The five second rule is stricted enforced around here. In fact, usually we don't even get all five seconds. Any dropped food instantly becomes property of the canine clean-up service, and they don't take kindly to "take-backs".
Or rather they do, but they look at you with puppy dog eyes and you're forced to drop the food again.
Just finished reading the Lacey short stories in the Grimmer Than Hell collection, which was on the Baen CD-ROM Library Version 2.0 included with Hell's Faire by John Ringo (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=jri ngo). Brings forward a number of notions about what society would be like if every individual was recorded everywhere at all times. I enjoyed the Lacey stories, if not the stories of the fleet also in that collection.
The Hell's Faire book is worth purchasing just to get the CD alone, having a hard copy of one of the stories on the CD is just a bonus. I also highly recommend getting the first CD, which was included with War of Honor by David Weber (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=dwe ber).
The formats and style is the same as you would get the Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) and Baen's webscription service, but if you don't like reading electronic copy, use them to gauge your interest and borrow them from your local dead-tree library.
If you enjoyed the Thief games at all, I highly recommend the Thievery UT mod for Unreal Tournament. Do to the more relaxed gameplay (you spend a lot more time sneaking than fighting, as any fighting is liable to get the thief killed) it's very playable on even very slow connections.
It is a mod for UT though, so your computer has to be able to run that. UT is fairly scaleable though, so if you have a reasonably decent machine you should be able to play.
The main gameplay type in Thievery is Thieves vs. Guards, where the human players are split up equally among thieves and guards. The thieves then have to complete a few objectives (i.e. steal enough loot) and then get to the exit, all near impossible unless they remain undetected. The guards (with the aid of a number of AI and many weapons and tools) seek to prevent the thieves from doing all this. The gameplay is pretty much straight from the Thief games, with many of the items and weapons taken pretty much as-is. The major component of the thievery is the same as the single player games, the light gem. The gem tells you how visible you are, i.e. to the guards you range from completely invisible, to transparent, to completely visible depending on how dark the shadows you are in are. Note that the guards don't have this and are always visible, unless they use an invisibility potion.
To help keep it a sneaker and not a new variation of DM, each team has a limited number of common lives, and each spawn uses up a life. This means if a team has 5 lives, they can have 1 player with 5 lives, or 5 players with no team lives. Thieves, while able to take out a lone guard if they have surprise, don't have much health or damaging weaponry and will likely die quickly if they attract the attention of a guard.
The people behind the actual Thief games are aware of the mod and have said that if they were going to do multiplayer, it probably would have turned out quite a bit like this mod. I believe they said something like that they made the decision to only do single player and that while they aren't allowed to officially encourage the mod, they won't take any action against it as long as they respect the "Thief" and any other trademarks that might force them to take action. The net effect of this is that the mod shouldn't be "foxxed", so don't worry about playing. The mod's been around for awhile, and will be around for awhile yet.
I'm sure that someone out there has considered, if there isn't already, making a MOO (text) based on MOO (Orion).
If such a thing exists, then there likely also has been a thought to making a MOO (Orion) of the MOO (text) of the MOO (Orion).
Such a game, would no doubt, involve a cow. At the very least, many of the players would no doubt make cow sounds.
The end result of this would be: MOOing in the MOO based on the MOO of MOO.
Trailer Download: Working Link (for now anyways)
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Like the parent comment suggested, using asfrecorder does work, but the provided link to the trailer didn't.
"mms://a1919.v7287f.c7287.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/ 1919/7287/v0001/hollywood.download.akamai.com/7287/windows/equilibrium_t_700.asf" does work (for now anyways) and runs about 12.4 MB (be sure to delete the space after the/7/).
Note that I obtained the URL by changing 300 to 700 in a link mentioned in another comment, and you can likely access whatever format you prefer by changing the URL accordingly.
Actually you can, they're available as a "module". Just scroll up to the lander slots and then activate the slot to get the option of purchasing a lander.
Found Cursed using Google (http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200108/0671318594__ c_.htm). As fireboy said, only up to and including Chapter 20 appear to be there right now. Seeing as how Consulted is the other part of that compilation, when might Consulted be available?
