Oddly enough, almost all the WoW players I know in RL have played tabletop games at some stage, many of them still play in D&D campaigns. But that could be that I have a skewed sample. My WoW guild thinks it odd when my husband and I skip a raid to play D&D.
Personally, I'd be opening a design atelier looking at all aspects of design.
If you haven't already read it, look up a copy of Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" (formally known as "The Psychology of Everyday Things"), it's a real eye opener about the visual and contextual clues we use to determine how an object 'should' work, and how often these clues lead us astray.
By far the worst unit I encountered for AC adaptor failure was the original PB190/5300 AC Adaptor. It had two primary points of failure:
the first being the male connector which would 'snap' internally (most easily diagnosed either by the connector being at an angle from it's sheath, or being able to 'wiggle' the tip of the connector - a clicking noise could generally be heard where the ends of broken connector flicked across each other),
the second failure point was the grommet where the cable came out of the transformer (normally caused by people wrapping the cable around the adaptor too tightly and pulling it out of the casing - sometimes a inch or so of bare wire would be visible by the time it was brought in for replacement).
The biggest problem with AC Adaptors is that to make them samll and light for easy transport they are somewhat fragile and not particularly durable - especially in relation to the cable being wrapped over ridged edges.
The PB1x0 series adaptors were possibly the most durable adaptors I've ever seen, but there were total bricks and awkward to plug into power strips and low mounted wall points.
The other thing which is often overlooked is the frequency of the failures.
When the original iMac was released, during the service training we were told that Apple anticpated a 2% 'failure' rate of devices needing service in the first 3 months due to the changes in form factor, architecture and volume manafacturing (line issues). They had laid in service stock on the basis of that estimate.
They found in fact a
When talking about quality assurance, you generally talk about Defects per Million Opportunities (Six Sigma), has anyone looked at how many opportunities for Defects the new products represtent, and is the number of issues truely significant (in a statistical sense) or just highly visible?
It could only result in a mass wave of strokes and heart attacks as table top gamers encounter women who aren't Furries, WW groupies, game geeks or immediate family members. They won't know how to cope.
Re:1 Corinthians 13:11
on
Gen Con Bingo
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· Score: 1
I remember going t a gaming convention in Canberra (Australia) the year that Magic the Gathering was released. There was a charity auction with a carton of magic packs as the main draw. A group of hardcore (context is important in all things) roleplayers grouped together, won the auction and held a ritual burning of the unopened cards.
It seemed witty at the time.
From memory it was the same convention which saw the one and only sanctioned RPGA Master's Tournament that I'm aware of ever being run in Australia. We lacked the numbers of Master's ranked players for this to be a regular thing.
More to the point, are there Lagforge, Vendor Lag, Loot Lag and Quest Lag cards which limit particular activites your opponent can take. Additionally, there should be cards for "ML unexpectedly disconnects", "Ninja Looter", "Leeroy Jenkins", "Train Borelgore to IF" (or Terimus to SW) and finally "Deeprun Tram Cyber"
The other thing to check is whether the printer is a page printer or a document printer. The difference is in how the printer spools the job before release tothe imaging engine.
A document printer will spool the entire doucment before trying to print - fast for medium to long documents where you need to print multiple copies. Page printers release each page to print as it spools, but doesn't retain the data for reprint if printing collated sets, and has to re-process. Good for short or exceptionally long jobs.
An example of a long job better done on a page printer is a large variable data job where every page is uniquie and doesn't need to be printed again - but the whole document will overflow the memory.
We've found that post script fixes many random spooling issues, possibly due to the fact that most postscript upgrades come with additional memory.
If you are staying at a hotel or other public facility, they will give you a copy of the Census to complete. If you are staying at a friends, you are supposed to be included on their household form. IF you are overseas presumably you don't need to fill it in.
I like Xerox printers too[1] - but if you read I recommended Kyocera, who are not Xerox and are quite cheap.:)
[1] I work for Xerox, and the next printer I buy will probably be a Xerox. They do not currently make entry level laser printers - only serious workgroup printers. My current laser printer is an Apple Laserwriter 4/600 PS and is over 10 years old.
While I will accept this happened to you, I would suggest this was atypical.
