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Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message
by cortesoft 2y ago
Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use!
The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text.
The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Rastonbury 2y ago"the message does not exist in our system, only in your browser as text, copy and save it if you want to keep it, if you refresh this page the text will disappear"
- stall84 2y agothis cracked me up !
- tikhonj 2y agoIt's still funny that the text of a message can exist without being a message itself. That must make sense in the specific context of Outlook, but it shows that the conceptual design of the software does not match how we want to think about the domain abstractly.
- sherburt3 2y agoI don’t think the model is that far off. In real life I can read a letter and retain the contents in my mind, then burn the letter.
- Wolfenstein98k 2y agoBut this is claiming that the letter does not exist, while allowing you to read the contents of the letter. If it can show you the content, the container must exist!
- another-dave 2y agoThis letter cannot be read because it has been burnt to ash. You can only throw away the ashes. Make sure you read the letter and retain the contents in your mind, before you throw away the ashes, if you want to use them later.
- derefr 2y agoI would assume Outlook means that its locally-cached copy of the message exists, but the original server-side (probably IMAP) message no longer exists. And that without that message, there's no server-side resource to update — just a resource representation of a snapshot of that server-side resource, still temporarily persisted in a client-side read-through cache.
- denton-scratch 2y ago> the original server-side (probably IMAP) message no longer exists. Doesn't Outlook rely on the Exchange mailstore? It's a long time since I was near to Outlook and Exchange, but I thought the Exchange mailstore was some kind of X400 abomination, and that the IMAP capability was a bolt-on.
- nuancebydefault 2y agoDoes Outlook can even have opinions?
- m463 2y agoif the message never achieved a physical form such as printing, does the message exist? if the message stopped existing, but nobody was there, did it make the trash-can sound?
- verandaguy 2y agoWhat substantial difference is there between a message being manifested physically via printing as opposed to having it be a collection of bits in specific states on your hard drive (or memory, for that matter)?
- m463 2y agoisn't paper substantial while magnetic patterns are insubstantial?
- gorlilla 2y agoWhat would be transubstantial?
- verandaguy 2y agoIn what way are magnetic patterns unsubstantial? You can read information from them, which is really what we’re trying to do here, isn’t it? Is the goal to have it be readable to the naked, nominally working human eye? If so then I’d wager you could use magnetic paper as storage if you were a particularly persistent driver developer.
- doodlebugging 2y ago>if the message stopped existing, but nobody was there, did it make the trash-can sound? I know the answer for the case where this question refers to something on my pc. I have disabled audio warnings, alerts, etc so if the message stopped existing and I wasn't around to notice then it clearly does not make a trash-can sound.
- Sebb767 2y ago> if the message never achieved a physical form such as printing, does the message exist? The physical bits do exist, though, on the storage medium. Now, of course this does not match our usual image of existing, since the bytes were technically always there, but it still exists in the physical world. You can actually make the same argument with a letter: The paper and ink were there before, the pattern ist what brought it to existence.
- mananaysiempre 2y agoCeci n’est pas un message?
- actionfromafar 2y agoYou can stuff that in your pipe and smoke it!
- squeaky-clean 2y agoThe author addresses this though. He calls it the contents instead of the text but it's the same thing. > We learn a final affordance, which complicates the story. An inexistent message has contents, which may be copied – but only if the message has not yet been discarded. The message is gone and can't be saved anymore, but it can still be discarded (or presumably not discarded).
- bch 2y ago“Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gpvos 2y agoThe question remains: how can something that does not exist contain anything?
- mewpmewp2 2y agoThe message object used to contain those contents, but then the message object was deleted, although the contents value was still available in a UI in temporary memory.
- tempodox 2y agoI speaks to Microsoft's creativity that they are able to redefine logic that far.
- IsTom 2y agoThe sane will tell you that Necronomicon doesn't exist in our world, yet we have a vague idea of what it contains and we're sure that it contains only the most repulsive of things.
- jcparkyn 2y agoWell somebody had better discard it now, lest it start existing at some point in the future.
- fweimer 2y agoExample: You are editing a table row with some application, but when you try to save the changes, the system discovered that the row has been deleted from the table. The business logic does not permit you to create rows arbitrarily, so a new row cannot be inserted instead of updating existing one. The behavior admittedly does not make sense for files (although I suppose you could rename or delete the directory that contains it), but it's sort of unavoidable if you don't want to take locks while some client application you don't control may or may not make changes.
- gpvos 2y agoYes, I already could imagine that. I meant the question more in a philosophical sense.
- dahart 2y ago> the message is not the same as the text. Like people who’s bodies are gone but who’s souls are still here? I see dead messages… :P That distinction might be worthwhile, and it’s certainly true from a technical standpoint. But the real problem here is the message is not the same as the message. If that was referring to a single message it’d make a great philosophical problem. Unfortunately we’re just talking about a more boring problem of two different messages with two different texts where the text of one of them accidentally referred to the other one as ‘this’.