Root Access

Bob

12:00 AM

@Dog Funny that. Autocorrect 'fixes' that word for me.

Dog

I like how auto correct auto corrects auto cucumber to autoxucumwber

Bob

Hm. $10/month, 512 MB RAM. Windows would barely boot :P

Though, it should run RDG just fine...

Burgi

@Bob what is the energy generation mix in oz?

Bob

@Burgi ...I have no idea.

Probably mostly coal, some solar/wind now.

But I never really checked.

Burgi

the uk generation capacity is in the news almost weekly

its mostly gas and nuclear here

you guys have billions of miles of bugger all, loads of space for huge solar farms. i'm really surprised its not higher in the mix

Ben N

12:12 AM

For what it's worth, it's primarily coal, natural gas, and nuclear here in the US; solar is 0.6%

Burgi

the coal stations here are shutting down which is leaving a concerning gap in our generation capacity

we have to import about 2% from france

>
Gas: 30.2% (0.05% in 1990)
Coal: 29.1% (67% in 1990)
Nuclear: 19.0% (19% in 1990)
Wind: 9.4% (0% in 1990)
Bio-Energy: 6.8% (0% in 1990)
Hydroelectric: 1.8% (2.6% in 1990)
Solar: 1.2% (0% in 1990)
Oil and other: 2.5% (12% in 1990)

Energy in the United Kingdom

Energy use in the United Kingdom stood at 2,249 TWh (193.4 million tonnes of oil equivalent) in 2014. This equates to energy consumption per capita of 34.82 MWh (3.00 tonnes of oil equivalent) compared to a 2010 world average of 21.54 MWh (1.85 tonnes of oil equivalent). Demand for electricity in 2014 was 34.42GW on average (301.7TWh over the year) coming from a total electricity generation of 335.0TWh. Successive UK governments have outlined numerous commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. One such announcement was the Low Carbon Transition Plan launched by the Brown ministry in July 2009...

they are 2014 figures

why are all the places good for generating cheap, easy renewable electricity too far from anywhere useful?

if someone can figure out how to generate power from rain the UK is on to a winner ;)

Journeyman Geek

12:30 AM

I think my autocorrect autocucumbers to autocucumbers cause I complain about autocucumbers a lot.

That Brazilian Guy

Autochuchu?

Bob

@Burgi we also have a massive coal industry, and the current government prefers mining...

> As of 2016, Federal energy policies continue to support the coal mining and natural gas industries through subsidies for fossil fuel use and production as the exports by those industries contribute significantly to the earnings of foreign exchange and government revenues. Australia is one of the most coal-dependent countries in the world.

> In 2015 Federal policy reverted to a pro-coal economy with cuts to alternate and renewable energy government offices, targets and subsidies

@Burgi Seems we're comparatively mostly hydro-heavy in renewable sources:

But mostly coal overall.

Burgi

black coal and brown coal?

isn't that racist? ;)

Bob

For some reason, consumption is balanced differently... probably cars, etc.:

dammit

why is it so hard to find seeds

barlop

1:16 AM

what do people use to write a font?

also do fonts specify encodings? or do they only contain the glyphs?

and do they specify what key would produce what letter?

Ben N

There are font-creating programs, e.g. FontLab Studio

IIRC fonts only have the glyphs; the encoding is an issue for a different component

Bob

@barlop Keystrokes are converted into scancodes by the keyboard, and the scancodes are sent to the program.

The program then processes the scancodes it receives (shortcuts, etc.). It does not necessarily have to be interpreted as character data.

If it is character data, then it's stored as a character in whichever encoding a program chooses. There is no requirement that the scancode for the F key on your keyboard to produce an F character.

The encoding can generally be transformed into a different encoding. An encoding is simply how a character (codepoint, perhaps) is represented as basic data bytes.

barlop

what's the situation then when it comes to for example, writing a foreign language in a pre-unicode font

there's something fishy with the encoding there..

Bob

From there, the bytes are decoded back to codepoints/characters, then the appropriate glyph from the font is rendered.

