I don't think it's not really a "problem", it's merely the natural wisdom and wrinkles of any collective "growing up", for all the good and ill that entails.
It's a "problem" because the self-sustaining bureaucracy is full of assholes. If the self-sustaining bureaucracy stopped deleting people's work and generally being pains in the ass, nobody would be complaining right now.
What would be the point? Wikipedias problems *are* the people you're entrusting to fix it, the long-term editors and admins. I mean, obvious improvements, like adding a mode to view deleted articles, haven't been made. Why would you expect them to make any more wide-ranging changes?
It's goofy as hell in the first place that wiki keeps a detailed change log of everything ever by anyone-- except deletions. Deletions are holy, beyond reproach.
As an EU citizen, once you're admitted to state-run hospital, there is no charge for anything. (Well, there are payphones, and you can pay extra to rent your own TV, buy candy from vending machines etc. But everything from basic meals and drinks, to medicine, to surgery, is free.)
Do EU citizens honestly and truly think that health care is "free" and not tax-funded?
Asking mostly out of curiosity because of the terminology you've used so casually.
WOW has "fixed" this by making equipment listed in the AH relatively worthless compared to what you can get from just questing. I actually had a friend who was banned from WOW for price fixing, I thought that was crap personally. One of many reasons I stopped playing.
Handbrake doesn't decrypt DVDs. Unless you're using an ancient version, back when it was Mac-only.
I hear-tell that Handbrake will use VLC's libraries on some platforms (at least Mac, possibly Linux), but that doesn't work on Windows at all. So on the most popular OS, at least, Handbrake is useless for this purpose unless you've already downloaded a completely separate DMCA-violating program (like AnyDVD, for example.)
But not by much. Slashdot constantly out-does itself in the "retarded submission" category.
It could potentially be entertaining if the editors approved these with some indication that they understood how retarded they were, as some kind of a "haha look at the stuff we have to look at" joke. But, no, instead they always come through dead-pan serious.
What is WRONG with you people? Why do you real Slashdot stories like this one and instantly come to the conclusion that the story is accurate? Or even remotely true?
Look, maybe this is your first day, so let me clarify it: Every story on Slashdot about Microsoft is at least misleading; most are outright false. Repeat that mantra a few times until it sinks in.
No, this isn't Microsoft "going back to their old ways." This is some moron finally discovering a feature that IE has had since version 6, and possibly before, and going off on some crazy rant with no basis in truth. IE is only redirecting people to Bing because Bing is set to the default search provider!
Please, please, I beg you, DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ. In fact, on Slashdot, don't believe *anything* you read unless it's been confirmed elsewhere.
It's there, it was just renamed. In the same area, find the "Search from the Address bar" section and then click "Do not submit unknown addresses to your auto-search provider." True, it's a little bit confusingly worded, but the option is still there.
And if you do do that, *don't ignore the* "Last Gas for XXX Miles" signs. Believe me, they ain't kidding!
Took a road trip in my PT Cruiser once, even Eastern Washington is orders of magnitude more densely populated than most of the country-- pulled into gas stations running on fumes twice in Utah alone.
(BTW, we could buy more cell towers if we just sold Utah and New Mexico to someone else. It's not like we're using it for anything. Maybe Canada would be interested.)
And yet the 360 controller still has a d-pad that bad.
Two things: 1) Good D-pad designs are all patented; the reason Microsoft's sucks is because they were late to the market. Any other latecomer would have the same problem. 2) Xbox games generally don't bother using the D-pad anyway. Normally when it's used, it's just used as 4 additional buttons, and not as a joystick.
Given those, I think Microsoft's doing about the best they can with their controller.
Nevertheless, there were a few good N64 games and couple of great ones. Cartridges weren't a complete mistake.
That doesn't follow at all. Nobody ever claimed that because the N64 used carts, it was literally impossible to ever make a good game for it. Hell, Xbox has good games that could fit on N64 carts (like Geometry Wars.)
Cartridges were a mistake because Nintendo lost much of its support from publishers. Imagine where Nintendo would be right now if Final Fantasy 7 or Tomb Raider had come out on N64. It didn't help that the Gamecube's weird mutant disk format only alienated publishers further.
Due to the extremely high quality of the Apple products you worship, this is my third attempt to write a reply. Let's see if Safari can go more than 3 minutes without crashing this time.
