"Please, contact your local senator and representative, explain the dire need for the US to resume nuclear testing to prove that we have a valid, proven deterrent. We may nuke a few more Nevadans and Utahians, but they're dope-smoking whores and heretical polygamists, respectively. It's better that we detonate a few nukes, than rely on unproven simulations and end up being ruled by inscrutable atheistic Chinese overlords in a generation."
"what if the transformers was based on real events...and where does linux end up in this scheme."
The Constructicons were probably the Linux bots. They were small parts a of a giant robot called Devastator that was very good at the task at hand. (usually de-construction.) Devastator also had a limited vocabulary so he wasn't the most social. Few Decepticons knew how to give him the right commands to get him to do what he wanted.
"Whilst 'search' and 'king' may be commonly used nouns on their own, joining them together in a string 'searchking' is rare."
Google's not so literal with their 'containing all words' feature. Granted, 'SearchKing' should be fine, I've had Google remove periods and dashes from my verbose searches before.
Do a search for '6:05', the first match that pops up is "6/05".
"Do you live in the United States? Then you must be an extremist or fanatical - because those are the ideals the country was originally founded on."
Heh, that was an amusing troll. Apparently, my living in USA has magically caused me to subscribe to extremist ideas in the mid-1770's. I'm going to go to the store, shoplift some tea, and throw it into the river.
Did you forget to check the 'Post Anonymously' button?
"Despite the search criteria 'searchking' being typed in, searchking.com isn't even listed on the first page of results like you'd expect it to be"
'Search' and 'King' are commonly used nouns. I'm sure that's a factor in it.
Their approach could use some work...
on
The Free State Project
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Can anybody tell me why I shouldn't think of this as extremist or fanatical? Maybe I'm reading this in the wrong mood, but it seems to me like they're only trying to fix what they see wrong, as opposed to re-designing the system to be more useful. It doesn't seem like they understand why some things work the way they do.
"We will repeal state taxes and wasteful state government programs." -- Define wasteful. There's some that think that healthcare coverage of birth control is 'wasteful'. Others think that unwanted pregnancies cause greater 'wasteful' heatlh expense.
"We will end the collaboration between state and federal law enforcement officials in enforcing unconstitutional laws." -- Who's to judge 'unconstitutional'? Not that I actively pay attention to cases like this, but there's always opposing views. Some think that a law may be unconstitutional, but others have a different perspective that says it is constitutional. So... where's the middle ground? Who's to judge?
They're asking me to donate money and sign a petition with promises of utopica, but other than pandering to my desires (no taxes! no gov't unfairness!) they're not providing me with any useful data about how they'd meet my needs.
So, no, I don't see value here. I would understand if they were saying "Let's get together all the 'like-minded about certain issues' people into one state", instead they're saying "let's create a land where the gov't can't intrude!".
I think the internet is a good metaphor of this technology. Take Quake 3 for example. Think about what all it takes to get several people playing over the net. They all have to respond within a certain time-out phase, for adequate performance they have to respond in a fraction of the timeout time, and there's a whole lot of code dedicated to making sure that when I fire my gun, 200ms later it hits the right spot and dings the right player for it.
It works, but the logic to make that work is FAR more complex than the logic it takes to make something like a 'clocked internet' work. The downside, though, is that if you imagine what a clocked internet would be like, you'd understand why Q3 wouldn't work at all. In other words, the benefits would probably be worthwhile, but it's not a simple upgrade.
"2. Because asynchronous components only begin processing data when it becomes available they will only consume dynamic power when doing useful work; as compared with a clocked system which consumes dynamic power on every clock cycle regardless of the work done. This reduces system power consumption which is especially important for portable equipment."
That rung a bell with me. When I heard about 'clockless computing' a couple of years ago, one of the first examples was the microprocessor inside of a pager. They wanted to go clockless (which I assume is the same type of processor here, polite corrections invited...) so they could have a lower power processor. The idea? Make pagers last longer on a single battery.
I'd say it worked. However, from that same article, it'll be quite a while before desktop PC's use a processor like that. I should probably go read the article heh.
"I think I also was reacting to the post from "Anonymous Coward", and noticed after that you were playing on the spelling in your account name."
