#why are printers so fuuuuuucked then?????

[moch-ila]

I wasn't old enough to work when faxes were still in use so, did they break nearly as much as printers? this is a real question cause if I remember correctly they printed what someone faxed you right??

[thothxv]

This sounded wrong to me. So I looked it up. And sure enough, it is... wrong. But it's interesting. So I'm going to talk about it.

What is ASCII

ASCII (formally known as ANSI X3.4-1986, and originally codified as ANSI X3.4-1963 with only minor differences from the version we know today) is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It was designed primarily for teletypes. So in addition to making sure that when you type the letter A we all see the letter A and not § or something, it has characters that do things like signal the end of text, tell the printer to stop, tell the printer to return the carriage, tell the printer to go back a character, tell the printer to ring the little bell that it's got and so on. Remember, these are electromechanical machines, they are very dumb.

ASCII is great. If you are an American and you need 95 characters you can use to more or less express anything you need to express using characters... here you go. Sorting it numerically has meaning, case-insensitive comparison is easy, It's even very readable in binary form. It's also, notably, seven bits. This is because if you only have to send seven bits for every character instead of eight, your message is 88% of the size it would be with eight bits. But seven isn't a power of two or even a multiple of two, so whether you sent seven bits down the wire or eight bits down the wire by just filling in a leading zero, there's almost certainly an eighth bit in computer memory, just sitting unused.

Now, with eight bits, you have a full extra 128 characters undefined by ASCII to play with. Alternatively, you can use the eighth bit as a flag bit, or any number of other things. But it's the 1960s or 1970s, and there's no standard for what to use the eighth bit for. So if everyone just starts using it for their own purposes, then, why, the meaning would be different from system to system, or even from software package to software package. And if we ever needed that eighth bit for something later, like, say, more characters, all of this software would break horribly!

So it's probably not a great idea to use the eighth bit for something if you want to futureproof your software. Don't worry, though: software engineers would never just steal some bits that a standard wasn't using for their own purposes, thereby creating headaches for the people of the future.

Everybody steals the eighth bit for their own purposes and creates headaches for the people of the future

Never, ever, ever trust a programmer not to go steal some bits for themselves that the standard says should be zero. Just ask Motorola. People stole that eighth bit for all kinds of different purposes and nobody agreed about what it meant. Some people put extra characters up there, for drawing diagrams, or for characters with diacritics. Other people used the eighth bit to indicate something about the text. All kinds of stuff went on up there. But so long as that software doesn't have to interoperate it's probably fine.

Ooh! I just got an electronic mail message, or e-mail for short. From another computer! Over the network. It's informing me that... hmm. Apparently you can connect computers over a network now. So software might need to interoperate. That's... worrying. But all these computers are being connected together in one country, so it'll probably be fine-ish. I mean, we only have to worry about America.

...This e-mail is also telling me that there are countries outside of America what the fuuuuuuck

There are countries outside of America—ISO 646

Yeah so it turns out that there's all these other countries, and they all have their own characters that they need to write. The first attempt to solve this problem was ISO 646. To be more precise, ISO 646 starts by solving the problem of "England just called and want to know where the fuck the pound sign is". Easy enough. According to ISO 646, you may now replace the $ sign with whatever currency symbol makes the most sense for your country. Hooray! Unfortunately, if you're not England, you probably have some other characters outside the English alphabet that you need to write regularly. So in its final form, ISO 646 defines a set of characters you can replace from ASCII with other characters you need or characters that are similar and make more sense for your country: !"#$&:?@[\]^_`{|}~

On first examination, this is a terrible solution, but when you look more closely you realize that it's still a terrible solution. And a complete non-starter for countries like Russia or Greece that have their own alphabets. To say nothing of China, Japan, or Korea.

Remember that eighth bit? Well, what if we came up with a version of what to put in that eighth bit for each country that contains the characters they'll want? It'll be better and we won't have to sacrifice any characters to do it. Actually, we can do better than that...

ISO 8859

No, not yet.

ISO 2022

ISO 2022 set out to define a standard for how eight bit extensions to ASCII were supposed to work. It defined a new region for control codes (C1), and a new region for graphical characters (G1) above the 127 allowed by ASCII. It even has a mechanism for encoding all of this in places where the eighth bit is unavailable. You can swap between character sets in the middle of a stream of text, so even if russian and greek aren't together on one character set, you can still write a document with both in it.

In practice, switching between character sets, as far as I can tell, didn't happen happen all that much. You were usually stuck with whatever you had for C1 and G1. ISO 2022 was complicated, with all of its inherent statefulness (the same character code could refer to different characters in different parts of a document), and its most enduring mark today is probably the 2022-conformant ISO 6429 C1 block, which defines the escape sequences used to control terminals (change text color, etc). They are essentially never used in their eight-bit forms however.

...Okay, there is one other character set tied to ISO 2022 that tends to pop up a ton.

ISO 8859

ISO 8859 defines a collection of ISO 2022 compliant character sets. By far the most popular and significant of these character sets was ISO 8859-1, which defined most of the characters used by most of western Europe, with some random additions and minor omissions.

