Green robe? City of Efreet? Mine has a big Red satan looking dude holding a scimitar in one hand and a blonde amazon looking babe in the other. A blue robed sorceror is in the foreground casting a spell.
The back cover picture is split into upper and lower scenes. The upper is some city of gold looking place and the lower is a red colored ocean with some weird viking ship sailing towards a evil looking shore.
My player handbook looks old too. It's got a aztec looking idol holding a flaming bowl, with jewel eyes which are in the process of being stolen by two suspicious looking characters, while some adventurers hang out in the foreground.
So anyone have an idea how much these things are worth in very good/fine condition?
Yep First Edition all right. It would be very fine to near mint if it weren't for a few places in the first chapter where the original owner highlighted some words with a yellow marker.
As far as DM'ing goes, I've always been okay, but the trend is I get better as I get drunker.
chill. new cpu designs can be expected to have long lead times. M$ can announce and release new products simultaneously because they have hardware manufacturers at their beck and call. Transmeta doesn't have that. The fact that ANY top tier hardware manufacturers are going for Transmeta's tech right off the bat shows that the prototypes work pretty freakin well. And besides, it's a little hard to hold off the announcement once you file the patent.
Give me electronic. Just make sure it's complete well-written and easy to print on 8.5 x 11. Who wants to pay extra for shipping a bunch of useless atoms?
In this quote from the Wired article linked from the/. article, this guy Hunter is commenting on how the government is trying to get academics to testify that filters are not viable:
Hunter, who has written about the flaws in filters because he opposes their use in libraries, said he was surprised by the request. "Our research, meant to defeat restrictive mandatory filtering laws, may now be used in support of even more restrictive age verification regimes," he said.
Hopefully this guy's reluctance in testifying for the government is shared with his colleagues... Does filtering software work well enough for the Supreme Court? hrmm...
It's a hack and a half because it was based on code half done and crappy access databases but the client wouldn't pay to have it done "right", they just wanted it done.
Yes, that's generally the rationale behind using VB. But your application is not something one would open source. I am not one to refute Pirsig, and I think my original comment is valid under Pirsig's subject/object basis.
Yes, code, per se, just needs to work, I'll give you that. But Open Source Code becomes bulletproof. It becomes reusable. It aspires to be cool. The subject is not just the computer, it is all the people who will look at, alter or simply read that code later. Therefore, the definition of quality is different for public code. Open Source is just a mechanism for improving and propagating public code.
I mean, would you use VB if the APIs were poorly documented? If the functionality was implemented badly? What if you got on the phone with m$ tech support and they couldn't answer your questions? Well, you wouldn't use VB. Who the fuck open sources VB? Noone. Why? Because it doesn't make sense. It might make sense open sourcing controls or dlls but those are mostly written in C.
yah, admittedly, I didn't think grafitti wasn't a big deal to learn either. I guess I was thinking of some hypothetical "computer idiot" who has a hard time working his AOL account.
Then again, jot and M$ CE seem to use something closer to regular handwriting than what Grafitti uses. Grafitti almost seems designed so it's easy for the computer to process, as opposed to easy to draw correctly.
If you're a crappy coder, you can hide away in secret mediocrity inside the safety of a corporate IT shop. You'll make good money, and will rarely have to produce code that looks good. In fact, most custom code out of IT shops sucks dino balls. OSS is not for pussies. Everyone's watching. What do you contribute? Do you reveal your ugly incompetence in a spastic attempt to support the principles of the resistance, or do you cower in your den of corporate profiteering?
I found the M$ handwriting recog to be closer to printing real characters, and easy to pick up. But once you get the hang of it, Graffiti's probably faster. I think M$ purposely designed it that way, for a smaller learning curve, while Graffiti was designed to reward the expert user.
Whatever. Nobody uses a CE PPC over a PalmPC unless they're on PCP. Have you seen how big the Start Button looks on those things? It's gigantic. M$: Stupid Design In the Name of Branding.
The Korean alphabet is based on arrangements of letters (Arranged as triplets of letters in a sqaure formation) rather than Chinese style Iconographs
The similarities exist because the Koreans designed it that way.