In any case, a couple points: 1) if you have had the same OS install for 9 years, you aren't comparing to the current Windows version. To make your comparison fair, please obtain a 9 year old copy of OS X and use that. 2) if you have had any registry problems at all in Windows 2000 or XP, then I have absolutely no clue what the hell you're doing with it. I've admined hundreds of 2000 and XP machines, many on woefully insufficient hardware, and I've never seen that. Malware, I'll give you, but registry corruption? Solved long ago.
Apples folder layout is simplier because they don't give half-a-shit for backwards compatibility. I switched away from Apple because I got pissed at their constant breaking of old applications without apology, or even comment. If Microsoft pulled that shit, there would he riots, but with Apple it's all dandy-fine. "free for life.Mac now costs $100? Thank you sir! May I have another?"
On scripting: I can use any language, huh? Ok! I want to use PowerShell. Kidding, of course, but tone down the ridiculous hyperbole. Hell, you can barely use AppleScript on OS X, and they invented that one. In any case, PowerShell is indeed new, but it's also leaps and bounds above all competitors right now, and has the support of all the.net libraries, which is huge.
On cron: thank God they ditched that turd. If launchd was available on 10.3 (the last OS X version I used before ditching the platform) it was well-hidden.
Sorry for the ramble, this iPhone is really bugging out. It's hard to defend Apple when they can't even make a mobile browser run for longer than 5 minutes, Christ. Oh and there's no way to scroll this text box down so there might be orphaned text below this line. I give up trying o fix that. (The other reason I switched was because people assume you're a dick if you use Apple, because ao many Mac users are dicks.)
This preference pane has something like 10 tabs which control all sorts of disparate things. These 10 tabs then form two rows which creates its own usability nightmare.
No. All of the disparate control panels (Desktop Background, Customize Colors, Screen Resolution, Screen Saver, and Change Theme) have ONE tab each. But don't let a silly thing like a FACT interrupt your constant flow of anti-Microsoft bullshit.
However, I think at Apple someone looked and thought and decided that separating them out was the better way.
Gee! If only Microsoft would separa-- OH WAIT THEY DID.
Microsoft obliges its users and their UI design is the result.
What the holy fuck do you know about the Microsoft UI? You only gave *one* example in your post, and it was completely, utterly wrong. Each word makes you sound dumber and dumber.
However, I'm actually a little surprised that you yourself haven't gotten into it. Mac OS X offers a LOT for the highly technical user. You get a more stable system than Windows (registry, filesystem layout, malware),
When's the last time you used Windows? It's not 1998 anymore. (Also, what in blazes does the filesystem layout have to do with stability?)
you get a full BSD environment and CLI for whatever you want to hack about with or automate,
And with Windows you get the (admittedly poor) CMD, the (admittedly clunky) VBA, and the (holy crap awesomesauce) Powershell. Also: Windows Scheduled Tasks is better than cron, there I said it.
And if you still need Windows, whether for gaming or a particular app, you can always dual-boot or virtualize. It's really the most flexible option by far.
That's a solid selling point. But I'd recommend actually *using* Windows before talking about it in the future, so that you might sound a little less out-of-touch.
OS X has practically nothing to appeal to large corporations, and they've never really (seriously) persued that market. Large corporations make a large percentage of computer buyers. They lack the networking features, they lack a serious office suite, and until very recently they lacked the development tools.
Anyway, just chiming in to agree with you. There are entire markets OS X doesn't even bother targeting.
(as I recall, Bill Gates admitted that he was blindsided by the Internet)
Even if you consider the time it took to perfect Winsock, Microsoft was still ahead of their main competition for Internet-using desktops, the Macintosh, by at least three years.
Despite Gates' admission, it doesn't seem like his lack of foresight actually hurt Microsoft in any way... you didn't see people recommending against buying Windows 95 because of flaky Internet support, for example.
In fact, there's a lasting legacy of Microsoft's near miss. Pretty much every attempt Redmond has made to create THE Internet portal has failed miserably. How many times was MSN rebooted? How long did Live last? We'll see how Bing does, but if it fails, then history is going to record that while Microsoft remained the computing platform de jeur, it never was able to create a web presence to equal their platform dominance.
That's definitely true, but also a different argument to the above one. A web portal isn't, and never has been, part of Microsoft's core business.
