Serious investigations into UNIX and Windows

[David Kelly]

On Oct 27, 2004, at 11:25 AM, Kevin Lyons wrote:

> In pointing out the advantage of pointy clicky, I think you may 
> overlook a signifigant deleterious side effect.  In fact there is 
> plenty of reason to disdain the point-click approach.  Mainly because 
> it adds complexity to the software which tends to make the software 
> unstable. How often have you performed a gui command on a windoze 
> "system" (pick your flavor) and found that 1 time out of 10 it did not 
> work, even though the same procedure was repeated?   How many times 
> has that happened on a Unix box with command line?

As a mere mortal "forced" into Outlook at new employment I spent an 
hour or so spread over the past couple of days trying to figure out how 
the change the default password on my email account. The "admin" is an 
hourly part-time consultant. My "default" password was same as 
username.

Microsoft online help wasn't helpful. No phrase I could conjure and 
utter as a magic spell would produce helpful hints.

Google turned out to be a better help system than Microsoft. Of course 
the examples I found did not look like my version of Outlook. Learned 
Outlook behaves differently if it has an Exchange Server to talk to, 
which mine did not.

On a lark I opened the company mail host with Internet Exploder and 
found a webmail server running which allowed changing my password. Knew 
full well were to type the new one in Outlook and the change worked.

Then I installed Eudora in "advertising supported mode." Had more 
problems until I discovered my email account name was my full email 
address. When Eudora polls the server it says its checking 
account at host@mail.host.

Prior to this situation I never fully understood how broken Outlook 
really was. That it really won't let one properly insert-reply. That it 
does not reply-quote any of the plain text component, not even when one 
forces plain-text mode on reply. When one insert-quotes the HTML 
section it only changes the color of one's text, does not break the 
quote bar down the left side.

Overheard the Admin proclaim, "For only $X we can become a Microsoft 
Partner and get all sorts of wonderful software thrown in!" I can smell 
an Exchange server coming. I don't doubt Microsoft is one of the higher 
paid "employees" at this little company.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
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Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.