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• Site consacré aux Sims 2 et à ses Add-ons : tests, astuces, créations sims à télécharger.
• Officecore has three subgenres, in rising order of scope: Desktop simulation, office simulation, and corporate simulation. Desktop sims turn the computing environment.
• In the case of the Acer 21 X, it is a chore. Thanks to the gentle curve of the display, the lid does not sit flush, so the 19-pound laptop cannot simply be shoved in.

This question is part of the Ask Lifehacker advice column, where Lifehacker staff answers readers’ burning questions with practical tips. After all, some of the. Cities: Skylines’ PlayStation version has a release date of August 15th. You can ruin tiny simulated peoples’ commutes on so many platforms!

Games That Simulate Boring Jobs. It is as if you were doing work, a new browser game by impish developer Pippin Barr, simulates puttering around inside Windows 9. Depending on your real job, it’s a relaxing desktop toy or a horrifying parody of your waking life. It’s a fine example of the overlooked (and previously unnamed) gaming genre of officecore.

While many games explore exciting professions like pilot, city planner, or hitman, officecore focuses on the drudgery of a desk job. The job’s details are usually generic, its fictional results obscured to heighten the potential relatability. While the average gamer will never slaughter demons or conquer France, they will probably spend some time, maybe all their time, working at a desk, so here’s a chance to help them reinterpret a familiar environment. As a player, you might use officecore to work out your workplace frustrations.

You might find it useful for discreetly passing the time at a dead- end job. Or you might even learn something about yourself and realize you’re approaching your career all wrong.

If the idea of playing a game that looks like your day job is off- putting, that already tells you something. Whatever your chosen profession, we all have something in common: We're trying to do the best. Desktop sims turn the computing environment into a puzzle or arcade game; office sims explore the workplace as a weaponless first- person shooter, RPG, or adventure; and corporate sims work like top- down simulations such as Sim.

City or Roller Coaster Tycoon. Each provides a different commentary on the modern white- collar workplace. Desktop Simulation Games. Desktop sims imitate a typical computer interface, with a varying degree of verisimilitude. While in almost any other desktop game, the player’s inputs correspond to some fictional or metaphorical outputs, here they map quite directly; clicking a fictional dialog box is no different than clicking a real one.

A desktop simulation’s unique relationship to the surrounding computing environment lets it play with the boundaries and directly provoke the player. It is as if you were doing work.

Despite its retro design, It is as if you were doing work takes place in a post- labor world of “9. Randomized dialog prompts and document headings describe futuristic technologies like biofuels, tricorders, and gene doping, while the documents you “type” give self- help advice. Stock photos of office work pop up, with headers like “There is joy in work” and “No one ever drowned in sweat.”You are constantly validated and “promoted” for your simple tasks. You feel the condescension from whatever computer handed you this “work,” and you realize you’re neither important nor useful. The only real change you can effect is choosing from four desktop wallpapers and four background MIDI tracks.

It’s an interesting preview of a future (and a present) where human work is mere decoration around automated labor. Can’t You See I’m Busy! While many games can be discreetly played inside a real copy of Excel, the 8- year- old game suite Can’t You See I’m Busy! Breakdown is a Breakaway clone inside a Word doc; Leadership is Helicopter inside a line graph.

Crash Planning is a Bejeweled knockoff disguised as a calendar; Cost Cutter is a quirky tile matcher inside an animated bar chart. The idea is that you can play these games at the office without anyone noticing; there’s even a “boss button” to hide the most egregious game elements. The ruse is a bit thin, especially now that the fake software looks ancient. So the faux desktop interface is more stylistic than practical, and it emphasizes the relative monotony of the games themselves. To open a game, you click a button that oscillates between “start game” and “start work,” a winking gesture that feels sadder each time it loops.

These games are designed to make time pass. To play them is to admit that you don’t even need to be entertained, just distracted. To play them is to admit you are wasting your life.

