Subj : Re: 40 Cups of Coffee
To   : Maurice Kinal
From : Nick Boel
Date : Sat Apr 05 2025 20:30:24

Hey Maurice!

On Sat, Apr 05 2025 13:36:50 -0500, you wrote:

 > A little worse for wear but yes I am not dead yet.  Still gettting 
 > probed and scanned as they still haven't found the cause.

What are they probing and scanning for?

 > Heh, heh.  I think the opposite but am unsure if he had anything to 
 > do with it.  Seems to me that about 15-ish years ago, maybe more, MS 
 > came up with a windows release where UTF-16 was the default, which of 
 > course wreaked havoc given the lack of compatibility with standard 
 > 7-bit and 8-bit character sets that everyone was using and still are.  
 > Since MS adopted UTF-8 instead, I haven't heard anything about that 
 > particular fsck-up since.

It seems 15 years ago was around the time of WinXP and Win7. I've even recently installed both of those in a virtual machine to check out some old BBS software, and I don't remember anything odd in regards to charsets. As far as I can remember, the command prompt has always used CP437, but there was a time I didn't use Windows at all (nothing in between Win 3.11 for Workgroups and Win2kPro, and then I never used ME or Vista, either).

A quick look at Wikipedia states that Windows has been using UTF-16 since Windows 2000, and didn't support UTF-8 in it's API until 2019. If that is the case, it was a thing for a lot longer than we thought..

 >> I definitely wasn't serious

 > I am not surprised.

Does my new tagline sway your decision on that? ;)

 > Probably, but I do prefer the layout I posted as opposed to the 
 > glibc's gconv-modules or 'iconv --list' and especially IANA's html 
 > page of encodings and corresponding aliases.  The posting in this 
 > echoarea is more along the line of file listings on BBSes which is 
 > vastly more humanly readable than anything else I've seen.

When is the last time you actually listed files on a BBS? If it's been awhile, you can check the address in my origin line. However, I'd recommend CP437 capabilities in some capacity. I can use a UTF-8 enabled Putty client with proper settings to telnet and it displays pretty good (CP437 and UTF-8), though.

 > HTML definetly sucks.  Beats me why anyone in their right mind would 
 > subscribe to that format over plain text output, including 
 > (espcially?) UTF-8.  :::sigh:::

The incessant need for fancy emojis, maybe?

Regards,
Nick

.... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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