>all the legacy code using 1-byte characters has to be revised.
But only once for Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Unicode.
True. Doesn't (didn't) make it easier.
>Chinese text also requires a full Latin set
Multiple copies of which are tucked away in most Chinese character sets.
I know. (Usually very shitty glyphs that look like a bastard hybrid of Times and Courier). That was in response to your(?) remark that Hebrew was more complex becasue it needs English support too; so does Chinese.
e looked at new TVs but it was really clear that now is a lousy time to buy a TV.
But it's a great time to pick up a used big CRT monitor for almost nothing. All those years I spent squinting at a 14"... I got a 17" last year, if I could think of an excuse now I could get a 19" even cheaper...
it takes epoxy to rise above those two and distinguish oneself as a geek.
You might be appreciate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The "motorcycle maintenance" is actually quite interesting -- some similar ad hoc repairs are described. When the author gets into more abstract philosphy it doesn't hold up so well.
You know, with this development, and all the recent talk about gecko super-tape being developed... it makes me feel a little uncomfortable. We're developing products that make structures, installations etc. more and more permanent.
If we used a glue that was similar to an existing organic substance it most likely would be more recyclable than the current acrylics and cyanoacrilates and such; hopefully production would produce less toxic waste, though I doubt they'll be milkng mussels for it. Conversely, making more durable products reduces obsolescence so ideally less is discarded.
A true classic and a standard among comic strips, Mandrake the Magician has been mystifying readers since 1934!
Mandrake the Magician was created by Lee Falk during the Great Depression, a time in our nation's history when adventurous comic strips became popular for their morale-building appeal.
The dapper, mustached magician remains one of the most famous characters in the comic strip medium, his adventures appearing in newspapers worldwide. Mandrake uses his legendary powers of hypnotism and illusion to combat crime, and has worked his debonair magic to find a place in the hearts of comic strip fans everywhere.
Many comic strips and comic books throughout the history of the medium have starred mystics and magicians. Over the years, characters such as Merzah the Mystic, Sargon the Sorcerer and Zanzibar the Magician have worked their magic, but none have displayed the longevity of the Mandrake the Magician comic strip.
Mandrake is also the first comic strip with a racially integrated cast of crime-fighters. Mandrake's partner in adventure is the gigantic Lothar, and the two of them have been fighting evildoers for decades! Mandrake is also aided by his girlfriend, the lovely and exotic Princess Narda.
Falk originally drew the Mandrake strip, but soon turned the job over to artist Phil Davis, who illustrated the silken illusionist's doings for more than 30 years. When Davis passed away, Falk recruited current Mandrake artist Fred Fredericks.
Lee Falk passed away in March of 1999, but his legacy lives on with Mandrake the Magician.
That's what I meant... what's the term I'm looking for... glyph set? Character set? I wanted to say alphabet but I know that's wrong for some reason.
"Alphabet" comes from Greek: alpha, beta, gamma... It refers to a phonetic system of writing. I believe modern Latin, Greek, Russina, etc alphabets are descended from Phoenician, and Hebrew (aleph, beth, gimel...) and Arabic (alif, ba , ta...) are closely related. India, Thailand, Tibet and some others use a Sanskrit related alphabet. Chinese, Japanese and old Egyptian heiroglyphs might be called ideographs, where the written form is unrelated (except sometimes in a punning way) to the pronunciation.
I think "character set" applies to both. "Glyphs", at least in typographic circles, refer to the exact graphic -- there is only one character "A" but untold numbers of "A" glyphs in different fonts, let alone handwriting.
The fact that there's 10,000 of them in modern use just dictates the size of ints you use to store characters.
Exactly. No problem if you're starting from scratch, but all the legacy code using 1-byte characters has to be revised.
I've seen and used all kinds of cobbled together Chinese enablers for DOS and Win 3. Tons of kludges. Also note that Chinese text also requires a full Latin set, and right-left, left-right and up-down orientations.
A market of over a billion versus one of, what, six million?
Which one would you write for?
You might have noticed the statement I was addressing was "It's not as easy as it sounds", not "which is the more lucrative".
(btw, I'm not sure the elaborate glyphs are what make Chinese more complicated
No, it's not. There are many decorative English fonts with more complicated glyphs thah an average Chinese one. The complexity is that you need at least 5000 glyphs for a Chinese font. That was a big problem when most software encoded characters with a single byte. Various workarounds were found to allow Chinese software to use 2 bytes, but since Unicode is supposedly now the standard for Windows and Office, that should not be such a problem. Hebrew is an alphabetic language, and so has a few dozen glyphs, about the same as Latin languages.
