At 83, I Decided to Develop an App
medium.com
medium.com
Mr. Rumsfeld can’t code. He doesn’t much even use a
computer. But he guided his young digitally minded
associates who assembled the videogame with the same
method he used to rule the Pentagon—a flurry of memos
called snowflakes.
As a result, “Churchill Solitaire” is likely the only
videogame developed by an 83-year-old man using a
Dictaphone to record memos for the programmers.
[...]
“We need to do a better job on these later versions.
They just get new glitches,” reads one note from Mr.
Rumsfeld. “[W]e ought to find some way we can achieve
steady improvement instead of simply making new
glitches.”
I see this all the time, especially with offshore development. I was the lead for a US project with an additional India team. We had a US-based PM for the Indian contractor. Then we had an India based PM, then we had 3 developers. Any time I needed to discuss something, I had to consult with the US PM, the US PM consulted with the India-based PM and the India based PM would then ask the devs. Then the answer would go through that path in reverse. A simple question like, "Where is the setup script file in the repo?" That took literally 6 emails, with delays of several hours between responses.
Needless to say, that arrangement didn't last long before I fired the company.
My point is that you don't always need an experienced project manager depending on the scope of the project and the number of developers. 10 devs -- yes absolutely. But 2 or 3 devs? Not necessarily.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/design_hell/8....
Rumsfeld himself is interesting, though. There's a documentary about him currently on Netflix, directed by Errol Morris: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2390962/
[Comic panel was from http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell ]
Why not call it Stalin solitaire then?
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest... [2] http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...
The point you're making is that they can't be compared because Stalin killed more people? I suppose there is a minimum number in millions that must die to be considered a terrible person?
You should read up on the relish Churchill took in killing "savages". Read Late Victorian Holocausts too.
Up to 3 million people starved to death while
British officials begged Churchill to direct food
supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He
raged that it was their own fault for "breeding
like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague
was "merrily" culling the population.
And quoting or arguing that kind of unsubstantiated claptrap does a disservice to the point you are making.
I don't believe you are a neo-Nazi, I think you just pulled the first result from Google on "how many people did Stalin kill", but in my experience it's usually people with right or extreme right agendas who try to paint Stalin as worse than Hitler by quoting such nonsensically high figures.
You attempt to discredit my take on Stalin with rhetorical flourish, so generously implying that “you don’t think I’m a neo-nazi”, yet you provide no evidence that he wasn’t a butcher. While I don’t think you are an “uneducated fascist”, most attempts to propagandize pro-Stalin viewpoints come from… Not a good way to change someone’s opinion if that is your goal. You did make a good catch on the first google link, but hardly surprising when providing supporting references in HN comments. Wikipedia has the number at 3-60 million, with 3 being the “officially” recorded number. [1] Perhaps you are right that Stalin was better than my interpretation, but you haven’t convinced me.
I didn't say he wasn't a "butcher", so why should I have to provide evidence to that effect?
As for my "rhetorical flourish", most of the people online I see making the ludicrous claim that Stalin killed 50+ million people turn out to be Hitlerites.
>Wikipedia has the number at 3-60 million, with 3 being the “officially” recorded number. [1] Perhaps you are right that Stalin was better than my interpretation, but you haven’t convinced me.
Apparently neither has Wikipedia and every historian who places the figure at less than 20 million, such as William Rubinstein and Yale University's Timothy Snyder.
As that Wikipedia article states, the 3-60 million wild guesses were before records became available after the demise of the Soviet Union. When researchers were able to study and analyse the records the ridiculously high estimates were revised drastically down.
Perhaps you can explain the difference between deliberately not sending food to people you know will die without it, while revelling in their deaths, and "actively attempting to exterminate" them? Preferably from the point of view of the people being killed.
>Churchill largely did the first, and perhaps in small amounts did the second.
Of course. The 25% of the entire planet that made up the British Empire was a hotbed of free elections and democracy.
>It's quite ridiculous to claim that Churchill is just as evil as Stalin, even if you believe Churchill is on-the-balance evil.
I'll try and remember that, if I ever say Churchill was just as evil as Stalin.
If a person on the street who is starving asks me for food, and I decline and yell some epithet about the homeless, and keep walking, any reasonable person would consider that less evil than if I shot that person while yelling that epithet.
At the end of the day, the direct cause of the famine were crop failures and the invasion of Burma, not Churchill's inaction. At the end of the day, the direct cause of the millions of deaths in famines in the USSR was Joseph Stalin's mass collectivization.
You should remember it, because, to put it bluntly, if you ever said that in Western society, you would be laughed out of the room.
In this case, given that Churchill was prime minister of a colonial power, its more akin to starving POWs while siphoning their crops to a different locale; a crime in any post war court. Your analogy is way off base.
Would also add that part of the crop failures thing is because the British forced the locals to grow cash crops over several centuries. Funny how independent India has yet to have a drought that escalated into a famine and has effectively dealt with droughts huh?
As for "Western society", that you modestly imagine yourself as a representative of/spokesperson for, I'm British. I have never met a single person in my entire life who had a positive opinion of Churchill, with views ranging from contempt to indifference.
Outside of Conservative/Establishment circles, among people who know more about him than a handful of speeches he made, Churchill is rightly loathed. He was an objectively bad person.
He was supported during WWII because, unlike others in the cowardly Quisling British Conservative Establishment, he actually wanted to fight Hitler, albeit for his sense of 'supremacy' over Germany/Hitler than any particular morality.
Once Hitler was defeated, in spite Churchill's ego-maniacal interference in the war effort that caused countless unnecessary deaths and catastrophes, he was rejected by the people in every single general election.
Unfortunately for Britain, and for Obama's grandfather who Churchill tortured along with thousands of others, the "democratic" British electoral system allowed him to become PM again, despite receiving far fewer votes than his opponent.
Sounds like an election Stalin would be proud of.
But I find his valorization of war really disturbing given his role deceiving the public into increased warfare. The way he writes about this game makes it seem like he has a fetish for callous, take-no-prisoners violence. I think it's an outdated mindset and it disturbs me to think about the human bodies that were burnt to a crisp under Rumsfeld's direction. So many people lost their lives and will lose their lives because of his war perversion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A946-2004Jun23...