This character set is perhaps better known as Latin-1.

Latin-1 and variants thereof were hugely dominant through the end of the 90s. And by "variants thereof," I mean Windows-1252. Windows-1252 was a version of Latin-1 that added those missing characters and some extra stuff (most notably, "smart quotes", or left and right quotes like “, ”, ‘, and ’) in the place of some rarely-used control characters (Apple did the same thing in a totally incompatible way, but Apple didn't matter so much). If you were a non-windows user in the late 90s or early 2000s, Windows-1252 is probably responsible for the �amazing� experience of reading websites where all the quotation marks and apostrophes has been replaced with �s because the web designer didn�t bother to ensure their website was readable for you.

Unicode

The dream was to have one character encoding. One encoding to rule them all, one encoding to find them, one encoding to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. To numbers. By them, I mean characters. Thus was born Unicode, which took ASCII and Latin-1 as a basis, and then extended to 16 bits (and then to 21 bits when they realized 16 bits wouldn't be enough) and set out to assign numbers to every character in every writing system currently in use, and to create a set of rules around encoding and laying out text in different writing systems, and then adding characters from dead languages, and other characters and... look, Unicode is a goddamn miracle. It is fantastically complicated, it is very very sophisticated, and it realized the dream of combining every character in every language in a single, unified encoding, where each number means exactly one thing. And with UTF-8, any valid ASCII is also valid UTF-8 (but not valid Latin-1, that's not valid UTF-8).

But is the meme accurate though

No. Not in any way that matters. ISO 8859-1 defines a set of codepoints that are still in use and a character encoding that isn't. ISO 6429 defines a set of escape codes that are pretty much always used in their ASCII-compatible forms and are therefore valid ASCII. No other ISO 2022 conformant encodings ever gained that kind of traction in the English speaking world. UTF-8 is the dominant text encoding on the web, and it's a superset of ASCII but not of Latin-1.

Meanwhile, ASCII is alive and well in raw text files and especially in source code. While many modern programming languages will accept UTF-8 source files, it's generally accepted that you should just stick to ASCII characters unless you have a really good reason not to.

True ASCII is a seven-bit encoding, and it's still widely used today. Nobody uses Latin-1 by choice.

[darkicedragon]

Slept through take off haha.

Started off with Descendants 2! Fucking loooved it. Really hope the read more works. If not IM SORRY D'8

Then watched Reset and zashchitniki

Start off song was so gooood.

Carlos with a puppyyy aaaah

Still prefer the thought of Evie and Mal being together pfft.

Throught Carlos was going to hint he wanted to dance with Jay, aww.

Oooooh green eyes!

The fencing class looks aaawessssome

Ofc Chad is the asshole but Omfg Loonnniiieee!!!!

‘How to get out of the friendzone…’ Carlos, no

'Carlos,dont you ever miss griefing at people and them running away from you?’ *huff* ’ youre thinking of my mother and i was usually on tje recieving end of that so not really.’ Aw carlos :(

Omg they have the 3d printer. Thaaats going to be relevant later.

Truth gummy oh no

TALKONG PUPPERRRRR!!!

Hooook. Uuuursullaaaaa. Umaaàaaa. FUUUUUUCK YES UMAS SONG. CANTS STOP SCREECHING OVER IT AAAH!!

Ho boy all those swords going abt. Im hoping for a lonnie and uma fight?

Cant find my pen for writing at the airport. :(

AAAAH GOING BACK TO TJE ISLE.

Found my pen!

Daaang that pink hair 8D

Harry hook pfft

Ewwwww D8

PUPPER WANTS SHOTGUN BWAHAHA

Oooh evies song

Pleasr come home Ooooh buddy….

Aaaay ben got kidnapped

Arm wrestling? Huh

Theeeres the 3d printer haha

'Have you been to a swimming pool? Have you had ice cream?’ Aaaaaah :(

Hnnnnng evies voooooice. Love evie and mals song aaaah

Ship them together so much aaah

Aaaah carlos and jay sleeping on each other quq

Carlos sucks at lying pfft. And aww other dude who knows evie

LONNIE WITH FUCKING DOUBLE SABERS FUCK YEAH FUCK YEAH … WAIT WAIT WAIT OMFG SHE HAS *5 SWORDS* I LOVE HER SO MUCH. Shes totally going to be on the team by the end of the film aaaah. And chad gets booted off

I love carlos keeps telling pupper how much he loves him quq

I *FUCKING LOVE* UMAS SONGS AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

The beeeeats aaaaaaah

Yeeees the pupper helped!

OH NO CARLOS WITH A SLINGSHOT. SO CUTE

I LOVE LONNIE

Aww nice, uma stopping chasing mal to pull harry back up

FUCKING LONNIE TAKING ON TWO PPL AT ONCE YESSSS

Oooh the tunnel went to umas ship

They…could hae brought the swords in with them rather than storing them in the back? XD; though i guess less chance of being skewered

Yessss Lonnie getting invited to the teeeam

weeeeee carlos wants to be included in the evie and mal huddling!

