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KodiaX987
Jun 8, 2004, 08:30 PM
More and more, I witness games and programs that are done more quickly, with more bugs, and more butchered than before.

Exhibit #1: Neopets. A good half of the action games are buggy beyond belief. I somehow die if my SWORD hits a wall of spikes. I'm able to click on a button bigger than Ron Jeremy's dick and yet the botton doesn't get pressed. The server crashes at least 5 times an hour, and I get DNS errors at random.

Exhibit #2: Instant Messengers. Those things aren't IM programs anymore. They're almost a clone of the infamous fucking Bonzi Buddy. Now they check your news, play your games, and have all other sorts of useless features that never work anyways. On top of that, always a new "spiffier" layout and rounded corners and shiny buttons - all sorts of feature that make my computer slow down to such a speed that it wants to commit hara-kiri to escape the suffering of such poor performance. I'm still speechless to see some computers taking more than 2 minutes to just load Windows XP.

God dammit, make fast and functional programs instead of super-mister-do-everything pieces of shit. I use WinMX instead of KaZaA because it doesn't surf the net, or has shiny plugins or tons of other crap. I'm here to DOWNLOAD FILES, period. I use Pueblo instead of all those other MUD programs because Pueblo does just that: it connects me to a MUD, and that's all.

When I saw the Yahoo Messenger quit message "Are you sure you want to exit such an amazingly useful program?", I laughed. I laughed because this was the most fucking lamest quit message I had witnessed in my life. No, I don't find you useful you piece of shit. I just want to chat with people. I'm not interested in SMS messages, minigames and IMvironments. It's like MSN and its endless list of tabs. How the hell do I remove those nuisances?! They are as useless to me as the keyword field on AOL!

Someone really needs to understand the idea of what a program should be: it should serve one, and only one function. I wanna go on a peer-to-peer network, I will open the program for that. I wanna exchange instant messages, I will open the program for that. I wanna check the news, I will open my browser and go to the webpage I want to check. Unfortunately, the corporate Internet morons have decided otherwise.

Lord, please have salvation on our poor l33t souls...

Sord
Jun 8, 2004, 08:37 PM
On 2004-06-08 18:30, KodiaX987 wrote:
More and more, I witness games and programs that are done more quickly, with more bugs, and more butchered than before.

Exhibit #1: Neopets. A good half of the action games are buggy beyond belief. I somehow die if my SWORD hits a wall of spikes. I'm able to click on a button bigger than Ron Jeremy's dick and yet the botton doesn't get pressed. The server crashes at least 5 times an hour, and I get DNS errors at random.

Exhibit #2: Instant Messengers. Those things aren't IM programs anymore. They're almost a clone of the infamous fucking Bonzi Buddy. Now they check your news, play your games, and have all other sorts of useless features that never work anyways. On top of that, always a new "spiffier" layout and rounded corners and shiny buttons - all sorts of feature that make my computer slow down to such a speed that it wants to commit hara-kiri to escape the suffering of such poor performance. I'm still speechless to see some computers taking more than 2 minutes to just load Windows XP.

God dammit, make fast and functional programs instead of super-mister-do-everything pieces of shit. I use WinMX instead of KaZaA because it doesn't surf the net, or has shiny plugins or tons of other crap. I'm here to DOWNLOAD FILES, period. I use Pueblo instead of all those other MUD programs because Pueblo does just that: it connects me to a MUD, and that's all.

When I saw the Yahoo Messenger quit message "Are you sure you want to exit such an amazingly useful program?", I laughed. I laughed because this was the most fucking lamest quit message I had witnessed in my life. No, I don't find you useful you piece of shit. I just want to chat with people. I'm not interested in SMS messages, minigames and IMvironments. It's like MSN and its endless list of tabs. How the hell do I remove those nuisances?! They are as useless to me as the keyword field on AOL!

Someone really needs to understand the idea of what a program should be: it should serve one, and only one function. I wanna go on a peer-to-peer network, I will open the program for that. I wanna exchange instant messages, I will open the program for that. I wanna check the news, I will open my browser and go to the webpage I want to check. Unfortunately, the corporate Internet morons have decided otherwise.

Lord, please have salvation on our poor l33t souls...


our hearts are turning into text! OMG!

Okay, seriously, I get what you mean. Another thing that's annoying is having the right version. It's like, you hav version 1.5 with webcam, and your friend has version 2.0 with web cam, and you can't connect because they are not the same program, bleh, waz up with that? The useful and slightly amusing things they do add they screw up.

