MeckMeck GRE
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The Media of the Eighth

Our official contest of November is a creativity contest. The aim of the contest is to design the front page of an imaginary newspaper (tabloid, magazine, etc.) of Beethro's world "The Eighth". The newspaper may be one from the aboveground kingdoms or one from the Empire or one from the Smitemaster's Guild, etc.

Rules:
Your work should contain a title (e.g. "Daily Delver"), one main story (40-250 words) and other newspaperish elements (adverts, jokes, sudoku...). Feel free to experiment!
If your work dosen't meet those criteria it won't appear in the poll.
Your work must not cause copyright issues and must not contain already publicated articles. It must not contain bad language or content.
Your work must be ".pdf" or ".rtf" or ".jpeg" or ".html"
Submit your work until Local Time:11-25-2007 at 02:00 PM which is in negative 886 weeks, 3 days. Just post it into the submission topic and everything is fine.
In the poll, the voters will be asked how much they like your front page and how original it is.
You may only submit one entry, but you are allowed to edit/resubmit your entry until the deadline.

Prizes:
Winner : 100 rank points and an unconditioned choice from the Prize Pile.
Runner up : 50 rank points
Third one : 25 rank points
If this contest is your first contest, you'll get a rookie bonus of 10 rank points.

Edit: I am very sorry about the many spelling mistakes. I was in a hurry when I wrote the thing.

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[Last edited by MeckMeck GRE at 11-18-2007 09:02 AM]

Neather2
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I don't have understood. I need use frontpage for a site of drod (Beethro)?

Sorry for the question

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[Last edited by Neather2 at 11-05-2007 04:23 PM]

Jason
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The Eighth! The Eighth! The Eighth!

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Dolan42
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MeckMeck GRE wrote:
Prices:

[nitpick]Prizes:[/nitpick]

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Jacob
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Neather2 wrote:
I don't have understood. I need use frontpage for a site of drod (Beethro)?

Sorry for the question

No. The idea is to create the front page of an Eighth-style newspaper or magazine.

Other than the spelling mistakes, this is a cool idea for a contest.

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Syntax
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MeckMeck GRE:
Our official contest of November

Is this actually the official November contest? Was expecting to see the Department of Challengs announce such a thing...

Jason
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I also am confused. I can confirm that there have been no such announcements on the Challenges Mailing List.

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Jatopian
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If I vote in this contest, I will surely give a 1 to any PDF, because I hate PDFs. Just throwing that out there, giving fair warning.

Also, possible inspiration.

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[Last edited by Jatopian at 11-07-2007 01:49 AM]

Chaco
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Jatopian wrote:
The former because I hate PDFs for common reasons which needn't be reiterated

Please don't assume everyone knows what your reasons are - some of us can't read your mind over the internet.

Could you iterate your "common reasons" of hating PDFs? I myself don't mind them if they present a mixture of text and images as opposed to pure text.

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calamarain
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Jatopian wrote:
The former because I hate PDFs for common reasons which needn't be reiterated

Also, that's rather unfair to those whose only easy means of producing a newspaper like article is using a PDF.


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coppro
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And PostScript isn't an option.

Jatopian
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Mainly, it's an undifferentiated block of content, resistant to operations like copying; opening them takes some time on a slow machine and stops browser operations for that time; the mechanisms for viewing and browsing through them are unintuitive and inconsistent; and of course there's no reason to use them, as no task they accomplish isn't done better by another format.

And calamarain, I don't know what you're talking about. No one is confined to PDFs. There's plenty of open-source software for making RTFs, and HTML can be done with bloody Notepad.

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Dex Stewart
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I also hate PDF files for the same reasons. Opening or closing one blocks my computer for about half a minute, and it "lags" a lot while scrolling.

And I think one doesn't need software to create an RTF file, or knowledge to create an HTML file... Simply creating something in Paint and saving it as jpeg(with compression of course) is enough.

calamarain
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Jatopian wrote:
And calamarain, I don't know what you're talking about. No one is confined to PDFs. There's plenty of open-source software for making RTFs, and HTML can be done with bloody Notepad.

I mean for those who don't have the computer skills to move to a different package. Also, some people have programs they like working in, and they output as PDF.

You're right, there are loads of other programs, but there are those who really won't want to use them.

(I'll be making mine in html, probably )

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Tahnan
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Jatopian wrote:
If I vote in this contest, I will surely give a 1 to any PDF or any Su Doku puzzle. The former because I hate PDFs for common reasons which needn't be reiterated; the latter because Su Doku is a strictly Terran and modern form of entertainment.