Heh that started off as an experiment. I wanted to see how confusing it'd be for people if an 'AC' posted at +2. The result? I got modded as overrated a lot. That pretty much stopped when I started using a sig and making my mail address available.
I have a similar (non-freeware) app to link Windows and my cell phone. I thought using your laptop to send sms messages via cell phone was a cool idea. It really makes me ache for a Bluetooth card so that my phone could relay the SMS w/o having to take the phone from my pocket.
"There are *plenty* of *far* more egregious examples of the problem you describe here on/. "
I would, but the problem is that my experience is broad enough that few poorly described things posted on Slashdot escape my scope, thus it doesn't occur to me to request clarification.
"I'm sorry, but this seems like a Microsoft sales person's post."
err okay. I'm going to politely share something with yout: It is a pet peeve of mine to be accused of being an MS salesperson just because I see the positive sides of one of their products. I use OL2k at work because I choose to. I wish I was an MS salesman because then it'd be worth arguing with people about it. But I'm not. If you want any definitive proof of that, look at this part of my post:
Until OL2K has competition, it is really hard to replace Office. Until Office is replaced, Windows cannot be replaced. (in a bidness setting...) As a matter of fact, that's why I'm not using Star Office right now. I'm too dependent on OL2K's org features. Might as well install the rest of Office while I'm there.
Do you really think that an MS salesperson or evangelist would point out exactly what is needed to produce a competing product to OL2K?
As for the rest of your post, the arguments you make are that the features are 'not new'. I never claimed that MS invented/created/envisioned/or even innovated. What they did do was put it all together in one useful product.
"So, this is a "run out and get outlook" post that is written as if none of us heard of these things before Outlook."
I find that comment amusing. Most people here are either Linux users or stay as far away from anything made by MS as possible. At the same time, I do see comments along the lines of "Replace Outlook with some other mail client", which says to me "Maybe they don't understand what it is that makes OL2k useful." To put it another way: how could you see a good chunk of the/. community being aware of some of O2k's non-mail features?
In any case, no, I am not an MS salesman or even an evangelist. The point of my post was to explain why the article isn't talking about the development of 'yet another mail client', but rather an app that covers personal organization. I was trying to clarify what this program has to go up against.
That way will work. Usually what I do is open an explorer window, then go to Tools/Folder Options/File Types and change it from there. (Note: That's Win2k, 98's subtley different but I cannot remember how.):)
"Sorry, but this is just not right. Outlook (9x or 200x) is at least as vulnerable as Outlook Express, and probably more so. More often than not the MIME header, buffer overflow or Windows scripting host exploits that affect OE work just as well in Outlook too. And then it's also susceptible to malicious VBA code."
Umm, nope, I would challenge that point. VBS and other scripting stuff is turned off by default. I've never heard of a buffer overflow exploit in OL, but if you have an example somewhere I'd love to read about it. (in other words, I'm not claiming it doesn't exist.)
As I said, numerous attempts are made here all the time. Nobody's gotten through. I even came up with an interesting trick to catch somebody sending out viruses, you all may find it interesting:
I created an account called 'virus'. I had everybody in the company add the virus address into their contact list. Then, I set up a rule in Outlook that says 'If the message is sent to the virus account, set off an audible alarm and quarantine the message.' The idea is that the worms out there will go through the contact list and send messages out.
At least that's the start of my idea. If anybody has any tips for enhancing that idea, please fire off a message to me.
"I am listening, but I have my own argument against storing it on the SIM card: first, if you lose your cell phone, you lose the SIM card. Second, why be dependent on some card when you could synchronize it with your computer and reliably back it up?"
I'm storing it in Outlook, then synching the phone up to it. My previous cell phone did not have a sim card. So I needed a solution to the 'How do I maintain my numbers?' problem. The only way I had back then was to buy an expensive cable to hook the two since it did not have an IRDA port.
Now, as for the SIM card, you are absolutely correct that it's a safer way to store your numbers. However, the main reason I got interested in backing up my numbers in the first place is that my first cell phone was stolen. The sim card would have done me no good then. Today, though, if my cell phone were lost or stolen my laptop'd have a good backup of my numbers. Plus, I synch up with my PocketPC as well, so my contacts are retained on it. So today, if I lose my phone or my laptop, I still have a backup.:)
I'm the guy who owns the mailserver and I have to support 20 or so people with Outlook related problems. I may be crazy, but it's well documented that I have an abundance of time to spend on Slashdot.