Not at all. I used to use a PS laser with Wordstar 5 (DOS), printing mainly in Courier and occasionally Times for my faxes and such. Very simple and fast. I could also incorporate the letterhead in the page with a single code in the header to include an EPS file.
That wouldn't have justified the extra expense of PS, but I needed it for DTP as well.
yeah they were too good, on some of the old hp printers the postscript was actually significantly faster than the native pcl of the printer!
A postscript page of text, if it uses one of the fonts already in printer ROM, can be 20k or less. But if it's rasterised to PCL it's basically a single bitmap of about 1 MB (at 300 dpi -- for 600 dpi 4 MB), and PS is mostly resolution independent. So just sending the file to the printer takes much longer. You can use a font downloader to make any PS font resident in RAM if you're using ones not in the ROM.
but surely. Microsoft's 'monopoly' isn't about using it's power to force little guys out of the market, it's using its resources to make a better and cheaper product, which then runs the little guys out of the market.
The rest of your argument is reasonable, but this part is really not. There are many examples of MS "using it's power to force little guys out of the market". And not just little guys, but big ones (until MS had wiped them out, anyway). With bundling and OEM deals the competition is locked out. Eg Netscape, alternative all office suites (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc).
I fail to see much newsworthy in an article that tells you to: (this is the ENTIRE substance of the article)
At this point, you need to obtain the version of FreeDOS used by DOSEMU. Snag the binary version from the DOSEMU download page - it'll be named something like dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz. Save it into the directory you've decompressed DOSEMU into.
Now execute the following commands:
mv dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz
make install
You no longer need to be root, so type exit to go back to your own shell.
You can now type xdosemu to start DOSEMU in a new X window. Before it can start for the first time, it'll ask you a few simple questions. Press enter to accept the defaults to each question.
The rest is just a list of "classic DOS games" you can play.
What if RedHat had to pay for every Windows machine shipped?
Tthe majority of PCs running Redhat were bundled with Windows, so their customers have; if unbundled or customers had a choice at least some of that money paid for OEM licenses might go to Redhat.
Now, if they start asking for their software back over it, that could be a bad thing... Let people keep their LindowsOS', consider it a marketing cost...
Lindows.com does not agree with the ruling, but stands by its customers. Consumers who processed their claims through the MSfreePC.com site are permitted to keep and use all the software that they received.
We may do better in reverse. Send only the dumber ones by the time we get it right and can guarantee more than a minuscule level of survival, we will send the smart ones
In "The Marching Morons", 1951, by C. M. Kornbluth, a seedy salesman from our century is reawakened two hundred years in the future. He was frozen in a dentist's chair after an accident. The salesman, Barlow, quickly comes to learn that over the years intelligence was bread out of the human race by macho men and buxom women who cared more about looks then smarts. By now the vast majority of the people are idiots who are being controlled by the few intelligent people left. Barlow, who could sell ice to Eskimos, concocts a scheme to get rid of the losers. A sales campaign will promote Venus as a beautiful place to start a new colony. Those stupid enough to fall for the pitch will die aboard the phony spaceships (and probably burn up on reentry). The plan is clean and easy to implement. Barlow's price for all this is fair: absolute dictator of the whole world. He is given his share until the last of the morons is gone from Earth and then he himself is put aboard one of the ill-fated ship. After all, a mass murderer such as Barlow can not be left to live among the better people now left.
I've seen a lot of thse kind of tables to support claims that living in 3rd World cities is more expensive than New York. But having lived in some of these places I find I can have a very nice lifestyle on about 10% of a Western budget. The problem is that they usually calculate costs of the exact same product -- so eg a steak dinner with a bottle of wine can be found quite cheaply in New York, but in a 3rd World city the only place you might find that dish is at a 5 star hotel, so it costs much more. But if you eat local food (not lower quality; generally higher) your costs are tiny. Also accommodation is usually rated from foreign enclaves at far higher than equivalently comfortable local-style places. But if you have children you may pay extremely high private school fees if you want them to learn in English -- that may be one cost diferential you don't want to compromise on.