The whole genre of games that look like work share a muddy boundary with work that looks like games, a manifestation of crumbling work- life balance and the rise of social networking, the ultimate grey area between work and pleasure. The desktop sim genre has stagnated in the past few years, maybe because the office drone found a better time waster in social media. There are spreadsheet interfaces for hiding your Twitter and Facebook use, but this isn’t even necessary in the growing number of jobs that include social media management. When work is play and play is work, neither are very satisfying. Looking busy has a bad rap. Sometimes you have to look busy so you can actually work on the things.

While the player might advance up the ranks, gameplay never shifts into the top- down style of a god game or a Sim. City. The most common format is first- person. Most tabletop officecore games also play out on this level, focusing on interaction between characters.

The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is a video game about video games, but it’s also about exercising free will and challenging the limitations we unconsciously accept.

Before it spirals into Matrix- like ontological absurdism, the game opens in a mundane office, depicting a mundane job. The later game’s mechanics, and even much of its message, could have been mapped onto all kinds of settings. But the modern office ties strongly into those free- will themes. To imply authority and obedience, the game could have started in a prison or a mental institution, but the office environment projects the same qualities with a subtler horror. It also turns The Stanley Parable into a power fantasy. When Stanley disobeys the narrator, he’s like Office Space’s Peter Gibbons ignoring Lumbergh and dismantling his cubicle.

Every office drone has wanted to reject the system like this. Job Simulator (Office Worker level)2. VR game Job Simulator also takes place in a computer- automated post- job world, where museum- goers try out extinct occupations like auto mechanic, gourmet chef, store clerk, and office worker. The office level particularly highlights the disassociation between workday and product. As a chef, your job is to make a pizza; as an office worker, you have to “make job happen.” As at so many real office jobs, tasks like drinking coffee and chatting up co- workers are as important as doing any actual work.

Job Simulator is a fumblecore game where half the fun is struggling with awkward controls. The incompetent feeling of this interface is reinforced by a tutorial bot that treats office rituals like exotic local customs, and who suggests you use “an ancient human technique called . Comfortingly, the robots seem to be just as clueless as you are about how business works, and they congratulate you for banging on your two- button keyboard or assembling a dadaist Power. Dot deck. You can’t really fail at this job. Payroll. Payroll is a first- person adventure game set in a 9. While one playthrough takes just 2. There’s no heavy satire here, no frame story or fourth wall to step behind.

Your goals are typical work goals. How To Install Godaddy Ssl Certificate Iis 7 Download. You can get fired, or you can do your job and earn retirement.

For an office sim, it’s optimistic and peaceful. The bitterest this game gets is a charmingly dreary simulation of an office birthday party. Generic Office Roleplay. The Generic Office Roleplay Facebook group is more of a sandbox than a game.

Australian teen Thomas Oscar created it in 2. Oscar shut out unfunny ideas, striving for realism, rejecting friends who all wanted to play as janitors. Like any good DM, Oscar set boundaries around the roleplaying.

But as discussed on Reply All, newer players got much sillier, replacing all the subtle jokes about fonts and social tension with goofs about iguana invasions and golden staplers. Years later, the current content is mostly middling, but this is still a fun destination for casuals. Synergon. Serious office roleplayers should consider Synergon, a loose RPG system presented satirically as a LARP, or live action roleplay.

Every Voting Machine at This Hacking Conference Got Totally Pwned. A noisy cheer went up from the crowd of hackers clustered around the voting machine tucked into the back corner of a casino conference room—they’d just managed to load Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” onto the Win. Vote, effectively rickrolling democracy. The hack was easy to execute.

Two of the hackers working on the touchscreen voting machine, who identified only by their first names, Nick and Josh, had managed to install Windows Media Player on the machine and use it to play Astley’s classic- turned- trolling- track. The rickroll stunt was just one hack at the security conference DEF CON, which ran a three- day Voting Machine Hacking Village to test the security of various machines and networks used in US elections. Dead Island Plus 14 Trainer All Versions Of Hallelujah.

