On Jun 23, 13:43, Geoff Roberts wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Pete Turnbull" <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
> To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 5:13 AM
> Subject: Re: How do you finance/afford your computer collection?
>
>
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> >
> > which is ridiculous, because "Windows-1252" is a unique Microsoft
> > non-standard character set (meant to be similar to ISO 8859-1, but
> with a
> > unique symbol order), and it's also an 8-bit character set which can't
> be
> > represented in 7 bits without using base64, uuencode,
> quoted-printable, or
> > similar.
> >
> > I'm not complaining, merely informing :-)
>
> No problem. :^)
>
> Bloody thing. Thanks for that. I'm going to reach into the registry
> settings or whatever and bludgeon it into submission. It seems to be
> resetting the charset to whatever I'm replying to, and if I change it,
> it only changes for the one msg and then reverts to that.
> (Theoretically, it's supposed to be the ISO set not that one.)
> I'm going to find out what does this and fix it. I'll let you know how
> I get on. Bill Gates has a lot to answer for.
Best of luck :-)
Several months ago, one of our most senior members of staff (who has been
around a long time, and is perfectly happy with text mail, Unix, etc, but
has to use a PC for various reasons) sent several long messages to
'support' in mixed HTML+<something else> format, which caused some touble
for our support mail system. I politely advised him of this and he said
he'd fix it. Well, the next mail was still full of cruft, so I pointed out
that we don't support Outlook, and could he please stop using it or set it
properly. OK, he replied, in plain text. But the next message was in --
guess what! So I politely mailed him back, just to let him know. There
followed a long discussion; basically he refused to beleive his mailer
(Outlook) was sending crud because he'd reset it, tested it, and couldn't
beleive that his computer/OS could non-deterministically change its own
settings. We never did get entirely to the bottom of it, but it seems that
in some versions of Outlook, certain settings only apply to that session
(ie are reset next time you restart), and some settings are accessible in
two places, and you have to change both.
We still don't support Outlook, in fact we remove it from view in our
standard installs of Windows. But it's still there and people still use
it, and it's mostl OK so long as it's set up sensibly. The problem is that
Microsoft don't really understand standards like TCP/IP, MIME, DNS, ... (or
just don't believe in them).
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
Received on Fri Jun 23 2000 - 02:15:43 BST