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User: Ark42

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  1. Re:Updated Policy: on Names That Break Computers (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    The issue isn't how many characters exist. There is room to add more characters to Unicode when missing ones are found. The big failure of Unicode is Han Unification, which is basically like saying "Well the character A in America has the same *meaning* as the character B in Canada, so let's only issue one codepoint for A/B" and now when you type an A on your American computer, all Canadian's see a B because their fonts render the exact same character differently. This happened with many common characters that have the same *meaning* in Chinese and Japanese, but are drawn completely differently. As an example, try to copy the Kanji at http://jisho.org/search/%E5%B0... into MS Word and compare the Meiryo font vs Microsoft YaHei font.

  2. Re:Updated Policy: on Names That Break Computers (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Quite frankly, Unicode works well right now, provided you use UTF-8 or UTF-32. UTF-16 and surrogate pairs is really quite an ugly hack, and 16-bits are obviously not enough when we need nearly 21 bits to encode all the existing characters already. UTF-8 is quite elegant (compatible with ASCII, but easily countable and self-synchronizing) and UTF-8 can easily be extended to 31 bits, should we need more codepoints in the future. UTF-16 can't be extended in any easy way and will just become a nightmare to support, should future versions of Unicode decide to start using codepoints above U+10FFFF

  3. Re:Not sure I trust it. on It's Time To Kill the $100 Bill, Says Larry Summers · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's basically bigger banks or the central government charging smaller banks to keep their money. The idea is to encourage lending and spur the economy. No personal checking/savings account has negative interest that I've heard of (yet?).

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01... - Japan this year

  4. Re:either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a po on Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    I looked into this before, and in the newer setups like my laptop, it seems common that your choices for GPU in the BIOS are Intel-only, or Hybrid. You cannot select just the nVidia one. There is probably some reason in the hardware that it's not possible now.

  5. Re:either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a po on Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    Even with the crummy update that Google didn't need to do, Google Maps runs significantly faster and smoother on way older, slower hardware (custom built desktops) where there is not a hybrid GPU setup. Having a 100% dedicated nVidia card that everything always uses is great. Having an Intel GPU that is used for anything at all makes having the nVidia GPU a pointless waste of money when buying a laptop.

  6. Re:either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a po on Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    Basically, the end result is that I paid extra for an nVidia card when I bought this, thinking it would *replace* the Intel one, but it did not. Several desktop computers I built from parts all work just fine with nVidia cards, and don't have an Intel GPU or funny Optimus drivers getting in the way of things. Google maps always runs super fast and smooth, and nothing ever crashes. Next time I buy a laptop, I'm going to pay extra attention, and if you can't entirely 100% disable the Intel GPU, then there is zero point to having the nVidia GPU added on.

  7. Re:either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a po on Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    The nVidia driver actually greyed out and prevents you from selecting the nVidia GPU for apps in it's known-list. Firefox and Chrome are on the list of programs that can only use the Intel GPU. You can always copy Firefox.exe to Firefox2.exe and then it's not on the known-list. You can browse to it from the nVidia control panel thing, then set that to use the nVidia GPU. Unfortunately, it tends to crash the whole OS a lot if you do that, which seems pretty ridiculous. I tried both Firefox and Chrome and eventually gave up and left them on the Intel GPU.

  8. Re:either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a po on Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    On my laptop, no. You CAN disable the nVidia GPU though.

  9. either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a power on Dell Brings 4K InfinityEdge Display To XPS 15 Line, GeForce GPU, Under 4 Pounds (hothardware.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    What "either integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 or a powerful GeForce GTX 960M" means is that the nVidia driver will make regular windows, and apps like Firefox/Chrome use the slow Intel card for all your regular stuff. Google maps or anything that uses WebGL will slow to a crawl. Only games are "allowed" to run on the real GPU.
    At least, that's how the last laptop I got a year ago with a setup like that worked...
    I have a Core i7-4500U, 16GB RAM, and a GT735M, and it is absolutely painful to use certain things like Google Maps.

  10. Re:Learn your mathematical operators on The Real Cost of Mobile Ads · · Score: 2

    So many developers reflexively include tons of jQuery and Bootstrap CSS/JS files, 99% of which aren't used on the entire site. Just because that's the only way some people know how to "code" web sites. When you add in jQueryUI and a bunch of FontAwesome fonts that aren't used either, I'm surprised some people could write a single "Hello World" page in under 20MB.

  11. Why do I have a 6.55GB $Windows.~BT folder if it won't let me upgrade yet? If it already downloaded everything at some point, shouldn't the install just start? Why stagger the installs and not the downloads? I thought the point was to not hammer the servers with lots of downloads at once...

  12. Re:Drivers on Windows 10 Will Have Screen Recording Tool · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure this stupid hybid GPU system is the reason I need Sony-specific drivers and the Intel/nVidia default graphic drivers just make things run super super slow. I do suspect the current 8/8.1 drivers will work just fine on 10 though, but Sony's official position is to not install Windows 10 until after November right now.

  13. Re:Drivers on Windows 10 Will Have Screen Recording Tool · · Score: 1

    Given how bad the stock Intel and nVidia drivers make my Vaio Flip 15 function compared to the modified Sony ones, I'm pretty worried about upgrading to Windows 10. Drivers aren't going to be available until November according to Sony - http://esupport.sony.com/US/p/... - because mine came with 8 (not 8.1) preinstalled, even though 8.1 was out at the time.

