On screen layout, font selection, text flow direction and the like should have been provided by supplemental libraries that understand languages.
Then it's still part of unicode, you just make some parts undisplayable despite the software "supporting unicode".
I'm thinking about something like this.
Say you have a range dedicated to Japanese, 0x00010000 to 0x000FFFF. In your font description metadata you can have all the glyph mapping information. Your word processor software will know about bidirectional text and Japanese grammar.
You might have an official table that states that characters in that range are all Japanese language. They are typically rendered left to right, or alternatively top to bottom. It's up to the software to do what it will with that information. At least it can select a reasonable font, unlike now where there is no way of knowing if it should use Japanese or Chinese characters.
Unfortunately just using UTF-32 won't really help fix Unicode because a lot of the problems are unrelated to it. The Unicode Consortium's dislike of UTF-32 is actually quite telling.
For example, they say that there isn't much advantage to fixed size code point encodings because with UTF16 and UTF8 you can still work backwards by simply examining 2-3 previous bytes... But what does 95% of software do? Convert UTF8 to UTF16 internally and then assume 2 bytes = 1 character.
It's this kind of thing that makes Unicode software so unreliable and fragile enough that a single character can boot loop your phone.
Unicode is full of similarly terrible ideas, like the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The pitch is that if you support the BMP you are good with 99% of the world's languages, only obscure stuff needs the extended parts. In reality millions of people can't type their name into your software. And all that because >2 bytes per codepoint is barely supported by anything. It's like going back to the 7 bit ASCII days on Usenet.
All of these problems are because Unicode to highly inconsistent and seemingly designed to cause these kinds of bugs and denial-of-service attacks.
Unicode should have focused just on encoding characters. No modifier characters - Unicode uses them inconsistently in some scripts but not others - which would fix the need for an impossibly complex set of crash-proofing, anti-trolling and grammar rules.
On screen layout, font selection, text flow direction and the like should have been provided by supplemental libraries that understand languages. Stuff like the on-screen width of a string is something you need to query the font rendering engine for anyway. Translation of input is done by the IME.
All the meta characters need to go too, like zero width spaces and bidirectional flow encodings. That stuff is metadata.
The app most likely only really cares about handling arbitrary strings (remember programmers don't know anything about languages) without crashing. And if it does care, the developer doesn't want to become an expert in Unicode as well as in the relevant languages.
A lot of these movies are bad, and they are bad because they boil down to being fights between CGI good guys and CGI bad guys, none of whom you care about and which is nothing you haven't seen before.
DC is actually far worse for that. Compare Nolan's Batman to Snyder's movies. Nolan was actually very conservative with the CGI and focused on the characters instead. You didn't notice most of the CGI because it was just there to enhance the acting and sets, not to create silly action figure fight scenes on obviously fake sets.
It's not just that Batman is a more down-to-earth character either. Wonder Woman managed to do the same thing, it was a film about the character's coming of age and taking her place in the world as a champion of justice. When Snyder got hold of her he replaced her with a CGI model or pointed the camera at Gal Gadot's arse and it sucked.
Directors who are obsessed with CGI treat the actors the same way - meat to create a certain image on screen, usually just some dude 'roiding out or some generic "hot babe" to wank over. And their movies all suck. And DC can't seem to figure this out.
Marvel is doing much better. Sony keeps botching Spiderman and the Fantastic 4, but the other movies are actually pretty good. Avengers, Thor, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr. Strange, Ant Man and now Black Panther is probably the best of the lot, or at least in the top 3.
I've read hundreds of studies in psychology about the biological differences between men and women and there's evidence both ways.
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Just because Damore can google some studies to support your position doesn't really help him. The Labour Board and the court will look at the memo he distributed. They will note that the authors of the studies he cites don't agree with his conclusions, so even if he can cite other sources he has already undermined his cased by selecting support material he clearly didn't understand.
However well meaning his point may have been, saying that women are biologically less suited to the job and then debunking yourself with studies is probably an unrecoverable position. "I meant well but screwed up massively" isn't much of an argument against being fired.
