The only MMO that really hooked me for a while was Warhammer. I'm not interested in the tabletop wargaming or painting, I just really love the fluff.
I had to drop WAR because I am a very casual gamer. I only put in 3 to 6 hours a week. It got really boring at a round level 20. A very poor Solo experience at around there. It's soul-numbing drudgery. I've heard that it gets better at Level 30 onwards (or 'Tier 3' as Mythic have divided it by decades) for the solo player...but I got frustrated. I just wanted to see places I'd read about and meet the various personalities (that didn't require a group) and enjoy the story lines (the Dark Elf storyline is brilliantly conniving and you get involved in everyone's backstabbing).
I was not interested in adjusting my life for groups, I find socializing on MMOs weird (but I'm also the kind of person who finds IM-type applications disruptive rather than enjoyable). I thought Mythic's solution with scenarios that reset themselves and were open to anyone was a great idea and I had fun whenever someone was around. Different story when no one was around though, especially scenarios that nobody liked.
Anyway, long story short, I like solo play. I'm in it for the story and a sort of semi-social CRPG experience. Naturally I am not their [the MMO companies] intended market but I might have been willing to spend more money if they had given just done a little bit more tweaking for the solo player.
Head Mounted Displays are a dead end for everyday, full-time casual and social applications. Full Stop. Period. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.
There is no point even discussing it or listing pros and cons or design hurdles. It simply will not be accepted. The sociological and psychological reasons are obvious and need not be listed. We absolutely loathe those Star Trek-ish bluetooth headsets. What makes you think HMDs will be any better accepted? "Trendy" HMDs disguised as fancy Issey Miyake glasses simply inspire resentment at needing an external fashion item to get a service.
The Augmented Reality Revolution will happen as soon as a display can be miniaturized on to a contact lens or some sort of walk-in day-surgery that replaces your lens, cornea or some part of the eye with an artificial one that acts as a display and runs off bio-electricity. Something like specially designed mitochondria or kinetic energy conversion like in those fancy "kinetic" watches. The latter is probably the most practical and safest as eyeballs are constantly moving and genetically engineered mitchondria could mutate into something life-threatening or cause catastrophic immune responses.
For all intents and purposes, the Augmented Reality tool, no matter it's form, must be perceptually invisible to the user and to all observers in order for it to become a more permanent fixture in our lives and culture. HMDs are strictly for hazardous or military applications. At the Facebook, cafe or pub crawl level, no one is interested in wearing some stonking doodad on their head.
At an even higher tech level, is bypassing the senses completely, and connecting directly to the appropriate parts of the brain, merging vision, sound and tactile information in one fell swoop (since the contact lens or implant solution would still require a permanent "hearing aid" type implant if sound information is desired as well).
At first I was going to call you on liking Tekken, but not buying a PS3 for Tekken 6: Meaningless Subtitle....until I checked Wikipedia and was surprised to see that Namco have not made the next Tekken a PS3 exclusive. You'll be able to get it with the Xbox360. No doubt there will be exclusive characters just like Soul Calibur IV did.
I want to give you a mod point but you've already maxed out, so I'll say thanks for making that post as I personally don't know enough about music distribution to have noticed it was fishy.
The game is still as good as ever because the story is not anchored to its graphics. After seeing how beautiful the human models are in both the Source engine and whatever engine they are using for Mass Effect, I think updating the graphics side, remastering the voice tracks and music and adding any and all side-missions and storyline Warren Spector wanted to put in originally but couldn't, would make it an instant hit. I'd hire Greg Bear and Grant Morrison as story consultants if the original story were to be expanded. Especially on fleshing out a full version of "Jacob's Shadow", the fictional book you can read excerpts from during the game.
Dawn of War
I still play this RTS in skirmish mode. It's just so damn fun. But it's really showing it's age. More polygons, better textures, more balance...heck...it needs a whole new engine. I would happily buy it again. Especially if it came with a powerful army painter and an option to host points-based games over the internet. A sort of weird hybrid of traditional table-top rules and RTS, including having persistent online army profiles that can gain XP from online play, earning phat loot (read: Wargear), unlockable classes (Exarchs, named characters from canon) and fame. Oh and none of this bollocks with being tied to Steam or Windows Live.
