Thanks to the Internet, sounding like a polyglot is easy. The question you have to ask yourself, especially when you don’t know what polyglot means, is do you want to sound like a polyglot. (Hint: You do.)
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There is a question and there is an exclamation. In English, there are special characters for both. For a question there is the question mark. Really? Yes. For an exclamation, there is the exclamation point. Of course! For the common situation when a question is said with excitement, there is something called the interrobang. What!?
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Behold the exclamation point! It’s a handy thing to have and use! It adds excitement to each and every sentence that you write! Over-using it is like reading a conversation with someone high on espresso and crack! Caution is advised! On the computer, however, the exclamation point means more than a frantic writing style!
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Though there are only 8-bits in a byte, and 256 values for those 8-bits, there are far more than 256 characters available for display on a computer. Add in all the foreign language characters, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, plus a host of common symbols from all over and there’s no way you could stuff them all into 8-bits. That’s why computer scientists went to 16-bits and developed the Unicode standard.
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There are 256 values in an 8-bit byte. Yet the ASCII standard defined only 128 characters, where 128 is exactly half of 256. That meant that a typical 8-bit PC had to come up with 128 more characters to assign to the “upper values” found in an 8-bit byte. Contrary to popular belief, those are not ASCII characters, they are Extended ASCII characters.
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Back in the dawn of the computer age, there existed a thing called ASCII, one of many common and confusing computer acronyms. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, but more importantly it’s pronounced ASK-ee. That was about all you needed to know in the old days.
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Internet radio isn’t dead. Well, one form of it is. I remember a while back when they tried to do “Internet radio.” That method bombed, but it didn’t signal the end of listening to stuff on the Internet with your PC.
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After the thrill of the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld in January there’s nothing much happening in the computer biz these days. We’re in the February doldrums, but the rumor mill is still active about some upcoming events that may affect your digital life.
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One of the tricks I mentioned in last Friday’s post was how to extend your PC’s life by adding a second, internal hard drive. You then clone the contents of the original hard drive to the second hard drive, and start using the second hard drive as the primary drive. That begs the question, “What is this “cloning” thing Dan speaks of?”
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