By version 4, IE was a better product than Netscape 4. Microsoft's distribution definitely helped on the Windows platform, but even on the Macintosh platform, where the OS didn't favor one browser over another, IE soundly whipped Netscape.
Netscape is like the Commodore of Internet software-- they went from having an almost indomitable lead to pissing it away in a matter of only a few years. I mean, check off the bullet points: releasing untested, extremely buggy, software? Check. Conflating their core browser product with tons of features the average customer didn't want? Check. Stopped development entirely to rewrite the product from scratch, leaving them with no flagship product whatsoever? Check.
I dunno; this always strikes me as revisionism. I mean, dropped the ball in Internet connectivity compared to whom? At the time Windows 95 shipped:
* Apple hadn't even really begun to integrate TCP/IP into their OS, it only supported proprietary Apple networking protocols. * Sun and other Unix vendors definitely had a leg-up here, but they weren't, and have never been, notable on the desktop space-- so regardless of their Internet support, it wasn't relevant to the average user. * So what else is left? IBM OS/2? Novell Netware? (I'm not familiar enough with those products to speak to their Internet support.)
So basically, the argument seems to boil down to: "Microsoft missed the Internet boat by being several years ahead of their only desktop OS competition." That makes no damned sense.
Considering the vast majority of software houses do absolutely no usability testing whatsoever, if you consistently do Hallway Testing, you're way above average in the industry. Seriously.
Now, obviously, having a real usability testing lab/plan is far superior to Hallway Testing alone, but it doesn't make a hallway usability test obsolete. (Think of it like Unit Tests-- nobody sane would say that Unit Tests could replace a proper QA department, but they sure help a lot despite that.)
I guess that explains Microsoft's shit-poor attempts at UI design?
Of course the thing that pisses me off the most is that Microsoft puts tons of time and effort into usability testing, far, far more than any other software company (except perhaps Apple.) All the changes that have gone into Vista and Office 2007 are there because they're measurably superior to the older way of doing things, confirmed by a program of usability testing.
For example, you snark that Microsoft's UI designs are "shit-poor." Really? Then put your money where your mouth is and prove it. Show me a valid study that backs up your claim, and I'll eat my hat.
Usability is important, perhaps the most important part of software development. Any company that commits resources to it should be cheered on, even if they're Microsoft.
Ditto here. I got pulled over and ticketed on an obvious speedtrap-- a State highway (State prescribes 50 MPH) on a straight, perfectly safe, stretch of road. For some "mysterious" reason, the speed limit turns to 35 MPH right before a perfect spot for a cop to hide, then about a half mile down goes back to 55 MPH. Went in front of the judge with some photos of the road, and a citation of the State law, and got off.
This sounds a lot like the Outlook 2007 discussion on Vista (and some reports on XP). Vista has "advanced memory management" and Outlook "continually asks for RAM, as long as some is available". The result? Outlook allocates ~700M, according to the Task Manager process list, while the Physical Memory free (on a 3G system) reports 6% free. Closing Outlook brings the ram free percentage up to %60. Some MS MVP said just what you said "The RAM is available, so Outlook uses it and the program responds faster, that's a good thing", completely disregarding the fact that the computer is near unresponsive to everything else. A program should never take RAM "because it's available", it should take it "because it's needed". Using over 2G of RAM to open 3 emails is absurd, using 1G for texture and sound data is more reasonable.
I'm running Outlook 2007 on Vista right now this instant, and it's using 92MB of RAM. Physical memory free = 57%.
Even if Outlook was using all but 6% of free RAM, why would that necessarily make your system "unresponsive to everything else?" 6% of RAM is plenty to keep your machine responsive, assuming it has a gig or more in it.
And this statement:
A program should never take RAM "because it's available", it should take it "because it's needed".
Is doubly-retarded. RAM takes time to fill, yet takes no time to empty. Therefore, all software should fill as much RAM as feasible to make itself more responsive to the user. RAM isn't some physical object you "take away" from something else-- if Outlook allocates RAM than another process needs, the OS just overwrites it as needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's not really a "problem", it's merely the natural wisdom and wrinkles of any collective "growing up", for all the good and ill that entails.
It's a "problem" because the self-sustaining bureaucracy is full of assholes. If the self-sustaining bureaucracy stopped deleting people's work and generally being pains in the ass, nobody would be complaining right now.
