My school has a laptop program where everyone uses laptops. We all have acess to a huge online network. How would I be able to connect to a MUD at school?

I also realize that the netowork has a firewall, so how would I find out what ports are blocked/non-blocked?

In order to bypass the firewall, you need to speak to the network administrator; ask whoever this person is in your school to set up the laptop to connect to the mud of your choice.

Of course, I personally prefer that you use the laptop for schoolwork rather than exploiting taxpayer supplied technology to play games.

No. I have never once played solitaire, hearts, tetris, or any other game on a machine not owned by me or 'on company time'. Be a responsible and honest person; do your mudding at home.

Whoa, hold on. This school is catholic, taxpayer's money doesn't even graze the school's treasury.

I know that some ports are open, because I can use AIM, and if i'm correct, AIM uses some form of a port.

My mudding at home is severely restricted. I'm asking you to help a MUD addict enable himself to play on what he loves to play.

I see your point, well made.

I always loved this silly argument. Perhaps one needs to play a game every once in a while to clear their mind so that they can continue with their schoolwork more efficiently? Precedence for this is pretty easy to find two days of every week. One is not a slave, even on company / school time. Do you put a picture of your family on your desk at work?

Furthermore, you both assume this is something that the administrators of the network want to actively restrict. Many, many times they simply setup a firewall and leave it alone because they don't know how to configure it for much else. Why do you think so many poorly configured firewalls drop ICMP?

To the OP:
You can try to find Java mud clients to get around output restrictions. If you have a friend that runs a server, you can have him setup a shell to listen on the AIM port, and from there you can telnet or use a unix mudclient. My preferred method is to use ssh, which has port forwarding facilities, and encrypts all text. You need a shell account that has ssh however. You can also setup a system at home to forward your connections. Let me know what your options are.

Speaking as moderator: This has nothing to do with Advanced Mud Concepts, and has been moved accordingly.

That you disagree does not, ipso facto, make it a silly argument.

The benefits of taking an occasional break are well-documented; this does not entitle employees, or in this case, students to consume company (or school) resources without permission.

Employees are not slaves because they are paid for their labor. I have worked at more than one job where there were strict rules forbidding such things as family photos or other items commonly used to personalize workspaces. More and more firms are making use of spy-ware to document the unauthorized use of computer resources for gaming, web browsing, instant messaging and other activities not related to an employee's responsibilities.

Though students going to a school are not being paid wages or salary as employees of a businesses are; it may be said that the benefits package is 'an education'.

The point is that the computers exist in the business to perform BUSINESS related tasks; the laptops provided to the school are for SCHOOL related tasks. Any attempts to use them without prior permission for any other use is stealing.

I attended a college where several machines were set aside every Friday afternoon for networked gaming sessions; perhaps if enough students at the catholic school joined together and requested that a time and means for using the laptops for mudding, the administrator(s) could be persuaded to set it up.

When did I say that my disagreement was enough to make the argument silly? My disagreement is not what makes something silly; the qualifying text following my statement should've been enough to show that it wasn't 'ipso facto'.

And where did I say that this was an 'entitlement'? Do you get permission to use the restroom, or grab a cup of coffee from the break room? Do you get permission to step outside for a smoke? Do you get permission to call your spouse at home? Why would you get permission to pop on a mud or respond to an IM? Do you honestly believe every employer is a micromanager?

Stealing, now? You said yourself that "the benefits of taking an occasional break are well-documented", so why do you presume to judge that this mudding experience is not a small break that will in turn provide benefits to the school or business of which the OP is a part? If there were benefits, your 'advice' here could very well decrease productivity. And the only way that you could truthfully say that it would decrease productivity is if you had far more information on the OP than you had when you made that post.

No, employees are not slaves because they are not owned in servitude. Many of the slaves of times past were paid for their labor.

Actually every other day, at the end of the day I have one and a half hours
to burn.

I'm not a genius when it comes to computers, I was just wondering if you could provide a more in-depth explanation of how I could find out what ports I could use, or how I would be able to play my Mud at school.

Actually, I rented my computer. The school just configured my computer so that everyone has the same programs to do homework.

Going to use the restroom or get a sip of water is NOT the same thing as using the office computer to IM a friend, play solitaire, or engage in other pastimes.

I don't know what your work experience is, I have been working for 35 years; every one of those jobs had rules regarding when you could take a break, and for how long.

There are places I have worked in recent years that the ONLY opportunity during the workday for smokers to have a cigarette was during their half-hour lunch break away from the facility.