On the link you provided, only the first two books (Bane & Compiled) appear to be available. Is the third (Cursed) available somewhere else? Or perhaps you read it in another form?
In yet another example of the link between memory access and external stimuli, access to the "proof-reading" memory routines appears to only be accessible after the "clicking the Submit button" stimuli has been provided.
The problem with the Human Brain Storage System [TM] isn't really total capacity, but instead the memory addressing system. It doesn't even use a simple system like a linearly numbered addresses, instead it seems to use an sense/input based address system, where an image and a smell (or other inputs) will give you back a memory of your first tricycle. Too bad what you really wanted was the answer to the exam question.
I also think H.B.S.S. manufacturers have let quality control slip a little bit, as the address systems don't appear to be consistent across similar models. This is especially apparently when "Male" and "Female" type models try to interface and compare stored memory concerning things like whose turn it is to walk the dog.
Was the book Japan: Profile of a Nation? It is indeed published by Kodansha and appears to be close to what you described.
From the description on Amazon, it also appears to be a condensed version of their large encyclopedia: Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, which is an order of magnitude more expensive.
Just because you can't immediately establish a cause and effect with ESD, doesn't mean it's not causing damage. ESD can happen without you even noticing and it's especially hard to detect if it doesn't cause a failure outright. I.e. if a discharge doesn't outright kill a product, it can still do damage that increases the likelyhood of failure further on in the life of the product, or even worse, variability. Far worse than a product that you know doesn't work, is one that appears to work but produces wrong or variable output. Combined with the sheer number of products that have the potential to be damaged, increasing your ESD defence will likely give a decent increase your product's overall reliability.
If your product is so cheap that you don't care about failure and just want to produce as many of them as cheaply as possible, then go ahead and skimp on ESD. Just make sure you have a good system to deal with the failing products that will cost you less than the increased ESD defence.
I agree that using tabbed browsing by itself isn't very likeable, you end up with many little tabs in one window that has it's own task list separate from that of the OS. I don't however, use windowed browsing by itself either. I use a combination of the two with Mozilla that involves grouping related sites in windows with tabs. This really helps in managing browsing on sites such as Slashdot, where each story gets its own window, and each link from that story gets its own tab within that window. Each window is then a self-contained group of sites related to the main Slashdot story that I can return to after an interruption or other delay and not have to restablish the relationships of open sites.
But to each their own, if this style of browsing doesn't appeal to you, then don't use it. I encourage those who normally detest tabbed browsing to try it, I found it helped organize my "browsing experience". This "system" however, isn't for those who browse one-window one-site-at-a-time and don't take advantage of windows or tabs. It is really only appreciated when you have many sites open at one time, especially when related sites are slow to load and can be relegated to a tab until they finish loading.
Perhaps an analogy of oil in an engine might apply to the function of IT. It's not gasoline, tires, an aerodynamical shape, or any other feature that might make the car go faster, but over use the oil, use poor quality oil or try to use gasoline as oil and you'll find the car won't go fast at all (or for long).
Optimally at company X, IT is made up of many "Operators", few "Administrators", and even fewer in "Management". Operators handle the Help Desk, the new user setup and other day-to-day repetitive low-key issues. Administrators handle the larger issues as well extend and improve the various services IT provides. Management (for simplicity, this includes "administrative assistants") manages all the paperwork, inter-group company communication, etc.
Instead, at company X, there aren't enough and/or properly trained operators working as operators, too many operators acting as administrators, the few administrators overworked and management merely creating more things to manage and causing the administrators to also perform management duties. Generally, pretty much making it impossible for Company X's IT group to be cost-efficient (or even helpful to users).
When company X was swimming in money, they got along by throwing more money at any IT problems. Hiring more operators, paying expensive consultants (who recommend what the administrators proposes, or worse, recommend a white elephant solution) and buying software and hardware based largely on which vendors played golf with the upper management of IT.
