ExtremeLabs, Inc

This is Step One of several in a series of posts. It’s simple, really.

Every mail package can sense what character set that’s being used by an email message’s sender. As an example, the language you’re reading is a “Latin language derivative”. Cyrillic, as an example, is meaningless to me. I have respect that it’s understood by millions of people. Not me. Therefore, let me opt out of getting any messages that contain Cyrillic characters/fonts. The same goes for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Urdu, Hebrew, and Arabic. Instant trash can.

The Internet, whether we like it or not, was initially formed with 7-bit ASCII character sets. It’s not terribly tough to allow users to simply vaporize character sets that they can’t read/don’t use. It’s that simple. No one’s thought of it, which makes me crazy. Step Two comes tomorrow.

Today I came back from an older cousin’s house. Her machine used a ‘taskbar’ that dominated her machine to the point of using 99% of CPU without letup. Everything dragged on endlessly trying to fight the application for resources. Slow doesn’t quite get there. Toss it out the window gets closer.

I fixed it. Windows of course, didn’t really tell her anything. Apparently 99% utilization is normal even when it lasts for hours. Shouldn’t an operating system ask a user if this is ok? In her case, it was time to buy a new computer. She wasn’t looking for an excuse to do so, but was ready to cough money to replace it, as if it had worn out. When I brought it back to life, she was amazingly happy. I tried to explain what I’d done in the briefest and most ephemeral of terms so that she could understand it. “One of your programs wasn’t letting anything else work”. She nodded, blankly. But she smiled, now able to get her email and surf. She’s still happy with dial-up. And she should be.