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Though there's not a lot of news to report this week, we do have a bunch of rumors to suggest and debunk.
For starters, YES, the face part expiration is continuing. Some people have spread the rumor that face parts aren't expiring, it's being postponed, etcetera... they're simply not true. These folks are confused, I'm afraid. The database is still severely overloaded, and the expiration will continue as planned -- the first parts will expire in about a month. City Hall suggests you think of it as a new way of approaching your design business: Now you've got to decide what parts are worth remaking and what parts can be redone with a twist!
Next, the Times may be moving! Yes, the publication day for the Whyville Times may be shifting a few days, in order to accomodate the Editor's varying schedule. Right now, it appears a Sunday publication will fit best, allowing citizens to start off their week with a brand new dose of the Times and allowing the Editor to keep from going crazy beneath the pile of paperwork and emails he is buried under every week.
Looking to the future, the Editor gazed into his crystal ball, stirred up some tea leaves, and came up with whispers of a Whyville mall and a People Finder tool. In his mystic vision, they appeared to "in development", whatever that means. Probably before the first edition of "The Whyvillian" comes out, slated for early next year.
City management programmers have told Times staff that they really are in need of an excellent professional programmer to join their team. They may post a "programming test" to see if the right person is already floating around Whyville! The perfect programmer knows UNIX, perl, Java, and databases. She or he can work self-motivated in an unstructured environment, and doesn't need documentation in order to understand a system and produce careful, quality code. Keep an eye out for the test -- maybe it will drive some of you to learn more about programming and write about it for the Times!
There's also discussion of improving the way citizens access Akbar's Face Factory. Right now, Akbar is constantly being flooded with new designs, many of which just don't cut the mustard. We can't give you much detail on the new system being devised, simply because they've already changed it three times since we heard about it. But rest assured, when something is decided, you'll learn more about it in the Times.
Finally, regarding the recent "debate" about certain citizens running a boycott against Whyville, we at the Times just would like to say this: Please focus on the issues and the points of your arguments. Don't make personal attacks. Don't throw around accusations of being "stupid", a "dictator", or other things totally unrelated to the question of whether a boycott is good or bad. Both sides were guilty, both sides can now bow out of those attacks with grace, we hope. The fact is, a boycott is a significant act of democracy, an act of choice, so saying the supporters of this idea were like "Hitler" was more than just bad taste, it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. Now, we all feel that boycotting Whyville *definitely* has a lot of negatives to it as well as positives, but please, when you debate this (or ANY other issue) in the Times' BBS, please keep your arguments fairly polite and very well-reasoned. Everybody has made good points, in between the bickering -- let's focus on people's reasoning, rather than their wrath.
Get informed, stay informed with the Times,
Times Editor
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