Slashdot Mirror
Dilbert's Ultimate House
angkor writes "Dilbert's Ultimate House (DUH) is the product of the combined wisdom of thousands of Dilbert readers, plus the help of real world experts, and it's online for viewing at dilbert.com/duh. Are you tired of tripping over the cat's litter box in your bathroom? Dilbert's house has its own bathroom just for the cat. Do you hate dragging a Christmas tree into the house every December just to throw it away in January? Dilbert's house has a huge closet off of the Great Room where he stores a fully decorated artificial tree on wheels..."
Dilbert's house isnt complete without an evil mastermind.
where is ratbert's toidy?
It has an excercise room. Sorry.
Does anyone remember the site "Leisure Town", in the episode Comedy Crises the main character takes all these Dilbert cartoons and adds his own text. he posted them all over his office and people just flipped out because the stuff was so raunchy and explicit. the Leisure town guy (in real life) was contacted by the Dilbert company's lawyers and he was forced to change the comics to stick figures or risk being sued. anyways, that was funny
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
Kid's bedroom? Wife's bathroom? this can't be dilbert we are talking about.
What do you get when thousands of Dilbert readers put their minds together and design a house?
:)
slashdot effect?
... soon to become Dogbert's Ultimate House...
And does Bob and his brood still live under the couch?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Come on.
That greenhouse needs a good hydroponics system if Dilbert's looking to get any quality chronic.
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
Look at the Kid's rooms. Ummm. What children would want that?
Overall nothing thrilling. I got excited but then disappointed with the actual results. I read a lot of Dilbert and don't see why he would be all that thrilled about energy efficiency and all the other mumbojumbo. He seems more a gadget head and as a gadgety cutting edge home it's lacking.
People keep their cat's litter box in the bathroom? Might as well keep it in the kitchen or your bedroom. Why keep it in a room where you spend a lot of time? Do people like smelling cat shit? I keep mine in the basement. If you don't have a basement keep it somewhere where no one goes.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
After reading through the stacks of Dilbert cartoon books in my college apartment's bathroom I was under the assumption that Dilbert's house looked something out of a third grader's art class.
Turns out I was completely wrong and it looks like something out of Art 453, The CGI of Star Wars and how it can be applied to comics.
I guess I preferred living in a world of Simpsons where I didn't have to mentally map out the entire episode based on a "fact" or look at Dilbert's house in anything except black and white pencil.
That's just me though.
I think it's HUGE
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
is that in some areas, you simply cannot build them, because your neighbours might complain that your house makes their house's property value go down.
:(
I live in such an area.
Instead of a motif of elongated curvature, though, I was working with hexagons, and mine was a split-level, not a flat ranch. My movie theater was above the two-car garage.
The tower wasn't a plain observatory, but a hollow tower designed for evaporative cooling: a good way to cool the central patio in the summer is to have a high evaporative "swamp" cooler at the top of a hollow tower, and let the cooled air fall down and into the patio area.
[
If you aren't organized, having a giant house won't help you. The closet for the Christmas tree will get filled up with other stuff and you won't be able to get at the tree when you need it. One of the first rules about labor saving devices is that labor saving devices don't. They mostly just occupy space.
I have spent some time on ships and have always been impressed by how neat and orderly they are. Everything aboard is necessary and gets used regularly because there is no room for unnecessary stuff. (Unfortunately, I am surrounded by 'stuff' because I didn't learn from the experience.)
I'd need a room with padded walls to come home to after a grueling day of putting up with the pointy-haired boss.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
hahaha, it includes a "kids room" ... like that'll ever happen.
... lol.
And as for the exercise room, yeah right.
Home theatre, yes. Home office, yes. He doesn't need a double bed.
And yes, 6000 sq. ft. in the area of Silicon Valley too
Still, it looks pretty and is more sensible about making areas of the house that will be used rather than not used.
Nice house that seems to reflect the owners tastes and desires without going overboard. Some might disagree due to the turret paying homage to the character that paid for it, but its nice to see a celebrity's home that doesn't try to match Aaron Spelling's mansion.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It has to have an excercise room, otherwise you couldn't not use it.