What would be the point? Wikipedias problems *are* the people you're entrusting to fix it, the long-term editors and admins. I mean, obvious improvements, like adding a mode to view deleted articles, haven't been made. Why would you expect them to make any more wide-ranging changes?
It's goofy as hell in the first place that wiki keeps a detailed change log of everything ever by anyone-- except deletions. Deletions are holy, beyond reproach.
Oop, and the answer is hidden "beneath the fold." Sorry, ignore that post.
As an EU citizen, once you're admitted to state-run hospital, there is no charge for anything. (Well, there are payphones, and you can pay extra to rent your own TV, buy candy from vending machines etc. But everything from basic meals and drinks, to medicine, to surgery, is free.)
Do EU citizens honestly and truly think that health care is "free" and not tax-funded?
Asking mostly out of curiosity because of the terminology you've used so casually.
WOW has "fixed" this by making equipment listed in the AH relatively worthless compared to what you can get from just questing. I actually had a friend who was banned from WOW for price fixing, I thought that was crap personally. One of many reasons I stopped playing.
Handbrake doesn't decrypt DVDs. Unless you're using an ancient version, back when it was Mac-only.
I hear-tell that Handbrake will use VLC's libraries on some platforms (at least Mac, possibly Linux), but that doesn't work on Windows at all. So on the most popular OS, at least, Handbrake is useless for this purpose unless you've already downloaded a completely separate DMCA-violating program (like AnyDVD, for example.)
I think this one is still dumber:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257
But not by much. Slashdot constantly out-does itself in the "retarded submission" category.
It could potentially be entertaining if the editors approved these with some indication that they understood how retarded they were, as some kind of a "haha look at the stuff we have to look at" joke. But, no, instead they always come through dead-pan serious.
What is WRONG with you people? Why do you real Slashdot stories like this one and instantly come to the conclusion that the story is accurate? Or even remotely true?
Look, maybe this is your first day, so let me clarify it: Every story on Slashdot about Microsoft is at least misleading; most are outright false . Repeat that mantra a few times until it sinks in.
No, this isn't Microsoft "going back to their old ways." This is some moron finally discovering a feature that IE has had since version 6, and possibly before, and going off on some crazy rant with no basis in truth. IE is only redirecting people to Bing because Bing is set to the default search provider!
Please, please, I beg you, DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ. In fact, on Slashdot, don't believe *anything* you read unless it's been confirmed elsewhere.
It's there, it was just renamed. In the same area, find the "Search from the Address bar" section and then click "Do not submit unknown addresses to your auto-search provider." True, it's a little bit confusingly worded, but the option is still there.
Ok; then turn it off.
Either way, it's not worthy of a mouth-foaming angry Slashdot story-- unless it's time for the 2 Minutes Hate, I guess.
And if you do do that, *don't ignore the* "Last Gas for XXX Miles" signs. Believe me, they ain't kidding!
Took a road trip in my PT Cruiser once, even Eastern Washington is orders of magnitude more densely populated than most of the country-- pulled into gas stations running on fumes twice in Utah alone.
(BTW, we could buy more cell towers if we just sold Utah and New Mexico to someone else. It's not like we're using it for anything. Maybe Canada would be interested.)
And yet the 360 controller still has a d-pad that bad.
Two things:
1) Good D-pad designs are all patented; the reason Microsoft's sucks is because they were late to the market. Any other latecomer would have the same problem.
2) Xbox games generally don't bother using the D-pad anyway. Normally when it's used, it's just used as 4 additional buttons, and not as a joystick.
Given those, I think Microsoft's doing about the best they can with their controller.
Nevertheless, there were a few good N64 games and couple of great ones. Cartridges weren't a complete mistake.
That doesn't follow at all. Nobody ever claimed that because the N64 used carts, it was literally impossible to ever make a good game for it. Hell, Xbox has good games that could fit on N64 carts (like Geometry Wars.)
Cartridges were a mistake because Nintendo lost much of its support from publishers. Imagine where Nintendo would be right now if Final Fantasy 7 or Tomb Raider had come out on N64. It didn't help that the Gamecube's weird mutant disk format only alienated publishers further.
Due to the extremely high quality of the Apple products you worship, this is my third attempt to write a reply. Let's see if Safari can go more than 3 minutes without crashing this time.
