Now I still have a couple of joysticks sitting somewhere in the closet, but the real thing was SpaceOrb. Nothing ever beat that for free flight games such as Descent.
The problem is, in part, in the general deterioration of word meanings, etiquette being one of those. You see, it can't be mine:)
The obvious statement is that times change, and socially accepted behavior changes. What I was asking in the OP is how people on/. handle this particular change trend, and I chose/. because the audience here, in significant numbers, can actually think of why something happens and how it impacts stuff, instead of just randomly following the current easy mode player mob.
Exactly. And my frustration comes mainly from the realization that it's mostly ignorance (no pun with your sig intended). Let's take a more concrete example. Someone remembers that in a couple days a certain person is having a birthday. The concerned employee writes a message, addresses it to an allemployeesinthatcityoffices mailing alias, *expands it*, strikes out the one with upcoming birthday and shoots out "how are we going to congratulate the guy?". Within half an hour, every single employee within that city, except one, receives up to a hundred one-liner messages, each of which includes all top-quoted previous ones (and every reply and quote includes an expanded list of addressees, thus making every reply grow by a couple kilobytes of meaningless text).
The existence of the mailing alias is justified by legitimate business needs. I mean, we have a special "offtopic" mailing alias, to which all the requisite office jokes and whatever go, and anyone can sign up to receive it, or choose to be skipped the privilege. So, technically, it's an abuse of proper business tool. However, we do not run a fascict admin policy, so there is no practical way to just threaten the originator or participants with "AUP violations" and the like; threats never work anyway.
The obvious answer is that there is a whole lot of consistent and patient of educating the employees and, especially, the management, about the negative side-effects of such things, but that takes a lot of time and resources. Thus my submission to/. to see how people treat similar problems, if at all.
I would be quite happy if it helped, but alas, it doesn't. We do have a fully operational MS Office Communicator (with lookup in AD working, and there's no excuse not to use it, because it is installed automagically on every company workstation). I would estimate that 90% of employees have each other on ICQ. No matter.
My concern is that there is way too many wrong things stemming from the basic lack of respect towards communication between colleagues and, generally, inside the company. Including, but not limited to (in no particular order and varying importance):
- mass spamming of in-company inboxes - disruption of peoples' e-mail workflow - serious disruption of e-mail workflow for people using ActiveSync and/or other form of e-mail push to mobile devices, especially for rapid response type of job functions - proliferation of "to hell with this corporate e-mail shit" attitude and default redirection of mail to/dev/null via filters; also general numbing towards e-mail as convenient tool for internal communication - loss of important e-mails amongst the flood of inconsequential overquoted miscontent - unnecessary use of IT resources - sizeable amount of lost man-hours of productive work - creating unnecessary and team-busting frustration between the "easy e-mailers" and people who have to unwillingly wade through the results
Installing more tools won't help if there is no desire to use the tools because of easy-go-lucky attitude.
Purely technical restrictions like a word-count filter are possible but most likely won't work in our company either because of rather unique spectrum of stuff that has to go on in the comms during regular genuine work.
Thanks for a well-considered reply, though, I appreciate it.
I'm surprised noone mentioned EVE Online (http://eve-online.com) here - it's quite an open-ended, single-world, player-run economics game. Check it out, it's much better than Everquest clones, in my (limited) experience.
Another place to watch Mir falling in realtime is
this VRML model. The company itself makes Cortona VRML plugin for Windows-based browsers; can't say if this can be vieweed by any of Linux viewers, but one surely can give it a try.
People who want a database abstraction layer (and also session/user level persistence and lots of other things) with PHP should take a look at PHPLIB at http://phplib.netuse.de/
When saying there are almost no children games for Linux, it might be wise to check for existing toys not really perceived as games. A friend of mine used to think there's nothing for his kids on his Linux workstation at home, but when he fired up Logo for them, he found that he's not always able to pull them off the keyboard. Logo is a great tool, very intuitive even for small children and with nice educational bonus.
I'm not sure about Squeak, but being as agile as it is, I think something could be made from it for children as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I still have a couple of joysticks sitting somewhere in the closet, but the real thing was SpaceOrb. Nothing ever beat that for free flight games such as Descent.