Outrider
Jun 8, 2004, 10:16 PM
What really bugs me is when they make an update that effectively ruins the program.

All I know is that I haven't updated to the most recent version of AIM due to some of the "great" features I've heard about. I'm scared about ever updating it again now.

KodiaX987
Jun 8, 2004, 10:29 PM
On 2004-06-08 20:16, Outrider wrote:
What really bugs me is when they make an update that effectively ruins the program.



That's exactly what happened with Media Player before I formatted. I actually downloaded DivX, and it somehow caused Media Player to freeze whenever I opened it.

Arislan
Jun 8, 2004, 10:51 PM
For IM programs... One word.
Trillian

No frills, does it all system. Does IRC too, but that client sucks, hard. mIRC works far better.

Outrider
Jun 8, 2004, 10:57 PM
On 2004-06-08 20:51, Arislan wrote:
For IM programs... One word.
Trillian

No frills, does it all system. Does IRC too, but that client sucks, hard. mIRC works far better.



My friends actually suggested some other programs besides Trillian, most of which are still in beta, but unfortunately I think those are only for Mac.

Firocket1690
Jun 9, 2004, 12:12 AM
Noooooo
all those companies expect you to have a good expensive top of the line thingy that can run all that crap without lagging. :p

I just find it most annoying when they force you to download some updates or a newer version or whatever.

My dysfunctional house only has one phone line for computers. Mother wants to get online, but I can't even close aol because they're downloading stuff.
If I use task manager to crash it, aol just restarts, thinking the d/c was accidental.

It's really annoying ...
o.O

Oh, and as we all know, WinMX > kazaa
.. less viruses too ^^;

AquaFlare7
Jun 9, 2004, 01:37 AM
On 2004-06-08 22:12, Firocket1690 wrote:
Mother wants to get online, but I can't even close aol because they're downloading stuff.
If I use task manager to crash it, aol just restarts, thinking the d/c was accidental.

It's really annoying ...
o.O

Oh, and as we all know, WinMX > kazaa
.. less viruses too http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/anime2.gif



She needs to not use AOL, as it is the worst ISP known to man, especially for gamers (I know this because I used to work for them). If she will not change servers then just tell her to call and cancel. The aol rep's job is to give you 2 free months to stay, and can be repeated every 2 months. How do I know they will do this? Because every time you threaten to cancel but stay on for 2 more free months, they get 6 dollars in their pockets. When you take in anywhere between 100-300 calls a day the bonus money really adds up. Go ahead, give it a try.

navci
Jun 9, 2004, 02:22 AM
*applauds for Kodi*
Maybe for the people who runs super powerful PCs it is less a problem. But for people who doesn't only a PC that can instantly take over the world when you press any key any program that has useless functions or ads are just going to cause problems, slow down CPUs and cause frustration and loss of hair. I abolutely LOATHE AIM because of their Ad. When ICQ Lite first launched, it was actually quite efficient and was ad free, then they keep update it and add more and more pointless and useless stuff on it until it is no longer "Lite" http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif Well Regular ICQ can actually call itself ICQ-extra heavy edition instead. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif

Goodness.
While I like Trillian and use it quite often. It always crash on exit. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_frown.gif

edit: Sorry Firo, Kazaa Lite > WinMX
I have only horrible experience on WinMX. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_frown.gif

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: navi on 2004-06-09 00:23 ]</font>

BrokenHope
Jun 9, 2004, 03:43 AM
Aim ad hack(use google) will remove most of the shit from aim, you can switch yahoo back to it's default theme if you don't like the new one.

Most of the other stuff is just stupid people trying to run stuff like windows XP on a computer that isn't good enough to run it, or they have a million things running at start up or they are so infested with spyware that there computer slows down.

Nai_Calus
Jun 9, 2004, 06:04 AM
Before my 900Mhz Athlon fried due to Hewlett Packard's inability to design a computer(Athlon. Minitower. One tiny fan. You do the math. Hell, the fan wasn't even aimed at the processor), the only problems I ever had were other components frying from the heat in the damned thing. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif I mean, you opened this thing and you saw WIRES. Just wires. Had to take the thing apart just to SEE the motherboard, let alone get to it.