So there are a few possibilities here:
-I'm more competant than the guy you have maintaining the mail system.
-You're spreading FUD.
- You're uninformed about what the problem really is.
- You're using OL2k in an unsual or custom way.
- You're supporting a great deal more people than I am.
Now, listen carefully: I am not claiming that OL2k doesn't have defects. If it doesn't support SSL well, then I cannot defend that. We aren't using that here. We're not using an Exchange erver. (I've heard that's a fair source of a number of problems.)
I can tell you that the rules do work fine, but they have a few drawbacks:
1.) They ignore HTML. So if somebody sends you a mail that says 'Hamdingers' but it's bracketed with HTML tags, it won't get picked up of a rule says "delete all messages that say 'Hamdingers'.
2.) The rules wizard only sort of works in IMAP. Since the body of the message isn't downloaded through IMAP until you open it, the Rules Wizard cannot respond to any message that has a rule that applies to that section of the message.
3.) Attachments disappearing sounds more like a server problem than an Outlook problem. Lots of attachements flie around here all the time and we haven't had a case of disappearing attachments.
So take your pick. At the very least, I hope my notes on the Rules Wizard is useful to somebody. MS does a terrible job of telling you what the Wizard's limitations are.
To be fair, though: I've tried a number of rules on various clients and OL2k by far has the most sophisticated and useful. One of these days I'm going to learn VBA so I can write even fancier rules.
Note to mail developers: Anything you can do to enable scripting or programming on an email client will be a big win, expecially when fighting SPAM.
Actually, he's right. The last time I tried this was OL98, so don't flame broil me if it's not true with 2k. I uninstalled Outlook Express once and it did remove a DLL that OL98 needed. The problem is, I have no clue what that DLL did. For all I know, that DLL was just the 'Preview Pane' bit.
Does this mean that O2k or 98 is vulnerable because of OE? No. (Actually there is ONE vulnerability that's OE's fault, I'll explain that in a bit...)
O2K has similar features to OE, but the default security settings are better. It makes better decisions about what kind of scritps can be run and what type of attachements can be called. If you want my opinion, I suspect that the reason OE's security settings are further behind is to give O2K a 'more secure!' rating on the marketing brochures. I cannot substantiate that of course, but it does amaze me.
There is one O2k vulnerability involve IE that really frosts me. If you save a message as a file in O2k, then the extension is '.MSG'. If you save a message in OE as a file, the extension is '.EML'. Can you see the problem with the two different extensions? You can have O2k installed, but if you double click a message saved in OE format, then... BING it opens Outlook Express. (And all the annoyances that come with it..)
I have friends who think they need to forward every chain letter that goes around, and a good chunk of them use OE to do it. So they are forwarding a.EML file around (as an attachment) that will fire up OE no matter what email prog is your primary one. Result? They could be sending me an infected mail and I might be dumb enough (or non-attentive) to open it.
I have a piece of advice for ALL of you that are using Windows: Reroute the.EML extension to Notepad. I don't care if you're running Netscape mail or even Hotmail, you do NOT want OE getting run. Otherwise, yes, you could get bitten by an Outlook virus even if you're not running it.
With that said, I feel pretty confident with O2K. My company's run Outlook since it first came out and we've only had one virus actually get through and cause any problems. The damage caused was not a result of a flaw in Outlook, but rather a flaw in the person who decided to open the mail.
Interestingly enough, that virus picked exactly the right believable message for the user to open it, so I don't entirely blame him. We used to have an employee with contacts in the gov't. He got a message one day that said "Take a look at these FBI pics..." Heh. Of all the 40 or so random messages that email picked to display, that was the one that would have pretty much guaranteed it'd be opened. Given the context of things going on around that time, it would have been akin to recieving a message like "Check out these pictures of my baby" recieved from somebody who had given birth a week earlier.
Your mileage may vary, but you'll understand why I will stick with 2k and not bother with XP or future versions of Outlook until a.) I have a better choice or b.) Microsoft pulls out its compatibility crowbar and demands I upgrade.
