I hate waiting for flash animations to load, but in this case, the flash animations *are* the pictures you're looking for.
I wouldn't mind having one of these at all, and since I live in Sweden I can probably head right down to the store and pick one up, but I still have to say there's absolutely no excuse for such poor web design. Maybe I'll take a look at some competing products first.
That's fine. As long as you don't mind nobody ever inventing anything that requires a significant amount of research and development.
That's utter hogwash. People were inventing things long before patents themselves were invented, and we'll be inventing things long after they're abolished too, assuming we don't destroy ourselves of course.
There are plenty of business models for how to make back R&D investment besides 'get patent, get checks for decades by threatening to sue.' Admittedly, in a world where a long term revenue stream can be guaranteed by resort to patent they don't perform so well, but if they didn't have to compete with patents they could do quite well again.
Abolishing patents would actually have a positive effect on invention, because inventors themselves wouldn't have to worry about avoiding patents from the past. And it would have a great effect on the economy in general, lowering costs and thus prices, while increasing productivity. The enourmous amount of resources now going into patent applications, patent searches, patent litigation and negotiation, could be redirected to productive efforts instead, improving the economy even more. And the better the economy is, the more folks have time and resources to tinker and invent...
The quick launch tray may get a little use from some people, but most 'regular users' I see are just confused by it. It doesn't confuse me, personally, but I have no use for it either. But all the other crap... and no you can't 'turn it off' in all cases. 'Active Desktop' for instance, can still cause crashes after you supposedly turn it off. If you grab TweakUI and a few other utilities, you can turn most of it off, but it's still in there, and can cause crashes, as well as slowing things down. Try WinXP on your oldest, slowest computer, sleek it down as much as you can, and then time how long it takes to open an explorer window. Then install 98lite with the 95 explorer and try it again. The difference is positively breathtaking. Hell, run the same experiment with stock 98SE and 'sleek' 98SElite, it's still very noticeable even there. And in that case the difference is entirely in the explorer.exe version.
But speed and resources aside, I've never had any trouble getting my 98lite 'sleek' machine to display explorer windows the way I want them. When I occasionally have to use a WinXP box it never wants to do that for me, and it appears I am not alone, and it sounds like it takes black magic to accomplish sometimes from the replies to that thread. And even if you do get the default set, some folders won't follow them without more black magic. Now I'm sure if I were motivated enough to take the time, I could probably find all the right invocations and get that thing to behave somewhat usably, but why should I when my method works better, faster, with less fuss? Not to mention allows me to avoid giving MS any more of my money.
A tax on copyright holders (those that have an income stream from customers of those copyrighed works, at least) will simply be accounted for as a business cost and added to the price their customers pay.
For the purposes I use my Windows box for, 98SE is definately the best version around.
First off, it's easy to easy to disinfect IE from it, which seems to greatly reduce the stability problems, in addition to taking care of the most commonly exploited security holes. Second, it supports a lot more games than 2000. You can also use 98lite to install the old '95 explorer.exe, which is a HUGE gain in usability over the later more annoying explorers. Unlike XP, it doesn't call home. And it's hellaciously fast on my fairly modern equipment, where XP would be just slow enough to make me want to waste a bunch of money on new components.
Unless you can present the case in U.S. law that decided that a EULA is a non-legal contract, or even questioned the constitutionality of the concept, help yourself to a nice foamy sconce of STFU.
It's not a legal contract on it's face, as you could easily verify yourself if you'd spend half an hour educating yourself on what a contract is.
Can you present a precedent clearly stating that these 'agreements' are, in fact, legally binding? I've been following these cases with some interest myself for years, and I can't think of one. There are very few precedents, and they tend to be rulings on very narrow particulars that neatly sidestep the broader question.
I repeat, the plaintiff bears the burden of proof. Unless you can present a case in US law that a click-through EULA is a valid contract, you can feel free to choke on your STFU yourself.
And, btw, since you seem to have some confusion on the issue, US Law doesn't apply outside the US anyway. So even if US courts are so corrupt that they would enforce such a thing, that doesn't necessarily mean that the courts where I live would.
First off, what are the chances of a Judge ever needing to see it any way? Practically nill.
Second, even in that case, what on earth makes you think that such a thing could be binding? Burden of proof is on the plaintiff. What are they going to claim? Violation of a license? The EULA is not, despite it's name, a license in the legal sense. It grants no rights, rather it purports to forfeit them. A contract? There are several legal requirements for something to be a valid contract, and this EULA looks to me like it fails those requirements on several points. Even if it only fails one, it's not a valid contract.