Arcanum
Again, except for some badly needed balance issues so that the majority of character stereotypes are equally effective (as opposed to becoming a mage, specializing in Force, vaporize everything = easy mode), the great story can carry it through a major graphics upgrade. I would love to see Tarrant in the Source engine, right down to Madame Lil's (*nudge, nudge* *wink, wink*). And that amazing string quartet soundtrack remastered. In fact, I'd love to bring back the old Troika crew and give all their work an upgrade.
For all games from here on out: As much support as technically possible for the mod community. Bethesda make money hand over fist from people who want to mod Fallout and Oblivion, who might never have been interested in the original games when first published.
Did it work? Was it something in Lua which you then asked all members of the guild to install as an "exclusive guild messaging system"? Did you achieve the desired outcome? What was the spy's reaction if you did get him?
Sorry for all the questions. Curious minds wish to know.
You have a point there. I forgot that Blizzard don't follow the usual trope of all greenskins being related and they are more like mad-scientist Phoenicians with dollar signs in their eyes.
Only my desktop runs Vista64. I learned from previous experiences that pretty much nothing that is legacy runs on it.
Fortunately my laptop running Vista 32 seems to handle all these old games just fine. DosBOX even managed to get my old copy of Syndicate Wars to run pretty decently. Unfortunately, the music track doesn't work in game and the DOS mouse driver is jittery and fickle.
Speaking of Outcast 2, that wiki article you linked to has two links to two different fan mods. Neither are finished, though one claims to have a working tech-demo so you can wander around the first stage.
I'm an adult and I disagree with you. I've only played Vice City and San Andreas in full so my experience is limited among all the releases, but I do believe Vice City was one of the funniest games I've played. Hopefully someone who has played them all can throw in their voice and perhaps say Vice City is the funniest of all the GTA titles.
Visually and thematically, the whole 80s thing was brilliant. Hawaiian shirts, lesiure suits, big white marble Neo-Classical mansions etc.
Then there was the 80s music, some of which is funny because we're embarassed how much we like it and then the moronic Spinal-tap-ish band made up of drug-addled Northerners and Scotsmen. Love Fist was it? I think it was also based on the backstage and off-stage scandalous antics of bands like Motley Crue.
They outdid themselves with the commercials and the talk radio shows. Yes, I concede that some of the ads are very crude, like Robot Chicken crude. No finesse, just toilet humour on steroids (I'm thinking of a particular commercial promoting chocolate donuts). They poked fun at things like the Atari having super-realistic graphics ("That one dot just vaporized the other dot!!!")and Casio Keyboards making you an instant musician (anyone remember the 'key-tar' i.e the "keyboard guitar").
My greatest praise goes to the talk shows. They did a great job satirizing the biggest topics of American politics: religion, gender and sexuality, Republicans vs. Democrats and the usual Oprah topics for flavour.
Of course let's not forget all the racial stereotypes. Sort of a very dark Quentin Tarantino makes fun of Mel Brooks' standard character tropes. The cowardly neurotic accountant comes to mind. Then there are the silly names so typical of TV shows of the 80s like Lance Vance. C'mon, you had to chuckle at that. Finally the random soundbites from NPCs walking around who themselves are each and every one, a caricature of some stereotype. I thought the bikini-clad rollerskating girls were hilarious, such an artifical expression of 80's beach culture.
First off, I am glad this case did not set a clumsy precedent dstined to become absurd the first time it is applied.
The best case scenario is some thought is put into making a more appropriate law for cyberbullying - which is essentially what it is.
No one here filled with rage or feeling like justice was not served should worry in the least, that Lori Drew is "getting away with it". She's not. We don't know much about her current personal situation but I am certain that members of her own family have essentially disowned her. I am sure former best friends have turned their back on her because they cannot overlook this one act of malice. If she is a churchgoer, is she still welcomed at her church or has she stopped attending? People know her name, her face has been in the papers and she walks shoulders huddled against the whispers in the aisles as she does her grocery shopping. Her children and her husband face collateral social damage. Her daughter - on whose behalf she apparently acted - will forever have her life tied to the death of another.
The judge made the correct decision, but from what I can see here in Slashdot, the court of public opinion has other plans for Lori Drew.
Disclaimer: This is really more of a combined life-long regret/wish-fulfilment reply but I think you can still get a useful ping on the sonar from it.
