Re:Online Muds: Free and Non-commercial
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 2
Personally I've found that sometimes playing a classic Pen & Paper Roleplaying game on IRC is a great, especially if the genre fits (Shadowrun comes to my mind).
Or via email, though I have to admit I'm a bit biased (something about running a PBeM server for, uh, 16 years or so will do that to you).
We've lately been setting up an enCore MOO for realtime (we had an IRC server up, but enCore is cooler). Unless the GM really wants to get into setting up locations for flavor, the MOO itself won't be used for gameplay, just to provide a venue. EnCore seems very well suited for that.
There's an article here on a different skydiver (mentions Fournier and another attemptee, too) shooting for the same record.
"If her plans succeed, on Sept 3, 2003, she'll ride a balloon to 130,000 feet, jump out in a McConnell Air Force Base pressurized space suit and free fall to Earth nearly 25 miles below -- landing somewhere within 70 miles of Wichita."
Oh yeah. Our church just had sixty-some Compaq DeskPros donated for our garage sale ($20 got you at least a P133, 16MB, 1.1GB, keyboard, mouse, 14" monitor, and 95 license... the local Linux users group members are buying 'em up five at a time), and out of a large number of Compaq and Dell keyboards, there was one lonely IBM keyboard.
I pay for the postal service with my taxes. Who says I'm not paying for the spammer's mail? The postage rate doesn't cover all of the costs.
Cite? Or are you talking non-US? The USPS only receives federal appropriations to provide free mail for the blind and for overseas voting. So unless you're getting a large quantity of junk mail from blind people, you're really not paying for it. (In fact, I'm going to guess that without the volume of junk mail, postage would go up.)
Quickbooks does corporate/business accounting. If you want double-entry accounting, buy Quickbooks. You don't need the Pro version for real estate and most small businesses.
Has that changed in the last few years? ISTR my CPA sister ranting about people who used Quickbooks (not merely Quicken, definitely Quickbooks) instead of a real double-entry system like Peachtree.
He's never made it a secret that it was supposed to be nine movies. Or did you mean "Are we to expect that he's really going to try to go through with his planned nine movies?"
All in all, it's pretty darned explicit for a warning label.
Nah. Look at any infant's rear-facing car seat. Nice little graphic of a baby's head being chopped off by the car seat being hit by an air bag. *That's* explicit. (I foresee a manufacturer being sued because a kid was traumatized by seeing it...)
We ordered (now, before you laugh, this was nigh twenty years ago) an MAI/Basic Four machine for one of our clients (we were a dealer). And we waited. And we waited. To make a long story short, the client was in a hurry, and paid for air freight. Turned out somebody along the line pocketed the money, contracted the shipment out to a trucking company and basically paid for "whenever you have a truck going that general direction that isn't fully loaded" shipping. After much back-and-forth with the mfr, we eventually found the "missing" machine in the shipper's warehouse, where it had sat for weeks.
Eventually(!) we persuaded them to ship it counter-to-counter, and one of the senior partners went to go pick it up personally, with one of the Asoks along for muscle.
They had the joy of watching the beast, in its packing crate, being unloaded from the plane's belly. Saw the loader put it on the conveyor. Saw the loader at the bottom get distracted. Nearly got busted by security for frantically pounding on the observation-area window, screaming and gesticulating. Which was silly, the loader was standing under a jet engine wearing ear protection. But they felt like they had to do something as they watched tens of thousands of dollars of behind-schedule equipment faw down go boom off the end of the conveyor.
Of course, the really funny part was that the client was a regional trucking company itself, and probably could have gotten the the thing trucked in himself via interline agreements. No, I take that back. The really funny part was the scorpion story, but that happened later.
In the first book, this is barely apparent, but by the third book it dominates the story.
This really put me off, too. I sort of had an "neat story, I wish he hadn't turned it into such a soapbox" feeling. Soured me on the whole series. And the whole ending just wasn't as "neat" as the setup.
When I hit the line to the effect of "the entire Christian religion was built on a false foundation" that left me thinking "What about Jews and Muslims?" It just seemed to make the bias a little too in-your-face.
Because only Martha Stewart would expect her mother to hand-make a Valentine while staying in a hotel in a country where she doesn't speak the language?