As a disclaimer, I work for FXA (Fuji Xerox Australia), and am aware of us routinely installing hundreds of machines on client sites without the issues you are describing.
Most manufacturers publish the cartridge yields for their toner carts - you may have to ferret around to find the value. Most manufacturers quote in terms of 5% coverage of a 8" x10" page.
Internal testing where I work has indicated that for a fairly standard basket of typical office documents, the average page coverage is closer to 7.5% of an A4 page (located in Australia), which is nearly twice the area fo the manufacturers quoted coverage - meaning the cartridges last half the number of pages.
If you are printing a lot of graphics, they will typically have much higher page coverage than a page of text - this coverage may go up to 20-50% coverage.
For good graphics performance, look at how many levels of greyscale can they emulate, and whether they can do some varient on fine print - allowing the software to distort/locate the dot in the greyscale render to permit shart edges on fonts and curves. It increases the subjective resolution of the device with increasing the actual resolution of the device. 600dpi is pretty standard for office applications, 1200dpi is common on engines used in the graphic design market.
I used to do this for a living, but not in the US market.
You haven't mentioned how many pages you expect to produce per week/month/year, which makes this a little tricky.
Ideally you need to look at the expected usable life for the device (for corporate use 5 years, personal use maybe up to 10 years), does the device require a maintenance kit, what is the device lifetime duty cycle and what is the cost/yeild of the toner cartirdge.
Additionally, do you print a lot of postscript or PDFs, and is speed an issue?
The cost per page calcualtion is basically: ((purchase cost of the device / lifetime pages printed)+(cost of tomer cart/yield)+(cost of maintenance kit/yield))
Kyocera make good quality low TCO (total cost of ownership)laser printers - but I haven't found them to be especially durable in high volume applications.
The HP 4xxx series are generally good entry level workgroup printers, reliable and well supported.
If speed or large PDFs are a requirement, you may want to consider a memory upgrade or postscript kit. Remember that when they quote pages per minute - that is the speed per page for additional copies of the same page (engine speed) once the first instance has been processed (first page out).
So early last year my husband an I both purchased a copy of WoW and started playing. Until last week, we hadn't bought another game since then. We used to buy a new game every month or so, averaging about 9 new titles per year, mostly purchased as new releases. Even my Animal Crossing village has lain abandoned after months of neglect.
Last week I purchased Oblivion, mostly because I thought it was about time we try something different, and I'd heard so many good reviews for Oblivion, it seemed like a good first outing. Both of us have managed two sessions with Oblivion since then, and in both cases the second session was more about "there must be some value in this game somewhere".
WoW has coloured my expectations on how graphics aid in game play, how the UI supports the gameplay and a number of other factors which are probably more subconcious that realised. I bought Oblivion thinking I'd get into the story, but so far I have been frustrated by the UI and the graphics just give me a headache, I haven't really found the plot yet beyond the starting cut scenes.
At least it validated our choice of WOW as a game and all the value we've gotten from those purchases. And clearing BWL in 150 minutes rocks.
Moreover, why do people play D&D? To assume one of a set of fairly cliched roles, or to crawl through a maze slaying monsters and working as a team to accomplish a goal? I suggest that the length of the rulebook dedicated to combat encodes an answer.
There are as many different reasons to play as there are players. I have played in games which have run for years with large overarching plot lines and campaigns which have been abandonded after one session because the players have agreed that "now that we have that out of our system we should never return to those characters or that setting" (no, we don't make it a practice to round up the local townsfolk and drive them into the dungeon ahead of us to set off all the traps).
Different GMs run different styles of games; political, Monty Haul, high fantasty, gritty realistic, ancient worlds, modern setting, futuristic, post-holacaustal, mystery, hack and slash, the list goes on and on.
The core rules exist to create a commonly accepted set of mechanics - they are a simple way of expressing the laws of physics in a way the all players agree to at the start of the game. Some games prefer to run with GM fiat, I have found that very few players (or GMs for the matter) are mature enough to run that type of game for very long before there are accusations of favouritism or harrassment.
For a person to download an episode that is a.) not avaiable in any other way, or b.) occasionally, because it was either the 'bestest episode evar' or he/she missed the showing, is one thing. Downloading a readily available series in toto is something else again. And while the/. crowd balks at calling the second theft for technical reasons, it is ethically equivalent as far as I can tell.