You know, I have to say that I find this utterly distasteful. It almost tempts me to offer a "1" to any entry that either isn't in PDF or doesn't include a sudoku.

I mean: you're honestly talking about penalizing people for following the rules of the contest, because you happen not to like the rules? To my mind, if you don't like the rules of the contest, and you can't give a fair vote to any legitimate entry, don't vote in it.

(I also think that objecting to sudoku on the grounds that it's "strictly Terran and modern" is a bit silly. For one thing, how do you know that it's strictly Terran; have you done a complete and thorough survey of other planets and/or dimensions? For another, you could say the same thing about the game Mastermind, and there's an instance of that in TCB, which kind of suggests to me that any given low-tech game could easily appear in the Eighth as well as on Earth. And finally, sudoku are a natural outgrowth of Latin Squares, which have been around at least since Euler in the 1700s, and possibly longer, so it's not clear that they're necessarily modern.)

Jatopian
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Tahnan wrote:
I mean: you're honestly talking about penalizing people for following the rules of the contest, because you happen not to like the rules? To my mind, if you don't like the rules of the contest, and you can't give a fair vote to any legitimate entry, don't vote in it.

Merely that it is allowed does not make it good. I did similarly in the Cheap Trick contest, penalizing everyone who used darkness or unpredictable scripting with a maximum vote of 2. By your logic, wouldn't it be despicable to mod down "1st p0st!!!1111", just because the rules allow it?

____________________________
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Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

techant
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Now is the point how the whold thing looks or the content of the article? I am concerned we will have the same issues we had last month.

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Rabscuttle
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Apparently the point is what the filetype is?

I'm going to give a 3 to .rtf, 5 to .html, 6 to .pdf, 7 to .jpeg, 8 to .jpg.

Wow, easiest contest judging ever!

Mattcrampy
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I find your argument against PDFs strange, Jatopian, especially since one of the other allowed formats are also quite resistant to copying, being picture formats. PDFs are an open standard, and plenty of open-source software exists to edit them. I do believe Open Office can do PDFs.

So most of your objections seem mostly derived from you being old?

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[Last edited by Mattcrampy at 11-06-2007 05:14 AM : Whoops, just one, not two. Doesn't change the point.]

techant
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Mattcrampy wrote:
I find your argument against PDFs strange, Jatopian, especially since one of the other allowed formats are also quite resistant to copying, being picture formats. PDFs are an open standard, and plenty of open-source software exists to edit them. I do believe Open Office can do PDFs.

So most of your objections seem mostly derived from you being old?

Hey I am old and I like PDF format!

How would you read the article if it is a jpg or some other graphic format? You can look at PDF's off line so you don't need fast bandwidth to view them. Yes, bigger files can take time to load but how big could these entries be. HTML would be OK (I design webpages) but some find that harder to work with than their word-processors. I think PDF is becoming the next medium for documents, so we may all have to get use to it .

I would hate to see this good contest disintegrate into a who can design in what format best contest. Maybe we should all use flash (tongue in cheek...hee hee).


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[Last edited by techant at 11-06-2007 05:46 AM]

Tim
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I do want to know if MeckMeck (or the judges) is going to do word counts on the entries, because he will have a great time if he only gets JPG files.

I'd also want to know if the judges are allowed to vote based on (for example) spelling mistakes, in that case they should be able to do a spell check on the texts. If the entry cannot be easily transferred to a spell checker, like some PDF or JPG files, should a judge mark these entries lower?

PS. Has anyone try the Foxit Reader to view PDF files? It's faster than Acrobat... (Windows only)

PPS. I'm not willing to install OpenOffice just to view PDF files. My hard drive is currently full now due to the many versions of DROD I'm using

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[Last edited by Tim at 11-06-2007 05:40 AM]

techant
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Tim wrote:
PS. Has anyone try the Foxit Reader to view PDF files? It's faster than Acrobat... (Windows only)

I have not tried it but after looking at it today and seeing I would have to complete one of the offers, no thanks. I'll stick with what I have PDF 995. It has a real free version and has worked well for me for a couple of years. The free version has annotation and it is easy to print to and fast. Don't tell but I block the ads with my firewall so I don't have to worry about those either.

By the way you should just use your browser to open the PDF file to view it no need to install Open Office even though it is a good program as well.