This is quite a common flaw in many self-proclaimed rationalist arguments. You see it on YouTube, Reddit and Slashdot all the time. They have already formed an opinion, so they go googling for evidence. They find a paper, skim the first page and see that it seems to confirm their beliefs, and claim they have scientific proof. Typically if you actually read the paper it's much less conclusive or actually debunks them. King of rationals Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon) does this every single time without fail. It's actually quite incredible, until you realize that the gallery people like him are playing to don't bother check sources either.
I've been evaluating Windows 10 IoT Core, their current Windows-on-ARM offering that is replacing Windows CE. It's total crap, like Windows CE before it.
Microsoft can't make good operating systems for ARM and non-desktop platforms. I don't know why, they just can't. You download the test Win 10 IoT image for Raspberry Pi and it doesn't have a soft keyboard installed, or any demo apps, or any way to actually evaluate it without huge effort. Microsoft are just terrible at this.
So I'm not expecting Windows 10 on ARM to be much good, if you couldn't tell. Probably just another Windows 8 RT. Doesn't run anything, no-one wants it, quietly dies in a corner.
It really is time to replace Unicode with something more robust. These errors due to things like combinational characters and tricks like using the text flow control characters to mask file extensions keep coming up.
Programmers aren't language experts, there are no good libraries for handling Unicode, can't even agree on one sane encoding for it... And it's so bad that it's avoided in east Asia for the most part, or just some incompatible subset is used.
It's telling that the only response left to pointing out the flaws in Damore's memo is to bring it the straw men. As I've told you over and over, I know there are biological differences, the Labour Board knows there are biological differences, the studies are about biological differences. That's not in dispute by anyone except for you.
The issue, the one you refuse to address because you know it's devastating and impossible to dispute, is that the authors of those same studies said that the conclusions Damore drew were unwarranted.
If you claim they are wrong then the memo is built on flawed studies. If you accept they are right then Damore is wrong. If you try to claim that Damore knows better than the experts who did the studies and his conclusions are more valid, you look foolish.
So you go to the straw man. You know it's not what I said, you know it's not the argument being made, but you pretend it is.
That's how bad the memo is. We went from "you didn't read it" to "you didn't read the studies" to pretending not to understand the argument put to you.
If diversity is "obvious" and we need "50-50" party and all that shit, and Salon et al minimum-wage journalists know what's best for us, then why do you need someone making over half-a-million a year just to tell you that? Is "not hiring black people = bad" something so profound you need a dedicated "scientist" to reveal that gem?
That paragraph actually demonstrates why you need someone to explain this to you.
Obsession with goals like 50-50 isn't going to get you anywhere. And the problem is far more complex than overt racism like simply refusing to hire non-white people. Simply saying "okay, from today no more discrimination" won't make much difference either... I mean, it's been illegal for a long time already and a lot of problems still persist.
Meanwhile, notice a complete lack of any formulas, philosophies
Really, are you totally unaware of the many decades of research and the vast body of work on diversity, and the various philosophies that incorporate it? Have you never heard of feminism, for example? Never read any papers examining the equal pay gap, complete with formulas for adjusting the raw stats based on education and experience etc?
Diversity is also a popular target for demagogues and populists. It's easy to point to it and generate some outrage that other people are getting something extra, while simply ignoring the fact that they also started in a much worse position too.
It takes companies a while to realize that it's profitable. As the big, successful ones start throwing serious money at the problem (like Intel's $300m investment) more and more start getting on-board.
Companies don't behave rationally. They are as prone to fads, dogma and incompetence just like people are, only worse because the hive mind tends to be a bit sociopathic. Actually, a lot sociopathic.
It's funny because Damore made exactly the same observations about Google's workplace being unfavorable to women and how to improve it to better retain women in his memo
Unfortunately he got it so catastrophically wrong that he actually put women off working for Google. Check the Labour Board investigation of the issue, at least two women dropped out of the recruitment process citing his memo as the reason.
I'm also not sure that the article you cite applies in the U.S. as it's illegal to ask if someone has children or even if they're married.
It's legally problematic in the UK as well, but of course difficult to prove and often not enforced. In any case, an employer doesn't necessarily need to ask, they can just throw any application from a woman under the age of 45 in the bin.
I've had people ask about my ancestry before based on my last name.