There are thousands of these bloody EULAs around, and the only reason anyone ever clicks 'accept' is because that is the action you must take in order to use the software you already bought. Practically no one even reads the things, let alone agrees to them. It's just a mechanical task that poorly designed software imposes on the user.
If you copy a song and sell it, you've violated copyright law. If you copy a song and give it away, without destroying your original copy, you may have violated copyright law. For better or worse, those are real legal offenses. Violating a 'EULA' you never read and never signed, which doesn't meet the legal requirements for a license or a contract or anything else binding, is not.
I was trying to figure out why the hell they were using this phrase in reference to Star Trek and Klingons (who are just as much 'ugly bags of mostly water' as humans are) and you gave me a clue on that - apparently it was ripped off for a TNG episode I haven't seen, eh?
But it certainly didn't originate there. The earlier reference I'm aware of (it's possible this traces back to an even earlier reference I'm not aware of, of course,) was a sci-fi novel where an alien pre-colonisation probe crash-landed on one of the moons of Saturn (maybe Jupiter?) and due to fortuitous damage to the self-replicating robotic terraformers onboard, developed an analogue to mutation in their replication processes and, voilá! evolution made its appearance in a robotic race. It's been decades since I read that book, but a little searching on google leads me to believe it was 'Code of the Lifemaker' by James P. Hogan, (c) 1983. Could be wrong, but it sure sounds like it.
So in that context, it made perfect sense, this race was completely electro-mechanical and the when humans landed and discovered them, they found biological life a completely unforseen and disgusting possibility. I'm at a loss to see how it makes any sense whatsoever in the context of Klingons, however, as I said they're just as much bags of water as humans... wtf?
As a practical matter, I'd really prefer these guys keep their work lower-key. It'd be nice if the publicity went to cracks of MS drm instead, for purely tactical reasons.
But they clearly are within their rights to do it, and it's really a tribute to the popularity of iTunes.
Stagnant? Useless bells and whistles added to up the version number, but little bug fixing? Sounds a lot like MS Office to me.
Frankly, if they'd just ship WP 6 with updated import filters, that would be a hell of a lot better than MS Office anyway.
Of course, I've never been a great fan of the whole wordprocessor idea - I'd rather have a good text processor and a good desktop publisher, and for most things that latter is un-needed. Wordprocessors always seem to be a half-assed text processor plus a quarter-assed DTP program wrapped into one, cumbersome in either role. But I've certainly had to use them often enough, so I've got plenty of experience to base an opinion on.
Plus, everyone running Windows has outlook express for "free" as well as web mail, so lack of an email client in the office suite isn't that big of a deal.
I would completely disagree. The fact that Windows comes with Outlook Express, and that the user will probably wind up using it if another one isn't installed for him, is exactly what makes it a big deal. OE has to be the one piece of... software responsible for the most trouble in the history of computing.
Sun is not and has never been a friend of Free Software - they were the bad guys back when MS was just a little shop in Seattle no one cared about. Maybe some newcomers are fooled by them, but to say that 'the Open Source community' thinks Sun is a friend is ludicrous.
There is a much bigger issue here, however - Monsanto has patents on genetic engineering. Using selective breeding informed by genetics is a way around this massive legal obstruction.
I'm not sure what you're getting at Bruce, but if I'm supposed to find something that contradicts my understanding of levirate marriage the first two pages of googles results certainly doesn't fit the bill. If you're saying that I've misunderstood the custom in some way, you need to be a little more explicity.
On the other hand, if you're just saying that the common modern interpretation is screwy, I do agree. This is part of a larger pattern of Christians generally misunderstanding the OT, which starts in the NT and never lets up. The NT writers misquote and misunderstand the OT over and over again, and often show themselves to be astonishingly ignorant of all things Jewish.
And I believe I explicitly said there's plenty of barbarity in the Bible. But if you want to show how the Bible condemns homosexuality, this episode doesn't show it. Leviticus 20:13, on the other hand, is quite straightforward. And we see in Romans 1:26-27 that Paul, rather than repudiate the OT prohibition, is inclined to expand it to include female homosexuality, which wasn't an issue in the OT. For that matter, when levirate marriage is mentioned in the NT (Mark 12:18-27) it seems that Jesus himself endorses it, though I've never heard of Christians practicing it.