  14. Re:What bug? on New Unicode Bug Discovered For Common Japanese Character "No" · · Score: 1

    Except while that is called "Hyphen-Minus" and can be used for two things, Unicode does try to solve that problem by having:
    00AD Soft Hyphen
    2010 Hypen
    2011 Non-Breaking Hyphen
    2012 Figure Dash
    2013 En Dash
    2014 Em Dash
    2015 Horizontal Bar
    2212 Minus Sign
    2796 Heavy Minus Sign

    There is no "Mathematical Hiragana No" glyph defined by Unicode, and as such, it should never be rendered in a different font just because somebody *might* use it in a formula. The application is wrong, and there is no bug in Unicode.

  15. Re:What bug? on New Unicode Bug Discovered For Common Japanese Character "No" · · Score: 1

    I'm aware of the problems with the han unification and certain Kanji being displayed "wrong" because the Chinese equivalent is drawn significantly different from the Japanese Kanji, but this doesn't seem to be anything close to that kind of problem. I'm also aware of the Unicode block U+1D400 "Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols" which is what should be used for formulas. Any application that is rendering one particular character in the Hiragana block in a different font than the rest of the Hiragana block, is quite frankly, just rendering it wrong. The bug is with the application as far as I'm concerned, and this clearly does not impact default system rendering or any common web browsers as far as I can see either.

  16. Re:Still too much on A Welcome Shift: Spam Now Constitutes Less Than Half of All Email · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hotmail/MSN/Outlook mail is well known for just not delivering lots of legitimate mail now. You may not see spam there, but you may not get mail from a friend who doesn't use common webmail like gmail or Yahoo. The mail does not even go to your junk/spam folders, and it does not get bounced to the sender. They just silently accept and delete incoming mail, without any notification.

    I'd, personally, rather see spam getting through than email become a useless technology that fades away because people can't rely on it anymore.

  17. What bug? on New Unicode Bug Discovered For Common Japanese Character "No" · · Score: 4, Informative

    The character in question is Hiragana "No", codepoint U+306E. As far as I can tell, this has existed since Unicode 1.1 and there are no differences in the Unicode metadata when compared to any other Hiragana glyph. It is marked as IsAlphabetic=True, Category=Other Letter, and NumbericType=None for example. So are all the other common Hiragana glyphs. If there is a bug, it's clearly with some specific application, and not Unicode or Unicode metadata. Compare http://www.fileformat.info/inf... with any other Hiragana glyph, like http://www.fileformat.info/inf... (Hiragana "Ha").

  18. Vanilla JS on To Learn (Or Not Learn) JQuery · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    http://vanilla-js.com/ is probably much more worth learning and using. The *ONLY* reason to be using jQuery is for IE8 support, but I've long since required IE9+ for all freelance work I do, and do everything in CSS and Vanilla JS now.

  19. Important questions... on Samsung Cellphone Keyboard Software Vulnerable To Attack · · Score: 1

    Can this be used to root your phone (as in, install SuperSU), and can this be done without tripping Knox?

    Can this be then mitigated by a simple hosts entry for the domain used to check for updates? (Pretty sure the answer here would yes - if skslm.swiftkey.net points to 127.0.0.1, no rouge WiFi's DNS is going to be able to change that).

  20. Windows does render ClearType fonts into the subpixels BEFORE scaling up though, completely negating the subpixel rendering benefits, and actually making fonts look significantly worse as a result.
    The whole scale-up solution for applications that don't declare DPI aware in the manifest resource would be a lot better if they at least reverted to greyscale subpixel font rendering first...

  21. It's because unless your app declares itself HiDPI-aware in the manifest file (Skype does not do this) then Windows will pretend that it's still 96dpi and then just scale up the UI 200% (for 192dpi screens). But it's not as simple as adding the line to the manifest file. You actually have to write your software without the assumption of 96dpi dialogs, and use the system API functions to query the proper scales. Most developers never seem to even know about those functions though, so you end up with a random mix of too-big and too-small things.

    Even if Microsoft's scaling approach didn't render fonts into the subpixels BEFORE scaling up the 200%, it would still look really blurry and horrible compared to just fixing the code in Skype to actually take advantage of higher resolution. Apple's approach just gives you grey blurry edges around fonts and blurry graphics vs Microsoft's red and blue blurry edges around fonts and blurry graphics.

  22. Maybe they can finally make it looks readable on HiDPI (192dpi) screens like my 2880x1620 laptop. The font pixelation is so horrible you can't use the chat at all.

  23. Collections on Google Announces YouTube Gaming · · Score: 1

    So this is why they removed the super-useful feature that used to let you group your subscriptions into named groups until a few weeks ago? Because it was called "collections" and they wanted to repurpose the name for some useless video game thing nobody is going to use?

  24. "You'll experience problems with your display" on Windows 10 Release Date: July 29th · · Score: 2

    Click the menu icon in the top left of the upgrade reservation thing, then pick Check your PC. On my VERY new Sony VAIO Flip 15, which came with Windows 8, I get the message "These devices aren't fully compatible with Windows 10" -> Intel(R) HD Graphics Family -> You'll experience problems with your display.

    So what does this mean? If I let the upgrade happen on July 29, my screen goes black after that? How can such a new video "card" be unsupported? (It's the built-in display on the Core i7-4500U this thing has). Is it because I also have the Nvidia GeForce GT 735M on here, with that GPU-switching technology (Optimus?) that so many new laptops have now?

  25. Re:Why not Vista? on Microsoft Confirms It Won't Offer Free Windows 10 Upgrades To Pirates · · Score: 1

    No, why not offer the free upgrade to Vista+ instead of 7+ (for legitimate installs)?