Or
you could not not use it
Should mean
you could use it
But doesn't, but what about
otherwise you could'nt, not use it
Or
otherwise you could not, not use it
Perhaps
otherwise you could'nt not, use it
Giving up
otherwise you could, not, not, use it.
Why have rooms that no one goes? You're paying for a useless room?
GPL Deconstructed
IMO, the ultimate house has no cats, but thats just me.
The exercise room is woefully inadequate. And the "Wiring Center" is pitifully small. My home theater room alone has more cables than that. I have an entire wiring closest that is about 8'x 10' with many dozen runs of Cat5 and RG6 coming into it (for a house that is not yet 100% wired, and only about 70% of the size of the DUH.
-This sig intentionally left blank
I actually like it. At least parts of it. The site was running a bit slow, but we haven't quite /.'d it yet. I'm gonna fire up some wget's and see what happenes... (just doing my part)
The pics looked pretty good, and I will probably take note of some of the "requirements" that the house had to have.
I think that was a mac on his workroom table:)
-=fshalor
I was going to post that combined wisdom here, but Slasdhot won't allow empty comments.
But can it pass a Feng Shui test
the dork tower.
Where's the bondage room?
...and after they'd been dating for several weeks, Scott Adams drew one strip where Dilbert shows up to work with his necktie completely flat.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
at least they got that part right-Allllriiiiight
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I don't see a floorplan for this wonder house. Interior and Exterior views can't fully describe the layout. I want a floorplan!
Beautiful house, very much approaching an engineer mentality...but hey no matter what I couldn't find a cost extimate or a decent cost analysis.
Point being...my dear Scott, Dilberts out there probably will never be able to afford that house considering the rabbit exponential breeding rate of pointy haired bosses.
Dilbert would never have kids.
Building underground makes sense; where I live, there is also an extensive downtown underground network (in light gray on this map;interconnected city blocks are in pink) which everyone raves about (especially during winter), so it's not that silly an idea.
However, the most striking feature of the house is the master closet adjacent to the master bedroom which leads to two bathrooms. I've been reading an interesting series of books about the evolution of the architectural distribution of rooms as social customs evolved. A long time ago, in France, posh houses had precisely that, dressing rooms adjacent to the bedroom that led to bathrooms (the only difference was that the husband and wife had separate bedrooms). The setting makes a lot of sense.And it proves that history repeats itself... There is a lot to learn from the past.
This might not be a popular opinion here, but this house looks so cold and engineered and artificial. There's something to be said for the aesthetics of a lawn that isn't astroturf and a house that hasn't been built entirely around the principle of energy (and everything else) efficiency. Of course I'm not currently living in a drafty two-hundred year old monstrosity with leaky plumbing, I might change my mind if I was, but I get the feeling that such a house would be infinitely more livable than this thing.
... it keeps the riff raff out!
You wanna live in an area where you are free to park your car up on cinder blocks in the front yard and let the grass grow wild all around it? Go right ahead.
Hahhahahahaha!! That's hilarious. Looks like you're getting modded down though by some empty-minded moderators.
I can see playing paintball around this house would be a blast! BUT! That turret would be a deathtrap for any joker that got into the top of it. hmm....
Veteran: "Ok, I want you to go to the top of that turret and defend it."
Newbie: "erm, ok!"
Veteran: *thinks* "at least he'll be out of my hair for the time being..."
*Splat*Splat*Splat*Splat*Splat!* HIIIIITTT!
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Is there any Linux software out there capable of rendering architecture like this house? Which program was used to generate these images?
This is true, but honestly, I think sometimes it's just a case of a few eccentric people who came before you ruining it for everybody.
Case in point. Not too far from where I live, there's a guy (fancies himself an artist, I suppose) who was known for his decorating up the front of his house in bright neon. He had neon lights surrounding his front windows and his street address lit up in neon over his door, etc. Later, he added on a room to one side of his place - and instead of creating a flat, level room as any sane person would do, he designed it so it slopes upward at about a 30-35 degree angle. (I guess the furniture in there is bolted down to the floor or something?)