Most TV series of late that I have seen for the first time I have seen this way. Not living in the US, thi sis sometimes the best way to see the episodes before they have a few extra minutes chopped out of them to fit in a few more ads, or shown out of sequence, or put on indefinate hiatus or moved around in the scheduling to accomodate a sporting event.
I refuse to watch commercial television for a regular series any more. I made this choice after being stuffed around by the programming of the 3 major stations here in Australia with The West Wing, Angel, Buffy and X-Files.
Having watched a first season, if we like the show we try to find it on DVD. Sometimes they are available locally, sometimes we look to import them from the US/UK. If they are not available, we wait to download the next season.
Most of my more technically literate friends behave in the same way - prove yourself and we'll pay money, it you suck, it's the delete button to free up space for the next series.
The commercial channels lost this audience through the way they treated us. Why should we wait 12 months to see a series everyone online is talking about. Why should we wait to see them cut from how they were meant to be shown? Why should we put up with them pre-empting them on no notice for a sports event?
I like to make an informed choice about how I spend my money. I like to control when I see a show and not arrange my schedule around one when the networks can't hold to their own scheduling. I could be a good little consumer and sit through the ads or wait to pay for a show on the chance that it might be as good as I've been told. I'm not.
Back around 1992, I used to work for a Kodak dealer who sold the Kodak DSC200 series digital cameras. They were a Nikon 35mm camera body with a digital film back and Li based rechargable battery pack.
My boss was on a client site setting up to run a demo, these cameras cost AU$30k each, it was sitting on a counter waiting to be hooked up when it burst into flames.
While I wasn't present for the actual fire, I did see the melted unit afterward when packing it to be sent back to Rochester for tests.
This has been a *known* issue for a very long time.
Unfortunately, the Cane Toad problem in Australia is not recent. I was astonished when it showed up as 'news' on slashdot recently. I remember watching a documentary about the Cane Toad menance back in the late 1980's.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough, almost all the WoW players I know in RL have played tabletop games at some stage, many of them still play in D&D campaigns. But that could be that I have a skewed sample. My WoW guild thinks it odd when my husband and I skip a raid to play D&D.
How to get the Babel Fish:
Personally, I'd be opening a design atelier looking at all aspects of design.
If you haven't already read it, look up a copy of Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" (formally known as "The Psychology of Everyday Things"), it's a real eye opener about the visual and contextual clues we use to determine how an object 'should' work, and how often these clues lead us astray.
By far the worst unit I encountered for AC adaptor failure was the original PB190/5300 AC Adaptor. It had two primary points of failure:
The biggest problem with AC Adaptors is that to make them samll and light for easy transport they are somewhat fragile and not particularly durable - especially in relation to the cable being wrapped over ridged edges.
The PB1x0 series adaptors were possibly the most durable adaptors I've ever seen, but there were total bricks and awkward to plug into power strips and low mounted wall points.
The other thing which is often overlooked is the frequency of the failures.
When the original iMac was released, during the service training we were told that Apple anticpated a 2% 'failure' rate of devices needing service in the first 3 months due to the changes in form factor, architecture and volume manafacturing (line issues). They had laid in service stock on the basis of that estimate.
They found in fact a
When talking about quality assurance, you generally talk about Defects per Million Opportunities (Six Sigma), has anyone looked at how many opportunities for Defects the new products represtent, and is the number of issues truely significant (in a statistical sense) or just highly visible?
Please, god, NOOOO!!!!!!!
It could only result in a mass wave of strokes and heart attacks as table top gamers encounter women who aren't Furries, WW groupies, game geeks or immediate family members. They won't know how to cope.
Ohh, come now.. haven't you ever heard of iSue?
Surely you mean Sosumi.
I remember going t a gaming convention in Canberra (Australia) the year that Magic the Gathering was released. There was a charity auction with a carton of magic packs as the main draw. A group of hardcore (context is important in all things) roleplayers grouped together, won the auction and held a ritual burning of the unopened cards.
It seemed witty at the time.
From memory it was the same convention which saw the one and only sanctioned RPGA Master's Tournament that I'm aware of ever being run in Australia. We lacked the numbers of Master's ranked players for this to be a regular thing.
It made it easy for computer users to use their computers without having to worry about hardware compatibility.