At any rate, it was a 900Mhz processor, had 384MB of RAM, and would happily run Photoshop, actually DO stuff in Photoshop, run AOL, run Xchat, run WinMX, run Winamp, run whatever other damned thing I had open at the time, and still not puke and die. XP

It also ran ME and was related to the Antichrist(First HP mom got WAS the Antichrist), but up until everything started to die, it ran fine. ...Without ever having AdAware/Spybot run on it. And mom never renewed the Antivirus software so that didn't get updated for two years. Honestly, I don't know HOW it ran so well. o.O;

'Course my current computer is a 2.8GHz PIV with 512MB of RAM and doesn't choke on much of anything....

What the hell kind of horrible experiences have you had, Navi? WinMX has always worked fine for me. SoulSeek works OK too.

I just use AIM because it doesn't bug me. Also, I don't leave my buddylist open. I close it and leave the sound for someone coming on enabled(I turn everything else off. XP). Someone comes on, then I look at it, if I want to talk to them, I'll IM them, if not, I won't, and either way I close the buddylist again. I've tried ICQ once in the far, far distant past on a 266. I don't know if it's gotten any better since then, but back then my complaints were: Annoyingly long hard to remember number instead of a vaguely useful name.
Ugly as fuck and annoying to use interface.
Slow as shit.
Another one I don't care for is MSN messenger. Talk about bloated. Do I really need all these shitty useless menus to do stuff I will never WANT to do, much less actually do, on the side of the window that I can't do any more than minimize? It also has the most god forsakenly hideous smileys in existance.

On the subject of IRC clients, X-Chat > mIRC. mIRC is a hideous piece of shit. I used it for years before I was introduced to the numminess that is X-Chat. Which lets you re-order your channel windows, has the button for closing them on the left side of the screen so you don't accidentally close them going to minimize the program, doesn't look like shit, is generally nifty and since the Windows version is a port of an open source Linux program, it doesn't have any annoying nag screens when you start it up bugging you to register it if you like it. XP

Mozilla > IE, but this goes without saying, fucking Lynx is better than IE. (Speaking of which, I want to know who the FUCK was using it to view my webpage. O_o );

Still haven't found a media player I really like. I should try WinAmp 5, I suppose, since I haven't heard a billion people bitching about it(And that's what you keep your old installation programs for anyway. XP).

And I'm guilty of bloat myself. On my CIS 115 final I realized that one of my programs I'd put a completely unnecessary loop in where one single line of code would have done it because I wasn't thinking and I was half asleep by that point. To this day, it still bugs me. XP I don't think I even got marked down on it, either, which is disgusting. ...Not that two or three extra lines of code is going to kill anything these days, but it's the principle of the thing.

And thus ends Ian's Happy Fun Rant on programs.

KodiaX987
Jun 9, 2004, 09:13 AM
I have Winamp 5 and though it's a good deal slower to load than Winamp 2, it's a huge improvement over the shittiness that was Winamp 3. Yus, I get my classic skins back! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif

HUnewearl_Meira
Jun 9, 2004, 10:54 AM
On 2004-06-09 00:22, navi wrote:
I abolutely LOATHE AIM because of their Ad.


Their ad didn't bother me that much, but I literally removed it from the program's code, just in case they decided to start running ads with audio, again. I can give you the modified file that will fix that, if you like.


Oh, and Outrider, I dunno, the new version of AIM isn't bad-- What makes it worth the upgrade, to me at least, is that it got rid of the annoying habit of taking over an open web browser window whenever you click a link that someone has sent you. That made a world of difference, and I'd never go back to the older version, personally.

I have to say, AIM is actually pretty good about not forcibly integrating needless stuff... For the most part, the stuff you don't want or need can be turned off. Like the Stock quotes ticker. Don't want it? Close it, and it'll never come back again. Same thing with the news ticker.

MSN bugs me. That's a huge rant though, that I don't intend to go on, here.

And AquaFlare, AOL is a crappy ISP, because it's not technically an ISP. An ISP offers a dial-up or broadband connection to the internet, thus providing you with either a static or temporary IP address, depending on the type of connection. AOL offers software to connect to their services, and also offers access to the interweb through their software, but never gives your computer a real IP address. I don't know the exact details of the way AOL's network functions, but nonetheless, your computer never actually gets its own IP. It's some sort of funky proxy that AOL uses, and that's why it screws up multiplayer access to some games, and it's also why some internet-based applications simply don't work with it. Because of this, AOL is technically a Web Service. Not an ISP.

