Slashdot Mirror
She Blinded Me With Quickies
18buddhas brought us stories and pictures of id Software's New Office.
TheLocustNMI busted some MC Paul Barman and Commodore 64 on us. Geek rap, eh? Apparently C-64 is the sixth-most downloaded Jewish hip-hop group on the planet.
An anonymous coward told us about grown men with joysticks on their heads.
a2fan shared the super-secret
Microsoft Breakup Plan.
Ant told us to check out some commercials, and then akaChe got our hopes up with the iTari. Combat, anyone?
Fish shared the proposal to encode Basic Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2.
Speaking of history, another anonymous coward sent in the link to a really great PBS parody, The 1999 House.
tobyjaffey (aka trj) wrote in about the Geekshirts project at SourceForge.
Josh Woodward told us about the scary fact that Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own.
And how! But look at the submission date. This has been in the queue for almost 3 years. Anybody know who to lobby on these issues?
I'm puzzled by your font comment, though. The font in the proposal is commercially available, and has been for some time. It looks a lot like what's in my Middle Egyptian textbook, but no credit is given.
There are some problems with the proposal. They've essentially presented the encoding used in their font set unchanged; it could probably use an update with current scholarship and input from other parties. The character names are silly, too. I guess it's difficult to find a name for every character since we're not sure what some of the symbols are, but most have conventional names.
Of course it would be really nice if they'd make their font available for free, but that's never stopped the unicode folks before.
I think it is a nice idea to extend unicode to all known scripts. Just read the stuff about the Linear B deciphering in Simon Singh's code book. Some of the charakters reminded me of Japanese Kanji. Also the way a konsonant and a vowel are encrypted by a character.
I'm puzzled by your font comment, though. The font in the proposal is commercially available, and has been for some time. It looks a lot like what's in my Middle Egyptian textbook, but no credit is given.
:)
;)
*blush* That's embarrassing. I rushed straight down to the glyphs and missed the fact that it's based on an existing font.
The characters are stylisticly quite similar to Budge's standard characters, but I have no idea where he got those. Ain't no way he drew everything in there himself, the lazy freak.
BTW, (I don't often encounter people that might be interested in knowing this) it's getting easier to find his dictionary. Both volumes! For years, I only had one. You can see them at Amazon, and buy it wherever politics permit.
-Waldo
That crappy music?
"Under Fifty Bucks /
That's a special low price"?
God no, tell me that wasn't what you meant; I've been trying to *forget* that for YEARS!
Heh, you too? I was, what, maybe 11 years old when that commercial came out and I *still* have it memorized--SCARY! I'll be lying on my deathbed with those lyrics running through my head. >_<
The original "Proposal to encode Tengwar in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2" is here:
n 1641.htm
http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1641/
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Man, my 2600 didn't have two buttons.
Are they going to be releasing new "software applications" for the iTari? It could be great for marketing..check out the cool NEW games that come in the transparent orange and blueberry cases!
"Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own"
Oh, no! He's posessed by the evil paperclip!!!
Can you imagine my disapointment? When I first read "Id's new Office" I thought "YES! This software will literally kick M$ all over the place." But then it turned out to be an actual building and not an software productivity suite. And I thought I would be able to train a BFG 9000 at everyone's favorite paperclip.
Oh please. Heiroglyphics are not boring! It's quite clever, significantly different from any other wide-spread writing system, and IMHO significantly more legible than roman text. That's not to say that Klingon, Cirth and Tengwar shouldn't also have been in there years ago. (the proposals were submitted at the same time) Oddly enough, I remember ~8 years ago someone asking for help on tolk-lang in putting together a pre-1.0 tengwar proposal, and it dying from lack of interest. :(
Don't tear down someone else's idea to elevate your own.
How about "The Limits of the Unlimited Information Store"....
http://www.microsoft.c om/TechNet/exchange/technote/store55.asp
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
How do you think Josh found that one? Be afraid. -Chris
Its official, BARNEY MUST DIE!
Oh, those were the days... Now I'm just going blind from other things.
You can watch the TV ads here.
This is the relevant one.
"I will give you $20 for one!"