If I was in your position, with a BSc already under the belt and (I'm guessing here) not yet hit your 30s, I would have indulged my Japanophilia and applied for the JET program. If you can get in, you'll have a year paid for (no need to burn any of your savings except for some travel expenses, toiletries and some guilty pleasures), you'll pick up a useful business language, expand your general life experience and maybe even have romance or two. Once you are in, you get preference for extending your commitment (saves them a bunch of work teaching someone new how to do their job). You get to wait out the recession too, optimisitic estimates say we'll be out of it by about 2012.
In a similar vein, a friend of mine is dropping his teaching career to drive a car to Mongolia from London for charity (there's a specific village community he's helping). He's using his savings to do it, he'll be piss poor when he's done, but the experience will be priceless. He's a good looking guy, very charming and he may even get a cool Discovery channel job out of it. I can totally picture him being that lucky.
Basically what I'm trying to say is, you can spend the recession NOT trying to have a career. It's OK. It is a little bit like trying to swim upriver doing so at a time like this.
You can KEEP your savings. You can learn (not necessarily academically) without burning what you've earned.
Consider doing something totally unrelated for a year. Who knows what doors it will open.
Now's a good time as any to buy yourself a little notebook and spend a weekend writing your ideas and dreams in it.
It's when I hear fascinating inside stories like this regarding the gigantic telecoms industry, that I really wish somebody would do a Fast Food Nation style expose of all the ugly guts of the industry. If only Joseph Heller were still around to write it.
...create another tale in the universe of The Incredibles for a sequel.
Exactly this. It has always been my opinion that The Incredibles felt unfinished by the time the credits rolled, never mind the huge loose end introducing The Underminer character right before them. They could even do a prequel so we could learn more about Gazerbeam et al. and the "Golden Age" of heroes hinted at in the film.
Personally I'm up for more of that kitschy Ultra-Lounge Exotica in the soundtrack too, and all the tips-of-the-hat and nods to Industrial Design geeks.
When the netbooks first came out with 8" screens, I was excited but not quite satisfied by their design. It couldn't be used as a phone and was still too big.
Then the next-generation Netbooks went up to 10" screens and I was dismayed. As far as I am concerned, that's going the wrong way up the size-scale. Those extra 2" make it even more difficult to fit it in a minimal shoulder-bag (or "man-bag" as my sister calls them) let alone a pocket.
I'm hoping for something with a screen around 4" (my Nokia E61i's 2.8" is still too small, the iPhone is nearly perfect), good pixel count (not insane like the VAIO P series), physical, tactile QWERTY keyboard, Blackberry Bold style trackball and an OS that is an excellent thin client backed up by a good app store. If anything, the mobile phone is the best platform to take advantage of cloud computing, especially for borrowing processing power from the web.
The Nokia N97 is kind of there, it might be what I settle for while I wait for the Holy Grail. I'm sad that the new Android phone from HTC has ditched the physical keyboard for a touchscreen one.
Personally - and I have done this - I appeal to their empathy and sense of how it is an inconvenience to you.
In my case I said something along the lines of "I'd love to but last time I did that I got a virus/they busted a USB port/my keyboard got Coke all over it."
Play the Once Bitten, Twice Shy game.
Like a couple of posters have already said, they really don't need to be checking their email simply because you are there with a resource.
Rebuff casual requests to check Facebook. Use your judgement for more important requests like need to google a hospital a friend of their's is in.
One slight problem is that you have already been generous with your laptop, therefore people expect to use it again (seriously, humans are a rude and presumptuous species). They will be more annoyed than if they never enjoyed your generosity in the first place. But the above white lie can still work. Say that one guy/girl, can't remember who or choose a good, plausible scapegoat, messed up your laptop and now no one gets to use it. It was an expensive fuck-up, sorry dude.
If your colleagues start holding your reluctance to share against you...I think you are better off knowing who were the first to turn on you than to walk around thinking they gave a shit about you or your kindness. Overall, think of this as good practice for learning how to gracefully say no while minimizing or totally nullifying consequences. It is an EXCELLENT tool in life and one I admit I sometimes have trouble with.