Prior Art = the Macintosh in 1984...
That's the minimum that every single single serious WoW player will buy.
What's your definition of serious - cos I have no plans on buying the cards - when would I get the time to play, I'm too busy raiding?
More to the point, are there Lagforge, Vendor Lag, Loot Lag and Quest Lag cards which limit particular activites your opponent can take. Additionally, there should be cards for "ML unexpectedly disconnects", "Ninja Looter", "Leeroy Jenkins", "Train Borelgore to IF" (or Terimus to SW) and finally "Deeprun Tram Cyber"
I don't think the 'smugness aura' is generated by the user base.
I don't know, I've been a Mac user since '87 and I fell pretty smug about it.
The other thing to check is whether the printer is a page printer or a document printer. The difference is in how the printer spools the job before release tothe imaging engine.
A document printer will spool the entire doucment before trying to print - fast for medium to long documents where you need to print multiple copies. Page printers release each page to print as it spools, but doesn't retain the data for reprint if printing collated sets, and has to re-process. Good for short or exceptionally long jobs.
An example of a long job better done on a page printer is a large variable data job where every page is uniquie and doesn't need to be printed again - but the whole document will overflow the memory.
We've found that post script fixes many random spooling issues, possibly due to the fact that most postscript upgrades come with additional memory.
If you are staying at a hotel or other public facility, they will give you a copy of the Census to complete. If you are staying at a friends, you are supposed to be included on their household form. IF you are overseas presumably you don't need to fill it in.
I like Xerox printers too[1] - but if you read I recommended Kyocera, who are not Xerox and are quite cheap. :)
[1] I work for Xerox, and the next printer I buy will probably be a Xerox. They do not currently make entry level laser printers - only serious workgroup printers. My current laser printer is an Apple Laserwriter 4/600 PS and is over 10 years old.
While I will accept this happened to you, I would suggest this was atypical.
As a disclaimer, I work for FXA (Fuji Xerox Australia), and am aware of us routinely installing hundreds of machines on client sites without the issues you are describing.
Addendum
Most manufacturers publish the cartridge yields for their toner carts - you may have to ferret around to find the value. Most manufacturers quote in terms of 5% coverage of a 8" x10" page.
Internal testing where I work has indicated that for a fairly standard basket of typical office documents, the average page coverage is closer to 7.5% of an A4 page (located in Australia), which is nearly twice the area fo the manufacturers quoted coverage - meaning the cartridges last half the number of pages.
If you are printing a lot of graphics, they will typically have much higher page coverage than a page of text - this coverage may go up to 20-50% coverage.
For good graphics performance, look at how many levels of greyscale can they emulate, and whether they can do some varient on fine print - allowing the software to distort/locate the dot in the greyscale render to permit shart edges on fonts and curves. It increases the subjective resolution of the device with increasing the actual resolution of the device. 600dpi is pretty standard for office applications, 1200dpi is common on engines used in the graphic design market.
I used to do this for a living, but not in the US market.
You haven't mentioned how many pages you expect to produce per week/month/year, which makes this a little tricky.
Ideally you need to look at the expected usable life for the device (for corporate use 5 years, personal use maybe up to 10 years), does the device require a maintenance kit, what is the device lifetime duty cycle and what is the cost/yeild of the toner cartirdge.
Additionally, do you print a lot of postscript or PDFs, and is speed an issue?
The cost per page calcualtion is basically: ((purchase cost of the device / lifetime pages printed)+(cost of tomer cart/yield)+(cost of maintenance kit/yield))
Kyocera make good quality low TCO (total cost of ownership)laser printers - but I haven't found them to be especially durable in high volume applications.
The HP 4xxx series are generally good entry level workgroup printers, reliable and well supported.
If speed or large PDFs are a requirement, you may want to consider a memory upgrade or postscript kit. Remember that when they quote pages per minute - that is the speed per page for additional copies of the same page (engine speed) once the first instance has been processed (first page out).
Two nights?
One night for MC, one night for ZG, one night for AQ20, one night for BWL, one night for AQ40, one night for Naxx (ok, 2 nights for Naxx).
If pushed, we could probably do MC and BWL in one night - around 4-5 hours total, and do AQ20 and Ony in a night.
