It seems the square "wafer" (silicon substrate) is developed by Mitsubishi Materials a year ago.

https://www.mmc.co.jp/corporate/en/news/2024/news20240821.ht...

CSCI 3210: Modern text encoding and processing

Learn unicode and utf-8.

Unlearn the 1 char = 1 byte concept

Not only encoding/decoding but searching and sorting is also different. We may also cover font rendering, unicode modifiers and emoji. They are so common and fundamental but very few understand them.

Handling text is a minefield. UTF-8 is great but when you get into graphemes, there's basically no way to handle them properly unless you write some code to generate graphene recognition based off the spec which is rather large and continuously updated.

Same for font rendering, there is a reason why harfbuzz is used everywhere. Getting an 80% working renderer is easy but the remaining 20% can take years.

It really "handling text correctly"should be a masters, and I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Yes. As a site owner who keep fighting with bots and malicious traffic, I wish web browsers provide me a way to identify real users from bot traffic. Otherwise I'll have to put everything behind account registration.

> "coherent desire" or "precise imagination" or "structured wishing."

the most precise way to express your desire is by giving computer commands, or you may call it programming.

I think it depends on what you're compressing. I experimented with my data full of hex text xml files. xz -6 is both faster and smaller than zstd -19 by about 10%. For my data, xz -2 and zstd -17 achieve the same compressed size but xz -2 is 3 times faster than zstd -17. I still use xz for archive because I rarely needs to decompress them.

Try combining it with --long

My use cases are usually source code, SQL dumps and log files.

Sometimes xz gave marginally better results, but difference was well below 1%

thanks for the tips. As my data has very low entropy, both can compress down to 3-4% of original size, but xz is a lot faster in compression.

raw size: 9612344 B

zstd --ultra -22 --long=31 => 376181 B (3.91% original, 4.088s compress, 0.013s decompress)

xz -z -9 xml => 353700 B (3.68% original, 0.729s compress, 0.032s decompress)

zstd -17 --long=31 could match the compression time of xz, but the size is bigger (405602 B, 4.22% original)

If you compare only the compressed size (not to the original size), .zst would be about 6-15% larger than .xz

Bi-directional gates are always open by default. One-way gate would close after a certain time to prevent people coming from the wrong side.

There are charging machines that accept cash cards / debit cards, but only those issued by Japanese banks. So cash is the only option for touristists. You can go completely cash-less if you can use mobile Suica / ICOCA, which let's you charge your phone with Apple Pay / Google Pay (with osaifu-keitai).

Yes, I believe so. JR East is now planning to fade-out magnetic tickets by using paper QR Code tickets.

Japan has lots of IC cards in various regions, and they have spent a lot of effort integrating their system. Unfortunately some IC cards like Kumamon decided to opt-out due to high maintenance fees.

AFAIK, you can go through up to 4 different company networks once you enter paid-area. Beyond that, you'll need to do the override settlement (乗り越し精算) with the help of station staff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...

Suica has a pretty large sensing distance (85mm). So it can "power up" the card at a distance before getting close to the reader.

To avoid large touch area causing accidental touches, places like vending machine requires you to keep your card within sensing area for up to 1 second before completing the transaction.

reference: https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1316685....

Speed test between magnetic ticket / IC Card / Credit Card https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQM5NNnCi4