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[Last edited by techant at 11-06-2007 08:48 AM]

Maurog
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You only need the offer for advanced features (saving files after you changed them). It's a free pdf reader, and it's really fast. You clicked the "get it (full version)" link instead of the "download (reader)" link. I liked it way more than the slow Acrobat Reader.

For the record I also dislike working with pdf files, precisely because it's such a pain to edit them. But not to the point of discriminating over other formats.

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Briareos
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Tim wrote:
PPS. I'm not willing to install OpenOffice just to view PDF files.

Ummm... you're not meant to - you use OpenOffice to create PDF files, not to read them.

@Jatopian:

See, some nice things about PDF as a format are:

* It's thoroughly documented and widely supported.

* There's a boatload of (free) libraries to create them programmatically (which I've done on several occasions).

* It's vector based so there's no ugly jaggies on text because it was rendered at too few DPI as opposed to image formats, not to mention the smaller file size.

* It'll look the same no matter what's the output device (you just can't make HTML print like a book - there's no settings for print margins, or page numbering, or dozens of other things that produce a nice page layout), which also means that if you hand a PDF to a print shop the layout stays exactly the same as you last saw it.

* It's meant to be read, not edited - period. You use whatever tool and file format you want for editing and produce a PDF at the very end.

Just because you had a bad experience or three with, let me guess, Adobe's Acrobat Reader doesn't make PDF a worse format than others nor should the format be reason enough to adjust your score by even a single point...

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Briareos
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Maurog wrote:
For the record I also dislike working with pdf files, precisely because it's such a pain to edit them.

But that's exactly the point - editing them is using the wrong tool for the job. If you really need to edit a PDF, request the source document it was produced from - tools that let you edit PDFs are an ugly hack IMHO. You don't edit PostScript files either, do you?

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Znirk
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Briareos wrote:
You don't edit PostScript files either, do you?

Ha! Back in my days we used to type PostScript files. In ed. Blindfold.
Before anyone asks: I've never hand-written any ps, or used ed.

Tahnan
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Jatopian wrote:
Merely that it is allowed does not make it good. I did similarly in the Cheap Trick contest, penalizing everyone who used darkness or unpredictable scripting with a maximum vote of 2. By your logic, wouldn't it be despicable to mod down "1st p0st!!!1111", just because the rules allow it?

But there's a difference between "the rules say nothing on this; judge it how you will" and "the rules explicitly permit this". If the rules say "create a cheap trick" and your judgment is that using darkness isn't interesting or fair, of course you should mark it down. But if the rules say "create a cheap trick using darkness or unpredictable scripting" and your judgment is that using darkness isn't interesting or fair, it's no longer really fair for you to mark it down. (Imagine someone saying, "I hate invisibility potions. I'm going to mark everything in this Invisibility Contest as a 1, because they all used invisibility.")

Similarly, the rules of the forum allow a wide variety of things to be posted; they allow "f1rst p0st!!1!" but they don't sanction it.

calamarain
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Is it just me, or is this thread getting... kinda vicious?

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Tim
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calamarain wrote:
Is it just me, or is this thread getting... kinda vicious?

I think most forumites here just want more clarifications on the rules. Because they are not clear at all.
We want answers for at least the following questions:

1. How should an entry be judged, by the contents, or by the idea, or by the spelling, or all of them?

2. Will you disqualify entries by (for example) performing an word count check?

3. Is it possible not to vote on some of the entries? In that case, what score should we give to those?

If MeckMeck is unable to do that, can someone else from the Department answer these question for him? It no one is willing to answer these questions, then all judges should vote as they want to.

Please?

In the meantime, if anyone have more questions, please ask. Because fighting won't lead to any answers.

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[Last edited by Tim at 11-06-2007 05:59 PM]

techant
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Tim wrote:
1. How should an entry be judged, by the contents, or by the idea, or by the spelling, or all of them?

You left out the media used to display it. "Your work must be ".pdf" or ".rtf" or ".jpeg" or ".html"'

I think MeckMeck GRE way trying to give us greater choice when it came to the media we used so that no one was disqualified because they lacked software or experience. The focus was to be on the page not the media needed to display it. But, like the real world the media used affects how much we like something so...,

A suggestion: Maybe the rule should be changed to an 'and/or' instead of just 'or'. That way if someone wanted to submit the same front page using various media they could.



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[Last edited by techant at 11-07-2007 12:40 AM : spelling]