In any case, a couple points:
1) if you have had the same OS install for 9 years, you aren't comparing to the current Windows version. To make your comparison fair, please obtain a 9 year old copy of OS X and use that.
2) if you have had any registry problems at all in Windows 2000 or XP, then I have absolutely no clue what the hell you're doing with it. I've admined hundreds of 2000 and XP machines, many on woefully insufficient hardware, and I've never seen that. Malware, I'll give you, but registry corruption? Solved long ago.
Apples folder layout is simplier because they don't give half-a-shit for backwards compatibility. I switched away from Apple because I got pissed at their constant breaking of old applications without apology, or even comment. If Microsoft pulled that shit, there would he riots, but with Apple it's all dandy-fine. "free for life .Mac now costs $100? Thank you sir! May I have another?"
On scripting: I can use any language, huh? Ok! I want to use PowerShell. Kidding, of course, but tone down the ridiculous hyperbole. Hell, you can barely use AppleScript on OS X, and they invented that one. In any case, PowerShell is indeed new, but it's also leaps and bounds above all competitors right now, and has the support of all the .net libraries, which is huge.
On cron: thank God they ditched that turd. If launchd was available on 10.3 (the last OS X version I used before ditching the platform) it was well-hidden.
Sorry for the ramble, this iPhone is really bugging out. It's hard to defend Apple when they can't even make a mobile browser run for longer than 5 minutes, Christ. Oh and there's no way to scroll this text box down so there might be orphaned text below this line. I give up trying o fix that.
(The other reason I switched was because people assume you're a dick if you use Apple, because ao many Mac users are dicks.)
For example, (if I remember correctly)
You don't.
This preference pane has something like 10 tabs which control all sorts of disparate things. These 10 tabs then form two rows which creates its own usability nightmare.
No. All of the disparate control panels (Desktop Background, Customize Colors, Screen Resolution, Screen Saver, and Change Theme) have ONE tab each. But don't let a silly thing like a FACT interrupt your constant flow of anti-Microsoft bullshit.
However, I think at Apple someone looked and thought and decided that separating them out was the better way.
Gee! If only Microsoft would separa-- OH WAIT THEY DID.
Microsoft obliges its users and their UI design is the result.
What the holy fuck do you know about the Microsoft UI? You only gave *one* example in your post, and it was completely, utterly wrong. Each word makes you sound dumber and dumber.
However, I'm actually a little surprised that you yourself haven't gotten into it. Mac OS X offers a LOT for the highly technical user. You get a more stable system than Windows (registry, filesystem layout, malware),
When's the last time you used Windows? It's not 1998 anymore. (Also, what in blazes does the filesystem layout have to do with stability?)
you get a full BSD environment and CLI for whatever you want to hack about with or automate,
And with Windows you get the (admittedly poor) CMD, the (admittedly clunky) VBA, and the (holy crap awesomesauce) Powershell. Also: Windows Scheduled Tasks is better than cron, there I said it.
And if you still need Windows, whether for gaming or a particular app, you can always dual-boot or virtualize. It's really the most flexible option by far.
That's a solid selling point. But I'd recommend actually *using* Windows before talking about it in the future, so that you might sound a little less out-of-touch.
OS X has practically nothing to appeal to large corporations, and they've never really (seriously) persued that market. Large corporations make a large percentage of computer buyers. They lack the networking features, they lack a serious office suite, and until very recently they lacked the development tools.
Anyway, just chiming in to agree with you. There are entire markets OS X doesn't even bother targeting.
(as I recall, Bill Gates admitted that he was blindsided by the Internet)
Even if you consider the time it took to perfect Winsock, Microsoft was still ahead of their main competition for Internet-using desktops, the Macintosh, by at least three years.
Despite Gates' admission, it doesn't seem like his lack of foresight actually hurt Microsoft in any way... you didn't see people recommending against buying Windows 95 because of flaky Internet support, for example.
In fact, there's a lasting legacy of Microsoft's near miss. Pretty much every attempt Redmond has made to create THE Internet portal has failed miserably. How many times was MSN rebooted? How long did Live last? We'll see how Bing does, but if it fails, then history is going to record that while Microsoft remained the computing platform de jeur, it never was able to create a web presence to equal their platform dominance.
That's definitely true, but also a different argument to the above one. A web portal isn't, and never has been, part of Microsoft's core business.