For one thing, you brought the concept of "Good vs. Evil(TM)" into an adult discussion about WW2. When I was 12 years old, John Wayne and the blue-clad US Army, trumpets a-blarin' and horses a-chargin' were always the good guys, and the Red Indians were bad, kidnapping white helpless women and scalping their fathers and brothers. I am not 12 anymore and those old films are by turns hilarious and cringe-inducing. (But John Wayne is still cool). There are no "good guys", the Allies were not fighting Satan (read up about Heinz Guderian). Can we leave the good vs. evil in the children's fiction section please.
I (like most people) think the ends justified the means.
Please speak for yourself. Do not nominate yourself as speaker for the majority. Don't assume your view is shared.
Fighting the Axis became the only decision because very little else had been done that might have avoided it. I will leave it to the academics to argue the nitty-gritty but the "good guys"- as you put it - had a lot to do with creating the teacup within which the storm was brewed. Read the criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles sometime. Read about the foreign policy of Prime Minister Chamberlain that pretty much "allowed" Hitler to make some bold moves and gave him the confidence that no one in the continent or outside of it was going to give him the least bit of trouble. I leave it to you whether to admire or condemn the man for his adherence to his values and making a bad problem worse.
I wish to add that one should seriously consider a heat exchanger/AC hybrid system for temperature management rather than pure AC.
You'll save a ton on electricity bills, lower electricity consumption and reduce maintennance and use of refrigerant. It's all very ecologically friendly as well as having the more important bottom-line: Cost savings. I don't see it mentioned, but if this data center is in a climate that does experience cold seasons, then you automatically have central heating redirecting the data center heat to any neighbouring buildings. If you want to look really long term, you might even look into some sort of heat pump that will create electricity for the building, or to sell back to the utility company.
Slashdot Mirror
I am in total agreement.
The only MMO that really hooked me for a while was Warhammer. I'm not interested in the tabletop wargaming or painting, I just really love the fluff.
I had to drop WAR because I am a very casual gamer. I only put in 3 to 6 hours a week. It got really boring at a round level 20. A very poor Solo experience at around there. It's soul-numbing drudgery. I've heard that it gets better at Level 30 onwards (or 'Tier 3' as Mythic have divided it by decades) for the solo player...but I got frustrated. I just wanted to see places I'd read about and meet the various personalities (that didn't require a group) and enjoy the story lines (the Dark Elf storyline is brilliantly conniving and you get involved in everyone's backstabbing).
I was not interested in adjusting my life for groups, I find socializing on MMOs weird (but I'm also the kind of person who finds IM-type applications disruptive rather than enjoyable). I thought Mythic's solution with scenarios that reset themselves and were open to anyone was a great idea and I had fun whenever someone was around. Different story when no one was around though, especially scenarios that nobody liked.
Anyway, long story short, I like solo play. I'm in it for the story and a sort of semi-social CRPG experience. Naturally I am not their [the MMO companies] intended market but I might have been willing to spend more money if they had given just done a little bit more tweaking for the solo player.
Head Mounted Displays are a dead end for everyday, full-time casual and social applications. Full Stop. Period. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.
There is no point even discussing it or listing pros and cons or design hurdles. It simply will not be accepted. The sociological and psychological reasons are obvious and need not be listed. We absolutely loathe those Star Trek-ish bluetooth headsets. What makes you think HMDs will be any better accepted? "Trendy" HMDs disguised as fancy Issey Miyake glasses simply inspire resentment at needing an external fashion item to get a service.
The Augmented Reality Revolution will happen as soon as a display can be miniaturized on to a contact lens or some sort of walk-in day-surgery that replaces your lens, cornea or some part of the eye with an artificial one that acts as a display and runs off bio-electricity. Something like specially designed mitochondria or kinetic energy conversion like in those fancy "kinetic" watches. The latter is probably the most practical and safest as eyeballs are constantly moving and genetically engineered mitchondria could mutate into something life-threatening or cause catastrophic immune responses.
For all intents and purposes, the Augmented Reality tool, no matter it's form, must be perceptually invisible to the user and to all observers in order for it to become a more permanent fixture in our lives and culture. HMDs are strictly for hazardous or military applications. At the Facebook, cafe or pub crawl level, no one is interested in wearing some stonking doodad on their head.
At an even higher tech level, is bypassing the senses completely, and connecting directly to the appropriate parts of the brain, merging vision, sound and tactile information in one fell swoop (since the contact lens or implant solution would still require a permanent "hearing aid" type implant if sound information is desired as well).