The problem is, in part, in the general deterioration of word meanings, etiquette being one of those. You see, it can't be mine :)
/. handle this particular change trend, and I chose /. because the audience here, in significant numbers, can actually think of why something happens and how it impacts stuff, instead of just randomly following the current easy mode player mob.
The obvious statement is that times change, and socially accepted behavior changes. What I was asking in the OP is how people on
I don't exactly understand the ad hominem attack angle, but just in case you are gebuinely interested, I outlined several pertinent problems in a reply here - http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426078&cid=22140180
And other people have posted rough calculations of simple monetary loss due to waste of time.
Exactly. And my frustration comes mainly from the realization that it's mostly ignorance (no pun with your sig intended). Let's take a more concrete example. Someone remembers that in a couple days a certain person is having a birthday. The concerned employee writes a message, addresses it to an allemployeesinthatcityoffices mailing alias, *expands it*, strikes out the one with upcoming birthday and shoots out "how are we going to congratulate the guy?". Within half an hour, every single employee within that city, except one, receives up to a hundred one-liner messages, each of which includes all top-quoted previous ones (and every reply and quote includes an expanded list of addressees, thus making every reply grow by a couple kilobytes of meaningless text).
/. to see how people treat similar problems, if at all.
The existence of the mailing alias is justified by legitimate business needs. I mean, we have a special "offtopic" mailing alias, to which all the requisite office jokes and whatever go, and anyone can sign up to receive it, or choose to be skipped the privilege. So, technically, it's an abuse of proper business tool. However, we do not run a fascict admin policy, so there is no practical way to just threaten the originator or participants with "AUP violations" and the like; threats never work anyway.
The obvious answer is that there is a whole lot of consistent and patient of educating the employees and, especially, the management, about the negative side-effects of such things, but that takes a lot of time and resources. Thus my submission to
I would be quite happy if it helped, but alas, it doesn't. We do have a fully operational MS Office Communicator (with lookup in AD working, and there's no excuse not to use it, because it is installed automagically on every company workstation). I would estimate that 90% of employees have each other on ICQ. No matter.
/dev/null via filters; also general numbing towards e-mail as convenient tool for internal communication
My concern is that there is way too many wrong things stemming from the basic lack of respect towards communication between colleagues and, generally, inside the company. Including, but not limited to (in no particular order and varying importance):
- mass spamming of in-company inboxes
- disruption of peoples' e-mail workflow
- serious disruption of e-mail workflow for people using ActiveSync and/or other form of e-mail push to mobile devices, especially for rapid response type of job functions
- proliferation of "to hell with this corporate e-mail shit" attitude and default redirection of mail to
- loss of important e-mails amongst the flood of inconsequential overquoted miscontent
- unnecessary use of IT resources
- sizeable amount of lost man-hours of productive work
- creating unnecessary and team-busting frustration between the "easy e-mailers" and people who have to unwillingly wade through the results
Installing more tools won't help if there is no desire to use the tools because of easy-go-lucky attitude.
Purely technical restrictions like a word-count filter are possible but most likely won't work in our company either because of rather unique spectrum of stuff that has to go on in the comms during regular genuine work.
Thanks for a well-considered reply, though, I appreciate it.
What about OMA DRM?
I'm surprised noone mentioned EVE Online (http://eve-online.com) here - it's quite an open-ended, single-world, player-run economics game. Check it out, it's much better than Everquest clones, in my (limited) experience.
Another place to watch Mir falling in realtime is this VRML model. The company itself makes Cortona VRML plugin for Windows-based browsers; can't say if this can be vieweed by any of Linux viewers, but one surely can give it a try.
People who want a database abstraction layer (and also session/user level persistence and lots of other things) with PHP should take a look at PHPLIB at http://phplib.netuse.de/
When saying there are almost no children games for Linux, it might be wise to check for existing toys not really perceived as games. A friend of mine used to think there's nothing for his kids on his Linux workstation at home, but when he fired up Logo for them, he found that he's not always able to pull them off the keyboard. Logo is a great tool, very intuitive even for small children and with nice educational bonus.
I'm not sure about Squeak, but being as agile as it is, I think something could be made from it for children as well.