I have no connection, yet I must post!

[penk]

So I'm converting over to Outlook2000 at work. Its not my fault, I must have access to group calendaring. I'm going to use Crossover to run Outlook on my Linux box, but for the nonce, I'm running it on my laptop, under WindowsXP.

And ya know, it ain't bad. Really. I've set up mail filtering rules, and they all work, the interface isn't bugging me as much as I had thought it would, and it just plain works. Group calendaring is -reallly- cool...

But, there's still that sour taste... and as Neimon put it, as he so eloquently does:

"It IS kinda like going into a restaurant and you hate the decore
and you smell something bad, but my, aren't these nice chairs..."

Comments

[d3l1r1um.livejournal.com]

You know, I've discovered that there's really nothing particularly wrong with Microsoft products... I mean, there's a lot of software for Windows, and the functionality is good. It's just the GAPING SECURITY HOLES that keep me screaming and running back to Mac OS X as quickly as I possibly can. How quickly we forget (http://www.techie.hopto.org/sqlworm.html)...

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Outlook's UI and functionality are actually pretty damn good for the most part. I still like mutt better as a general mail wrangler, but nothing beats Outlook's calendar/schedule functionality that I have ever found.

It's just the backend that's scary as hell. Their IMAP code is impossibly buggy, and from a security perspective, it's swiss cheese. If you take the time to lock it down, it can be run with only a little risk of melting your entire computer into a puddle of slag, but that's only based on the holes we know about today...

It's the Microsoft Way, and like it or not it sells....

[feoh.livejournal.com]

They make 85% of what 85% of the user base wants to do screamingly simple, and then make the last 15% either daunting or impossible.

I actually recommend Outlook to some people, particularly Mac users who can't be auto-buggered by ActiveX controls embedded in E-mail.

It does frustrate me though that Microsoft regularly ignores some very basic rules of computer security, rules that exist because as a f'rinstance there really IS NO totally safe way of allowing mailers to automatically execute program code embedded in the mail.

Everybody seems to be taking the successively more nasty waves of worms for granted these days, they just install NAV and forget.

As I recall when we used that strategy with antibiotics we ended up breeding new strains of antibiotic resistant germs that kicked our asses anyway.

I realize that the parallels between biological and machine-borne viri are tenuous in spots but I think this analogy is apt.