At first I was going to call you on liking Tekken, but not buying a PS3 for Tekken 6: Meaningless Subtitle....until I checked Wikipedia and was surprised to see that Namco have not made the next Tekken a PS3 exclusive. You'll be able to get it with the Xbox360. No doubt there will be exclusive characters just like Soul Calibur IV did.
"Counterfreedomary" is now officially my favourite neologism.
Thank you good sir!
Doh! You're spot on with the narrative style.
Ha! So I wasn't the only one who immediately thought of Max Payne.
I did not however, remember a weirdly appropriate quote from the game. Well done sir.
I want to give you a mod point but you've already maxed out, so I'll say thanks for making that post as I personally don't know enough about music distribution to have noticed it was fishy.
Deus Ex
The game is still as good as ever because the story is not anchored to its graphics. After seeing how beautiful the human models are in both the Source engine and whatever engine they are using for Mass Effect, I think updating the graphics side, remastering the voice tracks and music and adding any and all side-missions and storyline Warren Spector wanted to put in originally but couldn't, would make it an instant hit. I'd hire Greg Bear and Grant Morrison as story consultants if the original story were to be expanded. Especially on fleshing out a full version of "Jacob's Shadow", the fictional book you can read excerpts from during the game.
Dawn of War
I still play this RTS in skirmish mode. It's just so damn fun. But it's really showing it's age. More polygons, better textures, more balance...heck...it needs a whole new engine. I would happily buy it again. Especially if it came with a powerful army painter and an option to host points-based games over the internet. A sort of weird hybrid of traditional table-top rules and RTS, including having persistent online army profiles that can gain XP from online play, earning phat loot (read: Wargear), unlockable classes (Exarchs, named characters from canon) and fame.
Oh and none of this bollocks with being tied to Steam or Windows Live.
Arcanum
Again, except for some badly needed balance issues so that the majority of character stereotypes are equally effective (as opposed to becoming a mage, specializing in Force, vaporize everything = easy mode), the great story can carry it through a major graphics upgrade. I would love to see Tarrant in the Source engine, right down to Madame Lil's (*nudge, nudge* *wink, wink*). And that amazing string quartet soundtrack remastered. In fact, I'd love to bring back the old Troika crew and give all their work an upgrade.
For all games from here on out: As much support as technically possible for the mod community. Bethesda make money hand over fist from people who want to mod Fallout and Oblivion, who might never have been interested in the original games when first published.
That's pretty slick. You not only stopped your spy, but gave the game a group messaging capacity it never originally supported.
Did it work? Was it something in Lua which you then asked all members of the guild to install as an "exclusive guild messaging system"? Did you achieve the desired outcome? What was the spy's reaction if you did get him?
Sorry for all the questions. Curious minds wish to know.
You have a point there. I forgot that Blizzard don't follow the usual trope of all greenskins being related and they are more like mad-scientist Phoenicians with dollar signs in their eyes.
The Naga perhaps?
Goblin City? Hmmm...does this mean the Horde will finally have their comic-relief counterpart to the Gnomes?
What would the Alliance have as a new race? Pandaren?
Only my desktop runs Vista64. I learned from previous experiences that pretty much nothing that is legacy runs on it.
Fortunately my laptop running Vista 32 seems to handle all these old games just fine. DosBOX even managed to get my old copy of Syndicate Wars to run pretty decently. Unfortunately, the music track doesn't work in game and the DOS mouse driver is jittery and fickle.
Speaking of Outcast 2, that wiki article you linked to has two links to two different fan mods. Neither are finished, though one claims to have a working tech-demo so you can wander around the first stage.
Thank you!!!
I'd totally forgotten about this game and loved it's presentation and slick voice-acting. Cutter had some great lines.
Now if I could just find that CD-ROM...
I'm an adult and I disagree with you. I've only played Vice City and San Andreas in full so my experience is limited among all the releases, but I do believe Vice City was one of the funniest games I've played. Hopefully someone who has played them all can throw in their voice and perhaps say Vice City is the funniest of all the GTA titles.
Visually and thematically, the whole 80s thing was brilliant. Hawaiian shirts, lesiure suits, big white marble Neo-Classical mansions etc.
