[mythtv-users] Hauppauge HD PVR (A bit more info for those starved for it)

[Dewey Smolka]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 11:51 PM, David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote:
> Eric Martin wrote:
>  > John Drescher wrote:

>  I don't really understand what people mean when they say Outlook makes
>  it hard to bottom post.  I never had any problems positioning the cursor
>  at the bottom and they typing, which is what I've had to do in every
>  email client I've used.

I don't think the thing is that Outlook makes it difficult to bottom
post per se, but that Outlook makes it difficult to deal with emails
in any other way than its designers want you to.

This is not a good thing. And it fits completely the pattern of MS
apps when you think about it. When Outlook first started getting
included in the MS Office suite, and bundled with MS Windows, it was
comparable to, and as full featured as, the third-party apps it was
intended to kill -- namely Eudora. In the beginning it was pretty
good.

But MS development being what it is, they put all their efforts into
adding features and bloat to Outlook and you can see the resulting
product. It started as an email client and was intended to be an email
client. But now it is a calendaring system, an interface to shared
document repositories, a contact management system, an alarm clock,
and so on. It does all these things with a greater or lesser degree of
success. But as an email client, it is still stuck in the 1990s.

Outlook still does not do proper message threading. There is still no
way for you to see your see your sent messages in line with the
messages they're in reply to. It is complicated and confusing even to
try to get Outlook to deal with emails as text and not html. And, at
least in my experience, no matter how many times you tell it to use a
fixed-width font and to work only in text, it still randomly reverts
to a different font and embeds html.

I do like the calendaring, and I do like the some of the collaborative
features that are built into Outlook. But as an email client, it's so
far behind that's it's almost laughable.

Yes, you can bottom-post using Outlook. But you have to know how you
want it to behave, you have to want to configure it specifically to
behave that way, you have to navigate a dizzying array of menus to
find all the options you need to tweak, and you have to pray that it
keeps doing what you've told it to. More often than not I find with MS
applications that They Know what you want, and They Will Do what you
Really Want, no matter how often you tell Them otherwise.

It's frankly an embarasment for MS, similar to the embarasment of IE
-- they conquered the world with IE5, didn't really change it at all
in IE6, and figured that nobody would notice or care that their
product was several generations and lots of features behind the
homebrew stuff.

Unfortunately there's nothing in the FOSS world that does everything
Outlook does, particularly because we're locked out of MS Exchange
Server. But there are plenty of packages that do each of the parts
Outlook does better, cleaner, more efficiently, more transparently,
and more pleasantly.

One should not have to battle with something as simple as an email
client, but the fact is that Outlook forces the user to fight it. Even
pine (even elm) is simpler to use. Thunderbird runs circles around it.
Evolution is far more efficient. Even the Gmail client does a better
job with message threading, and let's not even get into how long it
takes to do a search using the built in Outlook tools.

Yeah! (*high-five*)

(/rant)