But downloading a movie that's been taken by a shaky handed teenager with a hand camera in a cinema...
In China you can buy DVDs of just about any movie within days of release in the US, or sometimes before. They all have very nice packages, probably pasted up from promo sites on the web. (However, the English text is often nonsensical, or relating to an entirely different movie. And sometimes they include real reviews from, eg, AICN, like "[Matrix 3] is a steaming pile of crap".) The quality of the movie though is a crapshoot. Sometimes it's a perfect dupe of a DVD release (especially Oscar screeners with the anti piracy notice floating across the bottom every 10 minutes), sometimes a slightly blurry image with good sound, not bad but a bit worse than VCR quality, sometimes it's obviously a video camera in a cinema complete with audience coughs and shadows on the screen. But as they're less than $1 you can just shrug and throw those away, or go back to the shop and exchange it -- it's actually a lot easier to exchange pirated goods than legit; less paperwork I suppose.
Re:This is Margaret Atwood!!
on
Oryx and Crake
·
· Score: 1
Is the reverse true? That Stephen King (who is discussed lots on slashdot) could have been one of the authors we had to read in english class?
You could do much worse. His short stories are much better than his turgid doorstop bestselling novels. King has a number of anthologies, look particularly for stories first published in F&SF.
Slashdot Mirror
Claim: NASA spent millions of dollars developing an "astronaut pen" which would work in outer space while the Soviets solved the same problem by simply using pencils.
Status: False.
In the FA:
But only once for Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Unicode.
True. Doesn't (didn't) make it easier.
>Chinese text also requires a full Latin set
Multiple copies of which are tucked away in most Chinese character sets.
I know. (Usually very shitty glyphs that look like a bastard hybrid of Times and Courier). That was in response to your(?) remark that Hebrew was more complex becasue it needs English support too; so does Chinese.
But it's a great time to pick up a used big CRT monitor for almost nothing. All those years I spent squinting at a 14" ... I got a 17" last year, if I could think of an excuse now I could get a 19" even cheaper ...
You might be appreciate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The "motorcycle maintenance" is actually quite interesting -- some similar ad hoc repairs are described. When the author gets into more abstract philosphy it doesn't hold up so well.
If we used a glue that was similar to an existing organic substance it most likely would be more recyclable than the current acrylics and cyanoacrilates and such; hopefully production would produce less toxic waste, though I doubt they'll be milkng mussels for it. Conversely, making more durable products reduces obsolescence so ideally less is discarded.
A true classic and a standard among comic strips, Mandrake the Magician has been mystifying readers since 1934!
Mandrake the Magician was created by Lee Falk during the Great Depression, a time in our nation's history when adventurous comic strips became popular for their morale-building appeal.
The dapper, mustached magician remains one of the most famous characters in the comic strip medium, his adventures appearing in newspapers worldwide. Mandrake uses his legendary powers of hypnotism and illusion to combat crime, and has worked his debonair magic to find a place in the hearts of comic strip fans everywhere.
Many comic strips and comic books throughout the history of the medium have starred mystics and magicians. Over the years, characters such as Merzah the Mystic, Sargon the Sorcerer and Zanzibar the Magician have worked their magic, but none have displayed the longevity of the Mandrake the Magician comic strip.
Mandrake is also the first comic strip with a racially integrated cast of crime-fighters. Mandrake's partner in adventure is the gigantic Lothar, and the two of them have been fighting evildoers for decades! Mandrake is also aided by his girlfriend, the lovely and exotic Princess Narda.
Falk originally drew the Mandrake strip, but soon turned the job over to artist Phil Davis, who illustrated the silken illusionist's doings for more than 30 years. When Davis passed away, Falk recruited current Mandrake artist Fred Fredericks.
Lee Falk passed away in March of 1999, but his legacy lives on with Mandrake the Magician.
"Alphabet" comes from Greek: alpha, beta, gamma... It refers to a phonetic system of writing. I believe modern Latin, Greek, Russina, etc alphabets are descended from Phoenician, and Hebrew (aleph, beth, gimel...) and Arabic (alif, ba , ta...) are closely related. India, Thailand, Tibet and some others use a Sanskrit related alphabet. Chinese, Japanese and old Egyptian heiroglyphs might be called ideographs, where the written form is unrelated (except sometimes in a punning way) to the pronunciation.