In many ways, Christian tradition goes far beyond the Hebrew mores in its puritanism, even while paying no attention to specific biblical commands such as levirate marriage and the prohibition on contact with a menstruating woman which were extremely important to the Hebrews.
Anyway, for real biblical barbarism I'd suggest Exodus 32:27-29, Numbers 31:17-18, Deuteronomy 28:53, Judges 11:29-39, Isaiah 13:11-16 and Ezekiel 9:4-6 for starters.
There's no shortage of really horrific barbaric passages in the Bible, but I don't think the story of Onan fits that lot. It's traditionally been (very badly) misinterpreted by Christians to condemn masturbation or even homosexuality, yes, but if you read the thing that's clearly not what it was about.
Onans brother married, but died before he could produce offspring. Under Hebrew law, Onan therefore became guardian of this property, including his wife. Under Hebrew law, however, he was supposed to impregnate that wife, and then his offspring through her were to be treated as his brothers offspring - to preserve his brothers name and line, which were very important things. Only in the event that the woman were sterile and no offspring could be reproduced was Onans line to retain his brothers property.
But Onan deliberately withdrew at the last moment, deliberately trying to avoid getting her pregnant, out of greed so he could keep what was his brothers. He was trying to keep the letter of the law but defeat its purpose, and in the context of the Hebrew law at the time, he was attempting to destroy his own brothers line and name in order to take his land. This was his sin.
Actually after another poster provided the name Swordbearer, I found the RGP Encyclopedia and recognised the book I was remembering there. Fantasy Wargaming
1st ed by Bruce Galloway, Mike Hodson-Smith, Nick Lowe, Bruce Quarrie, Paul Sturman (1982) Stein and Day.
I'd still love to remember the pseudo-Indian one. It came with a solo adventure, possibly the best one I ever played if memory isn't fooling me. That's the largest part of what I remember of it, I don't think the mechanics were very notewourthy or I would remember them. It had a pretty cool in depth world to play in, some hella cool character classes, including a class that specialised in training animals, beastmaster or beastlord? Certainly the first time I ever saw that in a game, although it's become pretty common recently but this was early 80s.
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sure, there was plenty of wargaming before D&D. There were also plenty of alternatives that many preferred. The first was probably Tunnels and Trolls (TnT) which had been in development at the same time Gygax and gang were playing around with Chainmail, although it wound up hitting the stores just after D&D. Where D&D had a very serious aura, TnT was infected with a quirky sense of humour. TnT character creation, combat and the like resolved much faster, and was at least as realistic despite that (and later was expanded in Flying Buffalo titles like MSPE to become far more realistic, without losing it's initial advantage in playability.) A number of great systems came out within a few years of the first two. For those into the sort of detailed, meticulous world-settings of great writers like Tolkien, it's worth trying to find a copy of 'Empire of the Petal Throne.' The gaming system was nothing particularly great, but the setting was absolutely incredible. Runequest was another great, the first 'skills based' RPG with again a combat system that beat D&D both for realism and playability simultaneously. Runequest (or rather the Basic Roleplaying System abstracted from Runequest which also became the core of Call of Chtulu, Stormbringer, and several other games from the same publisher) almost evolved into a true Generic system , but Chaosium never quite took that step, leaving the opportunity for former GW stalwart Steve Jackson to produce GURPS. Runequest was pretty much killed off by Avalon Hill later on, but it was a great system.
There are several more early systems I remember very fondly but can't quite remember the names of. One was published as a fairly large hardcover book, and took a very historical medieval view, with a wonderful magic system which was quite open ended without being nebulous... with distinctions such as between witches and hedgewizards versus high and cabalistic magicians... to cast a spell on someone you had to first make a link, often aided by a snip of the targets hair or a toenail or the like. Another was set in an almost Indian themed world, with guards who wore elephantine masks, one had a magic system based on magical 'nodes' I think they were called, tied to 5 elements, harvestable in particular ways and without which a magic using character was pretty helpless. I still remember my poor little L1 necromancer skulking around to kill folks housecats so he could harvest low-grade death nodes from them to power his spells. Anyone remember the names?
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I used to keep my character sheets in a nifty little program me and my cousin wrote together on a TRS-80 model 1. It did saving rolls, to hit rolls, and damage rolls for us too. Go ahead, try to beat that.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't mind having one of these at all, and since I live in Sweden I can probably head right down to the store and pick one up, but I still have to say there's absolutely no excuse for such poor web design. Maybe I'll take a look at some competing products first.
