These so-called "gold farmers" are freelancers who get paid to play games, so naturally the PC Gamer editors are getting irate. It's unwelcome competition! The only difference is that the farmers don't then turn around and kiss up to the publishers of the games they play so that they get to sell ad space and scoop the screenshots for the next round of titles.
Keep the gold farming where it belongs: in the reviews where games get glowing reviews and turn out to suck ass!
Doctorow's model, if I recall correctly, was that the automatic trading of songs would happen between two "tollbooths" on the highways. The tollbooths would count the number of songs you went in with versus the number you came out with, and would then charge your music account accordingly. THe more music you picked up on your trip, the more you got charged for.
The interesting twist was that if you had more than a certain amount of songs, you could trade freely because you were seeding everyone else around you, thereby earning exponential revenue for the copyright holders.
As long as having fun on the job is an institutional policy of the job, then having fun will be, sadly, a duty of the job. Having fun on command is no fun at all.
Example: one day at a past helpdesk position, I and a cubicle-conspiritor became so sick of the state of things that we deigned that the next day would be Sock Puppet Day. The two of us brought in many socks, fabric scraps, glitter, glue, everything we could possibly think of that might find a home on a sock. We then suggested to everyone around us that they might enjoy making a sock puppet.
The results were stupendous. Most everyone had a good time, and we were pretty adroit at hiding the process from management until we had all finished our socks. Then we hung them all over the place and went on with business as usual. No calls were dropped, tickets were still solved quickly and effectively. However, we were all in a much better mood.
One of the middle management frumps noticed what had happened and asked me if it was a team building exercise. I looked at her like she had grown a fourth nostril. Maybe in some far-removed way it was, but the sponteneity and silliness of it -- not to mention hiding it from our superiours -- was what made it fun and effective and morale-boosting. I suspect there was a sprinkling of having gotten away with something that really brought the flavor out in the moment.
The next year it was decreed from the top that we would again have an official sock puppet day. Everything was provided for us. There was a designated time and place where supplies could be found.
The results were predictably pallid, and few people particiated.
Don't make fun part of the job, you management types. If anything, make it easier for people to make their own fun on the job, but keep your mitts off of the actual process. You'll have much happier employees, and chances are they'll even take it up upon themselves to get work done anyway.
I dunno, man. A few months ago I happened upon a live version of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb - I think it might have been from the G8 concert earlier this year - and I about swerved into a telephone pole just to ease the pain. It was *awful*.
Turning the radio off was a cheaper solution.
The slinky background singers were the only, only attraction. David and Roger just can't belt 'em out like they used to. It's too bad, but sometimes it's best to just let the old acts out to pasture.
Hey! I've got a great new extension for our Microsoft friends. I call it "TTF", or "The Third Finger." And it's so efficient it only requires one-fifth the bandwidth of that needed for an entire spanking.
One advantage that I see using hard drives over CD/DVD is that hard drives have some intellegence about the state of their media. The controllers inside hard drives will monitor the temperature, spin rate, all that stuff, and if they notice something going wrong, they'll try to self-repair (or at least will shut down to prevent further damage). If they spot a damaged sector, they can try to recover the data and mark the affected sectors off limits. Of course, you've got to have power to the things for it to do that.
So I guess the solution is to run a check on your archival hard drive every time you power it up before you write the archival data to it, or periodically power up your filled drives and run a check then.
Yeah, I've been peering over that document for a few days trying to figure out everything I need to get my particular bugs worked out. I get a lot of error messages that aren't covered anywhere that I can find.
My next great trick is to copy the contents of/proc/acpi/dsdt from the successful Ubuntu implementation and them compile that into my kernel. We'll see how much I can put this laptop through before it explodes on me:)
The "low price as punishment" model only works if the companies expect customers to buy their music TUNES UNHEARD. I have *never* purchased music, online or otherwise, that I didn't hear from somewhere first*. By that time, I've already decided whether I'm ready to pay cash for it, and you know what? If I find the CD or whatever cheaper than what I'm willing to pay for it, that's what I call a BARGAIN.
I don't decide on quality of music by price. I decide on price by quality of music. Once again, the content controllers have their heads in the clouds.
* I do buy imported, so-called "ethnic" music, tunes unheard, but that's because I will probably never hear the music anywhere else in any other way. I'm talking CDs like the various Rough Guides, or CDs by people with names I can't pronounce but have apparently hit it big in their country of origin. In that case, I budget myself $10 and pick the first thing on the rack that falls under that price. I've been very happy with some of my picks, and the risk is practically nil.
I'm in a similar boat -- I recently got an AMD64 laptop and I decided to try Ubuntu's 64 bit support. I was pretty impressed, but I decided to stick with Gentoo anyway (which I run on my tower box). The reason why is that I do a lot of multimedia development, which Ubuntu does not handle very well without some work. It seemed to me that if I was going to futz around with kernels and device drivers and compiling non-Ubuntu-friendly software, I might as well stick to the environment I'm good at.:)
That's not to say I'm not feeling a little pang of envy for Ubuntu. Somehow the developers found a workaround to the infamous MS-compiled ACPI bugs that make it difficult to read battery status, etc. I've got to figure out how they did that.
