All Work And No Play ... 251
Clifton Forlines writes: "Jupiter Media Metrix released a report on Monday about PC gaming - here's one of the more interesting tidbits: 'Similar to past years, Microsoft Windows-bundled games dominated the top rankings in October 2001: Solitaire was number one, with 21.3 million users.' A little math tells us that americans spent about 24 million man-hours in October on Solitarie (estimating that each user spent a little more than an hour over the whole month) That corresponds to about 1 million man-days, or around 2740 man-years! For comparison, I looked up these numbers...
Empire State Building: 7 million man-hours (a mere 9 days of Solitaire), Panama Canal: 20 million man-hours (a mere 26 days of Solitaire), Apollo project: 15.5 billion man-hours (or a mere 52 years of Solitaire) Think about it!"
Windows-Bundled Games (Score:0, Insightful)
I have no admin rights, so I can't install everything else.
Just because more play it does not necessarily mean it's the best game!
The difference here (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but I can afford to play solitaire! (Score:1, Insightful)
Regarding the man-hour comparisons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is, if you choose the statistics that you compare to carefully, you can make anything seem amazing. Compare hours spent playing solitaire to hours spent while brushing teeth, and suddenly he numbers don't seem so amazing anymore.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative. (Score:1, Insightful)
My grandfather worked on the Apollo project; granted his role was small, he helped to turn down the radio stations operating in Apollo 13's band when it was operating under power due to difficulty. But without even his minor contribution men could have died. To compare the work of brave men in the same tally as lazy overpriveleged goof-offs is a damned insult.
Sorry if I come of as irate; it's because I am.
Re:Mythical Man Month (Score:1, Insightful)
Kinda Ironic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solitaire? No (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that Minesweeper is NP-complete [bham.ac.uk], are you so sure of that assertion? In a sufficiently-crowded field, you almost always get to some point where you can't deduce from the surrounding squares whether or not there's a mine in a space. You end up guessing and hoping for the best when this happens. I suspect that the Minesweeper where you never have to guess isn't the true Minesweeper.
Re:Come on. (Score:2, Insightful)
Particularly the version where the mines are actually disguised as really neat wristwatches and stuff like that.
Re:and before Solitare and Mindsweeper... (Score:3, Insightful)
Er, perhaps it has something to do with the bars on the cage?
Have you ever seen people in prison? wasting time is all they do!
Re:Regarding the man-hour comparisons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a libertarian, I said a few disparaging words upon hearing this suggestion, but I have to admit, he had a point.
Of course the proper counter is, having increased my efficiency 2000% or more, why shouldn't I reap the benefits? Because you didn't stop me? Is that a threat? There are other ways of getting threatening freeloaders out of the way...