That's utter hogwash. People were inventing things long before patents themselves were invented, and we'll be inventing things long after they're abolished too, assuming we don't destroy ourselves of course.
There are plenty of business models for how to make back R&D investment besides 'get patent, get checks for decades by threatening to sue.' Admittedly, in a world where a long term revenue stream can be guaranteed by resort to patent they don't perform so well, but if they didn't have to compete with patents they could do quite well again.
Abolishing patents would actually have a positive effect on invention, because inventors themselves wouldn't have to worry about avoiding patents from the past. And it would have a great effect on the economy in general, lowering costs and thus prices, while increasing productivity. The enourmous amount of resources now going into patent applications, patent searches, patent litigation and negotiation, could be redirected to productive efforts instead, improving the economy even more. And the better the economy is, the more folks have time and resources to tinker and invent...
Better yet, why not just close the patent office and repeal the patent laws? Save taxpayers money and everyone a lot of aggravation.
The quick launch tray may get a little use from some people, but most 'regular users' I see are just confused by it. It doesn't confuse me, personally, but I have no use for it either. But all the other crap... and no you can't 'turn it off' in all cases. 'Active Desktop' for instance, can still cause crashes after you supposedly turn it off. If you grab TweakUI and a few other utilities, you can turn most of it off, but it's still in there, and can cause crashes, as well as slowing things down. Try WinXP on your oldest, slowest computer, sleek it down as much as you can, and then time how long it takes to open an explorer window. Then install 98lite with the 95 explorer and try it again. The difference is positively breathtaking. Hell, run the same experiment with stock 98SE and 'sleek' 98SElite, it's still very noticeable even there. And in that case the difference is entirely in the explorer.exe version.
But speed and resources aside, I've never had any trouble getting my 98lite 'sleek' machine to display explorer windows the way I want them. When I occasionally have to use a WinXP box it never wants to do that for me, and it appears I am not alone, and it sounds like it takes black magic to accomplish sometimes from the replies to that thread. And even if you do get the default set, some folders won't follow them without more black magic. Now I'm sure if I were motivated enough to take the time, I could probably find all the right invocations and get that thing to behave somewhat usably, but why should I when my method works better, faster, with less fuss? Not to mention allows me to avoid giving MS any more of my money.
I think the point was, there's no difference.
A tax on copyright holders (those that have an income stream from customers of those copyrighed works, at least) will simply be accounted for as a business cost and added to the price their customers pay.
For the purposes I use my Windows box for, 98SE is definately the best version around.
First off, it's easy to easy to disinfect IE from it, which seems to greatly reduce the stability problems, in addition to taking care of the most commonly exploited security holes. Second, it supports a lot more games than 2000. You can also use 98lite to install the old '95 explorer.exe, which is a HUGE gain in usability over the later more annoying explorers. Unlike XP, it doesn't call home. And it's hellaciously fast on my fairly modern equipment, where XP would be just slow enough to make me want to waste a bunch of money on new components.
It's not a legal contract on it's face, as you could easily verify yourself if you'd spend half an hour educating yourself on what a contract is.
Can you present a precedent clearly stating that these 'agreements' are, in fact, legally binding? I've been following these cases with some interest myself for years, and I can't think of one. There are very few precedents, and they tend to be rulings on very narrow particulars that neatly sidestep the broader question.
I repeat, the plaintiff bears the burden of proof. Unless you can present a case in US law that a click-through EULA is a valid contract, you can feel free to choke on your STFU yourself.
And, btw, since you seem to have some confusion on the issue, US Law doesn't apply outside the US anyway. So even if US courts are so corrupt that they would enforce such a thing, that doesn't necessarily mean that the courts where I live would.
There's so many things wrong with this.
First off, what are the chances of a Judge ever needing to see it any way? Practically nill.
Second, even in that case, what on earth makes you think that such a thing could be binding? Burden of proof is on the plaintiff. What are they going to claim? Violation of a license? The EULA is not, despite it's name, a license in the legal sense. It grants no rights, rather it purports to forfeit them. A contract? There are several legal requirements for something to be a valid contract, and this EULA looks to me like it fails those requirements on several points. Even if it only fails one, it's not a valid contract.
There are thousands of these bloody EULAs around, and the only reason anyone ever clicks 'accept' is because that is the action you must take in order to use the software you already bought. Practically no one even reads the things, let alone agrees to them. It's just a mechanical task that poorly designed software imposes on the user.