However, Ubuntu has a very pleasant experience out of the box, and I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to see what a Linux box can look like, feel like, and get done.
If a private school is going to take it upon itself to sniff out its students on the internet, so be it. They're a private school, and within the bounds of the law, they can pretty well do what they want.
What chaps my ass about this is that the handbook admits that the school can seek criticism --
While Pope John's school handbook does not specifically forbid students from creating personal profiles on Web sites, it does prohibit students from posting anything on the Internet pertaining to the school, without the school's permission. (From TFA)
--but the prinicpal announces at the assembly that they're really protecting against "predators."
Guys. Please. Stop lying to your kids. Don't justify your actions with fear. Come out and say it: you're enforcing the rules that everybody agrees to when they join the school. That's all you have to say!
Having a heavy-handed but fair administration is more desirable than having an administration that has to make up reasons to justify its actions. The kids deserve to know by what rules everybody plays.
All I know is that it takes less time for me to make/apt-get/emerge than it does for me to wade through an EULA to figure out if I can actually run a peice of Windows software...
It's hard enough making a choice of laptop these days based purely on the numeric stats of the innards. The way they play merry-go-round with their suppliers can really screw up your chances -- basically they play the game of "who's selling the cheapest wireless this week."
Even if you find stable laptop distributors, it's practically IMPOSSIBLE to determine whether you can run Linux on it because they usually won't tell you what's actually inside. Like, is that a Broadcom or a Atheros 802.11 wireless in there? It makes a *huge* difference.
If you don't know what kind of chipsets a laptop has in it, you can't do the research. Easy as that. You have to wait for someone to buy the thing, try installing a flavor of Linux on it, and report back what their successes and failures were.
Even if HP or whoever doesn't support the hardware directly, it'd be nice to know what kind of hardware is in there to begin with. I don't need them to hold my hand. I just want to know what I'm buying.
Slashdot Mirror
These so-called "gold farmers" are freelancers who get paid to play games, so naturally the PC Gamer editors are getting irate. It's unwelcome competition! The only difference is that the farmers don't then turn around and kiss up to the publishers of the games they play so that they get to sell ad space and scoop the screenshots for the next round of titles.
Keep the gold farming where it belongs: in the reviews where games get glowing reviews and turn out to suck ass!
I for one object to all this sex on my video game systems!
I mean, I keep falling off!
Doctorow's model, if I recall correctly, was that the automatic trading of songs would happen between two "tollbooths" on the highways. The tollbooths would count the number of songs you went in with versus the number you came out with, and would then charge your music account accordingly. THe more music you picked up on your trip, the more you got charged for.
The interesting twist was that if you had more than a certain amount of songs, you could trade freely because you were seeding everyone else around you, thereby earning exponential revenue for the copyright holders.
Neat idea.
I don't have any MP3s.
Just to satisfy my own curiousity: if you've got a CD collection and access to a computer. . . what's stopping you?
Just wait until it dupes tomorrow. . .
As long as having fun on the job is an institutional policy of the job, then having fun will be, sadly, a duty of the job. Having fun on command is no fun at all.
Example: one day at a past helpdesk position, I and a cubicle-conspiritor became so sick of the state of things that we deigned that the next day would be Sock Puppet Day. The two of us brought in many socks, fabric scraps, glitter, glue, everything we could possibly think of that might find a home on a sock. We then suggested to everyone around us that they might enjoy making a sock puppet.
The results were stupendous. Most everyone had a good time, and we were pretty adroit at hiding the process from management until we had all finished our socks. Then we hung them all over the place and went on with business as usual. No calls were dropped, tickets were still solved quickly and effectively. However, we were all in a much better mood.
One of the middle management frumps noticed what had happened and asked me if it was a team building exercise. I looked at her like she had grown a fourth nostril. Maybe in some far-removed way it was, but the sponteneity and silliness of it -- not to mention hiding it from our superiours -- was what made it fun and effective and morale-boosting. I suspect there was a sprinkling of having gotten away with something that really brought the flavor out in the moment.
The next year it was decreed from the top that we would again have an official sock puppet day. Everything was provided for us. There was a designated time and place where supplies could be found.
The results were predictably pallid, and few people particiated.
Don't make fun part of the job, you management types. If anything, make it easier for people to make their own fun on the job, but keep your mitts off of the actual process. You'll have much happier employees, and chances are they'll even take it up upon themselves to get work done anyway.
Save everyone a little money this winter: burn your CD collection to stay warm.
I dunno, man. A few months ago I happened upon a live version of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb - I think it might have been from the G8 concert earlier this year - and I about swerved into a telephone pole just to ease the pain. It was *awful*.
Turning the radio off was a cheaper solution.