And I'm not sure chocolate eclairs would have made it through the mail.
What *you* said... my mother's on vacation in Spain, and she sent a valentine to my toddler son. Neato, I thought, something to put in his scrapbook (okay, the cardboard box) what with the international postmark and all. And I open it, and it says something in Spanish that I'll have to give to Babelfish but is obviously a Valentine's greeting, et cetera... and when I set it down, I notice on the back it's got a stupid little crown and "Hallmark, Made In Spain" written on the back. (In English, of course.)
That ends up with some extraneous stuff, like the title, things like that. Might have to switch to doing it that way, though, if the things can't send out proper HTML.
I run a mailing list server. When HTMLized mail came along, I read mail in yarn, and the tags ticked me off, so I had my software reject them.
Then, I started to think, heck, I *don't* run a technical mailing list. Accessibility is important. So instead, I wrote my software to *convert* people's posts, regardless of how wacky they look, to plain text. It can't do something as severely encoded as a.doc, but it does a pretty nifty job on what's left.
But you wanna know what ticks *me* off? The stupid sites like Hotmail, and recently Excite, that send *bogus* HTML stuff, with no BODY tags. The Perl HTML-to-text library I'm using reads that as a blank message (no BODY? Okay, no body). Bah.
Having a toddler puts a crimp in one's marathon parties.
But we used to, back in our bachelor days, rent movies and do the marathon thing. It was important, though, to get movies that served as "wallpaper"... nobody seriously watched them much, since there were always games going on (remember when Car Wars was fun?)
So we ended up with things like Cannonball Run marathons, Back to the Future marathons, "lite" things like that. Go figure.
I had a clueless luser ship me a computer in a paper box. No, really.
It was a desktop model, and they put it in a copier paper box. It didn't exactly fit, so they put it in at an angle, and sort of taped around the lid of the box, which wasn't all the way on. Padding? There wasn't room for any padding. Besides, it was such a tight fit, the computer wasn't going to bounce around any, so why would it need padding?
The Emery guy didn't even leave it in the mailroom. He came directly to the computer area, gingerly carrying the box and a damage form. Four of the box's seams had sprung, leaving basically a big wide loop of cardboard around an otherwise-naked computer.
The punchline is, the case wasn't even scratched, so I told the guy not to get worried yet, and grabbed a spare monitor and keyboard and booted the puppy up... and it was perfectly fine. Apparently all the handlers just felt so sorry for the poor thing that they were actually gentle with it.
But mainly because I've got a squajillion spams sitting in my spamtrap telling me I *could* buy one.
Makes the whole TLD smell bad to me already. And no, I haven't checked to see if the spams are coming from anybody with a legitimate business related to the rollout. It's just an irrational gut feeling; I now associate.biz with "Shy About You're Pacakge?" Feh.
Picking nits: King actually writes from, and about, New England, which is a bit east of the Midwest.
As near as I can figure, "the Midwest" is defined as "anywhere you can't see an ocean." Indiana, for example, calls itself "midwest," while Kansas, which also calls itself "midwest," calls Indy "back East" and Indy calls Kansas "out west." So hey, for people on the east side of the Atlantic, Maine can be "midwest" too, no problem.
Minor nit: yes, it has been, early on. I think the 1928 (or thereabouts) changes in US copyright law eliminated that, although it might have been earlier. In any event, it's pretty safe to say it never worked that way in any Slashdot reader's lifetime.
You *can* lose the ability to claim certain damages, though... basically, it cuts an infringer a certain amount of slack by saying "Okay, so you saw Company X violate the copyright without consequence and thought it was okay, so maybe your violation wasn't malicious."
(Someone with a working memory can probably provide the actual terms and dates and stuff if anybody really cares.)
Does anyone else see the irony (and perhaps the futility) in creating a site devoted to tiny apps that run on the most buggy and bloated OS known to man?
Contrariwise. When your OS is big, all you got left is room for tiny apps.
(I [heart] Boxer for DOS, myself. I'm pretty sure it's floppy-sized or less, at least in minimal version. If I could find my stupid interface cable, I'd put it on my HP200LX.)