Don't confuse Outlook Express for Outlook 2000. OE is the worm attractor. OL2K, though somewhat vulnerable, is nowhere near as problematic as OE. It's kind of surprising considering how much more OL2K does.
OL2K is more than an email prog, it's got a lot of cool things going for it. You've got the calendar, the todo list, the sticky notes, and contact list. This may not seem all that interesting until you synch up with an device such as a PDA.
I have an Ericsson T-68. It has an IR port (and bluetooth) and synchs up with my laptop. My laptop is running OL2K and has my contact list on it complete with phone numbers and email addresses. If I update a contact with a new phone # in Outlook, then it appears on my cell phone. In other words, if I buy a new cell phone, I don't lose all my phone #'s. Pretty cool considering I didn't have to buy a $120 cable to link the two.
The todo list has been a surprisingly useful feature on my phone as well. I do not carry my PocketPC around. My laptop's not on all the time. So what happens when I need a reminder? Well, I enter something to do in Outlook, the phone grabs it and will alert me. This may not be interesting to all of you, but it is to me. Nearly forgot my gf's birthday is on Tuesday and I need to go buy her present today!
Anyway, this isn't a 'Run out and get Outlook!' post, it's a "here's why people use it" post so that it's clearer why something like what is mentioned in this article is so interesting. MS basically has no competition in this area because nobody else seems to understand the value of it. The only app I can think of that could have given OL2K a run for it's money is the Palm Pilot desktop. It had similar features, though I don't remember it having mail. (note: I'm not saying it wasn't a mail client, I'm saying I don't remember it having one.)
Until OL2K has competition, it is really hard to replace Office. Until Office is replaced, Windows cannot be replaced. (in a bidness setting...) As a matter of fact, that's why I'm not using Star Office right now. I'm too dependent on OL2K's org features. Might as well install the rest of Office while I'm there.
Heh I remember when everybody was stunned at discovering (here on Slashdot in an interview with a respected VFX dude...) that Showgirls had some digital work done in it as well. Evidentally, a fountain in one of the scenes didn't work well during filming so they had to fix it in post.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what's funnier, that post or the moderations for it. Heh.
'Free-as-in-beer means it doesn't cost anything.'
:P~~
Good answer, now tell us what obvious-as-in-duh means.
"what if the transformers was based on real events...and where does linux end up in this scheme."
The Constructicons were probably the Linux bots. They were small parts a of a giant robot called Devastator that was very good at the task at hand. (usually de-construction.) Devastator also had a limited vocabulary so he wasn't the most social. Few Decepticons knew how to give him the right commands to get him to do what he wanted.
"Whilst 'search' and 'king' may be commonly used nouns on their own, joining them together in a string 'searchking' is rare."
Google's not so literal with their 'containing all words' feature. Granted, 'SearchKing' should be fine, I've had Google remove periods and dashes from my verbose searches before.
Do a search for '6:05', the first match that pops up is "6/05".
"Why don't you join the group [yahoo.com] and ask the questions there. "
I just wanted to see if I was the only one who's BS alarm went off.
"Do you live in the United States? Then you must be an extremist or fanatical - because those are the ideals the country was originally founded on."
Heh, that was an amusing troll. Apparently, my living in USA has magically caused me to subscribe to extremist ideas in the mid-1770's. I'm going to go to the store, shoplift some tea, and throw it into the river.
Did you forget to check the 'Post Anonymously' button?
"Despite the search criteria 'searchking' being typed in, searchking.com isn't even listed on the first page of results like you'd expect it to be"
'Search' and 'King' are commonly used nouns. I'm sure that's a factor in it.
Can anybody tell me why I shouldn't think of this as extremist or fanatical? Maybe I'm reading this in the wrong mood, but it seems to me like they're only trying to fix what they see wrong, as opposed to re-designing the system to be more useful. It doesn't seem like they understand why some things work the way they do.
"We will repeal state taxes and wasteful state government programs." -- Define wasteful. There's some that think that healthcare coverage of birth control is 'wasteful'. Others think that unwanted pregnancies cause greater 'wasteful' heatlh expense.