After all of this, I'm fully expecting the municipality to impose some new rules on home remodeling and construction....
As someone with a strong interest in energy-efficient, environmentally-sound house building techniques, this is a fantastic way to both rise awareness of current possibilities for reducing dramatically electricity bills (though the house could have used some grey water system combined with tanks for rainwater, and a seperate sewage treatment and containment system.
The guided tour pages are a treasure of information, especially the one on the exterior design, which introduces nice construction materials and other very neat gadgets.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I happen to like traditional homes, but the commentary brings up some good points. Most people don't use a formal dining or living room. A house should be built for the way it is used, but of course there are consequences when it comes to reselling.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
There are issues involved when you put rooms above garages. Maily to do with fumes. I believe you have to concrete shell the garage if you put a room above it, which is why I guess you mainly see garages off to the side.
Generally, when you quote from someone else's work, such as how the entirety of the submission in this case is quoted from yesterday's Dilbert newsletter, you mention that you're doing it and enclose it in quotation marks.
m l/newsletter57.html
Here is the original from which the submission was directly quoted:
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/ht
I had rooms above garage in California with little issue. I don't know if there was anything special, but the garage's ceiling was plain unpainted sheetrock. My sketches were assuming a good multi-layered floor over the garage anyway, for additional noise damping materials.
[
neutron bomb and a timely vacation seem to be in order.
In my one brief experience with home ownership, I (and my now-ex) turned down a 5-bedroom behemoth of a house, selling at an outstanding price, because of 2 reasons: the yard was small and there was an oppressive HOA that had rules such as you could only fence off an area of your property equal to less than 1/2 of your home's square footage and you could not have a visible antenna of any kind. Oh, and I believe there were decoration requirements for the major commercial marketing excuses (what we sometimes call "holidays").
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
" The quiet room doubles as a music practice area. When your teen decides to learn the drums, shove him in there and it's almost as good as if you'd never had kids in the first place. "
hahaha, I love it!
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
I assume you don't have kids?
What they WANT is nothing that is practical or good for them, at least until they are teenagers (then, they still don't want healthy practical things, but there is no longer any point in trying to fight the tide).
What you need is things they don't INSTANTANEOUSLY DESTROY. That's the parent's guideline, take it from me.
For example, in the "kids bathroom" of the DUH there is a sink cantilevered out from the wall. BRZZZT! No fly zone!!
If you actually construct this thing with a support system that will prevent kiddies from ripping it off the wall (something involving huge stainless steel beams and multi-ton weights, I think) when they and their little friends start doing the mambo on the countertop, then somebody will split his little forehead open when chasing his (shorter) sister through the room and not ducking fast enough. If you pad the edge, it will get ripped apart the first time said little sister passes through the room carrying a cat frantic to escape the Tea Party of Doom. The cat will be leaving gouges a quarter inch deep in the mouldings, so you can kiss your padded bolster goodbye.
The towel rack off the front of the sink, that's a GREAT idea, though. It'll soak up at least a tenth of the fifty gallons of water any four-year old spills while "washing his hands".
The cat won't use that litterbox. She can't see the whole room from it, the window above is a possible avenue for predators, it's not sheltered, and it's too close to the food bowl.
Move the box behind the door, away from the windows and food/bed, and your cat will stop pooping all over the house.
Also, cats don't need a stairway to climb 2.5 feet unless you have kittens.
What? I have never seen a house that had anything special for rooms above the garage. We had two bedrooms above the garage in our old house. And nothing but regular sheetrock / insulation / floor between them.
All those rooms and no library. Where am I supposed to put all my books (lots and growing)? My CDs (all 1500 and growing)? My DVDs (also growing)? I want a room I can store them in and be able to read, too.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Dilbert uses Apple Macs! There is a Powerbook in his home office and an iMac in the kids room.
For 1984 maybe..
I was 1/2 expecting to see a top loading Betamax deck in the wiring room.
The screenshots are either photoshopped or they are completely fake. I think we've been duped. Someone is trying to pass their photoshop skills as a real house lol.
First, we got rid of all the "museum rooms" like the formal dining room, fancy foyer, and the front room...