I ended up working at a bank. Yeah, you'd think it'd be the ultimate suitplace, and I'm not even really sure why I went in for the interview, other than the qualifications were exactly me.
It was one of those fun group interviews, and it started sounding like a fun place to work, but the clincher was when it came time for the other managers to ask me their questions, and the programming manager's question was "Rubber bands: office supply, or weapon?"
I got the job when my answer was "Office supply. I have *Nerf*."
The rest of the bank viewed the MIS department with tolerant amusement, but they weren't quite as stuffy as you'd expect either. (Each department had goofy "Camp" signs. Computer Operations was Camp Kickalottapeopleoff or some such, Foreclosures was Camp Usendadamoneyukeepadahouse, things like that.) They're still in business, though I quit to become a SAHM, after corrupting all their RPG programmers by teaching them Perl.
My husband, on t'other hand, works for A Really Big Airplane Manufacturer Who's Laying A Lot Of People Off Next Year, and it's definitely big-company mentality, even in the various IT departments. You can still be a nonconformist, though; I just bought him some Frigits, which he's using on the metal cube-dividing cabinets, and he came home and reported that he's now "famous."
As far as I know, and maybe there *are* dodges for this, if the companies take the deduction on the donations, they also have to take the income. It's a wash, in that case.
What it *could* do, I suppose, is inflate the income amount for annual-statement purposes. But that's getting into some *really* heavy accounting voodoo I don't do.
I just opened my latest PJ Scout email (I signed up when I left the airline (boy, am I glad I'm not there now) three years ago and have never figured out how to turn it off), and it started out like this, no lie, cue Twilight Zone music:
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I've found that sometimes playing a classic Pen & Paper Roleplaying game on IRC is a great, especially if the genre fits (Shadowrun comes to my mind).
Or via email, though I have to admit I'm a bit biased (something about running a PBeM server for, uh, 16 years or so will do that to you).
We've lately been setting up an enCore MOO for realtime (we had an IRC server up, but enCore is cooler). Unless the GM really wants to get into setting up locations for flavor, the MOO itself won't be used for gameplay, just to provide a venue. EnCore seems very well suited for that.
There's an article here on a different skydiver (mentions Fournier and another attemptee, too) shooting for the same record.
"If her plans succeed, on Sept 3, 2003, she'll ride a balloon to 130,000 feet, jump out in a McConnell Air Force Base pressurized space suit and free fall to Earth nearly 25 miles below -- landing somewhere within 70 miles of Wichita."
Oh yeah. Our church just had sixty-some Compaq DeskPros donated for our garage sale ($20 got you at least a P133, 16MB, 1.1GB, keyboard, mouse, 14" monitor, and 95 license... the local Linux users group members are buying 'em up five at a time), and out of a large number of Compaq and Dell keyboards, there was one lonely IBM keyboard.
It is *so* mine now.
I pay for the postal service with my taxes. Who says I'm not paying for the spammer's mail? The postage rate doesn't cover all of the costs.
Cite? Or are you talking non-US? The USPS only receives federal appropriations to provide free mail for the blind and for overseas voting. So unless you're getting a large quantity of junk mail from blind people, you're really not paying for it. (In fact, I'm going to guess that without the volume of junk mail, postage would go up.)
Quickbooks does corporate/business accounting. If you want double-entry accounting, buy Quickbooks. You don't need the Pro version for real estate and most small businesses.
Has that changed in the last few years? ISTR my CPA sister ranting about people who used Quickbooks (not merely Quicken, definitely Quickbooks) instead of a real double-entry system like Peachtree.
Are we to expect a third trilogy?
He's never made it a secret that it was supposed to be nine movies. Or did you mean "Are we to expect that he's really going to try to go through with his planned nine movies?"
All in all, it's pretty darned explicit for a warning label.
Nah. Look at any infant's rear-facing car seat. Nice little graphic of a baby's head being chopped off by the car seat being hit by an air bag. *That's* explicit. (I foresee a manufacturer being sued because a kid was traumatized by seeing it...)
We ordered (now, before you laugh, this was nigh twenty years ago) an MAI/Basic Four machine for one of our clients (we were a dealer). And we waited. And we waited. To make a long story short, the client was in a hurry, and paid for air freight. Turned out somebody along the line pocketed the money, contracted the shipment out to a trucking company and basically paid for "whenever you have a truck going that general direction that isn't fully loaded" shipping. After much back-and-forth with the mfr, we eventually found the "missing" machine in the shipper's warehouse, where it had sat for weeks.