For me it's about 90% of the people I've ever been introduced to. Seriously, people hear my last name and seem to automatically ask about its origin. I don't blame them or get offended, but it is beyond annoying. Sometimes it can even get problematic, like when they can't hide their concern that I might be a Muslim. I can't imagine what replying "yes" would be like, but I'm tempted to try it.
So it's a bit more than a pet peeve, and it's exactly the sort of thing that HR should be helping with. If it's less common in the US then that's a good thing, whatever the reason. In the UK it depends where you are - in London it's much less of an issue than in deepest Somerset.
If everyone were recruiting purely based on talent
companies who ignore that which is profitable for too long tend to be out of business quickly.
Unrelated to the real world.
I think that you also have to admit that diversity efforts can go too far in the other direction
It's not really an admission, because it requires you to assume that I think all diversity efforts are automatically good and there can be no incompetency. I think you have to admit that would be a rather strange assumption.
I'm not really sure how a diversity policy helps anything unless you've got a bunch of racists in HR or upper management
Then allow me to explain.
Data out today shows that a lot of employers have pretty regressive policies towards women and particularly mothers. That makes it harder for them to hire women and to retain women, which means they have a smaller pool of available talent to draw on.
Another example is lack of understanding about disabilities. A lot of people worry that having a disabled person work for/with them will be costly, that they will need a lot of time off sick, that they will be unproductive or that they might suddenly get worse and go on long term sick leave. A bit of education and understanding goes a long way. Once a disable person is hired a bit of support (which is legally required anyway in many countries) can help retain them.
To help recruit minority candidates a bit of understanding about why questions like "where are you really from?" are inappropriate goes a long way. Again, it's not really overt racism... The technical term is "microagreession" but that seems to trigger people (oops), so it might be better described as "don't ask the same daft questions they always get asked and respond to with no, really, I'm from Birmingham."
Diversity policies can help companies fill positions that they would otherwise struggle to, and retain staff for longer. It can help them develop better products, e.g. the recent story about facial recognition that doesn't work with dark skin.
In IBM's case it looks a lot like they are trying to cover up offshoring and the use of skilled worker visas (H1B in the US). Not really anything to do with diversity, except perhaps that she knows about using this trick to make the numbers look better while also cutting costs and quality.
Advertising is about selling you shit you don't need. Selling you shit you do need is easy, invasive advertising is only required to make you buy stuff you could live happily without.
The primary mechanism for making you buy shit you don't need is psychological abuse. Adverts make you feel inadequate because you don't own that thing. They try to make you measure your worth by the amount of worthless shit you own.
If say I could put â10 into a pot and have it paid out to sites I visit somehow I'd be happy to do that. Obviously I'd expect not to be bombarded with ads in return.
This sounds like a good application for a blockchain.
Sounds perfect for Wikipedia. Research and logic are now allowed, all that matters is finding a reliable source that says something and summarising it. The only real skills required are writing summaries and defending the reliability of your source on the talk page.
Anything search starting with "+torrent +magnet..." gets no relevant results on google but has relevant results on bing.
What country are you in? For me (VPN endpoint in various EU countries) I use Google to search for torrents all the time. I usually don't bother with the + symbol though, just the word "torrent" or "magnet".
- Windows ME - Windows Vista - Zune - Plays For Sure (except on Zune) - ActiveX - Windows firewall defaults to off - XBOX 360 Red Ring of Death - MICROS~1
One other area where the Bing image search is slightly superior is that you can search for more kinds of licence than on Google. Google is just free / not free, but Bing lets you select two types of Creative Commons, Public domain and a variety of others.
I tired to find out what I can spend these Microsoft Reward Points on. Unfortunately the front page of their web site is information-free and the more info link (https://rewards.microsoft.com/explore/error?page=ms-rewards-faq) is down.
Seems like you can only spend it on XBOX stuff, and I don't have any of that. Can I get free Microsoft products like Windows with it?
And is it compatible with random fake search generator add-ons?
Slashdot Mirror
On screen layout, font selection, text flow direction and the like should have been provided by supplemental libraries that understand languages.
Then it's still part of unicode, you just make some parts undisplayable despite the software "supporting unicode".
I'm thinking about something like this.