Many companys (no hard data at my fingertips to say most, though my experience leads me to believe it is so) have policies that expressly forbid personal calls using office phones. My current work location forbids the use of cell phones except in the break room during scheduled breaks.

An employer pays workers to perform the tasks outlined in their job description, not to play games or engage in other personal activities.

While I acknowledge that an occasional break is beneficial, those breaks need be no more than 30 seconds to do some eye exercises (I work in front of a computer), stand and stretch, get that drink of water, etc. There are studies out that discuss the benefits of these micro-breaks. Not one of them recommends using the company's resources to play games.

Yes. If you are being paid minimum wage to answer phone calls for an answering service, and you sit there playing a game because you 'need a break', then you are stealing (or perhaps, perpetrating a fraud). I know a woman who does this type of work in Virginia; she works for the answering service that fields all the incoming calls for a Cable company. She is required to eat her lunch AT her workstation and she is expected to take calls. The only time she gets away from her screen is to visit the restroom. One young girl was fired a few months ago for constantly going to the restroom when things were really busy because she could not handle the workload. They gave her a permanent 'break'.

I will not make the absolute statement that not a single, solitary business owner would consider un-authorized use of a company-owned computer and bandwidth to play on a mud to be theft, but I believe you would be hard-pressed to find one.

What would you call it if you were paying me an hourly wage to prepare your taxes on your computer, using software that you had purchased, and you found me playing (insert Mud of choice) ?

A rental agreement *does* change the perspective a bit.  Your agreement should cover what is acceptable and what is not.  You need the network resources of the school make the connection.  I still think the honest and straightforward thing to do is ask the network administrator about it.  

Yes, there may be ways to set it up without the administrator's knowledge, and even ways to actively get around what security they may have in place.  Would you want the school or your parents to catch you at it?

The administrator could say "No problem!" and set it up for you; or they could say "that would be okay, but I don't know how to set it up" and you could find someone knowledgeable to step in and help them; or they could flatly refuse, in which case you accept the fact that life does not always give us everything we want when we want it.

Two outta three ain't bad, IMO.

However they both have the same effect from the employer's point of view. Without using the restroom or getting a sip of water, you may become uncomfortable and your productivity may decrease. Without IMing a friend you may become uncomfortable and your productivity may decrease. The only difference here is that the former is easily quantifiable, and the latter requires great leaps of logic and data to state definitively that the activities have a net decrease of productivity. And even if you had this data on the average worker, the OP -- and others -- may not be the average worker.

No matter what your experiences may be, it is most certainly not like that everywhere. To assume it is so and denounce a particular activity is ill-informed, as evidenced by Valarauko's recent replies.

Nail and head: An employer pays workers to perform the tasks outlined in their job description. Why should an employer care if your productivity comes from playing games, animal sacrifice, school studies or what? If the employer does care, that shows that he is attempting to cater to a common denominator via an assumption about the average of his workers. Again, they likely have a great deal more data on this you did of the OP.

I highly doubt you are in a position to recommend the optimal break time for every person on the planet. Do you do any creative work at all? Let's say we have two programmers: Joe and Susie, both working on the same feature. Joe works from 8-5, churns out a thousand lines of code, and implements the feature. Susie goes to the park with some printouts to think about the problem, comes back at 12:00. She generalizes a function with a few extra lines of code to implement the feature, then leaves at 1:00. Who here was the most productive? It's obviously Susie: She was able to do something more concisely than Joe, and her work is thus more valuable.

I don't care *how* you prepare my taxes, so long as 1) the price is right, and 2) it gets done. If you estimate three hours (and I see this as the best price/value), but you get it done in one and decide to play a game for the other two, good for you! Anything else would be an assumption by me as to how you get the job done to achieve those goals, and is thus not accurate in all cases.

They also pay me to work a specified number of hours each week. Working weekends and pulling all-nighters is not part of my job description, but I still do them when the need arises - even though I don't get paid overtime. It's called "give and take". I typically get into work between half an hour and an hour late (unless I have an early meeting) and surf the net from time to time (perhaps just to give my mind a break, or maybe to wait for a compile to finish), but I also work more hours than are required. The company knows that the employees surf the net, and doesn't mind as long as we are reasonable about it and get the job done. My previously company had the same attitude as well.

I don't know what your job is, but in my line of work you cannot just sit down and mindlessly hammer at a keyboard all day. It requires careful thinking and puzzle solving, and that's not something you can just keep doing all day without taking a break every so often to clear your head.