Eventually(!) we persuaded them to ship it counter-to-counter, and one of the senior partners went to go pick it up personally, with one of the Asoks along for muscle.
They had the joy of watching the beast, in its packing crate, being unloaded from the plane's belly. Saw the loader put it on the conveyor. Saw the loader at the bottom get distracted. Nearly got busted by security for frantically pounding on the observation-area window, screaming and gesticulating. Which was silly, the loader was standing under a jet engine wearing ear protection. But they felt like they had to do something as they watched tens of thousands of dollars of behind-schedule equipment faw down go boom off the end of the conveyor.
Of course, the really funny part was that the client was a regional trucking company itself, and probably could have gotten the the thing trucked in himself via interline agreements. No, I take that back. The really funny part was the scorpion story, but that happened later.
In the first book, this is barely apparent, but by the third book it dominates the story.
This really put me off, too. I sort of had an "neat story, I wish he hadn't turned it into such a soapbox" feeling. Soured me on the whole series. And the whole ending just wasn't as "neat" as the setup.
When I hit the line to the effect of "the entire Christian religion was built on a false foundation" that left me thinking "What about Jews and Muslims?" It just seemed to make the bias a little too in-your-face.
Whatever happened to making your own Valentines?
Because only Martha Stewart would expect her mother to hand-make a Valentine while staying in a hotel in a country where she doesn't speak the language?
And I'm not sure chocolate eclairs would have made it through the mail.
Just another Hallmark Holiday
What *you* said... my mother's on vacation in Spain, and she sent a valentine to my toddler son. Neato, I thought, something to put in his scrapbook (okay, the cardboard box) what with the international postmark and all. And I open it, and it says something in Spanish that I'll have to give to Babelfish but is obviously a Valentine's greeting, et cetera... and when I set it down, I notice on the back it's got a stupid little crown and "Hallmark, Made In Spain" written on the back. (In English, of course.)
Hmph.
That ends up with some extraneous stuff, like the title, things like that. Might have to switch to doing it that way, though, if the things can't send out proper HTML.
I run a mailing list server. When HTMLized mail came along, I read mail in yarn, and the tags ticked me off, so I had my software reject them.
.doc, but it does a pretty nifty job on what's left.
Then, I started to think, heck, I *don't* run a technical mailing list. Accessibility is important. So instead, I wrote my software to *convert* people's posts, regardless of how wacky they look, to plain text. It can't do something as severely encoded as a
But you wanna know what ticks *me* off? The stupid sites like Hotmail, and recently Excite, that send *bogus* HTML stuff, with no BODY tags. The Perl HTML-to-text library I'm using reads that as a blank message (no BODY? Okay, no body). Bah.
Having a toddler puts a crimp in one's marathon parties.
But we used to, back in our bachelor days, rent movies and do the marathon thing. It was important, though, to get movies that served as "wallpaper"... nobody seriously watched them much, since there were always games going on (remember when Car Wars was fun?)
So we ended up with things like Cannonball Run marathons, Back to the Future marathons, "lite" things like that. Go figure.
Really! Suddenly the name KPMG is firm in everybody's brain
No, just that awful "theme song."
I'd quit anywhere that had a theme song that bad. That was... awful.
I had a clueless luser ship me a computer in a paper box. No, really.
It was a desktop model, and they put it in a copier paper box. It didn't exactly fit, so they put it in at an angle, and sort of taped around the lid of the box, which wasn't all the way on. Padding? There wasn't room for any padding. Besides, it was such a tight fit, the computer wasn't going to bounce around any, so why would it need padding?
The Emery guy didn't even leave it in the mailroom. He came directly to the computer area, gingerly carrying the box and a damage form. Four of the box's seams had sprung, leaving basically a big wide loop of cardboard around an otherwise-naked computer.
The punchline is, the case wasn't even scratched, so I told the guy not to get worried yet, and grabbed a spare monitor and keyboard and booted the puppy up... and it was perfectly fine. Apparently all the handlers just felt so sorry for the poor thing that they were actually gentle with it.
