I'm Australian, and we are still part of the British Commonwealth.
We have so many fabulous natural wonders that would be ideal examples of why the Earth should be saved from the Vogons..., The Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, etc...
I keep a cookie jar on my desk - studies have shown that good quality cookies are one of the most cost effective morale boosters an office can have. Everytime I suggest I'm going to change variety cookie, I get protests. They're "Arnots Premier Choclate Chip Cookies (40% chocolate)" and are known around the office as 'The Evil Cookies".
There are a few factors I would look for if I was designing an office layout from scratch.:
Break-out space for informal meetings, sometimes you need to be able to thrash out a workflow or concept with other people, you don't want to be distracting to others, but formal meeting rooms can sometime supress creative discussion. You need a white board, a few comfy chairs and possibly a small table or two. Mostly you need space around the white board for multiple people to move around.
Acoustic privacy personal offices for everyone is impractical and not cost effective these days, but people need mental space to order their thoughts and allow them to concentrate on what they are doing. Cube farms with acoustic panelling can help this by reducing how much sound will travel across a room. Office with lots of hard surfaces are much noisier than ones with lots of 'dead' surfaces.
Diffuse Daylight being stuck in an office all day, especially in winter, can be very demoralising to never see daylight. Having some form of visible daylight is good for everyone's morale - however, you want to avoid glare - especially around computer monitors.
Good positioning of shared office amenties filing cabinets, printers, copiers, water coolers, stationary cabinets, etc... are a fact of life in an office environment, but they always seem to be crammed into inconveient and sometimes dangerous locations simply becuase no one thought about where they would go and how much space the required when they did the original layout. Do they impede access to fire escapes, do they require power, are they noisy, do they give off fumes?
Circulation through the space what's the shortest path to the break room and the coffee machine? Does it mean that one particular workstation is going to have a constant stream of people going past it all day? Again acousitc panelling is your friend. Cubes don't have to be to the ceiling - though as a minimum shoulder high is good.
Personalisation what capacity is there for occupants to personalise their space without causing damage to company assets? If all they have is dry wall, they are going to pins into it, or tape things to it which will wreck the paint surface. Make pin boards available, or some alternative.
I met DNA twice, the first time a group of us from university went out to meet him at an airport.
While we 'knew' that he was tall and had a largish nose, we watched as the people from that particular flight filed out, at each tall man we were asking each other 'is that him?', and then he arrived and there was absolutely no doubt that it was HIM. He towered over everyone else from the flight.
We got him to sign the club banner "Don't Panic", which has never been washed since despite the many and varied stains accumulated on a Uni club banner, and we gave him a bottle of Australian red wine, becuase we heard he had a fancy for it. We had emptied the club coffers to pay for the bottle, hope it was good.
A few years later I was lucky enough to attend a literary lunch where he was the guest of honour. It was just after the release of "Last Chance to See", listening to him tell stories both from the book and from the background to the book was wonderful. He will be sorely missed.
I once typeset a complex econimics text book on a Mac Portable using MS Word 4.0. It used the equation editor for the full page matrices and integral equations, and the whole thing fitted on two 400k floppy discs (one was a backup)
I recently had to contact THQ regarding a glitch in one of their games on the GameCube. Their first question was "are you using a 3rd party memory card", which suggests not all cards are the same (ignoring size).
Oddly enough we eventually pinned the problem down to the Wavebird (official wireless controller), it frequently seems to be the cause of unexpected behaviour.
Did you know that one of the reasons women are forced to wear the veil in Muslim countries is because they are considered too great a temptation, and that men would not be able to resist thinking licentious thoughts, let alone act upon them.
In most of the western world, women are not forced to wear veils because there is an implicit understanding that the men of our community have a degree of self control, and will not be driven wild with lust simply be seeing a woman.
Is it that big a leap from not needing to wear a veil simply to walk down the street, to being able to go out on a date and relax because you don't expect to be assualted.
And for your information, it is possible to be raped within a relationship, I know from personal experience. Sometimes - for whatever reason - even though you have previously given consent, consent is withdrawn. If both parties respect each other, then they should respect the fact that there is no consent.
The tragedy is that people - of both genders - get caught up in the glamour which is the fame industry, and become intoxicated by their proximity to a 'star', sporting or otherwise. Add to this that most famous people are not rocket scientists and are accoustomed to having every whim catered to, they can often not recognise that they are going too far, too fast. Given the number of highly publicised cases of sexual assult and rape, you would think celebraties would be even more careful about who they sleep with. Unfortunately, it was often the sex-appeal that got them into the fame game in the first place.
We need to teach our kids that rape is not OK in any circumstance. And we need to teach our children to be more circumspect about putting themselves in a situation where they can be taken advantage of.