Aibobot

@allquicatic yes my spelling is wierd but not wyrd

barlop

1:26 AM

for example, let's say I choose the font bwhebb (bibleworks hebrew), that's an old font. If I type 'a' then it types the first letter of the hebrew alphabet, that's aleph. (not like the mapping of an israeli keyboard where it'd type a different letter). And if I change it to another font then the aleph becomes an 'a'. Such is the nature of an old font like bwhebb

Bob

@barlop Language does not have a one-to-one correspondence with writing systems (and therefore character sets). e.g. French also uses the Latin alphabet, with diacritics.

barlop

but I didn't deny that

Aibobot

that's also keyboard layout tho?

barlop

right

Bob

@barlop Not sure about the font side, but there are several non-Unicode encodings in use.

Aibobot

1:28 AM

sounds like bwhebb just uses a classic layout and maps what it needs to that.

Bob

@barlop you might find this useful

barlop

so I suppose a font would specify the mapping of letters to glyphs

bob, I know that stuff. eg what unicode is and glyphs

Bob

More in-depth: scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/…

Aibobot

vaguely

a font would say "if the symbol is this, under this encoding, render this"

barlop

if so, then in word, if I type stuff in a file and i don't save the file, then there'd be some encoding..

why would encoding matter..

Bob

1:32 AM

Oh, you're probably looking for the cmap (for truetype): scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/…

barlop

why couldn't a font say if the symbol is this, then render this

Bob

@barlop As soon as you assume textual data, there must be an encoding.

barlop

even before saving to a file?

Bob

An encoding is just a definition of what (sequence of) bytes means what codepoint.

@barlop Yes.

Your bytes in memory are entirely useless unless you know what encoding they're in.

barlop

so what encoding would ms word use?

utf-8?

Bob

1:33 AM

@barlop Depends what you set it to.

barlop

and where would the setting be when you click file..new and you don't save the file

do you really think word has a setting for that?!

Bob

IIRC default is Windows-1252 on American English systems

Default actually changes depending on the OS's locale.

More recently the default internal representation is probably UCS-2

barlop

that can't be windows-1252 'cos what if you copy/pasted an Aleph into your document

Bob

Which is similar to UTF-16, but existed before UTF-16 did.

Most of Windows is built around UCS-2 these days, IIRC.

UCS-2 LE, specifically

Hm, nope. That was old Windows. Should be full UTF-16 by now.

Yea, UTF-16 LE for the last decade+.

barlop

How can you know what Word is using prior to clicking save?

Bob

1:39 AM

@barlop You don't need to, basically. But it's probably UTF-16 LE, like the rest of Windows.

barlop

define "rest of windows"

besides notepad's default for when unicode is selected and saving a file

Seth

anyone know if I can open a onenote notebook from my office 365 account in onenote 2010?

Bob

I can't remember what encoding support BIFF/DOC had, but Word does have encoding options for plain text files of course. support.office.com/en-us/article/…

@Seth You definitely can with Onedrive, treating it as a local folder.

@barlop Windows. The OS. The APIs the OS provides.

barlop

@Bob do you understand my question.. Obviously There are encoding options for plain text files..

i'm not asking about that

Bob

As in, quite literally Windows itself.

barlop

1:41 AM

you seem to be talking about the options in a save as dialog box aren't you

if not then what options are you talking about?

Bob

@barlop I'm correcting my earlier statement because I misremembered.

That's all.

Seth

@Bob I can't seem to figure that out from within onenote either.

I could have sworn I've done this before..

Bob

@Seth Onedrive, the external program.

I haven't used Office 2010 in years... not sure what built-in support it has.

barlop

where do you think is the setting in word for encoding of a file before it is saved?

there probably isn't such a setting

Bob

@barlop What part of "I corrected myself because I misremembered" do you not understand?

barlop

1:42 AM

and if you're assuming there is one, then based on what other programs? where is their setting?

it doesn't tell me whether you are claiming to have answered the question I asked or not

Bob

I already said it probably uses UTF-16 LE.