"We will end the collaboration between state and federal law enforcement officials in enforcing unconstitutional laws." -- Who's to judge 'unconstitutional'? Not that I actively pay attention to cases like this, but there's always opposing views. Some think that a law may be unconstitutional, but others have a different perspective that says it is constitutional. So... where's the middle ground? Who's to judge?
They're asking me to donate money and sign a petition with promises of utopica, but other than pandering to my desires (no taxes! no gov't unfairness!) they're not providing me with any useful data about how they'd meet my needs.
So, no, I don't see value here. I would understand if they were saying "Let's get together all the 'like-minded about certain issues' people into one state", instead they're saying "let's create a land where the gov't can't intrude!".
Error #59: No me gusta!
"Never did figure out why it never caught on."
I think the internet is a good metaphor of this technology. Take Quake 3 for example. Think about what all it takes to get several people playing over the net. They all have to respond within a certain time-out phase, for adequate performance they have to respond in a fraction of the timeout time, and there's a whole lot of code dedicated to making sure that when I fire my gun, 200ms later it hits the right spot and dings the right player for it.
It works, but the logic to make that work is FAR more complex than the logic it takes to make something like a 'clocked internet' work. The downside, though, is that if you imagine what a clocked internet would be like, you'd understand why Q3 wouldn't work at all. In other words, the benefits would probably be worthwhile, but it's not a simple upgrade.
That rung a bell with me. When I heard about 'clockless computing' a couple of years ago, one of the first examples was the microprocessor inside of a pager. They wanted to go clockless (which I assume is the same type of processor here, polite corrections invited...) so they could have a lower power processor. The idea? Make pagers last longer on a single battery.
I'd say it worked. However, from that same article, it'll be quite a while before desktop PC's use a processor like that. I should probably go read the article heh.
No worries man, I totally understand. :)
:)
"I think I also was reacting to the post from "Anonymous Coward", and noticed after that you were playing on the spelling in your account name."
Heh that started off as an experiment. I wanted to see how confusing it'd be for people if an 'AC' posted at +2. The result? I got modded as overrated a lot. That pretty much stopped when I started using a sig and making my mail address available.
Interesting times.
Ah! Thank you.
I have a similar (non-freeware) app to link Windows and my cell phone. I thought using your laptop to send sms messages via cell phone was a cool idea. It really makes me ache for a Bluetooth card so that my phone could relay the SMS w/o having to take the phone from my pocket.
"There are *plenty* of *far* more egregious examples of the problem you describe here on /. "
I would, but the problem is that my experience is broad enough that few poorly described things posted on Slashdot escape my scope, thus it doesn't occur to me to request clarification.
err okay. I'm going to politely share something with yout: It is a pet peeve of mine to be accused of being an MS salesperson just because I see the positive sides of one of their products. I use OL2k at work because I choose to. I wish I was an MS salesman because then it'd be worth arguing with people about it. But I'm not. If you want any definitive proof of that, look at this part of my post:
Do you really think that an MS salesperson or evangelist would point out exactly what is needed to produce a competing product to OL2K?
As for the rest of your post, the arguments you make are that the features are 'not new'. I never claimed that MS invented/created/envisioned/or even innovated. What they did do was put it all together in one useful product.
"So, this is a "run out and get outlook" post that is written as if none of us heard of these things before Outlook."
I find that comment amusing. Most people here are either Linux users or stay as far away from anything made by MS as possible. At the same time, I do see comments along the lines of "Replace Outlook with some other mail client", which says to me "Maybe they don't understand what it is that makes OL2k useful." To put it another way: how could you see a good chunk of the
In any case, no, I am not an MS salesman or even an evangelist. The point of my post was to explain why the article isn't talking about the development of 'yet another mail client', but rather an app that covers personal organization. I was trying to clarify what this program has to go up against.
That way will work. Usually what I do is open an explorer window, then go to Tools/Folder Options/File Types and change it from there. (Note: That's Win2k, 98's subtley different but I cannot remember how.) :)
"Sorry, but this is just not right. Outlook (9x or 200x) is at least as vulnerable as Outlook Express, and probably more so. More often than not the MIME header, buffer overflow or Windows scripting host exploits that affect OE work just as well in Outlook too. And then it's also susceptible to malicious VBA code."