I think "character set" applies to both. "Glyphs", at least in typographic circles, refer to the exact graphic -- there is only one character "A" but untold numbers of "A" glyphs in different fonts, let alone handwriting.
Well, it's not grammatical.
Unless it refers to where they're going to send all their old indtall discs, licences and MS desksets.
No offence to the parent poster, it was the editor who made the senseless headline.
Exactly. No problem if you're starting from scratch, but all the legacy code using 1-byte characters has to be revised.
I've seen and used all kinds of cobbled together Chinese enablers for DOS and Win 3. Tons of kludges. Also note that Chinese text also requires a full Latin set, and right-left, left-right and up-down orientations.
Which one would you write for?
You might have noticed the statement I was addressing was "It's not as easy as it sounds", not "which is the more lucrative".
(btw, I'm not sure the elaborate glyphs are what make Chinese more complicated
No, it's not. There are many decorative English fonts with more complicated glyphs thah an average Chinese one. The complexity is that you need at least 5000 glyphs for a Chinese font. That was a big problem when most software encoded characters with a single byte. Various workarounds were found to allow Chinese software to use 2 bytes, but since Unicode is supposedly now the standard for Windows and Office, that should not be such a problem. Hebrew is an alphabetic language, and so has a few dozen glyphs, about the same as Latin languages.
I have an Apple LW 630. There's a mouse loose
Geckos like to get into my laser.
Not at all. I used to use a PS laser with Wordstar 5 (DOS), printing mainly in Courier and occasionally Times for my faxes and such. Very simple and fast. I could also incorporate the letterhead in the page with a single code in the header to include an EPS file.
That wouldn't have justified the extra expense of PS, but I needed it for DTP as well.
A postscript page of text, if it uses one of the fonts already in printer ROM, can be 20k or less. But if it's rasterised to PCL it's basically a single bitmap of about 1 MB (at 300 dpi -- for 600 dpi 4 MB), and PS is mostly resolution independent. So just sending the file to the printer takes much longer. You can use a font downloader to make any PS font resident in RAM if you're using ones not in the ROM.
The rest of your argument is reasonable, but this part is really not. There are many examples of MS "using it's power to force little guys out of the market". And not just little guys, but big ones (until MS had wiped them out, anyway). With bundling and OEM deals the competition is locked out. Eg Netscape, alternative all office suites (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc).
There have been Chinese versions of MS Office for almost 10 years. That's a lot harder than alphabetic scripts like Hebrew.
News?
Tthe majority of PCs running Redhat were bundled with Windows, so their customers have; if unbundled or customers had a choice at least some of that money paid for OEM licenses might go to Redhat.
msfreepc.com:
Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume IIA
I've seen a lot of thse kind of tables to support claims that living in 3rd World cities is more expensive than New York. But having lived in some of these places I find I can have a very nice lifestyle on about 10% of a Western budget. The problem is that they usually calculate costs of the exact same product -- so eg a steak dinner with a bottle of wine can be found quite cheaply in New York, but in a 3rd World city the only place you might find that dish is at a 5 star hotel, so it costs much more. But if you eat local food (not lower quality; generally higher) your costs are tiny. Also accommodation is usually rated from foreign enclaves at far higher than equivalently comfortable local-style places. But if you have children you may pay extremely high private school fees if you want them to learn in English -- that may be one cost diferential you don't want to compromise on.
Just order them direct from HK or Singapore. No delay, no dubbing (silly subtitles though).
In China you can buy DVDs of just about any movie within days of release in the US, or sometimes before. They all have very nice packages, probably pasted up from promo sites on the web. (However, the English text is often nonsensical, or relating to an entirely different movie. And sometimes they include real reviews from, eg, AICN, like "[Matrix 3] is a steaming pile of crap".) The quality of the movie though is a crapshoot. Sometimes it's a perfect dupe of a DVD release (especially Oscar screeners with the anti piracy notice floating across the bottom every 10 minutes), sometimes a slightly blurry image with good sound, not bad but a bit worse than VCR quality, sometimes it's obviously a video camera in a cinema complete with audience coughs and shadows on the screen. But as they're less than $1 you can just shrug and throw those away, or go back to the shop and exchange it -- it's actually a lot easier to exchange pirated goods than legit; less paperwork I suppose.
You could do much worse. His short stories are much better than his turgid doorstop bestselling novels. King has a number of anthologies, look particularly for stories first published in F&SF.