Seth

@Bob I guess now would be a good time to mention I'm running it in WINE lol

Bob

@Seth ...try the Linux Onedrive client? Does one exist?

barlop

I don't see how you can claim to know that Or even guess that

Seth

@Bob I doubt it. But I'll check.

barlop

1:43 AM

can you tell me one program where you know for sure it's using utf-16 LE prior to saving a file?

Bob

@barlop Every .NET program in existence.

Everything that uses Windows API w/ wide chars.

Everything that uses MFC. COM.

Literally the entirety of Windows' Unicode support is built on top of UTF-16.

barlop

say you write a .NET program that uses a textbox and the user types into a textbox and that's it

can you tell me a statement that will prove that the textbox is using UTF-16 LE?

Bob

@barlop Can you not look this up for yourself?

If you don't believe me, go look it up.

barlop

I am not sure that the code behind the textbox used by .NET is even public

Bob

Look up the documentation for System.String.

barlop

1:47 AM

Who says the internals of the textbox even use .NET?

Bob

To be honest, I don't care what encoding the underlying Winforms implementation uses. All I care is that it gives me a string, which is defined as UTF-16.

Therefore, my program uses UTF-16.

barlop

ok

Bob

Even knowing System.String uses UTF-16 is entirely meaningless information.

When I actually want to communicate with another program via a stream, I should always specify the encoding directly so I know how to interpret the stream of bytes at the other end.

@barlop You can be as pedantic as you want. I've already given entirely reasonable answers to your questions.

The return question is: why do you need to know?

It's like asking "how does Calculator add numbers?"

Answer: it applies the + operator in the language it's written in (probably C# or JS these days) to two variables.

How do you know what that operator does?

The docs. The definition.

How do you KNOW?!?! What does it actually do???

Probably whatever the C + compiles down to. Probably add in assembly, or some variant of it, assembled to x86 machine code.

HOW DOES THE CPU DO IT?!

See, it's endless.

Next think you know, you're looking at quantum mechanics and how electrons move in silicon.

Journeyman Geek

It's turtles. Turtles all the way down

Bob

Of perhaps some interest: CreateFile takes a LPCTSTR, which is a long pointer to an array of TCHARs, which is defined as WCHAR on a Unicode-supporting system, which defined as containing a "16-bit Unicode character".

Which is actually a very vague definition, but they most likely mean UTF-16.

And other sources do confirm that, so bleh.

There's actually an interesting amount of detail here, nicely hidden away. Oh well.

@JourneymanGeek I wondered why they chose turtles.

Ben N

2:04 AM

If you feel like seeing it yourself, type a bunch of international characters into a text box, dump the process's memory, poke around a bit with your debugger's text search tool, and you'll see the real bytes

Windbg can open the dump files created by Task Manager, IIRC

Bob

@BenN Fun fact: Windbg also defaults to UTF-16.

It's part of the whole "Windows is built on UTF-16" thing.

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/…

Ben N

Yep! Just trying to provide the best proof I can think of :)

Bob

@BenN If you really want to 'prove' it without foreknowledge, a general hex editor would probably work better :P

bwDraco

1

A: Add paragraphs to the legalnoticetext (Before Login Screen)

Right-click on the LegalNoticeText entry in Registry Editor, and select Modify Binary Data. Insert hexadecimal 0d 00 0a 00 where you want a new line, and 0d 00 0a 00 0d 00 0a 00 where you want a empty line separating two paragraphs. This code must be inserted after the 00 of the hexadecimal cod...

> Windows uses little-endian UTF-16, where two bytes represent each character, in this and related registry entries, and 0d 00 0a 00 is the UTF-16 code for newline on Windows systems.

Bob

Ha.

BIFF3 to BIFF5 (old doc/xls/etc.) stored as single-byte strings with a codepage specified.

Actually, I wonder how that would've worked with older multibyte encodings...