Now that they are no longer awash in money to throw at problems, they have to cut back. Cut back on management? Of course not. Consultants? University buddies and management doesn't trust the opinions of the experienced administrators. Use better vendors? And face him on the golf course this weekend? A lot of the "fat" is valued more than the "muscle" by the management and so when it's time to make the company leaner, they end up with little muscle supporting lots of fat. The remaining muscle ends up overworked and generally not skilled enough to handle a lot of the work assigned to it. To push the body analogy further, this generally only leads to three outcomes. Optimally, the management "Gets it" and the system is strengthened and made more efficient, or the company continues to work with IT on life-support or enough functions fail that the company goes under.
Luckily where I work is far from having a "heart attack" as it were, but I suspect that at too many other companies the situation is closer to "Company X" and that most problems are largely the fault of mismanagement (including problems of incompetance on the part of operators, as management hired them in the first place). Find and give more authority to management that "Gets it", and you'll likely find the "IT problem" will solve itself.
Remedy depends far too much on being configured well. It's far too easy to make a system that no one wants to use, causing many to bypass the system and defeating the purpose of the system. Remedy's Windows' interface could do with some improvement as well, most Remedy windows are far too cluttered and have many fields that aren't descriptive enough as to what they do. I haven't used the web interface, so I can't comment on that.
One thing that can be useful if setup correctly is the automated generation of tickets. There is a script available for Big Brother (http://www.bb4.com) that allows it to automatically generate tickets when one of the events it monitors goes bad. You have to tweak it to minimize false positives, but it can be handy to have a ticket there when a machine goes down and you even record the solution for the problem in Remedy in case the problem happens again.
Above all else, make the use of the system as smooth and as easy as possible. People will just bypass the system if it's too complex, too slow or tickets aren't responded to.
Using calc's packages and then only compiling the kdeartwork from source is pretty painless. You might need to grab a few -dev library packages, that's all.
Re:For Debian fans...
on
KDE 3.0.1 Ships
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been using the experimental packages for a week or so and other than having to purge the old KDE packages, they've been just as good as official packages. No problems whatsoever (other than wasting too much time playing with the eye-candy settings).
Slashdot Mirror
My suggestion is to take the day off and sleep in. Worked pretty well for me.
Found a useful looking list at Aerogel Suppliers. Nothing in Canada listed, unfortunately...
The main site though, Hubert's aerogel page, seems to have an interesting collection of links on Aerogels.
Big Brother
There's a vibrant community with lots of scripts to extend functionality.
It's free as in beer (but not freedom) for almost all uses, and is open source. You only have to pay if you use it to generate money.
The five second rule is stricted enforced around here. In fact, usually we don't even get all five seconds. Any dropped food instantly becomes property of the canine clean-up service, and they don't take kindly to "take-backs".
Or rather they do, but they look at you with puppy dog eyes and you're forced to drop the food again.
The Hell's Faire book is worth purchasing just to get the CD alone, having a hard copy of one of the stories on the CD is just a bonus. I also highly recommend getting the first CD, which was included with War of Honor by David Weber (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=dwe ber).
The formats and style is the same as you would get the Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) and Baen's webscription service, but if you don't like reading electronic copy, use them to gauge your interest and borrow them from your local dead-tree library.
As I speak, it is randomly there and not there on loading the page again. It's as if there were multiple servers and it had not propagated fully.
I do have games posts collapsed to the main page though.
It is a mod for UT though, so your computer has to be able to run that. UT is fairly scaleable though, so if you have a reasonably decent machine you should be able to play.
The main gameplay type in Thievery is Thieves vs. Guards, where the human players are split up equally among thieves and guards. The thieves then have to complete a few objectives (i.e. steal enough loot) and then get to the exit, all near impossible unless they remain undetected. The guards (with the aid of a number of AI and many weapons and tools) seek to prevent the thieves from doing all this. The gameplay is pretty much straight from the Thief games, with many of the items and weapons taken pretty much as-is. The major component of the thievery is the same as the single player games, the light gem. The gem tells you how visible you are, i.e. to the guards you range from completely invisible, to transparent, to completely visible depending on how dark the shadows you are in are. Note that the guards don't have this and are always visible, unless they use an invisibility potion.