(sigh)
Engineers.
the funniest stuff I've ever read. Ever.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
It would appear that Dilbert earns a comparatively large salary for an engineer working at a dysfunctional company. If he can afford a house like that then why is he still working for the boss? Sheesh even Dilbert earns more than I do...
Has Dogbert taken to keeping pet cats?
"Remembering the seventies energy crush, there was plenty of designs for underground houses (go to the library and peruse old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics back issues from that era)."
A nice feature is that they're very, very quiet. Especially if you live in a noisy part of town.
The only downside is that "living in a cave" feeling.
Okay; so you were joking, but in all honesty, *every* new house, of whatever size, should feature extensive underfloor/behind-wall spaces for wiring, and plenty of accessible openings (although you could add more, if need be).
This may all come back to bite the owner if everything goes wireless, but my guess is that, at worst it will be slight overkill with minimal cost; versus massive convenience when you *do* need to install wires. No reason it couldn't be used for temporary electrical wiring, after all.
prior to the tour... "As you probably know, most of the people who design houses hate your guts. For example, they know you'll never use the formal living room, yet they include it so you'll have to pay extra. They tease you with a fancy-schmancy dining room, making you fantasize about hosting important dinners for heads of state, despite the reality that you eat your meals directly from the refrigerator."
apparently our boy has been buying mass produced housing and never actually hired an architect. besides, nothing says you have to put a table in there. make it a reading room, or any number of things.
always mosh clockwise
Perhaps that explains a few irregularities in your behavior then? :)
so, where's the secret lair... you know every geek's dream house has one.
http://www.brentcastle.com
Re:Totally Rad house!!!!
For 1984 maybe..
I was 1/2 expecting to see a top loading Betamax deck in the wiring room.
Nineteen Eighty-Four? I was half expecting a propoganda-broadcasting radio that you couldn't switch off, cameras throughout (watched by the government), and a special "Room 101" to save you having to leave the house when it's time for the Party to torture you.
I think Scott Adams is probably planning to actually build this thing for himself, using the collective input from his tech-savvy readership to help him design it. Definitely better than relying on an architect.
Did anyone else notice that in the overhead picture?
Either that, or else they put the solar cells on the wrong side.
Of course, there's also the photo on the opening page that's not consistent with the layout.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I hate dilbert, and I hate you. Man... where did that agression come from? I gotta go eat some chips or something and chill out...
The Impractical Ideas page has several ideas that are not only practical, they're not even necessarily hard. For example, the solar closet; I've seen a couple webpages with houses in the desert that have columns of water standing in them that get sunlight from above, which distribute light into the house and retain heat at night. This is anything but an impractical idea. How about "Easy access to smoke alarms"? That's pretty goddamned practical. Stainless steel sink/counters are not only practical and no more expensive than, say, marble - but you don't even have to custom make them! Just buy some of the nicer commercial fixtures. And finally, the UPS system so you don't have to set your clocks is also something you can buy off the shelf, for instance APC's Matrix series products. They take 220VAC input (typically, in the US) and they spit out 110VAC battery-backed power which you can wire into the house.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I didn't realize that Dilbert had a corner phobia
I like the idea of a built in observatory, but you want some kind of pier to set the telescope on that isn't connected to the rest of the building, so footsteps don't cause vibration to the telescope. You also want some kind of retractable roof, so you don't have to reassemble and realign your telescope every time you want to observe. But I guess you need to put up with a bit of hardship if you want a building that looks like Dilbert.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
I don't know how many times I've heard people bring this up as a feature they wanted in their kitchen. However it has been brought up enough so that you can now purchase a fairly expensive dishwasher that has two separate wash compartments.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
They should have designed the house for India, where Dilbert's job will soon be. Maybe then the size of the house would also be affordable.
This is the section I liked best. The [a href="http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/duh/im practical_ideas.html"]impractical ideas[/a]. One that I really liked the idea of is the [a href="http://www.whispergen.com/"]whipsergen[/a] on the second page.
It would be interesting to see the cost of a natural gas powered electrical generator for the home. If not for everyday use, then at least as a whole or partial house generator to be switched over to during outages. It looks as small as a dishwasher. It looks like an indoor device though, and not something you'd put next to the outside AC unit.