BIFF8 (slightly newer doc/xls/etc.) stored as UTF-16LE

Modern OOXML actually serialises to UTF-8, probably because that's the recommended/default for XML. In-memory still UTF-16.

Hm. Or was BIFF xls only, not doc?

bleh, too troublesome to dig into more

Psycogeek

2:28 AM

talk about putting your money where "the mouth" is, comcast (monopoly isp) is now sponcering the "Your Side" parts of the news programs, where the media is called out to help little people fight the big corporations.

bought and paid for.

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

halp muh arch is bork

Ben N

Can you be more specific?

Psycogeek

amazon.co.uk/Pixnor-Adhesive-Support-Insole-Transparent/dp/…

Bob

@DmitryKudriavtsev hve u trd unbork?

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

ya

it stil b0rk

it completely refuses to display anything graphical. only tty's.

Bob

2:34 AM

Look at X11 error logs

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

i did

no screens found

Journeyman Geek

2:51 AM

@DmitryKudriavtsev sounds like arch.

Did it ever work?

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

funny thing is it works perfectly on my laptop

no

Journeyman Geek

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

yes many times

also getting stargne gparhical corruption

Journeyman Geek

Does your kernel have X support compiled in?

.... Is your video card dying?

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

wat

this is not gentoo

of course it does

and for the second point hopefully not

Although I think I mayhave a bad PCI bus

(or just a bad card)

Works well under Windows

Journeyman Geek

2:54 AM

Garbled text is literally a common sign of a dying gpu

@Bob en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

@JourneymanGeek

Journeyman Geek

Looks fine to me

That line of dashes looks intended

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

no. the screen is shifted down about 6-7 lines and the initial kernel messages stay frozen there.

the line does not appear if nvidia proprietary drivers are used

Bob

it's never worked on this machine?

meh, probably just driver issues

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

never at all

just windows

but the interestign thing is

if I take out the nvidia GPU, the system works fine with intel only. makes me thing that something's up

Bob

3:02 AM

see: driver issues

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

no, may be a bad gpu

Psycogeek

3:17 AM

is it working in windows now? you could do a gpu z in windows to see how it is going, specially the "link" if you suspect pci

@DmitryKudriavtsev which gpu specific is it? after all there are some new ones out that are known to bork.

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

gtx 970

gugabyte g1 gaming edition

@Psycogeek

bwDraco

Can you access your machine's BIOS or UEFI setup?

(It may contain your system's serial number, etc.; be sure to obfuscate that if possible)

Psycogeek

@DmitryKudriavtsev that one is not a "problem" one for many others.

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

i know.

@bwDraco Yes

bwDraco

3:36 AM

Can you post a picture of the setup screen?

Dmitry Kudriavtsev

yeah sure give me a feew minutes

Bob

reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5ar17i/…

@DmitryKudriavtsev If it works without any issues in Windows, it's unlikely to be a hardware fault.

bwDraco

4:08 AM

0

Q: What takes processors the most time?

My question is: what takes processors so much time? My background on what I know: I don't know much of anything about processors, except that modern processors use 64 bits, there are multiple processors in a processor chip (by "processor chip", I am talking about the processor as a whole, the s...

cpu

There are two ways to increase single-threaded performance: increase clock speed or increase the number of instructions executed per clock cycle (IPC). We've long hit a wall on clock scaling, as described in my previous comment. To increase IPC, modern processors search a wider range of instructions within each thread and determine which instructions can be executed concurrently. Because of dependencies, there are only so many instructions that can be executed at the same time, so expanding the processor's ability to do this suffers from diminishing returns. See my linked answer to learn more. — bwDraco 4 mins ago

Far too broad. It's an incredibly complicated topic.

barlop

thanks @Bob and @BenN

Journeyman Geek

6:10 AM

@Bob theverge.com/2016/11/2/13493170/…

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Would be weird to see MS branch out into gaming, but could happen...

I just hope the card part is optional :P

Journeyman Geek

@Bob it would be. But MS essentially kick-started Razer and games are one reason a power user would stick to Windows

Bob