Then there was the 80s music, some of which is funny because we're embarassed how much we like it and then the moronic Spinal-tap-ish band made up of drug-addled Northerners and Scotsmen. Love Fist was it? I think it was also based on the backstage and off-stage scandalous antics of bands like Motley Crue.
They outdid themselves with the commercials and the talk radio shows. Yes, I concede that some of the ads are very crude, like Robot Chicken crude. No finesse, just toilet humour on steroids (I'm thinking of a particular commercial promoting chocolate donuts). They poked fun at things like the Atari having super-realistic graphics ("That one dot just vaporized the other dot!!!")and Casio Keyboards making you an instant musician (anyone remember the 'key-tar' i.e the "keyboard guitar").
My greatest praise goes to the talk shows. They did a great job satirizing the biggest topics of American politics: religion, gender and sexuality, Republicans vs. Democrats and the usual Oprah topics for flavour.
Of course let's not forget all the racial stereotypes. Sort of a very dark Quentin Tarantino makes fun of Mel Brooks' standard character tropes. The cowardly neurotic accountant comes to mind. Then there are the silly names so typical of TV shows of the 80s like Lance Vance. C'mon, you had to chuckle at that. Finally the random soundbites from NPCs walking around who themselves are each and every one, a caricature of some stereotype. I thought the bikini-clad rollerskating girls were hilarious, such an artifical expression of 80's beach culture.
First off, I am glad this case did not set a clumsy precedent dstined to become absurd the first time it is applied.
The best case scenario is some thought is put into making a more appropriate law for cyberbullying - which is essentially what it is.
No one here filled with rage or feeling like justice was not served should worry in the least, that Lori Drew is "getting away with it". She's not. We don't know much about her current personal situation but I am certain that members of her own family have essentially disowned her. I am sure former best friends have turned their back on her because they cannot overlook this one act of malice. If she is a churchgoer, is she still welcomed at her church or has she stopped attending?
People know her name, her face has been in the papers and she walks shoulders huddled against the whispers in the aisles as she does her grocery shopping. Her children and her husband face collateral social damage. Her daughter - on whose behalf she apparently acted - will forever have her life tied to the death of another.
The judge made the correct decision, but from what I can see here in Slashdot, the court of public opinion has other plans for Lori Drew.
Disclaimer: This is really more of a combined life-long regret/wish-fulfilment reply but I think you can still get a useful ping on the sonar from it.
If I was in your position, with a BSc already under the belt and (I'm guessing here) not yet hit your 30s, I would have indulged my Japanophilia and applied for the JET program. If you can get in, you'll have a year paid for (no need to burn any of your savings except for some travel expenses, toiletries and some guilty pleasures), you'll pick up a useful business language, expand your general life experience and maybe even have romance or two. Once you are in, you get preference for extending your commitment (saves them a bunch of work teaching someone new how to do their job). You get to wait out the recession too, optimisitic estimates say we'll be out of it by about 2012.
In a similar vein, a friend of mine is dropping his teaching career to drive a car to Mongolia from London for charity (there's a specific village community he's helping). He's using his savings to do it, he'll be piss poor when he's done, but the experience will be priceless. He's a good looking guy, very charming and he may even get a cool Discovery channel job out of it. I can totally picture him being that lucky.
Basically what I'm trying to say is, you can spend the recession NOT trying to have a career. It's OK. It is a little bit like trying to swim upriver doing so at a time like this.
You can KEEP your savings. You can learn (not necessarily academically) without burning what you've earned.
Consider doing something totally unrelated for a year. Who knows what doors it will open.
Now's a good time as any to buy yourself a little notebook and spend a weekend writing your ideas and dreams in it.
It's when I hear fascinating inside stories like this regarding the gigantic telecoms industry, that I really wish somebody would do a Fast Food Nation style expose of all the ugly guts of the industry. If only Joseph Heller were still around to write it.
...create another tale in the universe of The Incredibles for a sequel.
Exactly this. It has always been my opinion that The Incredibles felt unfinished by the time the credits rolled, never mind the huge loose end introducing The Underminer character right before them. They could even do a prequel so we could learn more about Gazerbeam et al. and the "Golden Age" of heroes hinted at in the film.
Personally I'm up for more of that kitschy Ultra-Lounge Exotica in the soundtrack too, and all the tips-of-the-hat and nods to Industrial Design geeks.