The Korean language is basically a phonetic version of the spoken Chinese language. There are 14 consonants in Korean, 10 vowels. These can be combined into approximately 200-300 types of syllables. These syllables are combined into words, and sentences. You can fudge on saying every syllable explicitly depending on your particular accent, education level, excitement, alcohol ingestion, etc.
A Korean King created the language in his free time. Y'know. Things can get isolated on a peninsula. One day, you're so bored, you invent a phonetic version of Chinese. Then you convince everyone to learn and use it. Thus begin the formation of a unique national identity.
It is still a mark of scholarship to read and write Chinese in that part of the world. But then again, that's sorta how Latin used to be here. People might have expected you to know a little Latin, maybe a French to impress the chicks. Then our schools went down the tubes and the first thing the teachers said was screw Latin.
In Korea they teach Chinese characters infrequently to school children, compared to even 5 years ago. Korean newspaper headlines used to be in Han-Mun, the formal Korean written language, which as far as I can tell, is Chinese with a new name, but now they're almost always completely in Han-Gul, the more common written form.
When a spaniard says "hamburguesa", I don't have to know spanish he's talking about a hamburger. When I say "McDonald's" even the Chinese know what I'm talking about. Words are as portable as the air.
Maybe the reason the Japanese and Koreans are familiar with Chinese pictograms is because the Chinese civilization is about 5000 years old and they've been given plenty of time to assert their memes in that part of the world? I mean, why do you think the Canadians speak American?;)
Seriously though, your idea that the design of a written language has something to do with its application is interesting, but I don't think it's applicable here, because most people were illiterate in antiquity. In ancient China the ability to read and write was a pursuit of the scholarly and noble, so it's use as a tool for managing an empire was limited.
I suppose it was useful for maintaining a bureaucracy over distance, but there the time needed to transmit such written messages would also limit the written word's effectiveness. There, the autonomy feudalism afforded, the unifying force of a deified emperor and the might of the sword would probably be most useful.
Your asserion that:
A system of writing wherein the rearrangements of the letters of the alphabet corresponds to the sounds (romantic languages for example) makes it impossible for a single word to make sense in different languages.
is just plain wrong. It doesn't make sense to define "word" so narrowly. A word is more than a sequence of particular characters. A word doesn't have to be exactly the same to be understood by speakers of different languages.
"All the sounds that human beings make," you ask? And what would we do with this Mythical Phonetic Language Complete? We'd still have to convert it into something usable by human users. The issue is not that we need that many characters, but that we (as a world) use that many characters. Besides, Unicode's a lot easier to implement that your MPLC.
The point is, there are problems which existed before computers, and problems that arrived after the invention of computers. In my view the human voice is incredibly diverse and complex, and judging by the sound of the voices of great singers, without hard limits.
Unicode is a compromise. It's use implies, "we're not gonna bother with an uberlanguage, we just want our string handling algorithms to still work." It is impressively unambitious, a logical evolution of character-handling.
You don't have a decent gripe. You can't get a linguist to do a coder's work.
Y'all are just being anal. If we're just poo-pooing script kiddies, then hey, I'll sign up for that club, but that's not what this is about.
I assert that the use of "u" in place of "you" is no big deal.
I am NOT saying that "u" is an acceptable geek-ism, that is, an inconsequential mangling of the written english language under the guise of Net Patois. The poster did not write "ur" which is significantly more annoying in light of the fact that "yer" gets enough abuse when people misuse "your" and "you're".
I mean, what makes you assume that the poster did not proofread his/her article? That the use of "u" was not, in fact, deliberate? And what the hell makes any digitally stored content so fucking sacred? This is digital: You don't like it, you change a bit. It's not like you have to stop the presses and change the plate. After all, the article was timely and newsworthy. Anything else is nitpicking.
Further, amplifying an editor's use of the colloquial "u" into "devalues the whole experience" is plain crazy talk. Slashdot is a community. Community is the value-added in the/. experience. Community does not mean just Taco, nor just good spellers. It means geeks, trolls, script kiddies, bank-robbers, halitosis-sufferers, etc. etc. all together in digitally rendered, sometimes uncomfortable, for-better-or-for-worse proximity. Holding editors to a higher standard may or may not be appropriate, but slashdot ain't the NYTimes. I mean, does/. even have an editorial policy aside from not saying fuckshitdamnetc?
I say the comment should be moderated down to flamebait. The remark about hetz contributing "virtually nothing" comes off as just plain mean.