Liquid_Bacon
Jun 9, 2004, 01:22 PM
I feel your pain, Kodi! I have a 300Mhz AMD K62 here. And while I've tweaked the hell out of this computer and it runs faster than most 700-800Mhz machines I've seen, I really hate these new programs that fuck with my speed. As you said, when you use an IM program, you want to send messages. That's it. When you use a P2P program, you want to download files. Not burn CDs, scan for spyware, chat with people, etc.

*Fingers new version of Kazaa*

Here is a great website for anyone who feels the same way Kodi and I do on this:

http://www.oldversion.com
"Because new isn't always better."

navci
Jun 9, 2004, 01:27 PM
Well see, a lot of things don't tend to bug you more often if you have a PC that can handle pretty much everything. Currently I believe I am running on about 128 RAM, so you see the problem right there.

Thing is, when you are running on the kinda stuff that I have, you see slow down a lot easier than you do on other better PC. See. I remove AIM ad with the proggie also, and I turn all sounds off, but AIM itself slows PC down as much as say, Trillian, which is a lot bigger. That is also prolly why I prefer MSN over AIM, see, with AIM I can't run Photoshop at the same time without really horrible slow downs. With MSN I can.

Notice I am just giving you the impression I have when I am running the programs, not specs or whatever. Thing is, proggies are supposed to be designed for people to use, and my experience of it is that I rarely want to randomly open AIM unless I absolutely have to, but I keep MSN on most of the time. ... But I think, as far as the IM-convinience and everything goes, the second version of ICQ Lite was my favourite. It's simple and to the point.

Wimamp 5 is evil. It is way too huge. And they don't offer Lite version of anything anymore. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif

HUnewearl_Meira
Jun 9, 2004, 01:32 PM
On 2004-06-09 11:27, navi wrote:
I keep MSN on most of the time.


I keep MSN open because the retarded thing refuses to close, unless I want to forcibly kill it with the Task Manager...

That's the thing I dislike about MSN... It's got a million things going on in the background from programs that you might not even use... Outlook seems to be inseparably attached to it, which rather annoys me, because generally speaking, I'd sooner check my POP3 accounts manually, than with that atrocious program-- yet I can't close MSN because Outlook is using it. WHAT THE HELL IS OUTLOOK DOING WITH MY MSN SESSION?!?

navci
Jun 9, 2004, 03:03 PM
On 2004-06-09 11:32, HUnewearl_Meira wrote:

That's the thing I dislike about MSN... It's got a million things going on in the background from programs that you might not even use... Outlook seems to be inseparably attached to it, which rather annoys me, because generally speaking, I'd sooner check my POP3 accounts manually, than with that atrocious program-- yet I can't close MSN because Outlook is using it. WHAT THE HELL IS OUTLOOK DOING WITH MY MSN SESSION?!?


You have a point. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif

edit: I think the Microsoft stuff all like to link to each other so you can "conviniently" do everything you wanna do with one toool. But of course the end result is, it doesn't do anything that you want it to do. :/



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: navi on 2004-06-09 13:04 ]</font>

Sord
Jun 9, 2004, 03:16 PM
I only use MSN, just because Yahoo is a peace of crap and AOL schemes are bleh. Sure there's extra tabs down the buddylist, but who cares, that's gonna be closed out anyways. The only tabs I see on the IM window are one that can close out you speakers avatar and one that takes you to the avatar edit part. Oh, and I'm running whatever current whole number is .1 or .2

KodiaX987
Jun 9, 2004, 03:17 PM
This is exactly what makes me want to frag Bill Gates. Explorer is the core of the cores, if Explorer blows up, the entire computer blows up too, and usually as a result of a single Internet Explorer window, which is already stupid by itself. This is why I hated AOL as well. Back when I had it, the client had a tendency to crash at random, instantly killing my internet connection.

Outrider
Jun 9, 2004, 06:52 PM
On 2004-06-09 08:54, HUnewearl_Meira wrote:
Oh, and Outrider, I dunno, the new version of AIM isn't bad-- What makes it worth the upgrade, to me at least, is that it got rid of the annoying habit of taking over an open web browser window whenever you click a link that someone has sent you. That made a world of difference, and I'd never go back to the older version, personally.



That does sound nice, even though I've pretty much trained myself to open up new windows everytime somebody sends me a link.

