On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 02:14:51AM -0400, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > On Tuesday, September 5 at 07:38 PM, quoth Derek Martin: > > Oh, come on Kyle, that's not really true. There are few systems in > > existence today which can't handle at least most of the Latin-based > > ISO standard character sets. > > That statement is trivially false. Virtually every car, airplane, and > microwave out there has a computer in it these days, and very few of > them speak many standard character sets. And, do you run Mutt on those? We're talking about general purpose computers, on which people run general purpose applications, e.g. e-mail. I did not think you needed to have that explained to you. > This is one of the reasons I like mutt: I can send whatever limited > form of email my intended recipient can read, and I can view whatever > bizarre forms of email that people send to me. I'm pretty sure none of your intended recpients are reading e-mail on a microwave. > > UTF-8 *is* the standard... or at least *a* standard. Trouble is not > > everyone likes to comply to standards, and there is still a lot of > > crufty software out there. We'll get there. Maybe 2 more years. > > Just because it's *a* standard doesn't mean much. EBCDIC is also *a* > standard, as is TCP-over-carrier-pigeon, but I don't see much of a > stampede to use either one. EBCDIC is a dead standard; it's time has come and gone (and it's been replaced by Unicode)! TCP over carrier pigeon is a joke. Literally. > Unicode is a character standard that is indeed quite useful and solves > several problems for OS people. UTF-8 is a useful sub-domain of that > standard. While I have no doubt that Unicode will be used for 90% of > all computer IO in new systems in two years, we will forever be > dealing with the systems and softwares of the past. Yeah, but at some point we have to decide that users who refuse to embrace the present (nevermind the future) have to be left behind. I agree that we're not quite there yet, but I think it's time enough to try, and politely point out to people like your priest that their software is outdated, unsupported, and almost certainly infested with trojans and other malware, and they really ought to update. Maybe you can use it as an opportunity to introduce free software at your church, if that kind of thing interests you... -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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