Thanks - I'm surprised their bugzilla installation makes it so easy to superficially impersonate people in posts.

Still, some of the other comments are pretty strong too. He seems to have a knack for winding people up.

That's quite a read, you have to go out of your way to get multiple people writing comments like this one:

"Wow, you are a bastard. I hope you die alone. :D"

How do people with an attitude like Drepper's become maintainers of crucial projects? He seems obviously unsuitable (whether he has superb technical skills or not).

Having played multiplayer online FPS games since Quake 1, L4D is the first one that really felt like a different game to me. Part of that is the intense teamwork required - much more so than other 'team' games like the BattleField series. I'm not really into the whole zombie theme, but the gameplay and design are so well done that I can't help but love playing it anyway.

Thanks Valve for making a fantastic and innovative game better, and giving away the new content for free!

In NZ all Coke (cans, plastic bottles) seems to use real sugar, not HFCS. :-)

Sure for XP to Win7. But amongst other advantages Windows 7 is much 'snappier' than Vista (the UI is far more responsive on the same hardware), and I think will be an attractive upgrade for Vista users. So I think the adoption rate will be better than it was for Vista.

Mind you, that's not exactly strong praise given the poor Vista adoption rate.

Lucky critical mass isn't an issue, since it's just a statue!

Exactly (and I wish I had mod points!)

It's not just engineering that suffers, it's innovation and creativity in the product as well. It doesn't matter whether you're writing an accounting app or a game, innovate approaches to problems can save huge amounts of time, and greatly enhance the product. It's very hard to innovate when you're exhausted, stressed and miserable.

"The reason management likes it, is that they get to put all the burden on the lowly workers, and then blame them if the outcome is less than ideal."

I don't think that's really true. I think most management would want the project to succeed, and they're probably fairly desperate at that stage. They may have convinced themselves that crunch time is necessary, and anyone who doesn't put their whole life into the project is just not trying, but I doubt many of them like it. At least I hope not.

For a given project that's behind, what are the alternatives? It's considered somewhat 'standard' in the industry (and I know that's the real problem), and so the managers will be expected to make it happen. Standing up and saying that the project will miss the milestones and shipping dates to provide better working conditions would be unlikely to have a good result...

So the real need is to change how the whole industry views development. I think the post further down makes a good suggestion:
"Write your congressman and senator - IT should not be exempt from FLSA!"

But part of the problem is that the companies doing this to their employees are able to get people to take those jobs.

"Really it is the game industry equivalent of out of shape men at the gym crowding around each other lifting way too much weight and giving themselves hernias."

The sad part is that they're not like out of shape men - the ones pushed hardest are often some of the brightest and 'strongest' workers in an organisation. At crunch time who does a manager put the most pressure on? An employee that they know won't be able to get something done, or the star performer that can save the project if only they'd put more time in?

I think (2) is the critical point for programmers, although I don't know about artists, level designers, marketing etc.

I'm a development manager at a software company, and we produce fairly technical (scientific) software, but I imagine programming in the gaming industry has some of the same constraints. Diminishing returns on the number of hours put in, and even extra hours becoming counter productive after a point, is an obvious reality for us.

We still have "crunch time", but it means going from 7.5 hours a day to 8.5 or 9.5 hours a day for one to two months before a big release, which happens every 18 months or so. At the extreme, one or two developers might work 10 hour days five days a week for a few weeks. We're very careful to monitor stress levels and code quality when that's happening, and make sure it's something the developer is happy doing.

But here's the thing - we meet deadlines. We rarely drop features. We produce high quality products, with no panic-driven patches coming out days later. We actually add polish to .0 releases.

We do all this by training the developers to be able to give accurate estimates, and helping them develop project management skills. The developer writes the requirements doc (we have a meeting to discuss features, but the developer produces the document that the meeting discusses). The developer sets the schedule for the release, including all milestones. And the developer takes the responsibility to decide how best to write the code and implement the features to meet the commitments they agreed to.

And of course we hire good people. :-)

What the whitebox list doesn't tell you is the performance you're likely to see using local storage. We've seen massive variation between motherboards, from great (40-60MB/s transfers from Windows VMs) to terrible (4-6MB/s!). Same VM, same ESXi configuration, just different host hardware. ICH9R seems to be the best bet, and we've had a good run with the Asus P5K series. XenServer Express is easier - it seems to work well on any hardware we've tried.

This is getting off topic, but I think ESXi and friends are awesome so can't help replying...

I run Citrix XenServer at home, and my father and neighbour run ESXi. We all use these to run a single home server VM 24/7, and that's about it (so only one live VM!).

It's dead easy and quick to set up, you can use cheap parts with local storage (with the right motherboard for ESXi), and you can stick the machine down in the basement or in a closet. From then on you don't have to mess with the physical machine.

Once every year or two we'll be upgrading (software-wise) or reinstalling the home server, and it means we can have the new and old virtual servers running side-by-side and just transfer stuff across. All without spending extra on hardware.

Dad likes playing with Linux, and my friend and I wanted to try out Windows 7, so it can also be used for things like that. I know you can do that with Server, Player, Fusion, Parallels, Virtual Box etc, but I like that I don't have to have extra network interfaces/drivers on my computer that might mess up other software (games can be picky about it), and that I'm not filling up my personal harddrive with that stuff. Using ESXi or XenServer is less hassle for us. It also means the test machine can be left running when I turn my computer off, for example if I wanted it left on downloading stuff (which is nice because my PC is noisy, so having it on all the time is a pain). Anyway, we all really like the ease and flexbility doing this brings. We don't need it, but it's nice. :-)

I think you mean IR/V = 1. You've just quoted Ohm's Fifth Law.

If you have any left, I'd love an invite, please. :-)

... too late, and too Microsoft.