[extropy-chat] Microsoft (was: singularity conference at stanford)

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On May 16, 2006, at 2:23 PM, KAZ wrote:
> The "it shouldn't be popular because it's technologically inferior"  
> myth is something people should have outgrown after the well- 
> deserved failure of Beta.


Who said anything about technologically inferior?  I said Outlook  
Express is a defective implementation of standards that far more has  
been invested in supporting in other software.  It does not seem fair  
to ask everyone else to change their software because OE cannot  
implement a standard correctly that is older than it is.

What quantity of defects is the rest of the software world supposed  
to accommodate because 40-something percent of the population uses  
defective software?  A defect with no redeeming value in a single  
popular implementation of a standard is no basis upon which to  
rewrite the standard by default.  If we always did that, there would  
be no standards.


> Just as they did not feel the great need to have preemptive  
> multitasking, microscopically better video, et cetera, they don't  
> care about...what is it you're complaining that Outlook doesn't do?  
> Some kind of object embedding?


Outlook has numerous software bugs in its mail parser.  It isn't  
missing some shiny, blinky feature, it is just broken.  You used to  
be able to crash Outlook with simple properly formed emails the bugs  
were so bad, though now it mostly just hoses the display.

Last I knew, Eugen was using Mutt as his email client, so I find it  
highly unlikely that his emails are malformed due to some deviation  
from the standard.  Every other email client seems to handle them  
just fine, and I highly doubt they have all implemented mutt bug  
workarounds.


> Any time the "experts" find that the masses aren't adopting their  
> "smarter" standards, there's probably a good reason.


What the hell are you talking about?  Outlook has a broken  
implementation for parsing standard mail bodies.  There is no  
"smarter" standard, just THE standard and an unjustifiably buggy  
implementation in one particular piece of software.  What, you want  
every other mail client to add parser bugs that mirror those in  
Outlook?  I would much rather Microsoft fix their parser.

I do find it rather stunning that Outlook still cannot parse basic  
email correctly.  This is not a difficult software design task, and  
it has been done well many times in numerous other email clients.


J. Andrew Rogers