Once again, it's never been considered a problem at the places I've worked, as long as we're sensible about it. In fact, as my current job involves developing software for mobile phones, we're specifically told that we can use our company mobiles to make personal calls (although once again we're supposed to be responsible about it - for example, we should go easy on international calls).

If I were paying you an hourly wage and you spent 1.5 hours doing it, then spend half an hour surfing the net, but only charged me for one hour, I would call it a bargain. If I then demanded that you stopped serfing the net, the chances are you'd charge me for the extra half hour next time.

And as an aside, I also mudded a lot when I was at University. That led me on to developing my own mud, and by the time I graduated it had taught me far more about software development, team work and project management than my University course ever had. My qualifications helped me get invited to interviews, but in the end it was the skills I earned through developing a mud that helped me pass the technical interviews and thus earn a decent wage. I went to University to learn. Does it really matter that I didn't follow the "normal" method of doing so - particularly when my method resulted in a better salary, which means more tax going back into the education system?

Hey Loremaster, you shouldn't have to worry about breaks at work, you should have a job that you like.

I am forced to go to school, but who said I enjoy it? I have to have breaks even though I "work" less than you do.

Unless you had a fixed number of hours a day, i wouldn't really care if you got the job done in time.

Heh, we're getting a little off topic.

In my opinion, the whole concept of a work ethic appears to be a foreign concept to most of the young people I meet and work with today.

Personal cell calls are often one of the 'perks' of working for a communications company; I know a man whose wife works for a major carrier, so his wireless internet access is FREE.

Employees do not dictate to the employer when and how long and what of what nature their breaks are, unless they bargain for it as part of a pre-employment contract. Otherwise they are expected to perform their JOB. What you do 'off the clock' is an entirely different matter than deciding after 90 minutes of work, that you 'need' 30 minutes to level a character on your favorite mud.

People are terminated every day for playing games, chatting online with friends or family, and other activities not related to the job they are being paid to do. If a company *permits* the use of company resources for personal use, fine. I am absolutely positive that they also have policy delineating what is acceptable and what is abuse. Much like KaVir's company allowing the use of cells for personal calls, but also expecting that they do not abuse the privilege with many expensive international calls.

I'm not sure what you do, but my experience has been that the young folks are almost always the ones that work the hardest. The older guys all go home right at 5, while the younger ones work overtime (which of course, isn't much on salary). I like to think that it's because their experience has led them to work intelligently with the time they have, and that they've transcended the flawed equation of hours == productivity.

If you're trying to spin my words as against the Puritan work ethic (which is one of the few that advocate what you do), then you're absolutely right: I advocate productivity rather than hard work. If you want to see where the extreme of your work ethic takes you, attend pre-Collegiate classes in Japan or urban China sometime. It isn't pretty, nor is it very productive.

I've also noticed that, as a general rule, the older people tend to leave earlier. I suspect this is primarily because they have families and commitments at home, though - at least that's certainly the excuse such people tend to give when asked to work extra hours.

My current job is quite an interesting juxtaposition of cultures - working for a Japanese company based in Germany. The Japanese (or indeed all of the oriental) employees tend to stay in the office for very long hours, while the Europeans tend to work much shorter hours - however both seem to do around the same amount of actual work.

At one point I was considering working in the US or Canada, but I don't think I would enjoy what tends to be (in my opinion) the silly amount of time you're expected to work. In fact I think I'd even find it difficult going back to work in England again, after being in Germany for nearly a year and a half - I've just gotten too used to having 30 days vacation (plus around 13 days national holiday and numerous days of paid sick leave) per year, not being *allowed* to work more than 10 hours per day (and even then, only if your average over 6 months is 8 hours per day), only being able to work Saturdays in exceptional situations (and then having to take another day off to make up for it), not being legally allowed to work Sundays, etc, etc.

To play devil's advocate...

I believe this is guaranteed by some health and safety law.

The break room was kindly provided by the company and is a priviledge.

I don't smoke. I believe the employee's handbook says that smoking breaks come at the expense of "tea" breaks, however, so this too is clearly a provided priviledge.

I know of companies where using the work phone for personal use is a sacking offense. I don't anyway; I always use my mobile.

The phone in the break room has, I believe, an outgoing call block on it because someone (we suspect the cleaners) used it for premium rate lines at one time. Clearly usage of the phones for outgoing calls is thus a priviledge.

