appears in the US that people have been left deliberately clueless.
From: urgh813@homonidcave.com
:0)
To: urgh212@homonidcave.com
Date: Tue, Mar 18 160,000BC 14:36:14 PST
Subject: Urgh
Urgh Urgh Urgh Ugg.
Urgh Urgh Ug.
Urgh.
Or maybe I'm just reading more into the story than the WSJ folkd deserve.
On the other hand if we were talking about the New York Times...ahem.
The CEO of our company tried to get us to work more hours, we just laughed, and continued to work just over 40/week.
You got your way as a result of collective action. You already have a de facto union. Thats all trades unionism is. Lucky you, but some people aren't in that position. Some companies run things to deliberately isolate and divide employees so that situation could never happen (c.f. Walmart). The problem arises when the boss hints he's looking to "free up" a dozen or so positions. All it takes is a few worried family men to comply and thats that. What are you going to do then?
Yeah, you need an geek permanently on hand (well, glued to the back of it) to get anything done.
That said, R2D2 is clearly the king of the command line.
TBH the millenium falcon looked more a candidate for running Linux to me:
LUKE: What a piece of junk.
HAN: She'll make point five beyond the speed of light. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. I recompiled the kernel myself.
LUKE BOGGLES IN DISBELIEF.
Well I didn't really want to get into that but its done both by themselves and by others like the School of Journalism in Cardiff and the Glasgow Media group. Although even then they don't always agree in their assessments (but even then its only very slight biases and depends whether you think showing footage of warfare is itself pro or anti for example).
I'll put it to you the other way: what is the sound argument for the BBC having any degree of partiality beyond its remitt to educate and entertain the British public?
My MSI K8N Platinum NForce 4 runs "Cool & Quiet" as a feature. Thus my AMD64 is running at 1000MHz as I type this but will dynamically crank up the mulitiplier should increased grunt be required. Commensurate with this the fans pretty much shut the fuck up and I guess if I fixed those settings passive cooling would be fine.
Given this technology has been around for sometime now I'm not really sure what the point of the article is.
Heh, well thanks for clearing that up. Bizarre indeed. If you get the chance, treat yourself to watching a current affairs show the BBC do called "Newsnight". I have no idea if its broadcast overseas but I imagine it might. Put it this way, remember George Galloway gave some American politicians a bloody nose recently? He, like every other politician on hte face of the plant, is scared of Paxman as you can see from this transcript (Note the trademark determination that his question is answered fully whatever the attempt at evasion). Its in my view the best thing they put out on the TV. Glorious stuff. What you won't get from that clip is that about ten minutes later he was doing the same thing to memebers of the (ostensibly) pro-war British cabinet, which would probably better illustrate my point about bias. Thats what politicians hate about the BBC in general, its actually their integrity thats the problem for a lot of people.
I'm astounded. Theres been a long debate about the BBC over its history that will probably never go away. Both Labour and the Conservatives have decided its against them and for their foes at different times. As have the Liberals, the Greens, the Scots Nationalists, the parties in Ulster and obviously the socialists and the fascists harbour their own grievances.
I can't think of a more compelling proof that the BBC does its best to put out the truth; after all its the only type of news that could be equipotential in its power to upset politicians of starkly varying political persuasions.
But I must say I'm amazed that the Beeb is selected as "anti-Bush" and the "anti-USA" thing is outrageous. What possible grounds could one have for thinking that?
Let me put it to you this way: when I was at University I never met a student who wasn't either a socialist or a progressive radical. We haven't had a revolution yet and SWP usually gets less than a hundred votes even in council elections. What happened? I don't know but I see some of those people today and they are civil servants, corporate officers and lawyers who don't take legal aid cases.
Seriously, the first sniff of a decent tuition-fee offesetting pay cheque and people change. Before your eyes almost. Lets see, Linux and a month's messing about whilst the boss glares at me or do I buy this shiny box of closed-source data-hoarding not-quite-optimum Corporateware for a couple of grand of corporate chump change? Its actually quite sad but its part of life. It'll happen to you too. I'm sorry to be the harbringer of bad news but we truly are never the same after graduating.
So, take it all with a pinch of salt. Perhaps the scenario you describe could have happened in the early 1990s when I was around but, unfortuantely, it didn't. Programmers fresh from college don't have the power they could exert in the mid stages of the dot com boom and probably never will have again either. The chance was missed frankly.
that we like to hark back to are when people had PCs primarily for work-from-home business reasons. But with a couple of grand's worth of hardware in the room, why not use it for something else? Infocom, Sierra, SSI etc. found people were quite keen on using them for something else.
I don't see anything has changed now, except a vast amount of people now have PCs at home for work and internet use and for a range of other hobbyist persuits of which gaming might be only one of many (e.g., digital art, digital audio, programming). And actually for many of those persuits you can't get by with a 286 running Slackware, one needs a modern spec machine. MS OSs only make this tendency more pronounced; the spec of a PC happy with Longhorn running its best UI scheme (Aero-something) will be high end. Kids and students might blink at the price, but really in the grand scheme of things people will just upgrade to meet the current standard.
Sure, if you are only buying a PC for gaming then you have some difficult decisions re: consoles, but OTOH I'm not aware titles like Civ, Hearts of Iron 2 and Total War are particularly suited to consoles. Its notable that the growing demographic in gaming isn't the kids, its far older people, the early retirement people and the stressed execs. They wouldn't be seen dead in front of a console and consoles can't offer the types of experience they want (immersive strategy games/simulations or simple card games using the same UI they know from using MS Office). But in reality who doesn't use their PC for a range of additional purposes? Its a false question really.
To put it another way, imagine an alternative reality where Atari never dropped the ball and their had been complete continuity from when the 2600 came out until the PSX3 arrives and the great console 'death' of the mid 80s never occured. Games for PCs never really happened. What do you think the industry would be panting in excitement about? The prospect that people might buy games to play on the near ubiquitous PC hardware they now have in their homes almost as a matter of course.
I think whats missing from the article is any consideration of the market penetration of PCs. Sure, an Xbox is "only" 400 dollars, but my PC as of the day I bought it 0 dollars, I've already got it for office stuff.
Three reasons why PC gaming will never die:
1. Ubiquity of hardware in the home.
2. Ease of piracy (sorry but its true).
3. The nature of PC games played by the demographic whose time is worth more than money to them.
My own peeve is that the majority of society believes that a factory approach to education is what works best.
No, society knows that the factory approach is the cheapest way of doing it. Any idea how much individualised attention would cost at market prices? Ten or twenty times what sticking 30 kids in a room with one teacher does. Thats in theory 2 minutes per student every hour. Given even that isn't funded properly in most countries, well I don't see how it could become possible. Even merely doubling resources would be a drop in the ocean. Unfortunately society has decided the education for other people's kids isn't as important to them as subsidising the production of cheap consumer goods or foreign invasions or what have you, and theres not a lot we can do to change that.
its called winding your window down and turning up the radio.
works now favours older more senior staff so its hardly surprising if they then scoop the plaudits. Funding is increasingly "targeted" making younger researchers fight against stacked odds. Of course when we are talking of public money its hard to argue against the position that money should go to long proven performers. Add to this that academic promotion is largely a matter of dead-mans shoes for anyone who isn't a genuine genius (ie. for people who are merely extremely good at what they do) and there is an aging workforce then I think that could quite easily add up to an average shift of six years. In short I can't access the full text but I think this is a result of policy more than anything else. There are a lot of big ideas floating about but having the means to make them stick is another matter.