Yah. Impress the hell outta her when 4.0 crashes your system and/or makes your screen snow.
I think the Geforce support under 3.3.6 will do me very nicely.
The inclusion of Broadcast 2000 (video editing software) is pretty neat... it should be fun to play with, or at least give me some interesting code to read.
The L.A. Times had a front page (!) article on the phenomena of people paying green money for virtual stuff. Not only are people pulling down some respectable dough, there is an interesting quote regarding the soon-to-be-released Diablo II:
"Matt Householder, the producer of "Diablo II," said he is still uncertain about how his game will deal with this phenomena. "These are relatively uncharted waters," he said, adding that he has considered creating some sort of "escrow" service for equipment sales on the idea that if you can't beat them, you might as well join them"
how are they gonna do anything in this book besides hire people to play the few non-computer generated scenes? but woowee wouldn't it be fun to try? no wonder it took so long for a snow crash film to get going eh?... probably waiting for the filmtech to catch up. anyone know how much $$$ they're throwing at this project? With a lot of money and a lot of CG animation lovin', maybe they'll do justice to the nuclear powered portable depleted uranium needle firing gatling gun (named REASON in the book for the unwashed). and YT's skateboard should be neato++. I wonder who'll they'll get to play Uncle Enzo? or Hiro? and duh anyone who hasn't read it, should. rooting for the movie peeps... -x
Slashdot Mirror
The back cover picture is split into upper and lower scenes. The upper is some city of gold looking place and the lower is a red colored ocean with some weird viking ship sailing towards a evil looking shore.
My player handbook looks old too. It's got a aztec looking idol holding a flaming bowl, with jewel eyes which are in the process of being stolen by two suspicious looking characters, while some adventurers hang out in the foreground.
So anyone have an idea how much these things are worth in very good/fine condition?
As far as DM'ing goes, I've always been okay, but the trend is I get better as I get drunker.
chill. new cpu designs can be expected to have long lead times. M$ can announce and release new products simultaneously because they have hardware manufacturers at their beck and call. Transmeta doesn't have that. The fact that ANY top tier hardware manufacturers are going for Transmeta's tech right off the bat shows that the prototypes work pretty freakin well. And besides, it's a little hard to hold off the announcement once you file the patent.
Yah that big picture of a demon on the front of the DM's manual was never a big hit with my mom. For some strange reason.
Give me electronic. Just make sure it's complete well-written and easy to print on 8.5 x 11. Who wants to pay extra for shipping a bunch of useless atoms?
Yes, code, per se, just needs to work, I'll give you that. But Open Source Code becomes bulletproof. It becomes reusable. It aspires to be cool. The subject is not just the computer, it is all the people who will look at, alter or simply read that code later. Therefore, the definition of quality is different for public code. Open Source is just a mechanism for improving and propagating public code.
I mean, would you use VB if the APIs were poorly documented? If the functionality was implemented badly? What if you got on the phone with m$ tech support and they couldn't answer your questions? Well, you wouldn't use VB. Who the fuck open sources VB? Noone. Why? Because it doesn't make sense. It might make sense open sourcing controls or dlls but those are mostly written in C.
Then again, jot and M$ CE seem to use something closer to regular handwriting than what Grafitti uses. Grafitti almost seems designed so it's easy for the computer to process, as opposed to easy to draw correctly.
a man and his abyss...
Whatever. Nobody uses a CE PPC over a PalmPC unless they're on PCP. Have you seen how big the Start Button looks on those things? It's gigantic. M$: Stupid Design In the Name of Branding.
The Korean language is basically a phonetic version of the spoken Chinese language. There are 14 consonants in Korean, 10 vowels. These can be combined into approximately 200-300 types of syllables. These syllables are combined into words, and sentences. You can fudge on saying every syllable explicitly depending on your particular accent, education level, excitement, alcohol ingestion, etc.
A Korean King created the language in his free time. Y'know. Things can get isolated on a peninsula. One day, you're so bored, you invent a phonetic version of Chinese. Then you convince everyone to learn and use it. Thus begin the formation of a unique national identity.
It is still a mark of scholarship to read and write Chinese in that part of the world. But then again, that's sorta how Latin used to be here. People might have expected you to know a little Latin, maybe a French to impress the chicks. Then our schools went down the tubes and the first thing the teachers said was screw Latin.
