OK, I am an idiot.
So I get an email with an attachment and I go to open it and the window pops up to ask me what I want to associate this with.
HOW THE FUCK DO I KNOW?
So if I guess and am wrong, every time I try again it associates with the same wrong program.
Help!
Why isn’t this something automatic? Or is this a dumbass Microsoft thing?
And you call yourself a Presidential Advisor. Its a dumb ass Microsoft thing. Get a Mac.
Chou
Presidential Advisor = Law of diminishing returns
So if I associate it wrongly, how can I undo it and try again? Is there some way to coerce it to find the right association all by its lonesome?
What kind of file is it? That will give you indication of the helper app to associate with. If its an unsolicited executable file. I advise not opening it as it may contian a virus.
as for deassociation. In my best Rick Ricardo “I don use MS winows”
but one very easy solution is to save the attachment to a disk. Open the programs you think can run it, then open the file from wiothin the application. repeat until you get it right.
Chou
Dis Microsoft all you want, but I bet my bottom NT$, it’s a “.dat” file sent by a Mac that can’t figure out what kind of file it is, even though all other computers in the universe can.
Its the MS software that can not figure out the file format. I’ve sent many .jpg files that arrive as .dat files when read by MS windows mail programs. This is easy to overcome by saving it in the proper system format, I’ve never had the problem when recieivng files from MS Windows based machines…anyway irrelvant as we do not yet know what type of file it is.
Chou
Hi Wolf, I’m on XP at the moment but from memory Win 98 wasn’t too different.
The ‘associate with’ box should have a little checkbox at the bottom which gives you the option to ‘always associate this program with this kind of file’. If you don’t check it, you’ll get the ‘associate with’ box every time you try to open that file and others with the same extension.
To unassociate, you have to find the ‘file types’ list. I can’t remember where that was on 98, but on XP, in any Explorer window click on ‘Tools’, then ‘File Types’ should be at the bottom.
What extension does the attachment have? In XP, it’s very easy to change file extensions - just do it through the ‘rename’ option when you right-click the file. In 98, it was more difficult - you had to do it through a command-line accessed utility.
two more cents: 99% of the time this simply means that you don’t have the software on your computer to open it. ask the sender what they used, maybe you can download it from somewhere.
once you “associated” a file you can change/delete the association in win xp through start/settings/control panel/folder options/file types (not 100% sure about the english of those last two, i have chinese windows, it may be slightly different). in 98 i think you could get to this menu by right-clicking on the start button and choosing properties, don’t hold me to that though.
The file in question was called, in its entirety: interestingstuff
There was no suffix. Luckily I know the sender and asked. It was a .TXT file, believe it or not.
The thing that baffles me is the fact that Windows (this was ME) does not have some sort of way to automatically read what the fuck the file is and open it with the right program. Do Macs have this bullshit habit?
[quote=“wolf_reinhold”]The file in question was called, in its entirety: interestingstuff
There was no suffix. Luckily I know the sender and asked. It was a .TXT file, believe it or not.
The thing that baffles me is the fact that Windows (this was ME) does not have some sort of way to automatically read what the fuck the file is and open it with the right program. Do Macs have this bullshit habit?[/quote]
Ah, a conclusion at last. Rare around here.
Chou
PS. Get a Mac
[quote=“wolf_reinhold”]The file in question was called, in its entirety: interestingstuff
There was no suffix. Luckily I know the sender and asked. It was a .TXT file, believe it or not.
The thing that baffles me is the fact that Windows (this was ME) does not have some sort of way to automatically read what the fuck the file is and open it with the right program. Do Macs have this bullshit habit?[/quote]
Well, there’s your problem. In Windows, the suffix IS the “way to automatically read what the fuck the file is and open it with the right program.”
If you’d rather, you can spring for a Mac, which puts this information into one of the two “forks” that each file has, or you can move to Linux, which uses a mix of “magic numbers” and suffixes.
It’s entirely possible to screw up a Mac, too – for one thing, if you import a file from a non-Mac, you’re just gonna have to know what the file type is and tell the Mac when you save the file, otherwise there’s no telling what it will decide. And on Linux/UNIX, it’s entirely possible to create a binary data file that just happens to have the “magic number” of some other type of file, or to name a file with the wrong suffix – just as you can rename your .TXT file to be a .RAM file, and screw things up that way.