Umm, nope, I would challenge that point. VBS and other scripting stuff is turned off by default. I've never heard of a buffer overflow exploit in OL, but if you have an example somewhere I'd love to read about it. (in other words, I'm not claiming it doesn't exist.)
As I said, numerous attempts are made here all the time. Nobody's gotten through. I even came up with an interesting trick to catch somebody sending out viruses, you all may find it interesting:
I created an account called 'virus'. I had everybody in the company add the virus address into their contact list. Then, I set up a rule in Outlook that says 'If the message is sent to the virus account, set off an audible alarm and quarantine the message.' The idea is that the worms out there will go through the contact list and send messages out.
At least that's the start of my idea. If anybody has any tips for enhancing that idea, please fire off a message to me.
"get a brain. you don't know what gnokii is?!?! (for connecting to mobile phones in linux?)"
I need to 'get a brain'? A person with a brain would have noticed that I'm a Windows user. One big hint was that I talked about Outlook a lot. heh.
"I am listening, but I have my own argument against storing it on the SIM card: first, if you lose your cell phone, you lose the SIM card. Second, why be dependent on some card when you could synchronize it with your computer and reliably back it up?"
:)
I'm storing it in Outlook, then synching the phone up to it. My previous cell phone did not have a sim card. So I needed a solution to the 'How do I maintain my numbers?' problem. The only way I had back then was to buy an expensive cable to hook the two since it did not have an IRDA port.
Now, as for the SIM card, you are absolutely correct that it's a safer way to store your numbers. However, the main reason I got interested in backing up my numbers in the first place is that my first cell phone was stolen. The sim card would have done me no good then. Today, though, if my cell phone were lost or stolen my laptop'd have a good backup of my numbers. Plus, I synch up with my PocketPC as well, so my contacts are retained on it. So today, if I lose my phone or my laptop, I still have a backup.
"You're crazy if you think OL2K works well..."
I'm the guy who owns the mailserver and I have to support 20 or so people with Outlook related problems. I may be crazy, but it's well documented that I have an abundance of time to spend on Slashdot.
So there are a few possibilities here:
-I'm more competant than the guy you have maintaining the mail system.
-You're spreading FUD.
- You're uninformed about what the problem really is.
- You're using OL2k in an unsual or custom way.
- You're supporting a great deal more people than I am.
Now, listen carefully: I am not claiming that OL2k doesn't have defects. If it doesn't support SSL well, then I cannot defend that. We aren't using that here. We're not using an Exchange erver. (I've heard that's a fair source of a number of problems.)
I can tell you that the rules do work fine, but they have a few drawbacks:
1.) They ignore HTML. So if somebody sends you a mail that says 'Hamdingers' but it's bracketed with HTML tags, it won't get picked up of a rule says "delete all messages that say 'Hamdingers'.
2.) The rules wizard only sort of works in IMAP. Since the body of the message isn't downloaded through IMAP until you open it, the Rules Wizard cannot respond to any message that has a rule that applies to that section of the message.
3.) Attachments disappearing sounds more like a server problem than an Outlook problem. Lots of attachements flie around here all the time and we haven't had a case of disappearing attachments.
So take your pick. At the very least, I hope my notes on the Rules Wizard is useful to somebody. MS does a terrible job of telling you what the Wizard's limitations are.
To be fair, though: I've tried a number of rules on various clients and OL2k by far has the most sophisticated and useful. One of these days I'm going to learn VBA so I can write even fancier rules.
Note to mail developers: Anything you can do to enable scripting or programming on an email client will be a big win, expecially when fighting SPAM.
"why would you store your phone numbers on your phone anyways?(as oppose to storing on the sim card, you got what? 512+ numbers?)."
I don't understand why you're attempting to poke holes in my argument this way, but I do have an interesting response to that.
Respond to this so I know you (or somebody else) is listening and I'll tell you exactly why.
Actually, he's right. The last time I tried this was OL98, so don't flame broil me if it's not true with 2k. I uninstalled Outlook Express once and it did remove a DLL that OL98 needed. The problem is, I have no clue what that DLL did. For all I know, that DLL was just the 'Preview Pane' bit.
... BING it opens Outlook Express. (And all the annoyances that come with it..)