If you copy a song and sell it, you've violated copyright law. If you copy a song and give it away, without destroying your original copy, you may have violated copyright law. For better or worse, those are real legal offenses. Violating a 'EULA' you never read and never signed, which doesn't meet the legal requirements for a license or a contract or anything else binding, is not.
I was trying to figure out why the hell they were using this phrase in reference to Star Trek and Klingons (who are just as much 'ugly bags of mostly water' as humans are) and you gave me a clue on that - apparently it was ripped off for a TNG episode I haven't seen, eh?
But it certainly didn't originate there. The earlier reference I'm aware of (it's possible this traces back to an even earlier reference I'm not aware of, of course,) was a sci-fi novel where an alien pre-colonisation probe crash-landed on one of the moons of Saturn (maybe Jupiter?) and due to fortuitous damage to the self-replicating robotic terraformers onboard, developed an analogue to mutation in their replication processes and, voilá! evolution made its appearance in a robotic race. It's been decades since I read that book, but a little searching on google leads me to believe it was 'Code of the Lifemaker' by James P. Hogan, (c) 1983. Could be wrong, but it sure sounds like it.
So in that context, it made perfect sense, this race was completely electro-mechanical and the when humans landed and discovered them, they found biological life a completely unforseen and disgusting possibility. I'm at a loss to see how it makes any sense whatsoever in the context of Klingons, however, as I said they're just as much bags of water as humans... wtf?
'Clicking through a EULA' != agreeing to anything.
Actually fair use does allow you to copy the song. It just doesn't allow you to sell copies. Big difference.
Who agreed to it? I certainly didn't.
As a practical matter, I'd really prefer these guys keep their work lower-key. It'd be nice if the publicity went to cracks of MS drm instead, for purely tactical reasons.
But they clearly are within their rights to do it, and it's really a tribute to the popularity of iTunes.
Stagnant? Useless bells and whistles added to up the version number, but little bug fixing? Sounds a lot like MS Office to me.
Frankly, if they'd just ship WP 6 with updated import filters, that would be a hell of a lot better than MS Office anyway.
Of course, I've never been a great fan of the whole wordprocessor idea - I'd rather have a good text processor and a good desktop publisher, and for most things that latter is un-needed. Wordprocessors always seem to be a half-assed text processor plus a quarter-assed DTP program wrapped into one, cumbersome in either role. But I've certainly had to use them often enough, so I've got plenty of experience to base an opinion on.
I would completely disagree. The fact that Windows comes with Outlook Express, and that the user will probably wind up using it if another one isn't installed for him, is exactly what makes it a big deal. OE has to be the one piece of... software responsible for the most trouble in the history of computing.
It's not a matter of legality. It's legal for them to do this. But it does put lie to their pose as friends of Free Software, which was her point.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's friendly.
Sun is not and has never been a friend of Free Software - they were the bad guys back when MS was just a little shop in Seattle no one cared about. Maybe some newcomers are fooled by them, but to say that 'the Open Source community' thinks Sun is a friend is ludicrous.
There is a much bigger issue here, however - Monsanto has patents on genetic engineering. Using selective breeding informed by genetics is a way around this massive legal obstruction.
I'm not sure what you're getting at Bruce, but if I'm supposed to find something that contradicts my understanding of levirate marriage the first two pages of googles results certainly doesn't fit the bill. If you're saying that I've misunderstood the custom in some way, you need to be a little more explicity.
On the other hand, if you're just saying that the common modern interpretation is screwy, I do agree. This is part of a larger pattern of Christians generally misunderstanding the OT, which starts in the NT and never lets up. The NT writers misquote and misunderstand the OT over and over again, and often show themselves to be astonishingly ignorant of all things Jewish.
And I believe I explicitly said there's plenty of barbarity in the Bible. But if you want to show how the Bible condemns homosexuality, this episode doesn't show it. Leviticus 20:13, on the other hand, is quite straightforward. And we see in Romans 1:26-27 that Paul, rather than repudiate the OT prohibition, is inclined to expand it to include female homosexuality, which wasn't an issue in the OT. For that matter, when levirate marriage is mentioned in the NT (Mark 12:18-27) it seems that Jesus himself endorses it, though I've never heard of Christians practicing it.