Conclusion: no system is perfukt. 
Also, I have a friend that uses Macs exclusively, and every email she tries to send to my Hinet account does not come though. I can see it, but not open it. I use a PC.
Conclusion. Windows ME sucks. Even betwen my mac and my chinese windowed pc I have no problem passing files. the MaPoDoFu solution is the only thiong that works. Know your system. But you since you already confessed to being an idiot, you’re screwed.
Chou
Wolf,
I’m afraid that you cannot blame M$ here. There is in fact no way to automatically determine the type of a file by, as you suggest, peeking at the first few bytes of it. Techies call this the mime-type, a standard categorization for file types, such as text, bitmap, Excel Spreadsheet, etc. The only way that a file can tell the world what type it is is by its extension. It is possible to empirically narrow down the possibilities, and make an educated guess, by looking at the contents … the most obvious step is to determine whether the file is text or binary (read: crap to the naked eye), and there might be other clues, such as a “magic number” that identifies what application the file belongs with, but this approach assumes a certain level of intelligence in either the program or the eyeballs reading the file, and so it isn’t failsafe.
This is why extensions are so important, and why a file without an extension, such as the one you received, is pretty much useless. This is true for all operating systems, Windows, Macs and Linux are all shit out of luck w/ an extension-less file. Maybe Macs have a different way to deal w/ their own files but this doesn’t help if the file originated on another OS.
So what do you do with such an attachment? Well, if it has a name like “interestingstuff” or “readthis”, you should chuck it on general principle (if, as the Wolf from Pulp Fiction would say, self-preservation is an instinct you possess). However, if you are a bit more curious, the safest thing to do in this case is to save the attachment to your Desktop and stick a .TXT at the end of it, or simply tell your PC to open it in Notepad as a text file. This is the empirical approach mentioned above, and will at least tell you whether the file is human-readable or not. By the way, it’s safe because Notepad is one of the few programs that to my knowledge are not vulnerable to the kind of attack where opening a file will run a malicious program and spread viruses in your system.
'nuf said (and then some)
Ok, I have been abusive on you Soties out there. Nice post Mangalica, all I vaguely knew and can now better express. Call me a geek, but your inspiring me to had back to school for CS 101 and more.
Chou
A couple of requests for this thread:
Wolf: PLEASE DON’T SHOUT IN THIS FORUM BY USING ALL CAPS. ESPECIALLY IN THE SUBJECT.
Also, please don’t swear. This is a tech forum. Tech forums tend not to be so free-wheeling as other forums. As I conceive of it, this is a place where we try to get work done.
I realize that the kind of problem you had is very frustrating. And thanks to those who posted solutions.
Cho: Please don’t start religious wars by saying things like Get a Mac! I like Macs too, but this is not going to help Wolf.
BTW, I doubt very much you would learn much about handling file attachments in CS101.
Mac’s keep a resource fork, but with OS X extensions are a lot more important. You have the option of actually seeing them, which I leave on. And if you change the extension to something else, the file icon will immediatley change and the appropriate program will open it, EVEN IF it is the wrong progam … So, actually the behavior is similar to Windows. Like others have said, no system is perfect. Scanning the data in the file to map it to some structure proprietary to some program would make rather bloated OSes that would have to keep a very large library on file of all the possible 3rd party vendors out there that have their own file formats. That just would be a waste of time. It would also slow down processing time dramatically. Since most file types are know, it wouldn’t be worth it (.doc, .txt, .php, .png, .mov, .xls, .ppt, .zip, .jpg, .gif, .htm, .swf, … etc.). I actually do what was mentioned, and that is to turn an unknown into a .txt to see if there is anything I can recognize in the garbage code.
wow. I am learning a lot of cool stuff.
chou
[quote=“Feiren”]A couple of requests for this thread:
…
Cho: Please don’t start religious wars by saying things like Get a Mac! I like Macs too, but this is not going to help Wolf.
BTW, I doubt very much you would learn much about handling file attachments in CS101.[/quote]
O.K., Ive learned a lot.
Chou