By the end of the weekend, every one of the roughly 3. Even though several of the exploits ended up paying tribute to Astley, they’re not jokes—they also present a serious lesson about the security vulnerabilities in voting machines that leave them open to tampering and manipulation. And the more vulnerable our voting infrastructure is shown to be, the less confidence voters may feel. Researchers have been uncovering problems with voting systems for more than a decade, but the 2. Now the entire country, and maybe the world, is paying attention. But poll workers and former campaign officials say that their primary security concerns still aren’t with voting machines themselves but with protecting voter registration systems and defending against basic phishing attacks like the ones used to gain entry to the Democratic National Committee’s network. Meet the machines“This is the great Satan,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, gesturing dismissively at the Win.

Vote. The machine contains a cellular modem chip that allows its software to be updated remotely. Win. Votes were decertified by Virginia’s election board in 2. American voting systems are largely cobbled together with antiquated technology.

Voting machines can vary by state and county, and have to be certified by the Election Assistance Commission. But other devices, like the electronic poll books used in some jurisdictions to check in voters at their polling stations, aren’t subject to the certification process. Add in the voter registration databases themselves—which were reportedly breached in 3.

The machines are mostly new to the hackers at DEF CON. It’s obvious that election systems aren’t very secure, but it’s important to understand why the security problems exist in the first place, and why they’re so hard to fix. The security industry encourages regular software updates to patch bugs and keep machines as impenetrable as possible. But updating the machines used in voting systems isn’t as easy as installing a patch because the machines are subject to strict certification rules.

Any major software update would require the state to redo its certification process. Franklin said that even though the Election Assistance Commission’s most recent election security standards were released in 2. The cost breaks down to about $3. Tom Stanionis, an IT manager for a county election agency in California who attended the village in his personal capacity. Most states just don’t have the money. Since purchasing brand new systems is out of the question, Stanionis said most states do their best to protect the systems they have, walling them off from the internet and storing them securely when they’re not being used. The rat king of decentralized state vendors and machines might actually be a good defense during a general election—it would force hackers to successfully target many disparate systems.

If a hacker tucked away in a corner of a Las Vegas casino can alter a vote count, then surely a nation- state attacker can too. Does it make us better off or worse off?” Blaze told attendees.

That’s the question we haven’t really been sharply asking for very long.” Email security and beyond. Robby Mook, the former manager of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is at DEF CON for the first time, and you can kind of tell—he looks a bit too clean cut for a conference often filled with hoodie- wearing hackers. But he’s got experience being targeted by nation- state hackers that few other attendees can claim. Although hackers were hard at work down the hall figuring out how to alter vote tallies, Mook said he was still mostly worried about getting campaign workers to secure their email accounts with two- factor authentication and stop retaining data for longer than necessary.“It’s much more a matter of culture and education than it is of spending enormous resources,” Mook told Gizmodo. The Defending Digital Democracy project received a founding investment from Facebook, and executives from the social network as well as Google and Crowd. Strike are helping establish an information sharing organization that will give political committees and campaigns quick access to threat intelligence.“If you pull aside any campaign manager and say, .

And as exciting as it is to tear a voting machine apart, the goal of securing elections might be reached faster through educating election officials about cybersecurity best practices. Altering the voter roll to show an incorrect polling location for just a few voters could drastically slow down the voting process for many, he explained. If a voter isn’t believed to be in their correct polling station, she’ll be asked to fill out a provisional ballot, slowing down the line for everyone.

Some might get sick of waiting and leave. These kinds of softer attacks strike at public trust in election systems. There’s an amount of error that’s to be expected in any election—a voter might circle the name of a candidate on their ballot instead of checking the box next to it, or a machine might malfunction on its own—but without voter confidence, all errors start to look nefarious. Public confidence in elections is what gives government legitimacy,” Blaze said. Without fixing simple problems like two- factor implementation and more complex ones like vulnerabilities in vote- tallying machines, that legitimacy is at risk of being lost for good.“The Voting Hacking Village was just the start. This is one conversation that needs to leave Vegas,” said Jake Braun, the CEO of Cambridge Global Advisors and one of the organizers of the event.

We need to take these lessons back to DC, to state capitals, and to local election boards around the country to invoke change.”Update 3: 3. This story was updated to include credit for a second hacker, Josh, who helped rickroll the Win.