OK. This is just bizarre. I’ve tried it and it works, but only on XP.
Open Notepad and type in the words “Bush hid the facts”. Save it, close Notepad, then reopen the file. You will see boxes. If you open the file in another editor, the words are there, so it is something in Notepad. Microsoft trying to censor the truth?
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O_O It works with Notepad 2 (an alternate notepad replacement) so it’s not a notepad bug but rather an GDI text box bug.
It’s just a notepad bug. If you type any 4-3-3-5 character phrase you get the same thing. Try typing xxxx xxx xxx xxxxx and you get the same result.
I believe the output is supposed to be in Chinese characters, but most XP setups don’t support displaying them, so all you see is squares.
Mine worked just fine. I must have a blue-state version of XP.
Mine came out in Chinese characters. wierd. My state of Colorado, formerly red, went solid blue for the first time since the days of FDR. Maybe next upgrade, my notepad will lose the censorship feature.
Looking at the file with a hex editor…
When you save the file it saves it properly. But when you then open it and save it again, it adds a Unicode identifier string (which looks like a “y” with umlats followed by a lowercase thorn in the hex editor, but is invisible and uneditable in Notepad) to the beginning. So the conversion happens when it loads a file with the text, not upon entering the text.
Now erase the Chinese text (lgc90 is correct) and retype “Bush hid the facts” and resave it. When you reopen it, it’ll display the text properly, but if you examine the file with a hex editor you’ll see the Unicode identifier is still there and the letters are spaced out every other byte (as alphabetical text should be in Unicode).
Also works with the phrase “Gore can not think”. Maybe Microsoft is on to something.
It’s simply a side-effect of the statistical method that is used to figure out whether a file is Unicode or not. Lots of phrases do it, like “this app can break”.
the problem is when notepad tries to guess if the text is unicode or acii.
here is the full explanation:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.aspx
It only works if you don’t punctuate it.
Google translates the chinese text as “Hour Morocco by showing video games seized mongoose”. Chew on that one, conspiracy theorists!
“Google translates the chinese text as “Hour Morocco by showing video games seized mongoose”. Chew on that one, conspiracy theorists!”
*Gasp* The war in Iraq is just a decoy so people don’t see that Bush is seizing all our video games and shipping them to Morocco by way of mongoose!
Well played, Bush, well played.
Is this what happened to all the PS3’s sold on Ebay?
You can reproduce the results with the command-line command
notepad /w filename.txt
where filename.txt of any existing text file.
BTW, if anyone know how to (from the commandline) make Notepad open a text file with a particular font.
This is misleading and inaccurate. This same thing was posted on Digg, explaining why it happens (due to notepads guessing technique to determining the the type of text file).
For those interested in the FACTS, refer “Unicode detection” section of the following Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad
So…basically the point is Microsoft can’t even get notepad to work correctly. This is a viable operating system why?
If you have Windows XP, why do you use linux?
Basically I dont see any advantages to using linux over windows xp, Im dual booting windows
and ubuntu. Ubuntu is nice and all but I dont see anything that would make me prefer it
over windows.The only thing i have been using ubuntu for is web browsing playing
music/movies (cant play games) which I can do better/hassle free in windows.
So what are the advantages of l using linux over xp?