My problem with the new one is the other new features. I was fooling around on my brother's computer the other day and couldn't figure out how to get rid of all them. I wanted to get rid of the little messages notifying you if a friend signed on/signed off/went idle/etc, but I ended up getting rid of some other stuff by accident.

Maybe my problem is that I don't know what each one of these features is named, therefore I'm turning off the wrong things.

HUnewearl_Meira
Jun 10, 2004, 10:55 AM
On 2004-06-09 13:17, KodiaX987 wrote:
This is exactly what makes me want to frag Bill Gates. Explorer is the core of the cores, if Explorer blows up, the entire computer blows up too, and usually as a result of a single Internet Explorer window, which is already stupid by itself. This is why I hated AOL as well. Back when I had it, the client had a tendency to crash at random, instantly killing my internet connection.



That's why I refuse to use AOL's internal browser, whenever I happen to be using the AOL software. I don't know that it's ever integrated quite right, as Internet Explorer just seems to have half a million features that AOL's programmers didn't have in mind when they decided to stick the browser in there. What confuses me most though, is that AOL literally owns Netscape, but yet, they continue to renew their contract with Microsoft to include Internet Explorer as an internal web browser. That just doesn't make any sense to me. I mean dang, they COULD use Netscape as their internal browser, and then they'd be able to have a little more control over how it works, but nope, instead they want to use a shell as an internal browser. Go ahead. Type file://c:/Windows/system32/command.com into your Internet Explorer address bar, and see what your computer does. The fact is that anyone who has access to Internet Explorer on your computer can sit down and activate any given executable file on your computer.


Navi: You are pretty much correct. Microsoft is a big fan of integrating programs for just about every purpose on your computer. I'm not so certain that this is entirely a bad idea, but sometimes it's rather thoroughly uninsightful. The fact that Microsoft Office macros function in Outlook is literally, the entire reason why this whole E-mail Virus deal started up. The Melissa Virus, in fact, was intended to operate within the confines of a college campus, and was built with the express purpose of pointing out this glaring flaw in Microsoft's design. It wasn't designed as a malicious virus, but the thing to be pointed out is that it singlehandedly made that college's network crash, and still managed to escape out onto the general internet. Nearly everyone who actively used Outlook to view their e-mail was effected. It was also the reason why I made my own e-mail client, back in those days-- I made something too simple to be effected by Melissa-like attacks; and I cleverly titled it, "WASUP!"

Honestly though, I'd really like to know why it's so dreadfully important for a program that I horridly dislike and generally refuse to use is doing with my Instant Messager program, that it couldn't do on its own, and for that matter, why is it doing anything at all, when I don't want it running to begin with?


And Outrider... That little alert thing isn't hard to turn off. I forget where it is, but it's in the Preferences. If I were sitting at my computer at home right now, I could tell you exactly where to look. In fact, you can turn on and off different alerts. Personally, I've basically got might configured to let me know when people become available to talk to, except when I have my away message up. So whenever they come back from Idle, come back from Away, or sign on, it says, "HEY!" I kinda like the feature, but I have to admit, when they're all on, it's endlessly annoying. Especially if you have a particularly active buddy list-- those things stack, when more than one pops up at a time, y'know. I've seen them stretch all the way up my monitor.

navci
Jun 10, 2004, 12:56 PM
@VG: Under a friend's furiously dedicated enthusiastic recommandation, I downloaded AMSN. If there is nothing else I like about it, there is still one thing I like about it (what a redundent sentence): being really small. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

BrokenHope
Jun 10, 2004, 01:11 PM
On 2004-06-10 08:55, HUnewearl_Meira wrote:

Go ahead. Type file://c:/Windows/system32/command.com into your Internet Explorer address bar, and see what your computer does.

Honestly though, I'd really like to know why it's so dreadfully important for a program that I horridly dislike and generally refuse to use is doing with my Instant Messager program, that it couldn't do on its own, and for that matter, why is it doing anything at all, when I don't want it running to begin with?



The only thing that happened was a file open dialogue box opened, as if I was going to download a file, so only a complete idiot would say yes, so no exploit from that anymore.

Also the reason windows messenger and outlook express are integrated is because of the buddy list integration, which you can remove if you know how to make simple edits to the registry. If you want to do it, just paste this into notepad then save it with .reg file extension then double click the file and say yes to merging it and it should fix your msn and outlook integration problem.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOutlook Express]
"Disable Hotmail"=dword:00000002
"Hide Messenger"=dword:00000002

hollowtip
Jun 10, 2004, 01:12 PM
Well I don't mind frequent updates to IM programs such as Trillian, I just hate the fact of updates when useless features are added.