Say you have a range dedicated to Japanese, 0x00010000 to 0x000FFFF. In your font description metadata you can have all the glyph mapping information. Your word processor software will know about bidirectional text and Japanese grammar.
You might have an official table that states that characters in that range are all Japanese language. They are typically rendered left to right, or alternatively top to bottom. It's up to the software to do what it will with that information. At least it can select a reasonable font, unlike now where there is no way of knowing if it should use Japanese or Chinese characters.
"UTF" stands for "Unicode Transformation Format".
Unfortunately just using UTF-32 won't really help fix Unicode because a lot of the problems are unrelated to it. The Unicode Consortium's dislike of UTF-32 is actually quite telling.
For example, they say that there isn't much advantage to fixed size code point encodings because with UTF16 and UTF8 you can still work backwards by simply examining 2-3 previous bytes... But what does 95% of software do? Convert UTF8 to UTF16 internally and then assume 2 bytes = 1 character.
It's this kind of thing that makes Unicode software so unreliable and fragile enough that a single character can boot loop your phone.
Unicode is full of similarly terrible ideas, like the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). The pitch is that if you support the BMP you are good with 99% of the world's languages, only obscure stuff needs the extended parts. In reality millions of people can't type their name into your software. And all that because >2 bytes per codepoint is barely supported by anything. It's like going back to the 7 bit ASCII days on Usenet.
Bravo. I googled and no-one else is using that.
All of these problems are because Unicode to highly inconsistent and seemingly designed to cause these kinds of bugs and denial-of-service attacks.
Unicode should have focused just on encoding characters. No modifier characters - Unicode uses them inconsistently in some scripts but not others - which would fix the need for an impossibly complex set of crash-proofing, anti-trolling and grammar rules.
On screen layout, font selection, text flow direction and the like should have been provided by supplemental libraries that understand languages. Stuff like the on-screen width of a string is something you need to query the font rendering engine for anyway. Translation of input is done by the IME.
All the meta characters need to go too, like zero width spaces and bidirectional flow encodings. That stuff is metadata.
The app most likely only really cares about handling arbitrary strings (remember programmers don't know anything about languages) without crashing. And if it does care, the developer doesn't want to become an expert in Unicode as well as in the relevant languages.
A lot of these movies are bad, and they are bad because they boil down to being fights between CGI good guys and CGI bad guys, none of whom you care about and which is nothing you haven't seen before.
DC is actually far worse for that. Compare Nolan's Batman to Snyder's movies. Nolan was actually very conservative with the CGI and focused on the characters instead. You didn't notice most of the CGI because it was just there to enhance the acting and sets, not to create silly action figure fight scenes on obviously fake sets.
It's not just that Batman is a more down-to-earth character either. Wonder Woman managed to do the same thing, it was a film about the character's coming of age and taking her place in the world as a champion of justice. When Snyder got hold of her he replaced her with a CGI model or pointed the camera at Gal Gadot's arse and it sucked.
Directors who are obsessed with CGI treat the actors the same way - meat to create a certain image on screen, usually just some dude 'roiding out or some generic "hot babe" to wank over. And their movies all suck. And DC can't seem to figure this out.
Marvel is doing much better. Sony keeps botching Spiderman and the Fantastic 4, but the other movies are actually pretty good. Avengers, Thor, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr. Strange, Ant Man and now Black Panther is probably the best of the lot, or at least in the top 3.
I've read hundreds of studies in psychology about the biological differences between men and women and there's evidence both ways.
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Just because Damore can google some studies to support your position doesn't really help him. The Labour Board and the court will look at the memo he distributed. They will note that the authors of the studies he cites don't agree with his conclusions, so even if he can cite other sources he has already undermined his cased by selecting support material he clearly didn't understand.
However well meaning his point may have been, saying that women are biologically less suited to the job and then debunking yourself with studies is probably an unrecoverable position. "I meant well but screwed up massively" isn't much of an argument against being fired.
This is quite a common flaw in many self-proclaimed rationalist arguments. You see it on YouTube, Reddit and Slashdot all the time. They have already formed an opinion, so they go googling for evidence. They find a paper, skim the first page and see that it seems to confirm their beliefs, and claim they have scientific proof. Typically if you actually read the paper it's much less conclusive or actually debunks them. King of rationals Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon) does this every single time without fail. It's actually quite incredible, until you realize that the gallery people like him are playing to don't bother check sources either.