In Korea they teach Chinese characters infrequently to school children, compared to even 5 years ago. Korean newspaper headlines used to be in Han-Mun, the formal Korean written language, which as far as I can tell, is Chinese with a new name, but now they're almost always completely in Han-Gul, the more common written form.
Maybe the reason the Japanese and Koreans are familiar with Chinese pictograms is because the Chinese civilization is about 5000 years old and they've been given plenty of time to assert their memes in that part of the world? I mean, why do you think the Canadians speak American? ;)
Seriously though, your idea that the design of a written language has something to do with its application is interesting, but I don't think it's applicable here, because most people were illiterate in antiquity. In ancient China the ability to read and write was a pursuit of the scholarly and noble, so it's use as a tool for managing an empire was limited.
I suppose it was useful for maintaining a bureaucracy over distance, but there the time needed to transmit such written messages would also limit the written word's effectiveness. There, the autonomy feudalism afforded, the unifying force of a deified emperor and the might of the sword would probably be most useful.
Your asserion that:
is just plain wrong. It doesn't make sense to define "word" so narrowly. A word is more than a sequence of particular characters. A word doesn't have to be exactly the same to be understood by speakers of different languages.oral style defeats pictogram style.
"All the sounds that human beings make," you ask? And what would we do with this Mythical Phonetic Language Complete? We'd still have to convert it into something usable by human users. The issue is not that we need that many characters, but that we (as a world) use that many characters. Besides, Unicode's a lot easier to implement that your MPLC.
The point is, there are problems which existed before computers, and problems that arrived after the invention of computers. In my view the human voice is incredibly diverse and complex, and judging by the sound of the voices of great singers, without hard limits.
Unicode is a compromise. It's use implies, "we're not gonna bother with an uberlanguage, we just want our string handling algorithms to still work." It is impressively unambitious, a logical evolution of character-handling.
You don't have a decent gripe. You can't get a linguist to do a coder's work.
I assert that the use of "u" in place of "you" is no big deal.
I am NOT saying that "u" is an acceptable geek-ism, that is, an inconsequential mangling of the written english language under the guise of Net Patois. The poster did not write "ur" which is significantly more annoying in light of the fact that "yer" gets enough abuse when people misuse "your" and "you're".
I mean, what makes you assume that the poster did not proofread his/her article? That the use of "u" was not, in fact, deliberate? And what the hell makes any digitally stored content so fucking sacred? This is digital: You don't like it, you change a bit. It's not like you have to stop the presses and change the plate. After all, the article was timely and newsworthy. Anything else is nitpicking.
Further, amplifying an editor's use of the colloquial "u" into "devalues the whole experience" is plain crazy talk. Slashdot is a community. Community is the value-added in the /. experience. Community does not mean just Taco, nor just good spellers. It means geeks, trolls, script kiddies, bank-robbers, halitosis-sufferers, etc. etc. all together in digitally rendered, sometimes uncomfortable, for-better-or-for-worse proximity. Holding editors to a higher standard may or may not be appropriate, but slashdot ain't the NYTimes. I mean, does /. even have an editorial policy aside from not saying fuckshitdamnetc?
I say the comment should be moderated down to flamebait. The remark about hetz contributing "virtually nothing" comes off as just plain mean.
I think the Geforce support under 3.3.6 will do me very nicely.
The inclusion of Broadcast 2000 (video editing software) is pretty neat... it should be fun to play with, or at least give me some interesting code to read.
Broadcast 2000 Home Page
ftp://ftp.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/timing-c hn.html
bah. why repost an article when a URL will do?
how are they gonna do anything in this book besides hire people to play the few non-computer generated scenes? but woowee wouldn't it be fun to try? no wonder it took so long for a snow crash film to get going eh?... probably waiting for the filmtech to catch up. anyone know how much $$$ they're throwing at this project? With a lot of money and a lot of CG animation lovin', maybe they'll do justice to the nuclear powered portable depleted uranium needle firing gatling gun (named REASON in the book for the unwashed). and YT's skateboard should be neato++. I wonder who'll they'll get to play Uncle Enzo? or Hiro? and duh anyone who hasn't read it, should. rooting for the movie peeps... -x