Xerox/PARC still innovate. Their oil-less single pass colour laser printers are starting to move into the desktop market. Their high end print engines are still miles ahead of the competition, they are still innovating in software and networks.
Unfortunately, it's rarely until someone like MS or HP pick up the invention that it gets noticed.
It comes down to a cost/benefit equation. What can you least afford: to have money invested in backup equipment/parts or to miss the deadline and possibly the business due to equipment failure.
If it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars then you would have two plotters running in the first place, and be able to switch queues should one device go offline. Both devices would be on a on-site-warranty contract, and you would place a call as soon as the first device went down. You would have scheduled maintenance and a replacement strategy to ensure the devices didn't run themselves into the ground.
If it's merely going to be mildly inconvenient, or cost you maybe several tens or hundreds of dollars. Then you would run with a single unit and possibly have the number of a hire service on file for when your primary device fails (for while you are waiting for it to be repaired).
Like any other form of risk management, you need to weigh up the likelyhood of the risk event occuring, the cost of it occuring and the cost for mitigating it. If the probability of failure is low and the cost of effect is low, then the investment to mitigate should also be low. If the probaility of failure is high and the cost of failure effect is high, then you should be prepared to invest in mitigating the risk.
Ultimately, that's what make the difference between a well run organisation and a lucky one.
I got into trouble a few years back for returning an item to a vendor with the fault description "fucked" written on it. The vendor stated that without a proper fault description they could not accept the item for refund or exchange.
Item was relabelled and sent back to them with the following fault description: Faulty Unit, Continuously Kills Electronic Devices.
As a RPG designer I would agree that one of the key differences between a CRPG and a tabletop game at a game convention is that the CRPG is often linear in it's resolution (often only one viable solution), whereas a tabletop game has to accomodate anything the players come up with. Players are extremely scathing about "fishhook" modules - game that drag you along a set path as if their was a fishhook in your mouth.
I have no idea what would be involved in giving a CRPG the degree of flexibility you can get in a table top game, there would need to be character AIs which change their actions based on past actions and behaviours of the PCs. The biggest problem would be writing all the branches to emulate the way a tabletop GM can ad lib.
My original exposure to the Hitch Hikers Guide was as the radio series while still a child. The magic of the series/books is the way that DNA put words together.
In many ways radio was the ultimate medium for these stories because of the mental pictures they painted. "They hung in the air exactly the same way bricks don't" is a quote which will be with me for the rest of my life.
You may not enjoy them, not everyone has the same sense of humour. But if you enjoy language - you really should read them just to experience the juxtaposition of words that he creates. If you want to read some of his non-fiction to get a feel for the way he works, try Last Chance to See, which is a collection of articles about endangered species.
Having a rapper playing Ford is actually quite a good idea - Ford frequently goes off into high speed bizzarre rants which are almost stream of conciousness, delivering those lines with clear diction would be a challenge for many actors.
Re:Stock up on untainted books now
on
H2G2 Film Website
·
· Score: 1
Other examples of this phenomenon are:
LOTR (obviously)
Sometime around '80, which was before the animated film.
Harry Potter (When did you read Sorcerer's Stone)
I read Philosopher's Stone prior to PoA being released in hardcover.
My Slashdot ID is lower than yours (Sub-groups here are 3-digit, 4-5 digit, low 6 digit IDs)
resisted registering for a very long time, posted as an AC for about 2 years, registered about 6 months ago.
People who had to watch Soprano's Season 1 after Season 2.
watched Soprano's on DVD - we don't get HBO in Australia.
People who first watched the Matrix on DVD.
saw Matrix on the big screen first, wish I'd waited for DVD for the 3rd one.
Anyone born after Carter left office.
born during the reign of LBJ
Re:Stock up on untainted books now
on
H2G2 Film Website
·
· Score: 1
Ummm... how about copiers of the book that still say "trilogy" and not "the ever increasingly inaccurately named trilogy"... None of my covers match as they were bought as the books became available.
I have a copy of the original pressing of the radio series on CD and the silk screening on the discs is all mixed up - the colours don't match the cases and several disc have the same episode information on them.
Re:EDUCATION IS NOT SCHOOL.
on
The Flickering Mind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But school can be a useful place to prod education along.
In an ideal world, education would start long before school - after all, you learn to speak before school, and many children start to learn how to read. Schools are an ideal time and place to teach children how to learn in a structured manner. It should be giving them the framework to find their own answers, and more importantly how to frame their own questions.
Going back to the early '90's, there was a version of Disenfectant which flagged M$ products as viruses. We used to use it in the service department where I worked.
Surely the simplest check of whether it was a genuine Microsoft release was to check the file size...