'Were your family too’ YES YES YESSSSSS!!!!!!!

Carlos wanting to just talk with them abt the problems theyre having quq.

Yussss heart to heart with mal and jaaaay

YES YES FUCK YES!!! LONNIE AND JAYS ARC WENT SO MUCH BETTER THAN I HOPED!!!

Okay doug and evie are cute together

OH MY FUXKING GOD CARLOS UTTER SHOCK AT THE HUG.

Yes much better dress

'And lucky for me she doesnt go by first impressions’ Hdjai dbakls beast!!

I wanna see a close up of jay in his formal weaaar aaaah

….oh god bens going to be in isle clothes isnt he? Awww he isnt. :(

EEEEEEEEEEEEE MUCH BETTER SURPRISEEEEEEEE!!!!! …unleeeess… theres still time for that hm

Yeah was wondering if That Thing was going to be the third movie or if it was going to show up again. HO BOY

FUUUCK YES UMAS FORM

… SXTEAM SCREAM!!!!!!!!!

….OH MY GOD OH MY FUCKING GOD BEN AAAAHAHAHAHAHHA

Okay but mal could have carried him pfft

Muuuuch better dress haha

Dizzzzzzzy quq

//Reset// Really? Prisoner 69? XD;

This is some intro aha

Niiice hologram

I am concerned how the tech keeps glitching out

This tech is so cooo -woah. I was expecting something to happen haha

/THAT/ I WASNT EXPECTING

Sliiick organisation and carrying the mission out

Director is going to diiiie

…that eight yrs is going to be important. Maybe the final destination. Go 8 yrs in the past so she never gets into the reserch in the first place?

Separation with partner will be another important date

Mutation in the brain. Something to do with the guy who died at her car?

Awww doudou and xia tians relationship is cu -wah!

Why is there no other cars on yhis road? XD;

Ooh what did she see?? … Oh D8 another brain haemorrhage hm

Okay i see

That eye is HUGE

…i dont think sec would blazenly announce that there was a murderer in he building PFFT

Hmmm stable time loop or framing her? If it was a frame up oy would delay her so the antags wouldnt want that hmmm

'I dont have time to explain!’ My son was kidnapped! COMMUNICATE PLS oh my god its faster to explain than it is to not

Jc if youd explain he prob wouldnt be fighting you as hard. Hed at least understand why youre doing this

See, he helped once he learned what happened.

Not sure why elevators have cameras showing other floors but sure.

Niiice! Resourceful! 8D

Your lockdown system sucks XD;

Noooononono

Whay kinda disposal area is this, that it has to go to the roof before getting disposed of XD Aside from the ~future~ haha

Wonder if the person who died at the start is her son

Or maybe the antag is her son

Muse muse. Antag wears high collars. He could totally be her son and hiding that mark

…well thats the mentor dead 8’D

:(

..theyre taking the body too??

Woooooah!

Oh my god that drone is amazing OH MY GOD THEYRE SO CUTE TOGETHER 8’(

She keeps getting headknocks ow :(

'Why did you come back?’ WHY DID YOU STAY??

Nice future underwear

Waot she DROPS INSIDE??

Heeeey atleast sh told him instantly this time

'didnt you say you were coming yo see me? HMMMMM

This draging the body around is hilarious XD

BWAHAHAH OKAY THATS A GOOD WAY TO TAKE OUT THE AGENT XD

Yessss ultimatum!

YESSSSS

Yeah antag is totallu the son haha

Kid put your seatbelt on

Another headbash? Really?

Wtd is goibg on with that crate XD;

Xia tians clothing gets progressively darker with eac reset. Which is prob intentional fft

Nice car aiming. Ad for once the airbag actually deployed

Still havent been given background for the scene at the start hn

'How does he always know where we are?’ Bc he remembers it from his past

…wait. omg …..but also come on if youre going to do that, you could at least do a bit more research to get it right >_>

'We need to make a baxk up copy’ //SQUINT//

So hecking resourcful yeah yeaj yeah!

Well THATS a broken leg

Was that the bomb?

Yeah that thing def scarred.

Oh nice the rope climbing came back

Awww was hoping for a better tie in for the antag :(

When did you get a new clip?

:’(

It was an okay ending. I was hoping for a stable time loop though hahah

//zashchitniki//nice i tro song h I see wolfmaaan

Ooooh fucm yes that transformation 8D

Woaaah spider robot movements are coool

Gotta be shirtless to control robots bwahaha WOW they got hat info super fast XD;

Those swords are coooool

BEARMAN BEARMAN. Whos also gotta be shirtless pfft

Booo we only saw 2 recruits :(

So female character who doesnt feel the temp is obvs fine walking into a firefight with just a short dress on sigh. …yo if your transformation kills your shirt you should take it off XD;

…ppl are bleeding white. Okay.

Dont think we saw invisible lady fighting :(

How did the lady get caught???

Eh yhe story telling and skipping over stuff is weird so ill stop watching yhis here

Tried to watch dear my other self but it was just soooo awkward XD;

Not sure what to watch on the next flight hnn. Maybr 100 days. Or ill write haha.