I've been evaluating Windows 10 IoT Core, their current Windows-on-ARM offering that is replacing Windows CE. It's total crap, like Windows CE before it.
Microsoft can't make good operating systems for ARM and non-desktop platforms. I don't know why, they just can't. You download the test Win 10 IoT image for Raspberry Pi and it doesn't have a soft keyboard installed, or any demo apps, or any way to actually evaluate it without huge effort. Microsoft are just terrible at this.
So I'm not expecting Windows 10 on ARM to be much good, if you couldn't tell. Probably just another Windows 8 RT. Doesn't run anything, no-one wants it, quietly dies in a corner.
PS. I'm thinking of starting work on this, but can't think of a good name. Any suggestions?
It really is time to replace Unicode with something more robust. These errors due to things like combinational characters and tricks like using the text flow control characters to mask file extensions keep coming up.
Programmers aren't language experts, there are no good libraries for handling Unicode, can't even agree on one sane encoding for it... And it's so bad that it's avoided in east Asia for the most part, or just some incompatible subset is used.
It's a good business model not to dump toxic waste into the river because of government regulation.
It's telling that the only response left to pointing out the flaws in Damore's memo is to bring it the straw men. As I've told you over and over, I know there are biological differences, the Labour Board knows there are biological differences, the studies are about biological differences. That's not in dispute by anyone except for you.
The issue, the one you refuse to address because you know it's devastating and impossible to dispute, is that the authors of those same studies said that the conclusions Damore drew were unwarranted.
If you claim they are wrong then the memo is built on flawed studies. If you accept they are right then Damore is wrong. If you try to claim that Damore knows better than the experts who did the studies and his conclusions are more valid, you look foolish.
So you go to the straw man. You know it's not what I said, you know it's not the argument being made, but you pretend it is.
That's how bad the memo is. We went from "you didn't read it" to "you didn't read the studies" to pretending not to understand the argument put to you.
Invoking Dunning-Kruger is just like calling out virtue signalling. You have no arguments left, and are probably a victim of it yourself.
If diversity is "obvious" and we need "50-50" party and all that shit, and Salon et al minimum-wage journalists know what's best for us, then why do you need someone making over half-a-million a year just to tell you that? Is "not hiring black people = bad" something so profound you need a dedicated "scientist" to reveal that gem?
That paragraph actually demonstrates why you need someone to explain this to you.
Obsession with goals like 50-50 isn't going to get you anywhere. And the problem is far more complex than overt racism like simply refusing to hire non-white people. Simply saying "okay, from today no more discrimination" won't make much difference either... I mean, it's been illegal for a long time already and a lot of problems still persist.
Meanwhile, notice a complete lack of any formulas, philosophies
Really, are you totally unaware of the many decades of research and the vast body of work on diversity, and the various philosophies that incorporate it? Have you never heard of feminism, for example? Never read any papers examining the equal pay gap, complete with formulas for adjusting the raw stats based on education and experience etc?
Diversity is also a popular target for demagogues and populists. It's easy to point to it and generate some outrage that other people are getting something extra, while simply ignoring the fact that they also started in a much worse position too.
It takes companies a while to realize that it's profitable. As the big, successful ones start throwing serious money at the problem (like Intel's $300m investment) more and more start getting on-board.
Companies don't behave rationally. They are as prone to fads, dogma and incompetence just like people are, only worse because the hive mind tends to be a bit sociopathic. Actually, a lot sociopathic.
It's funny because Damore made exactly the same observations about Google's workplace being unfavorable to women and how to improve it to better retain women in his memo
Unfortunately he got it so catastrophically wrong that he actually put women off working for Google. Check the Labour Board investigation of the issue, at least two women dropped out of the recruitment process citing his memo as the reason.
I'm also not sure that the article you cite applies in the U.S. as it's illegal to ask if someone has children or even if they're married.
It's legally problematic in the UK as well, but of course difficult to prove and often not enforced. In any case, an employer doesn't necessarily need to ask, they can just throw any application from a woman under the age of 45 in the bin.