If it is several meg or larger in size, the chances of it being a piece of MS bloatware is high. If it's small it probably isn't.
Helping those who won't help themselves...
on
Privacy in the Woods?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While I can see why people are suggesting that it should be voluntary, but ultimately the people that will need it the most are people who won't think to use it.
The people who need rescuing typically are people who were ill prepared and didn't heed the signs that the weather was bad or conditions unstable. It's the people who go out without the right gear or clothes, without checking in at the ranger's hut, without a clue.
I don't have a solution, as a society we aren't prepared to say that's evolution in action - if they were meant to survive they'd have taken a compass, so the people who least deserve the assistence are the ones who will require it the most.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn...
I'm Australian, and we are still part of the British Commonwealth.
We have so many fabulous natural wonders that would be ideal examples of why the Earth should be saved from the Vogons..., The Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, etc...
Also known as "frottage".
Isn't that how trackpads work?
I keep a cookie jar on my desk - studies have shown that good quality cookies are one of the most cost effective morale boosters an office can have. Everytime I suggest I'm going to change variety cookie, I get protests. They're "Arnots Premier Choclate Chip Cookies (40% chocolate)" and are known around the office as 'The Evil Cookies".
There are a few factors I would look for if I was designing an office layout from scratch.:
I met DNA twice, the first time a group of us from university went out to meet him at an airport.
While we 'knew' that he was tall and had a largish nose, we watched as the people from that particular flight filed out, at each tall man we were asking each other 'is that him?', and then he arrived and there was absolutely no doubt that it was HIM. He towered over everyone else from the flight.
We got him to sign the club banner "Don't Panic", which has never been washed since despite the many and varied stains accumulated on a Uni club banner, and we gave him a bottle of Australian red wine, becuase we heard he had a fancy for it. We had emptied the club coffers to pay for the bottle, hope it was good.
A few years later I was lucky enough to attend a literary lunch where he was the guest of honour. It was just after the release of "Last Chance to See", listening to him tell stories both from the book and from the background to the book was wonderful. He will be sorely missed.
I once typeset a complex econimics text book on a Mac Portable using MS Word 4.0. It used the equation editor for the full page matrices and integral equations, and the whole thing fitted on two 400k floppy discs (one was a backup)
Mmmm... progress
For stability, you needed the 'a' varient.
Then it was totally sweet, ran it on my Mac OS 7.z to 8.x machines (wouldn't run under OS 9.x or later).
I recently had to contact THQ regarding a glitch in one of their games on the GameCube. Their first question was "are you using a 3rd party memory card", which suggests not all cards are the same (ignoring size).
Oddly enough we eventually pinned the problem down to the Wavebird (official wireless controller), it frequently seems to be the cause of unexpected behaviour.
Did you know that one of the reasons women are forced to wear the veil in Muslim countries is because they are considered too great a temptation, and that men would not be able to resist thinking licentious thoughts, let alone act upon them.
In most of the western world, women are not forced to wear veils because there is an implicit understanding that the men of our community have a degree of self control, and will not be driven wild with lust simply be seeing a woman.
Is it that big a leap from not needing to wear a veil simply to walk down the street, to being able to go out on a date and relax because you don't expect to be assualted.
And for your information, it is possible to be raped within a relationship, I know from personal experience. Sometimes - for whatever reason - even though you have previously given consent, consent is withdrawn. If both parties respect each other, then they should respect the fact that there is no consent.
The tragedy is that people - of both genders - get caught up in the glamour which is the fame industry, and become intoxicated by their proximity to a 'star', sporting or otherwise. Add to this that most famous people are not rocket scientists and are accoustomed to having every whim catered to, they can often not recognise that they are going too far, too fast. Given the number of highly publicised cases of sexual assult and rape, you would think celebraties would be even more careful about who they sleep with. Unfortunately, it was often the sex-appeal that got them into the fame game in the first place.
We need to teach our kids that rape is not OK in any circumstance. And we need to teach our children to be more circumspect about putting themselves in a situation where they can be taken advantage of.
I've been a Mac user since 1987, with the occasional exposure to Solaris, DOS and Amiga in the early days.
For the last 5 years I've worked in environments where I have been forced to use Windows at work, but at home I am still a Mac user.
Already been done by Michael Ninn, he has a fully animated porn called 2Funky4U
Cheesy even by porn standards
Try a LJ 4+, they are still everywhere. If you can still get a maintenace kit for them, they keep on ticking.
Xerox/PARC still innovate. Their oil-less single pass colour laser printers are starting to move into the desktop market. Their high end print engines are still miles ahead of the competition, they are still innovating in software and networks.
Unfortunately, it's rarely until someone like MS or HP pick up the invention that it gets noticed.
