No. This should be titled "No chance in hell".

The people who currently control congress are the same people who created the Patriot Act.

Maybe Mars One should partner with Amway.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...

  About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it.

First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports.

        8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ASCII is a subset). These have no BOM; they just dive right in with bytes of text. They are also probably the most common type of text file.
        UTF-8. These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
        Unicode big-endian (UTF-16BE). These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
        Unicode little-endian (UTF-16LE). These usually begin with a BOM but not always.

If a BOM is found, then life is easy, since the BOM tells you what encoding the file uses. The problem is when there is no BOM. Now you have to guess, and when you guess, you can guess wrong. For example, consider this file:

D0 AE

Depending on which encoding you assume, you get very different results.

        If you assume 8-bit ANSI (with code page 1252), then the file consists of the two characters U+00D0 U+00AE, or "". Sure this looks strange, but maybe it's part of the word VATNI which might be the name of an Icelandic hotel.
        If you assume UTF-8, then the file consists of the single Cyrillic character U+042E
        If you assume Unicode big-endian, then the file consists of the Korean Hangul syllable U+D0AE
        If you assume Unicode little-endian, then the file consists of the Korean Hangul syllable U+AED0

  Some people might say that the rule should be "All files without a BOM are 8-bit ANSI." In that case, you're going to misinterpret all the files that use UTF-8 or UTF-16 and don't have a BOM. Note that the Unicode standard even advises against using a BOM for UTF-8, so you're already throwing out everybody who follows the recommendation.

Okay, given that the Unicode folks recommend against using a BOM for UTF-8, maybe your rule is "All files without a BOM are UTF-8." Well, that messes up all 8-bit ANSI files that use characters above 127.

Maybe you're willing to accept that ambiguity, and use the rule, "If the file looks like valid UTF-8, then use UTF-8; otherwise use 8-bit ANSI, but under no circumstances should you treat the file as UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE." In other words, "never auto-detect UTF-16". First, you still have ambiguous cases, like the file above, which could be either 8-bit ANSI or UTF-8. And second, you are going to be flat-out wrong when you run into a Unicode file that lacks a BOM, since you're going to misinterpret it as either UTF-8 or (more likely) 8-bit ANSI. You might decide that programs that generate UTF-16 files without a BOM are broken, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. For example,

cmd /u /c dir >results.txt

This generates a UTF-16LE file without a BOM. If you poke around your Windows directory, you'll probably find other Unicode files without a BOM. (For example, I found COM+.log.) These files still "worked" under the old IsTextUnicode algorithm, but now they are unreadable. Maybe you consider that an acceptable loss.

The point is that no matter how you decide to resolve the ambiguity, somebody will win and somebody else will lose. And then people can start experimenting with the "losers" to find one that makes your algorithm look stupid for choosing "incorrectly".

You;re thinking of North Korea.

This isn't about Linux (although I'm sure Microsoft's hatred of Linux has something to do with it). People who buy a pre-built system from one of the big OEMs have no intention of installing an alternative OS, so this is a non-issue for them.

If you do buy a pre-built system from one of the big OEMs so you can put Linux on it, you're too stupid to be allowed near a computer.

Buy the components and build it yourself and you won't be bothered with any of this bullshit. Anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver to hold can easily do it.

And what makes you think that Rust will be any better? What makes you think Mozilla will "get it right" and not create just another language full of new/different vulnerabilities.

Technically, this is correct.

However, I've tried to make my own custom builds of Firefox and it's a nightmare. The build process used by Firefox is so complicated and convoluted, it would make Rube Goldberg laugh. I haven't tried building Chrome, but reading the build instructions, it appears to be only marginally better.

That's called Marketing.

But it's still a good benchmark even if you never play any of the Crysis games.

If the card gives a good performance in "Frames (per second) of Crysis3" then that's a reasonably good indicator that you'll get good performance in other applications -- it's at least better than AMD or Nvidia's meaningless marketing doublespeak.

I some time running the Windows 10 Technical preview that was released in January. Although it's an early, nowhere-near-finished- pre-beta version, it shows where Microsoft's thinking is headed. And it's not good.

While they have made some improvements over the clusterfuck that is Windows 8, in most cases they have doubled-down on stupid, keeping the vast majority of bad design decisions that were made with Windows 8. Even bringing back the Start Menu was botched. It still isn't as functional as Windows 7.

And the whole thing is just fucking ugly. More and more people spend an enormous amount of time in front of a computer, not just for social/entertainment purposes but for work as well. Aesthetics matter and Windows 8/10 fail horribly. This picture sums it all up perfectly:

http://i.imgur.com/iiXQRtN.jpg

Windows 10 IS Windows 9.

Because Microsoft knows better than you.

This is part of the absurd new mindset at Microsoft. You aren't supposed to exit the application. When the application has been idle for a while the OS (supposedly) will suspend it.

This design makes no sense, but neither do the other 1000 bad design decisions they made with Windows 8/10, so it's not surprising.

As long as Uranus doesn't get any closer to me, I'm OK with it.

Do you really think that the 'fake' watches don't come from the same Chinese factory as the 'real' ones?

You forgot the sarcasm tag.