I've had people ask about my ancestry before based on my last name.
For me it's about 90% of the people I've ever been introduced to. Seriously, people hear my last name and seem to automatically ask about its origin. I don't blame them or get offended, but it is beyond annoying. Sometimes it can even get problematic, like when they can't hide their concern that I might be a Muslim. I can't imagine what replying "yes" would be like, but I'm tempted to try it.
So it's a bit more than a pet peeve, and it's exactly the sort of thing that HR should be helping with. If it's less common in the US then that's a good thing, whatever the reason. In the UK it depends where you are - in London it's much less of an issue than in deepest Somerset.
If everyone were recruiting purely based on talent
companies who ignore that which is profitable for too long tend to be out of business quickly.
Unrelated to the real world.
I think that you also have to admit that diversity efforts can go too far in the other direction
It's not really an admission, because it requires you to assume that I think all diversity efforts are automatically good and there can be no incompetency. I think you have to admit that would be a rather strange assumption.
I'm not really sure how a diversity policy helps anything unless you've got a bunch of racists in HR or upper management
Then allow me to explain.
Data out today shows that a lot of employers have pretty regressive policies towards women and particularly mothers. That makes it harder for them to hire women and to retain women, which means they have a smaller pool of available talent to draw on.
Another example is lack of understanding about disabilities. A lot of people worry that having a disabled person work for/with them will be costly, that they will need a lot of time off sick, that they will be unproductive or that they might suddenly get worse and go on long term sick leave. A bit of education and understanding goes a long way. Once a disable person is hired a bit of support (which is legally required anyway in many countries) can help retain them.
To help recruit minority candidates a bit of understanding about why questions like "where are you really from?" are inappropriate goes a long way. Again, it's not really overt racism... The technical term is "microagreession" but that seems to trigger people (oops), so it might be better described as "don't ask the same daft questions they always get asked and respond to with no, really, I'm from Birmingham."
There are huge profits to be made from diversity.
Diversity policies can help companies fill positions that they would otherwise struggle to, and retain staff for longer. It can help them develop better products, e.g. the recent story about facial recognition that doesn't work with dark skin.
In IBM's case it looks a lot like they are trying to cover up offshoring and the use of skilled worker visas (H1B in the US). Not really anything to do with diversity, except perhaps that she knows about using this trick to make the numbers look better while also cutting costs and quality.
Advertising is about selling you shit you don't need. Selling you shit you do need is easy, invasive advertising is only required to make you buy stuff you could live happily without.
The primary mechanism for making you buy shit you don't need is psychological abuse. Adverts make you feel inadequate because you don't own that thing. They try to make you measure your worth by the amount of worthless shit you own.
I'd pay if there was a reasonable way to pay.
If say I could put â10 into a pot and have it paid out to sites I visit somehow I'd be happy to do that. Obviously I'd expect not to be bombarded with ads in return.
This sounds like a good application for a blockchain.
Sounds perfect for Wikipedia. Research and logic are now allowed, all that matters is finding a reliable source that says something and summarising it. The only real skills required are writing summaries and defending the reliability of your source on the talk page.
Anything search starting with "+torrent +magnet ..." gets no relevant results on google but has relevant results on bing.
What country are you in? For me (VPN endpoint in various EU countries) I use Google to search for torrents all the time. I usually don't bother with the + symbol though, just the word "torrent" or "magnet".
one of their all time greatest fuckups
I dunno man, the competition is pretty strong.
- Windows ME
- Windows Vista
- Zune
- Plays For Sure (except on Zune)
- ActiveX
- Windows firewall defaults to off
- XBOX 360 Red Ring of Death
- MICROS~1
One other area where the Bing image search is slightly superior is that you can search for more kinds of licence than on Google. Google is just free / not free, but Bing lets you select two types of Creative Commons, Public domain and a variety of others.
I tired to find out what I can spend these Microsoft Reward Points on. Unfortunately the front page of their web site is information-free and the more info link (https://rewards.microsoft.com/explore/error?page=ms-rewards-faq) is down.
Seems like you can only spend it on XBOX stuff, and I don't have any of that. Can I get free Microsoft products like Windows with it?
And is it compatible with random fake search generator add-ons?