...in Johor Bahru, Malaysia out near the Taman Desa Cemerlang suburb, was happily promoting the Pleo toy to local traffic.
I was throw for a loop because I thought the company went bankrupt. It's possible they simply forgot to take it down. And now, they don't need to.
You and I have the same Holy Grail.
When the netbooks first came out with 8" screens, I was excited but not quite satisfied by their design. It couldn't be used as a phone and was still too big.
Then the next-generation Netbooks went up to 10" screens and I was dismayed. As far as I am concerned, that's going the wrong way up the size-scale. Those extra 2" make it even more difficult to fit it in a minimal shoulder-bag (or "man-bag" as my sister calls them) let alone a pocket.
I'm hoping for something with a screen around 4" (my Nokia E61i's 2.8" is still too small, the iPhone is nearly perfect), good pixel count (not insane like the VAIO P series), physical, tactile QWERTY keyboard, Blackberry Bold style trackball and an OS that is an excellent thin client backed up by a good app store. If anything, the mobile phone is the best platform to take advantage of cloud computing, especially for borrowing processing power from the web.
The Nokia N97 is kind of there, it might be what I settle for while I wait for the Holy Grail. I'm sad that the new Android phone from HTC has ditched the physical keyboard for a touchscreen one.
Personally - and I have done this - I appeal to their empathy and sense of how it is an inconvenience to you.
In my case I said something along the lines of "I'd love to but last time I did that I got a virus/they busted a USB port/my keyboard got Coke all over it."
Play the Once Bitten, Twice Shy game.
Like a couple of posters have already said, they really don't need to be checking their email simply because you are there with a resource.
Rebuff casual requests to check Facebook. Use your judgement for more important requests like need to google a hospital a friend of their's is in.
One slight problem is that you have already been generous with your laptop, therefore people expect to use it again (seriously, humans are a rude and presumptuous species). They will be more annoyed than if they never enjoyed your generosity in the first place. But the above white lie can still work. Say that one guy/girl, can't remember who or choose a good, plausible scapegoat, messed up your laptop and now no one gets to use it. It was an expensive fuck-up, sorry dude.
If your colleagues start holding your reluctance to share against you...I think you are better off knowing who were the first to turn on you than to walk around thinking they gave a shit about you or your kindness. Overall, think of this as good practice for learning how to gracefully say no while minimizing or totally nullifying consequences. It is an EXCELLENT tool in life and one I admit I sometimes have trouble with.
Certainly.
So long as you don't consider the collateral damage and the bill from FEMA.
For one thing, you brought the concept of "Good vs. Evil(TM)" into an adult discussion about WW2. When I was 12 years old, John Wayne and the blue-clad US Army, trumpets a-blarin' and horses a-chargin' were always the good guys, and the Red Indians were bad, kidnapping white helpless women and scalping their fathers and brothers. I am not 12 anymore and those old films are by turns hilarious and cringe-inducing. (But John Wayne is still cool).
There are no "good guys", the Allies were not fighting Satan (read up about Heinz Guderian). Can we leave the good vs. evil in the children's fiction section please.
Please speak for yourself. Do not nominate yourself as speaker for the majority. Don't assume your view is shared.
Fighting the Axis became the only decision because very little else had been done that might have avoided it. I will leave it to the academics to argue the nitty-gritty but the "good guys"- as you put it - had a lot to do with creating the teacup within which the storm was brewed. Read the criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles sometime. Read about the foreign policy of Prime Minister Chamberlain that pretty much "allowed" Hitler to make some bold moves and gave him the confidence that no one in the continent or outside of it was going to give him the least bit of trouble. I leave it to you whether to admire or condemn the man for his adherence to his values and making a bad problem worse.
I wish to add that one should seriously consider a heat exchanger/AC hybrid system for temperature management rather than pure AC.
You'll save a ton on electricity bills, lower electricity consumption and reduce maintennance and use of refrigerant. It's all very ecologically friendly as well as having the more important bottom-line: Cost savings.
I don't see it mentioned, but if this data center is in a climate that does experience cold seasons, then you automatically have central heating redirecting the data center heat to any neighbouring buildings. If you want to look really long term, you might even look into some sort of heat pump that will create electricity for the building, or to sell back to the utility company.