I like Trillian because a lot of the features you can add come via plugins (HTML viewer, Winamp, Email checking on the fly ect.). Having the luxury to save on system resources available is a positive in my book, and I keep the program a lot more user friendly (less menus to sift through and such).

Link00seven
Jun 10, 2004, 01:46 PM
On 2004-06-08 23:37, AquaFlare7 wrote:

She needs to not use AOL, as it is the worst ISP known to man, especially for gamers (I know this because I used to work for them). If she will not change servers then just tell her to call and cancel. The aol rep's job is to give you 2 free months to stay, and can be repeated every 2 months. How do I know they will do this? Because every time you threaten to cancel but stay on for 2 more free months, they get 6 dollars in their pockets. When you take in anywhere between 100-300 calls a day the bonus money really adds up. Go ahead, give it a try.



haha. I signed up for an AOL Free Trial and I use it with my Broadband connection. When I went to cancel though, they were like "Here, take 2 more free months" so I still have it. I haven't tried it again, but I will before I acually do cancel. I'm not payin for their shit http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif

Outrider
Jun 10, 2004, 03:50 PM
On 2004-06-10 08:55, HUnewearl_Meira wrote:
And Outrider... That little alert thing isn't hard to turn off. I forget where it is, but it's in the Preferences. If I were sitting at my computer at home right now, I could tell you exactly where to look. In fact, you can turn on and off different alerts. Personally, I've basically got might configured to let me know when people become available to talk to, except when I have my away message up. So whenever they come back from Idle, come back from Away, or sign on, it says, "HEY!" I kinda like the feature, but I have to admit, when they're all on, it's endlessly annoying. Especially if you have a particularly active buddy list-- those things stack, when more than one pops up at a time, y'know. I've seen them stretch all the way up my monitor.



I know, I know... but I also turned off some stuff I wanted to keep when I was fiddling around in preferences.

My problem is I got online on my older brother's computer, tried IMing some people, got bothered by the new features, went on a clicking spree in the preferences section, decided to just screw it, and switched back to my computer.

I'll spend more than five minutes on the new version one of these days.

HUnewearl_Meira
Jun 10, 2004, 06:44 PM
On 2004-06-10 11:46, Linkooseven wrote:

haha. I signed up for an AOL Free Trial and I use it with my Broadband connection. When I went to cancel though, they were like "Here, take 2 more free months" so I still have it. I haven't tried it again, but I will before I acually do cancel. I'm not payin for their shit http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif



The *one* thing that really impresses me about AOL is their e-mail system. It's rather refined these days, but even as far back as v3.0 it was quite impressive.

I mean geez, Hotmail and Yahoo! are all in a huff because Google wants to offer people e-mail with a whole *gigabyte* of space to work with. I'm thinking... I've literally had more than that unopened in my mailbox on AOL at one time. That's only 72 full-sized e-mails on AOL's servers (15,000,000 bytes each). I've had occasions where I've had several CDs worth of file attachments e-mailed to me. It's a lot of information, and AOL just shrugs and looks away. I've yet to come across another e-mail service that offers a mailbox of that size, that isn't part of the same network as AOL. The best part is that anything you download from e-mail on AOL is off of AOL's servers, and using the AOL software, it goes through the built-in Download manager. If there is, on average, a faster place to download a given file than off of AOL's servers using AOL's software, then I am totally unaware of it (not to say that downloading something off of a website through the internal web browser is a good idea; remember that when you're downloading from a link in the internal browser, you're downloading with Internet Explorer, not AOL).

Then it's also worth considering that AOL doesn't function the way Outlook does in terms of e-mail, and therefore, the huge, news-breaking e-mail virus attacks like Mailissa were never a problem for AOL. Any sort of e-mail based attack on AOL requires that the individual being attacked be foolish enough to download a program and run it. There is no VBA for AOL, and macros are never executed. Ever.

So yeah, AOL has the most desireable e-mail system that I've personally ever seen.

Nai_Calus
Jun 10, 2004, 07:04 PM
...Except they only keep it for 30 days. >_>;

Outrider
Jun 10, 2004, 07:27 PM
Y'know, Meira... that almost makes me want to stop my dad from cancelling our AOL so I can keep my e-mail. I've been using it since almost as far back as I can remember.