To help keep it a sneaker and not a new variation of DM, each team has a limited number of common lives, and each spawn uses up a life. This means if a team has 5 lives, they can have 1 player with 5 lives, or 5 players with no team lives. Thieves, while able to take out a lone guard if they have surprise, don't have much health or damaging weaponry and will likely die quickly if they attract the attention of a guard.
The people behind the actual Thief games are aware of the mod and have said that if they were going to do multiplayer, it probably would have turned out quite a bit like this mod. I believe they said something like that they made the decision to only do single player and that while they aren't allowed to officially encourage the mod, they won't take any action against it as long as they respect the "Thief" and any other trademarks that might force them to take action. The net effect of this is that the mod shouldn't be "foxxed", so don't worry about playing. The mod's been around for awhile, and will be around for awhile yet.
I'm sure that someone out there has considered, if there isn't already, making a MOO (text) based on MOO (Orion).
If such a thing exists, then there likely also has been a thought to making a MOO (Orion) of the MOO (text) of the MOO (Orion).
Such a game, would no doubt, involve a cow. At the very least, many of the players would no doubt make cow sounds.
The end result of this would be: MOOing in the MOO based on the MOO of MOO.
Like the parent comment suggested, using asfrecorder does work, but the provided link to the trailer didn't.
/ 1919/7287/v0001/hollywood.download.akamai.com/7287 /windows/equilibrium_t_700.asf" does work (for now anyways) and runs about 12.4 MB (be sure to delete the space after the /7/).
"mms://a1919.v7287f.c7287.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7
Note that I obtained the URL by changing 300 to 700 in a link mentioned in another comment, and you can likely access whatever format you prefer by changing the URL accordingly.
Actually you can, they're available as a "module". Just scroll up to the lander slots and then activate the slot to get the option of purchasing a lander.
Found Cursed using Google (http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200108/0671318594__ c_.htm). As fireboy said, only up to and including Chapter 20 appear to be there right now. Seeing as how Consulted is the other part of that compilation, when might Consulted be available?
On the link you provided, only the first two books (Bane & Compiled) appear to be available. Is the third (Cursed) available somewhere else? Or perhaps you read it in another form?
If you have an Athlon, at least you won't have to worry about freezing to death.
In yet another example of the link between memory access and external stimuli, access to the "proof-reading" memory routines appears to only be accessible after the "clicking the Submit button" stimuli has been provided.
The problem with the Human Brain Storage System [TM] isn't really total capacity, but instead the memory addressing system. It doesn't even use a simple system like a linearly numbered addresses, instead it seems to use an sense/input based address system, where an image and a smell (or other inputs) will give you back a memory of your first tricycle. Too bad what you really wanted was the answer to the exam question.
I also think H.B.S.S. manufacturers have let quality control slip a little bit, as the address systems don't appear to be consistent across similar models. This is especially apparently when "Male" and "Female" type models try to interface and compare stored memory concerning things like whose turn it is to walk the dog.
Was the book Japan: Profile of a Nation? It is indeed published by Kodansha and appears to be close to what you described.
From the description on Amazon, it also appears to be a condensed version of their large encyclopedia: Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, which is an order of magnitude more expensive.
Just because you can't immediately establish a cause and effect with ESD, doesn't mean it's not causing damage. ESD can happen without you even noticing and it's especially hard to detect if it doesn't cause a failure outright. I.e. if a discharge doesn't outright kill a product, it can still do damage that increases the likelyhood of failure further on in the life of the product, or even worse, variability. Far worse than a product that you know doesn't work, is one that appears to work but produces wrong or variable output. Combined with the sheer number of products that have the potential to be damaged, increasing your ESD defence will likely give a decent increase your product's overall reliability.
If your product is so cheap that you don't care about failure and just want to produce as many of them as cheaply as possible, then go ahead and skimp on ESD. Just make sure you have a good system to deal with the failing products that will cost you less than the increased ESD defence.
Hmm... NSA, CIA, NASA. If we mix these around we get NASA = NSA + CIA - CI.
;)).
I guess this means NASA's just a blind front for the NSA and the CIA (blind front, get it? Can't "CI".