In many ways, Christian tradition goes far beyond the Hebrew mores in its puritanism, even while paying no attention to specific biblical commands such as levirate marriage and the prohibition on contact with a menstruating woman which were extremely important to the Hebrews.
Anyway, for real biblical barbarism I'd suggest Exodus 32:27-29, Numbers 31:17-18, Deuteronomy 28:53, Judges 11:29-39, Isaiah 13:11-16 and Ezekiel 9:4-6 for starters.
That's what happens when you read a story like this without understanding the culture it came from. ;)
There's no shortage of really horrific barbaric passages in the Bible, but I don't think the story of Onan fits that lot. It's traditionally been (very badly) misinterpreted by Christians to condemn masturbation or even homosexuality, yes, but if you read the thing that's clearly not what it was about.
Onans brother married, but died before he could produce offspring. Under Hebrew law, Onan therefore became guardian of this property, including his wife. Under Hebrew law, however, he was supposed to impregnate that wife, and then his offspring through her were to be treated as his brothers offspring - to preserve his brothers name and line, which were very important things. Only in the event that the woman were sterile and no offspring could be reproduced was Onans line to retain his brothers property.
But Onan deliberately withdrew at the last moment, deliberately trying to avoid getting her pregnant, out of greed so he could keep what was his brothers. He was trying to keep the letter of the law but defeat its purpose, and in the context of the Hebrew law at the time, he was attempting to destroy his own brothers line and name in order to take his land. This was his sin.
It seemed possible, but a quick glance at your journal shows it's not so. ;)
Actually after another poster provided the name Swordbearer, I found the RGP Encyclopedia and recognised the book I was remembering there. Fantasy Wargaming 1st ed by Bruce Galloway, Mike Hodson-Smith, Nick Lowe, Bruce Quarrie, Paul Sturman (1982) Stein and Day.
I'd still love to remember the pseudo-Indian one. It came with a solo adventure, possibly the best one I ever played if memory isn't fooling me. That's the largest part of what I remember of it, I don't think the mechanics were very notewourthy or I would remember them. It had a pretty cool in depth world to play in, some hella cool character classes, including a class that specialised in training animals, beastmaster or beastlord? Certainly the first time I ever saw that in a game, although it's become pretty common recently but this was early 80s.
Swordbearer! Yes, that was the name. Thanks.
Sure, there was plenty of wargaming before D&D. There were also plenty of alternatives that many preferred. The first was probably Tunnels and Trolls (TnT) which had been in development at the same time Gygax and gang were playing around with Chainmail, although it wound up hitting the stores just after D&D. Where D&D had a very serious aura, TnT was infected with a quirky sense of humour. TnT character creation, combat and the like resolved much faster, and was at least as realistic despite that (and later was expanded in Flying Buffalo titles like MSPE to become far more realistic, without losing it's initial advantage in playability.) A number of great systems came out within a few years of the first two. For those into the sort of detailed, meticulous world-settings of great writers like Tolkien, it's worth trying to find a copy of 'Empire of the Petal Throne.' The gaming system was nothing particularly great, but the setting was absolutely incredible. Runequest was another great, the first 'skills based' RPG with again a combat system that beat D&D both for realism and playability simultaneously. Runequest (or rather the Basic Roleplaying System abstracted from Runequest which also became the core of Call of Chtulu, Stormbringer, and several other games from the same publisher) almost evolved into a true Generic system , but Chaosium never quite took that step, leaving the opportunity for former GW stalwart Steve Jackson to produce GURPS. Runequest was pretty much killed off by Avalon Hill later on, but it was a great system.
There are several more early systems I remember very fondly but can't quite remember the names of. One was published as a fairly large hardcover book, and took a very historical medieval view, with a wonderful magic system which was quite open ended without being nebulous... with distinctions such as between witches and hedgewizards versus high and cabalistic magicians... to cast a spell on someone you had to first make a link, often aided by a snip of the targets hair or a toenail or the like. Another was set in an almost Indian themed world, with guards who wore elephantine masks, one had a magic system based on magical 'nodes' I think they were called, tied to 5 elements, harvestable in particular ways and without which a magic using character was pretty helpless. I still remember my poor little L1 necromancer skulking around to kill folks housecats so he could harvest low-grade death nodes from them to power his spells. Anyone remember the names?
I used to keep my character sheets in a nifty little program me and my cousin wrote together on a TRS-80 model 1. It did saving rolls, to hit rolls, and damage rolls for us too. Go ahead, try to beat that. ;)