It comes down to a cost/benefit equation. What can you least afford: to have money invested in backup equipment/parts or to miss the deadline and possibly the business due to equipment failure.
If it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars then you would have two plotters running in the first place, and be able to switch queues should one device go offline. Both devices would be on a on-site-warranty contract, and you would place a call as soon as the first device went down. You would have scheduled maintenance and a replacement strategy to ensure the devices didn't run themselves into the ground.
If it's merely going to be mildly inconvenient, or cost you maybe several tens or hundreds of dollars. Then you would run with a single unit and possibly have the number of a hire service on file for when your primary device fails (for while you are waiting for it to be repaired).
Like any other form of risk management, you need to weigh up the likelyhood of the risk event occuring, the cost of it occuring and the cost for mitigating it. If the probability of failure is low and the cost of effect is low, then the investment to mitigate should also be low. If the probaility of failure is high and the cost of failure effect is high, then you should be prepared to invest in mitigating the risk.
Ultimately, that's what make the difference between a well run organisation and a lucky one.
I got into trouble a few years back for returning an item to a vendor with the fault description "fucked" written on it. The vendor stated that without a proper fault description they could not accept the item for refund or exchange.
Item was relabelled and sent back to them with the following fault description: Faulty Unit, Continuously Kills Electronic Devices.
Item was subsequently accepted for full refund
As a RPG designer I would agree that one of the key differences between a CRPG and a tabletop game at a game convention is that the CRPG is often linear in it's resolution (often only one viable solution), whereas a tabletop game has to accomodate anything the players come up with. Players are extremely scathing about "fishhook" modules - game that drag you along a set path as if their was a fishhook in your mouth.
I have no idea what would be involved in giving a CRPG the degree of flexibility you can get in a table top game, there would need to be character AIs which change their actions based on past actions and behaviours of the PCs. The biggest problem would be writing all the branches to emulate the way a tabletop GM can ad lib.
My original exposure to the Hitch Hikers Guide was as the radio series while still a child. The magic of the series/books is the way that DNA put words together.
In many ways radio was the ultimate medium for these stories because of the mental pictures they painted. "They hung in the air exactly the same way bricks don't" is a quote which will be with me for the rest of my life.
You may not enjoy them, not everyone has the same sense of humour. But if you enjoy language - you really should read them just to experience the juxtaposition of words that he creates. If you want to read some of his non-fiction to get a feel for the way he works, try Last Chance to See, which is a collection of articles about endangered species.
Having a rapper playing Ford is actually quite a good idea - Ford frequently goes off into high speed bizzarre rants which are almost stream of conciousness, delivering those lines with clear diction would be a challenge for many actors.
Other examples of this phenomenon are:
LOTR (obviously)
Sometime around '80, which was before the animated film.
Harry Potter (When did you read Sorcerer's Stone)
I read Philosopher's Stone prior to PoA being released in hardcover.
My Slashdot ID is lower than yours (Sub-groups here are 3-digit, 4-5 digit, low 6 digit IDs)
resisted registering for a very long time, posted as an AC for about 2 years, registered about 6 months ago.
People who had to watch Soprano's Season 1 after Season 2.
watched Soprano's on DVD - we don't get HBO in Australia.
People who first watched the Matrix on DVD.
saw Matrix on the big screen first, wish I'd waited for DVD for the 3rd one.
Anyone born after Carter left office.
born during the reign of LBJ
Ummm... how about copiers of the book that still say "trilogy" and not "the ever increasingly inaccurately named trilogy"... None of my covers match as they were bought as the books became available.
I have a copy of the original pressing of the radio series on CD and the silk screening on the discs is all mixed up - the colours don't match the cases and several disc have the same episode information on them.
But school can be a useful place to prod education along.
In an ideal world, education would start long before school - after all, you learn to speak before school, and many children start to learn how to read. Schools are an ideal time and place to teach children how to learn in a structured manner. It should be giving them the framework to find their own answers, and more importantly how to frame their own questions.
Going back to the early '90's, there was a version of Disenfectant which flagged M$ products as viruses. We used to use it in the service department where I worked.
Surely the simplest check of whether it was a genuine Microsoft release was to check the file size...
If it is several meg or larger in size, the chances of it being a piece of MS bloatware is high. If it's small it probably isn't.
While I can see why people are suggesting that it should be voluntary, but ultimately the people that will need it the most are people who won't think to use it.
The people who need rescuing typically are people who were ill prepared and didn't heed the signs that the weather was bad or conditions unstable. It's the people who go out without the right gear or clothes, without checking in at the ranger's hut, without a clue.
I don't have a solution, as a society we aren't prepared to say that's evolution in action - if they were meant to survive they'd have taken a compass, so the people who least deserve the assistence are the ones who will require it the most.