But mainly because I've got a squajillion spams sitting in my spamtrap telling me I *could* buy one.
.biz with "Shy About You're Pacakge?" Feh.
Makes the whole TLD smell bad to me already. And no, I haven't checked to see if the spams are coming from anybody with a legitimate business related to the rollout. It's just an irrational gut feeling; I now associate
Picking nits: King actually writes from, and about, New England, which is a bit east of the Midwest.
As near as I can figure, "the Midwest" is defined as "anywhere you can't see an ocean." Indiana, for example, calls itself "midwest," while Kansas, which also calls itself "midwest," calls Indy "back East" and Indy calls Kansas "out west." So hey, for people on the east side of the Atlantic, Maine can be "midwest" too, no problem.
This has never been true of copyright.
Minor nit: yes, it has been, early on. I think the 1928 (or thereabouts) changes in US copyright law eliminated that, although it might have been earlier. In any event, it's pretty safe to say it never worked that way in any Slashdot reader's lifetime.
You *can* lose the ability to claim certain damages, though... basically, it cuts an infringer a certain amount of slack by saying "Okay, so you saw Company X violate the copyright without consequence and thought it was okay, so maybe your violation wasn't malicious."
(Someone with a working memory can probably provide the actual terms and dates and stuff if anybody really cares.)
Does anyone else see the irony (and perhaps the futility) in creating a site devoted to tiny apps that run on the most buggy and bloated OS known to man?
Contrariwise. When your OS is big, all you got left is room for tiny apps.
(I [heart] Boxer for DOS, myself. I'm pretty sure it's floppy-sized or less, at least in minimal version. If I could find my stupid interface cable, I'd put it on my HP200LX.)
Usually don't you paint a bulls-eye on your target, and leave the crosshairs on your scope where they belong?
Ehhhh, COULD be...
</bugs>
I ended up working at a bank. Yeah, you'd think it'd be the ultimate suitplace, and I'm not even really sure why I went in for the interview, other than the qualifications were exactly me.
It was one of those fun group interviews, and it started sounding like a fun place to work, but the clincher was when it came time for the other managers to ask me their questions, and the programming manager's question was "Rubber bands: office supply, or weapon?"
I got the job when my answer was "Office supply. I have *Nerf*."
The rest of the bank viewed the MIS department with tolerant amusement, but they weren't quite as stuffy as you'd expect either. (Each department had goofy "Camp" signs. Computer Operations was Camp Kickalottapeopleoff or some such, Foreclosures was Camp Usendadamoneyukeepadahouse, things like that.) They're still in business, though I quit to become a SAHM, after corrupting all their RPG programmers by teaching them Perl.
My husband, on t'other hand, works for A Really Big Airplane Manufacturer Who's Laying A Lot Of People Off Next Year, and it's definitely big-company mentality, even in the various IT departments. You can still be a nonconformist, though; I just bought him some Frigits, which he's using on the metal cube-dividing cabinets, and he came home and reported that he's now "famous."
As far as I know, and maybe there *are* dodges for this, if the companies take the deduction on the donations, they also have to take the income. It's a wash, in that case.
What it *could* do, I suppose, is inflate the income amount for annual-statement purposes. But that's getting into some *really* heavy accounting voodoo I don't do.
Hooboy.
t ml?pjid=408240
t ml?pjid=408240
t ml?pjid=408240
I just opened my latest PJ Scout email (I signed up when I left the airline (boy, am I glad I'm not there now) three years ago and have never figured out how to turn it off), and it started out like this, no lie, cue Twilight Zone music:
Here are the jobs that matched for this week:
1) Catastrophe Modeling Specialist
http://www.nationjob.com/pjshowjob.cgi/jjhl2688.h
Jacobson Associates, Job Location is Midwest
2) Catastrophe Modeling Specialist
http://www.nationjob.com/pjshowjob.cgi/jjhl2694.h
Jacobson Associates, Job Location is Midwest
3) Catastrophe Modeling Specialist
http://www.nationjob.com/pjshowjob.cgi/jjhl2695.h
Jacobson Associates, Job Location is Midwest
4) Network Administrator
(and so on with more normal stuff)