Because it did?
By version 4, IE was a better product than Netscape 4. Microsoft's distribution definitely helped on the Windows platform, but even on the Macintosh platform, where the OS didn't favor one browser over another, IE soundly whipped Netscape.
Netscape is like the Commodore of Internet software-- they went from having an almost indomitable lead to pissing it away in a matter of only a few years. I mean, check off the bullet points: releasing untested, extremely buggy, software? Check. Conflating their core browser product with tons of features the average customer didn't want? Check. Stopped development entirely to rewrite the product from scratch, leaving them with no flagship product whatsoever? Check.
I dunno; this always strikes me as revisionism. I mean, dropped the ball in Internet connectivity compared to whom? At the time Windows 95 shipped:
* Apple hadn't even really begun to integrate TCP/IP into their OS, it only supported proprietary Apple networking protocols.
* Sun and other Unix vendors definitely had a leg-up here, but they weren't, and have never been, notable on the desktop space-- so regardless of their Internet support, it wasn't relevant to the average user.
* So what else is left? IBM OS/2? Novell Netware? (I'm not familiar enough with those products to speak to their Internet support.)
So basically, the argument seems to boil down to: "Microsoft missed the Internet boat by being several years ahead of their only desktop OS competition." That makes no damned sense.
Considering the vast majority of software houses do absolutely no usability testing whatsoever , if you consistently do Hallway Testing, you're way above average in the industry. Seriously.
Now, obviously, having a real usability testing lab/plan is far superior to Hallway Testing alone, but it doesn't make a hallway usability test obsolete. (Think of it like Unit Tests-- nobody sane would say that Unit Tests could replace a proper QA department, but they sure help a lot despite that.)
I guess that explains Microsoft's shit-poor attempts at UI design?
Of course the thing that pisses me off the most is that Microsoft puts tons of time and effort into usability testing, far, far more than any other software company (except perhaps Apple.) All the changes that have gone into Vista and Office 2007 are there because they're measurably superior to the older way of doing things, confirmed by a program of usability testing.
For example, you snark that Microsoft's UI designs are "shit-poor." Really? Then put your money where your mouth is and prove it. Show me a valid study that backs up your claim, and I'll eat my hat.
Usability is important, perhaps the most important part of software development. Any company that commits resources to it should be cheered on, even if they're Microsoft.
No kidding, I've been going at this gummy bear for like three hours now. Fucking gummy bear.
What does the word "emulated" mean in your little screed?
For example, in what way is IE "emulated?" Do you say that because it runs in a security sandbox?
Ditto here. I got pulled over and ticketed on an obvious speedtrap-- a State highway (State prescribes 50 MPH) on a straight, perfectly safe, stretch of road. For some "mysterious" reason, the speed limit turns to 35 MPH right before a perfect spot for a cop to hide, then about a half mile down goes back to 55 MPH. Went in front of the judge with some photos of the road, and a citation of the State law, and got off.
This is utter bullshit:
This sounds a lot like the Outlook 2007 discussion on Vista (and some reports on XP). Vista has "advanced memory management" and Outlook "continually asks for RAM, as long as some is available". The result? Outlook allocates ~700M, according to the Task Manager process list, while the Physical Memory free (on a 3G system) reports 6% free. Closing Outlook brings the ram free percentage up to %60. Some MS MVP said just what you said "The RAM is available, so Outlook uses it and the program responds faster, that's a good thing", completely disregarding the fact that the computer is near unresponsive to everything else. A program should never take RAM "because it's available", it should take it "because it's needed". Using over 2G of RAM to open 3 emails is absurd, using 1G for texture and sound data is more reasonable.
I'm running Outlook 2007 on Vista right now this instant, and it's using 92MB of RAM. Physical memory free = 57%.
Even if Outlook was using all but 6% of free RAM, why would that necessarily make your system "unresponsive to everything else?" 6% of RAM is plenty to keep your machine responsive, assuming it has a gig or more in it.
And this statement:
A program should never take RAM "because it's available", it should take it "because it's needed".
Is doubly-retarded. RAM takes time to fill, yet takes no time to empty. Therefore, all software should fill as much RAM as feasible to make itself more responsive to the user. RAM isn't some physical object you "take away" from something else-- if Outlook allocates RAM than another process needs, the OS just overwrites it as needed.