The basement garden helps to obscure those "trees" from any peeping neighbors.
What's odd is that a whole house surge protector was listed as an impractical idea. I think they sell them at Home Depot. Somewhere around $100? Attaches to your incoming power line, protects the whole house, eliminates the need for in'duh'vidual surge protectors. There were a few other impractical ideas that caught my eye as being somewhat practical.
I would love this place. I'd make a few mods though. I've always wanted a house with a courtyard and circular layout.
Replace the b-ball court with a pool and or hot tub. I would definitely need a full weight room. Higher ceilings would be nice and a full bar somewhere for entertaining. I would also need a place to setup a home brewery and a place to store the boat and motorcycles. The garage is a tad small.
Overall it's a good home. I'd add a windmill for addition power since solar isn't as efficient in Minnesota.
You say this, yet your post has a link to the Libertarian Party, clearly a pro legal marijuana group* and hardly "lefties". Maybe marijuana is an issue for everyone.
* The Libertarian Party actually has some good ideas. I respect their "hands off" attitude towards social issues and their "hands off" attitude towards business concerns me. A pro LP person needs to explain to me how the LP would stop company problems like Enron, et al.
There is a fairly striking similarity between the DUH floorplan and the schematic of the Death Star's fire control mechanism. Observe:/ by41screen .jpg
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/zs/anh
Looks like that dilbert page was outsourced to Latin America, check out the page source! It's in spanish!
A whole-house surge protector sounds like a nice, easy, set-and-forget solution. But do you really need to surge protect your electric dryer and its 5000-watt appetite for juice? How about the washer, dishwasher, refrigerators and HVAC? Keep in mind of course that anything that claims to surge-protect your entire house for $100 is using MOVs, which give up some of their 'life' with every power spike they suppress, and would have to be replaced regularly.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Why would you put movie seats in your house, sure it makes it more like being at the movies, but the seats at the movies are one of the worst things about going to movies.Having 3 couches(or recliners) at different height tiers would be much better. Plus you can snuggle with your girlfriend on a couch, but then again, this IS the dilberts house.
Let's see...
:-)
1) The house has three, count 'em, three gardens located UNDERGROUND. I'd be curious to know what exactly he's growing down there.
2) The laundry room is located directly adjacent to the master bedroom. I can't be sure, but the washer/dryer could even be sharing a wall with it. (Man, the shit I would have caught from my old landlord if I were to start up a load of wash late at night...)
3) Similarly, the "Quiet Room" shares walls with the main entrance, kitchen and gym, and shares a floor with the playroom and possibly the basketball court(!). Hope Dilbert's company has a soundproofing division
4) Her Master Bath is only accessible from inside by walking through His Master Bath (uggh), or through the closet. (I guess this could be a Good Thing, as it might keep Her Master Collection of Shoes off the closet floor if she's got to trip over them all the time.)
5) From one angle of the virtual walkthrough, it appears that the windows of the Dilbert Observatory face toward a stone wall. I'm sure you can still see a lot of stuff, but a lot of stone wall as well. Actually, a good geek-grade observatory would be detached from the house so as not to transmit all the vibration from the house and its equipment/occupants...or at the very least, not so close to the basketball court.
6) The cat's room: Should the lip of the kitty litter box really overhang the food bowl like that? (OTOH, maybe it's just MY cat that somehow manages to spread litter granules in a 3' radius around the box)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Sheesh. For many people, that's not a viable option. If you're in an apartment, no basement, no garage with a kitty-door, not likely to have a utility room. Same for some houses. So if you have the option of having an infrequently-used room in your dwelling, then sure, put the cat box there. Everyone else, though, gotta make do.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Something to keep in mind is that these Home-Owner Agreements have almost no legal standing and cases against them are won almost every time. *wry grin* Heck, half of them never even bother writing down all the rules, so they really have no proof as to what you signed up for. That said, this is the first time I've heard of a group that actually charges for their services as some of the child posters seem to be stating. Usually it's just a bunch of busybodies with more time than sense on their hands...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.