So early last year my husband an I both purchased a copy of WoW and started playing. Until last week, we hadn't bought another game since then. We used to buy a new game every month or so, averaging about 9 new titles per year, mostly purchased as new releases. Even my Animal Crossing village has lain abandoned after months of neglect.
Last week I purchased Oblivion, mostly because I thought it was about time we try something different, and I'd heard so many good reviews for Oblivion, it seemed like a good first outing. Both of us have managed two sessions with Oblivion since then, and in both cases the second session was more about "there must be some value in this game somewhere".
WoW has coloured my expectations on how graphics aid in game play, how the UI supports the gameplay and a number of other factors which are probably more subconcious that realised. I bought Oblivion thinking I'd get into the story, but so far I have been frustrated by the UI and the graphics just give me a headache, I haven't really found the plot yet beyond the starting cut scenes.
At least it validated our choice of WOW as a game and all the value we've gotten from those purchases. And clearing BWL in 150 minutes rocks.
Moreover, why do people play D&D? To assume one of a set of fairly cliched roles, or to crawl through a maze slaying monsters and working as a team to accomplish a goal? I suggest that the length of the rulebook dedicated to combat encodes an answer.
There are as many different reasons to play as there are players. I have played in games which have run for years with large overarching plot lines and campaigns which have been abandonded after one session because the players have agreed that "now that we have that out of our system we should never return to those characters or that setting" (no, we don't make it a practice to round up the local townsfolk and drive them into the dungeon ahead of us to set off all the traps).
Different GMs run different styles of games; political, Monty Haul, high fantasty, gritty realistic, ancient worlds, modern setting, futuristic, post-holacaustal, mystery, hack and slash, the list goes on and on.
The core rules exist to create a commonly accepted set of mechanics - they are a simple way of expressing the laws of physics in a way the all players agree to at the start of the game. Some games prefer to run with GM fiat, I have found that very few players (or GMs for the matter) are mature enough to run that type of game for very long before there are accusations of favouritism or harrassment.
For a person to download an episode that is a.) not avaiable in any other way, or b.) occasionally, because it was either the 'bestest episode evar' or he/she missed the showing, is one thing. Downloading a readily available series in toto is something else again. And while the /. crowd balks at calling the second theft for technical reasons, it is ethically equivalent as far as I can tell.
Most TV series of late that I have seen for the first time I have seen this way. Not living in the US, thi sis sometimes the best way to see the episodes before they have a few extra minutes chopped out of them to fit in a few more ads, or shown out of sequence, or put on indefinate hiatus or moved around in the scheduling to accomodate a sporting event.
I refuse to watch commercial television for a regular series any more. I made this choice after being stuffed around by the programming of the 3 major stations here in Australia with The West Wing, Angel, Buffy and X-Files.
Having watched a first season, if we like the show we try to find it on DVD. Sometimes they are available locally, sometimes we look to import them from the US/UK. If they are not available, we wait to download the next season.
Most of my more technically literate friends behave in the same way - prove yourself and we'll pay money, it you suck, it's the delete button to free up space for the next series.
The commercial channels lost this audience through the way they treated us. Why should we wait 12 months to see a series everyone online is talking about. Why should we wait to see them cut from how they were meant to be shown? Why should we put up with them pre-empting them on no notice for a sports event?
I like to make an informed choice about how I spend my money. I like to control when I see a show and not arrange my schedule around one when the networks can't hold to their own scheduling. I could be a good little consumer and sit through the ads or wait to pay for a show on the chance that it might be as good as I've been told. I'm not.
Back around 1992, I used to work for a Kodak dealer who sold the Kodak DSC200 series digital cameras. They were a Nikon 35mm camera body with a digital film back and Li based rechargable battery pack.
My boss was on a client site setting up to run a demo, these cameras cost AU$30k each, it was sitting on a counter waiting to be hooked up when it burst into flames.
While I wasn't present for the actual fire, I did see the melted unit afterward when packing it to be sent back to Rochester for tests.
This has been a *known* issue for a very long time.
Unfortunately, the Cane Toad problem in Australia is not recent. I was astonished when it showed up as 'news' on slashdot recently. I remember watching a documentary about the Cane Toad menance back in the late 1980's.
the bread was already toasted, with butter and jam...