-Pip
You know, I wouldn't be surprised. This has happened before.
Anyone else remember the "The Fun Is Back" campaign?
Remember, folks, It doesn't get older - it gets better!
How do you know that it was *another* anonymous coward?
As a rabid Elton John fan and the former owner of three pair of said Radio Shack 'Slimline' walkie talkies, I decided to do a little experiment.
While no Radio Shack walkie-talkies were available for this scientific endeavor, I was able to locate a Tandy wireless intercom that sounds much the same.
For testing of the 'scratch' media, I used each of my three vintage turntables (1922 Victorola, a 1960's Sears Portable, and a 1972 Panasonic Quadraphonic), and tried to replicate the sound.
Testing media consisted of my father's collection of 1960-1980 LPs, including such greats as 'The Bee Gees', 'Emerson, Lake and Palmer', and the 1970's Disco diva Gloria Gaynor. I also selected two of the poorest examples of Elton John I had on hand, a severly scratched copy of 'Madman Across the Water' and a nearly mutilated copy of 'Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy' which is also short the dustjacket.
As a result, I'd say it's is nothing like scratching Elton John whilst playing the Beastie Boys over a Radio Shack walkie talkie.
However, it sounds exactly like a Barbara Streisand 45 scratched on a dull, steel-needled Victorola set to speed 2, coupled with random Steven Tyler screeches. Grab Aerosmith's last album, 'Nine Lives', and listen to 'My Girl' for a good example. The rest is provided by by a copy of 'Marky Mark and The Funky Bunch's premire album played in a skip happy Sony CD changer, broadcast over said wireless intercom with the 'Fine-Tuning' screw set all the way to the right on the base unit and all the way to the left on the remote.
Independant confirmation of my result is encouraged.
.sig: Now legally binding!
What I really want to know is what the 'additional query words' mean at the end of that MS KB page mean. What the hell is "barney barnie acti ac ta mates mate actimate actamate actamates kbimu actimates"?
Is that like "Klaatu barada nikto"?
Don't laugh, the same question has recently been asked in a German Linux newsgroup. As pointed out by the MS knowledge base, this isn't actually a problem of the operating system, but even advanced users are scared by a system suddenly playing music or other "warning" sounds. (I saw an advertisement recently, there's a "talking" mainboard out there, calling for "help" when something is wrong. Now that's what I would call scary.)
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You may like my a cappella music
I'll bet if we all get together we can make these guys' dreams come true. That's right - Slashdot the C-64 IUMA site, making them the all-time number one downloaded Jewish hip-hop group of all time!
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
Every time I start playing peekaboo by myself, my folks give me more ritalin.
Aren't you dead?
Bah. I'm not booting into another OS just to watch these. Maybe someone should convert the ads to Real. :^)
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
After lightly stepping on the cat (Poor Felix!) I still think the cat is irrelevant.
Well, irrelevant to the total sound of the music, but not personally irrelevant, unless you're wearing combat boots, which I wasn't. I have three bleeding clawmarks down my left leg now, thank you!
.sig: Now legally binding!
The Atari 2600 console had only 128 bytes of RAM and extremely simplistic graphics hardware; it pretty much had to generate each pixel in software as it was being drawn to the screen. There were only six objects (two sprites, three squares, and a horizontal strip of background) that could not be told to "draw at (x, y)" like on the Nintendo but instead to "draw at the current electron beam position."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seriously everyone needs to go listen to their songs, especially Foam. To quote:
'I'm a 6 foot tall mathematical rapper'
It's like playing the Beastie Boys through an old Radio Shack walkie talkie while scratching an old copy of Elton John and stepping on a cat. Good stuff to be sure.
EJL
Your computer randomly starts to play classical music
I don't know what's worse, that article, or the fact I find it fifty percent of the time while I'm doing normal searches for other information.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
Halla-fuckin'-lujia. Really. I'm sick of sketching them, and the existing fonts (there's a couple of sets) suck. Naturally, with a language that's both phonetic and ideogram based, the set is limited. But this set does a really good job of covering the bases. It's enough to get me back into Egyptian again.
-Waldo