I agree that using tabbed browsing by itself isn't very likeable, you end up with many little tabs in one window that has it's own task list separate from that of the OS. I don't however, use windowed browsing by itself either. I use a combination of the two with Mozilla that involves grouping related sites in windows with tabs. This really helps in managing browsing on sites such as Slashdot, where each story gets its own window, and each link from that story gets its own tab within that window. Each window is then a self-contained group of sites related to the main Slashdot story that I can return to after an interruption or other delay and not have to restablish the relationships of open sites.
But to each their own, if this style of browsing doesn't appeal to you, then don't use it. I encourage those who normally detest tabbed browsing to try it, I found it helped organize my "browsing experience". This "system" however, isn't for those who browse one-window one-site-at-a-time and don't take advantage of windows or tabs. It is really only appreciated when you have many sites open at one time, especially when related sites are slow to load and can be relegated to a tab until they finish loading.
Hmm... I suppose we could name the wrestling game "GNU World Order".
Perhaps an analogy of oil in an engine might apply to the function of IT. It's not gasoline, tires, an aerodynamical shape, or any other feature that might make the car go faster, but over use the oil, use poor quality oil or try to use gasoline as oil and you'll find the car won't go fast at all (or for long).
Consider this possible scenario:
Optimally at company X, IT is made up of many "Operators", few "Administrators", and even fewer in "Management". Operators handle the Help Desk, the new user setup and other day-to-day repetitive low-key issues. Administrators handle the larger issues as well extend and improve the various services IT provides. Management (for simplicity, this includes "administrative assistants") manages all the paperwork, inter-group company communication, etc.
Instead, at company X, there aren't enough and/or properly trained operators working as operators, too many operators acting as administrators, the few administrators overworked and management merely creating more things to manage and causing the administrators to also perform management duties. Generally, pretty much making it impossible for Company X's IT group to be cost-efficient (or even helpful to users).
When company X was swimming in money, they got along by throwing more money at any IT problems. Hiring more operators, paying expensive consultants (who recommend what the administrators proposes, or worse, recommend a white elephant solution) and buying software and hardware based largely on which vendors played golf with the upper management of IT.
Now that they are no longer awash in money to throw at problems, they have to cut back. Cut back on management? Of course not. Consultants? University buddies and management doesn't trust the opinions of the experienced administrators. Use better vendors? And face him on the golf course this weekend? A lot of the "fat" is valued more than the "muscle" by the management and so when it's time to make the company leaner, they end up with little muscle supporting lots of fat. The remaining muscle ends up overworked and generally not skilled enough to handle a lot of the work assigned to it. To push the body analogy further, this generally only leads to three outcomes. Optimally, the management "Gets it" and the system is strengthened and made more efficient, or the company continues to work with IT on life-support or enough functions fail that the company goes under.
Luckily where I work is far from having a "heart attack" as it were, but I suspect that at too many other companies the situation is closer to "Company X" and that most problems are largely the fault of mismanagement (including problems of incompetance on the part of operators, as management hired them in the first place). Find and give more authority to management that "Gets it", and you'll likely find the "IT problem" will solve itself.
Remedy depends far too much on being configured well. It's far too easy to make a system that no one wants to use, causing many to bypass the system and defeating the purpose of the system. Remedy's Windows' interface could do with some improvement as well, most Remedy windows are far too cluttered and have many fields that aren't descriptive enough as to what they do. I haven't used the web interface, so I can't comment on that.
One thing that can be useful if setup correctly is the automated generation of tickets. There is a script available for Big Brother (http://www.bb4.com) that allows it to automatically generate tickets when one of the events it monitors goes bad. You have to tweak it to minimize false positives, but it can be handy to have a ticket there when a machine goes down and you even record the solution for the problem in Remedy in case the problem happens again.
Above all else, make the use of the system as smooth and as easy as possible. People will just bypass the system if it's too complex, too slow or tickets aren't responded to.
Using calc's packages and then only compiling the kdeartwork from source is pretty painless. You might need to grab a few -dev library packages, that's all.
I've been using the experimental packages for a week or so and other than having to purge the old KDE packages, they've been just as good as official packages. No problems whatsoever (other than wasting too much time playing with the eye-candy settings).