Ray, Just a quick note. I agree with you that if you know what you are doing things don't crash. Sometimes they crash no matter what, but overall very stable. As a network administrator fine things work great, which is why I like Citrix (I'm in charge and I keep the crap off the machine). In fact since I went to Citrix I have had 0 desktop crashes. Unfortunately my Citrix servers like to crash once a month. Be it power problems, print drivers, or just something that is impossible to trace. My only point was M$ develops to much crap together and the more they develop into one package the more I hate the program. I'd still be on Office 97 if it were up to me. What features do you NEED that came after 97? None, Give me a blank screen some fonts and a spell check and I can write a document just as bad as the next guy. All that has gone up is file sizes, complexity, and integration. I want smaller and simpler. I just got Outlook 2003 and there is so much crap to it I can't find my email, if you know where my email is would you call me because I can't find it. :-) More importantly I'm making fun of the big guy that gives us all our jobs, in one way or another. I know that and respect that. When is Explorer 7 coming out? I'm looking forward to pop-up blocker. Which if I recall M$ brought into our lives in the first place. :-) (just a jab Ray, just a jab) Gunnar -----Original Message----- From: Ray Costanzo [mailto:listray@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, February 23, 2004 6:16 PM To: windows2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [windows2000] Re: Odd Message from Word > -----Original Message----- > | I have NEVER seen any software out there that crashes less than > | Microsoft's > > Then you need to get out more, there are ALOT of programs out > there more stable than MS products. IPCOP and qmail for two > quick examples. Since I don't get out enough, I'm not familiar with either of these applications. But, the way I look at it is, when was the last time you saw notepad crash? Never? Me too. Why is that? Well, what can really go wrong? There's probably only 300 lines of code to that application. When you get into the extremely complex development of something like Outlook, for example, I find it absolutely amazing in how uncrash-prone and how unbuggy it is. Most of the non-Microsoft software that I see is not really mainstream stuff, in that it is usually only applications that are sold to financial institutions. I've sat in on quite a few software demos for various banking systems, and man, it is utterly depressing how illogically some of these applications are created and how incredibly crash-prone they ALL are. It really is saddening. Microsoft really does a hell of a job with their software and creating a complete package. There's this one document imaging system that I was using today at work, and this system really is complex as far as the "underneath muscle" of it all. But the end user experience? It is absolutely herendously awful. There are so few software providers who are able to bring the back-end and the front-end development sides together to create a system that is not only powerful underneath, but is also pleasing to look at and use, as the end user. Microsoft, for the most part, does an outstanding job at this. > | and is anywhere even remotely close to being as powerful as > | a comparable Microsoft application. > > I'm willing to grant them the featurism crown, but I don't > necessarily consider that a compliment. I feel they have way > to much tendency to try and integrate everything trying to > improve useability at the cost of security and stability. I have to agree with this to at least some point. There are some things that I think that are just too much, when it comes to stuffing in features. There are some features of their applications that make the whole system worse and should just be forgotten. (Remember findfast? Ugh.) In my opinion, there are two kinds of software I'm interested in using. Either a full-out well designed GUI or something that does absolutely no hand-holding with a GUI and is not meant to. For reading e-mail, I have the choice to either telnet into my POP server and RETR my messages myself, or I will use Outlook. I wouldn't ever consider using anything in between, like Outlook Express or Eudora or anything. Again, there are just so few companies that are capable of creating complete software packages. And again, I'm not talking about a package as in a bundle of software like Office or something. I'm talking about just one single application that is beuatiful from the inside out. Ray at home ******************************************************** This Weeks Sponsor StressedPuppy.com Games Feeling stressed out? 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