The slinky background singers were the only, only attraction. David and Roger just can't belt 'em out like they used to. It's too bad, but sometimes it's best to just let the old acts out to pasture.
But Wikipedia was ready for The Register. They already had an entry for "Yellow Journalism."
Seeing as how this story posted up on December 7.
Hey! I've got a great new extension for our Microsoft friends. I call it "TTF", or "The Third Finger." And it's so efficient it only requires one-fifth the bandwidth of that needed for an entire spanking.
Please guys. Stop breaking things.
One advantage that I see using hard drives over CD/DVD is that hard drives have some intellegence about the state of their media. The controllers inside hard drives will monitor the temperature, spin rate, all that stuff, and if they notice something going wrong, they'll try to self-repair (or at least will shut down to prevent further damage). If they spot a damaged sector, they can try to recover the data and mark the affected sectors off limits. Of course, you've got to have power to the things for it to do that.
So I guess the solution is to run a check on your archival hard drive every time you power it up before you write the archival data to it, or periodically power up your filled drives and run a check then.
Yeah, I've been peering over that document for a few days trying to figure out everything I need to get my particular bugs worked out. I get a lot of error messages that aren't covered anywhere that I can find.
/proc/acpi/dsdt from the successful Ubuntu implementation and them compile that into my kernel. We'll see how much I can put this laptop through before it explodes on me :)
My next great trick is to copy the contents of
The "low price as punishment" model only works if the companies expect customers to buy their music TUNES UNHEARD. I have *never* purchased music, online or otherwise, that I didn't hear from somewhere first*. By that time, I've already decided whether I'm ready to pay cash for it, and you know what? If I find the CD or whatever cheaper than what I'm willing to pay for it, that's what I call a BARGAIN.
I don't decide on quality of music by price. I decide on price by quality of music. Once again, the content controllers have their heads in the clouds.
* I do buy imported, so-called "ethnic" music, tunes unheard, but that's because I will probably never hear the music anywhere else in any other way. I'm talking CDs like the various Rough Guides, or CDs by people with names I can't pronounce but have apparently hit it big in their country of origin. In that case, I budget myself $10 and pick the first thing on the rack that falls under that price. I've been very happy with some of my picks, and the risk is practically nil.
Cobra Commander is >THIS far away from carving his face on the Moon!
I'm in a similar boat -- I recently got an AMD64 laptop and I decided to try Ubuntu's 64 bit support. I was pretty impressed, but I decided to stick with Gentoo anyway (which I run on my tower box). The reason why is that I do a lot of multimedia development, which Ubuntu does not handle very well without some work. It seemed to me that if I was going to futz around with kernels and device drivers and compiling non-Ubuntu-friendly software, I might as well stick to the environment I'm good at. :)
That's not to say I'm not feeling a little pang of envy for Ubuntu. Somehow the developers found a workaround to the infamous MS-compiled ACPI bugs that make it difficult to read battery status, etc. I've got to figure out how they did that.
However, Ubuntu has a very pleasant experience out of the box, and I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to see what a Linux box can look like, feel like, and get done.
At what point do the heat effects of their computers get folded into the climate simulation parameters themselves?
Just wait 'till it gets duped next week . . .
What chaps my ass about this is that the handbook admits that the school can seek criticism -- --but the prinicpal announces at the assembly that they're really protecting against "predators."
Guys. Please. Stop lying to your kids. Don't justify your actions with fear. Come out and say it: you're enforcing the rules that everybody agrees to when they join the school. That's all you have to say!
Having a heavy-handed but fair administration is more desirable than having an administration that has to make up reasons to justify its actions. The kids deserve to know by what rules everybody plays.
You Catholics are a twisty, subtle lot.
I like it.
It's silliness . . . UNLEASHED!
It's the dominant paridigm, man. Grok it or don't, chummer.
All I ever needed to know about North American colonial history, I learned from Day of the Tenticle.
Which, come to think of it, explains a few things.
Photo banana, not Bananaphone.
All I know is that it takes less time for me to make/apt-get/emerge than it does for me to wade through an EULA to figure out if I can actually run a peice of Windows software...
Because I'm a zealot. That's right.
It's hard enough making a choice of laptop these days based purely on the numeric stats of the innards. The way they play merry-go-round with their suppliers can really screw up your chances -- basically they play the game of "who's selling the cheapest wireless this week."
Even if you find stable laptop distributors, it's practically IMPOSSIBLE to determine whether you can run Linux on it because they usually won't tell you what's actually inside. Like, is that a Broadcom or a Atheros 802.11 wireless in there? It makes a *huge* difference.
If you don't know what kind of chipsets a laptop has in it, you can't do the research. Easy as that. You have to wait for someone to buy the thing, try installing a flavor of Linux on it, and report back what their successes and failures were.
Even if HP or whoever doesn't support the hardware directly, it'd be nice to know what kind of hardware is in there to begin with. I don't need them to hold my hand. I just want to know what I'm buying.