To the OP's question: I reccommend asking the network administrator. They may say yes, they may say no, but it's just rude to assume it's a "yes, if you can get around my security measures" straight up.

Kas.

Heya,

In answer to your question:
If you can use AIM or any other messenger programs then it means the socket port is open which means you could use that to proxy the telnet port, which is also technical bla bla I wouldn't want to bother anyone with. (Besides I don't even know if I use the correct english term).

There are some programs that can do it for you, like socks2http who can emulate a socks port by tunneling through the http port. However since you seem to have socks already I suggest just trying to use a mud client that allows you to set proxy settings and put in connect through socks5 then fill in with server localhost and port 1080.

Yeah! Hack into the school firewall! Woohoo, mudding at school is the best thing you can do! Woot!

Greetings Dre

This is off-topic, sort of, but hey, run with it...

The concept of working 8-5 with an hour lunch is outdated and only really can be applied effectively in certain instances.

I work in an IT department, my services are pretty much on demand.  Yes I have projects which I have to devote time to at times, but none of the are the "I need it now!" variety.  Do i work "regular hours", well, yeah, sort of, but if something dies at 4:59pm, guess what, I'm not going home with the crowd at 5:00pm.  As long as things which are expected of my position are completed, and done timely, my bosss could care less if I am posting on TMS, reading Fark, writing code, etc.  I perform exactly what he needs me to do on a "on site, on call" basis, and he's perfectly happy with that.  We have people in our office who work flex time, we have people who work nights, we have people who come in promptly at 8am, take a lunch propmptly at 12:00 noon, and leave at 5:00 on the dot.  Do any of them perform any better or worse for it?  Probably not, in fact if it suits their own schedule and preference better, they probably perform BETTER than they would locked into a schedule.

I defy anyone to say I have no work ethic in my office, and gee, I surf the net, play games, write code, AND do my job...

Kas:
At my past three places of employ (woohoo for small business!), there was no employee handbook =). Rather, the things that are appropriate for employees to do were left to common sense, with the general rule being that we should maximize our billable hours. This is the standpoint that I was arguing from, that generally certain things are obviously beneficial to productivity even if that specific time is not spent in actual production. It's sort of like designing a program: You need to carefully balance too much and too little design; too much and you're left with little flexibility when the requirements change, and too little and you're left wondering what the requirements are =).

Which mud clients allow one to set proxy settings?

So far as I know only Zmud does that in Windows. There may be other clients, but SimpleMU and Mushclient don't offer proxy support.

ROAclient wll do that as well, though it is unbearably simplistic for most ZMUD scripters.

Couldn't you just use a java mud client? Like the one on

My experience has been that "non-billable activities", within reason, tend to improve work qualitiy and thus are to the benefit, rather than the detriment, of the company.

I drink just far too much coffee at work.  I tend to do this more because I need to take a break from my desk where I've got too close to the coal face, I need a chance to step back and gain a wider perspective, than because I'm that desperate for caffiene. Similarly, I tend to do my best design work while in the shower or driving down the freeway.

I don't think anyone performs particularly well at work when they're worried about their sick child but can't call home to check on them (or when they're dying to go to the restroom, for that matter).


Which isn't to say I don't entirely agree with this:

Groups will always work better when their members are pulling in the same diredtion and not trying to rip each other off.


K

Nothing should keep you from connecting to a MUD. Just use a telnet client, or if one is not available try a java telnet app available on many MUD webpages. Does TMC still do that?

-Xanes -=- Lone Coder WinterMUTE

in my humble opinion, you should befriend and ask the monitors of your school in order to MUD in your school. It is important to really befriend the admin, so that would not be just for convenience. Yes, it's takes much more time than hacking the firewall, but it's ethical and you would get in less trouble in case you get busted.
in respect of the issue of MUDding at school, I think it's like an aggregate value, of couse, if and only if you put your priorities straight.
just my two cents, no need for flames:
Ruobhe

My standard advice to anyone who wants to start their own mud is to use the base to which you are the most familiar. Be that ROM, Circle, Smaug, or whatnot. If you regularly play on a Smaug mud, you will be more at ease as a starting admin/coder with taht code because you know how it functions on the player's side of things, which makes it easier in theory to look at from a coder/admin side of things...

Personally, my base is ROM, which is because 95% of all muds which I played previous to making my own were ROM, and upon asking lots of people at the time I was starting, they gave the same advice which I give, "Use what you know"...

Good luck, and if you have questions, feel free to ask on either the administrator or coding forums, I'm an admin of both.


T