.EML file around (as an attachment) that will fire up OE no matter what email prog is your primary one. Result? They could be sending me an infected mail and I might be dumb enough (or non-attentive) to open it.
.EML extension to Notepad. I don't care if you're running Netscape mail or even Hotmail, you do NOT want OE getting run. Otherwise, yes, you could get bitten by an Outlook virus even if you're not running it.
Does this mean that O2k or 98 is vulnerable because of OE? No. (Actually there is ONE vulnerability that's OE's fault, I'll explain that in a bit...)
O2K has similar features to OE, but the default security settings are better. It makes better decisions about what kind of scritps can be run and what type of attachements can be called. If you want my opinion, I suspect that the reason OE's security settings are further behind is to give O2K a 'more secure!' rating on the marketing brochures. I cannot substantiate that of course, but it does amaze me.
There is one O2k vulnerability involve IE that really frosts me. If you save a message as a file in O2k, then the extension is '.MSG'. If you save a message in OE as a file, the extension is '.EML'. Can you see the problem with the two different extensions? You can have O2k installed, but if you double click a message saved in OE format, then
I have friends who think they need to forward every chain letter that goes around, and a good chunk of them use OE to do it. So they are forwarding a
I have a piece of advice for ALL of you that are using Windows: Reroute the
With that said, I feel pretty confident with O2K. My company's run Outlook since it first came out and we've only had one virus actually get through and cause any problems. The damage caused was not a result of a flaw in Outlook, but rather a flaw in the person who decided to open the mail.
Interestingly enough, that virus picked exactly the right believable message for the user to open it, so I don't entirely blame him. We used to have an employee with contacts in the gov't. He got a message one day that said "Take a look at these FBI pics..." Heh. Of all the 40 or so random messages that email picked to display, that was the one that would have pretty much guaranteed it'd be opened. Given the context of things going on around that time, it would have been akin to recieving a message like "Check out these pictures of my baby" recieved from somebody who had given birth a week earlier.
Your mileage may vary, but you'll understand why I will stick with 2k and not bother with XP or future versions of Outlook until a.) I have a better choice or b.) Microsoft pulls out its compatibility crowbar and demands I upgrade.
What is a 'gnokii module'?
Don't confuse Outlook Express for Outlook 2000. OE is the worm attractor. OL2K, though somewhat vulnerable, is nowhere near as problematic as OE. It's kind of surprising considering how much more OL2K does.
OL2K is more than an email prog, it's got a lot of cool things going for it. You've got the calendar, the todo list, the sticky notes, and contact list. This may not seem all that interesting until you synch up with an device such as a PDA.
I have an Ericsson T-68. It has an IR port (and bluetooth) and synchs up with my laptop. My laptop is running OL2K and has my contact list on it complete with phone numbers and email addresses. If I update a contact with a new phone # in Outlook, then it appears on my cell phone. In other words, if I buy a new cell phone, I don't lose all my phone #'s. Pretty cool considering I didn't have to buy a $120 cable to link the two.
The todo list has been a surprisingly useful feature on my phone as well. I do not carry my PocketPC around. My laptop's not on all the time. So what happens when I need a reminder? Well, I enter something to do in Outlook, the phone grabs it and will alert me. This may not be interesting to all of you, but it is to me. Nearly forgot my gf's birthday is on Tuesday and I need to go buy her present today!
Anyway, this isn't a 'Run out and get Outlook!' post, it's a "here's why people use it" post so that it's clearer why something like what is mentioned in this article is so interesting. MS basically has no competition in this area because nobody else seems to understand the value of it. The only app I can think of that could have given OL2K a run for it's money is the Palm Pilot desktop. It had similar features, though I don't remember it having mail. (note: I'm not saying it wasn't a mail client, I'm saying I don't remember it having one.)
Until OL2K has competition, it is really hard to replace Office. Until Office is replaced, Windows cannot be replaced. (in a bidness setting...) As a matter of fact, that's why I'm not using Star Office right now. I'm too dependent on OL2K's org features. Might as well install the rest of Office while I'm there.
Heh I remember when everybody was stunned at discovering (here on Slashdot in an interview with a respected VFX dude...) that Showgirls had some digital work done in it as well. Evidentally, a fountain in one of the scenes didn't work well during filming so they had to fix it in post.