cblood writes:
"This article tells how the worker bees at Time Warner are forced to switch to AOL for their email. That's one way to increase your user base." Turns out that not everyone at Time-Warner
wants to hear "you've got mail!" 50 times a day.
Re:In related news... (Score:2)
Re:They're not forced to use it (Score:2)
First hand... (Score:5)
Well at least I get one of those cool badges....
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
--
Re:News flash.. Workers at Microsoft do NOT.. (Score:2)
Ford makes a line of heavy trucks...I've rarely seen a car carrier loaded with all Fords that wasn't being pulled by a Ford (most likely independent carriers drive whatever they want though).
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
1 - We must use the ISO9000 documents, and if we see a problem with them, we must seek to change them rather than violate them. We must follow what they say even if we know it will cause a failure, we just need to mention the problem first so that when it fails it's not our fault. (We can point at the protest and say, "see - I told you so", and that will lend a lot of weight to getting the official policy in the ISO9000 document changed.)
2 - All ISO 9000 documents will be stored in Exchange as if they were discussion groups, so comments can be attached to them.
So, adding 1 and 2 together gives us the result that we MUST have exchange up and running 100% of the day so we can get at the ISO 9000 docs, which means we must be running Windows. This was excessively stupid since we wrote 90% of our software in Unix. When I had to give up my linux box at work and isntead reformatt it for windows full-time, by productivity dropped because my only access to unix systems was through terminal programs, instead of having one natively on my box. (I'm not trying to dis Windows here, but understandably A unix system is better to develop unix programs on than a windows one.)
That made me quit the place, not just because I hate using Windows (I do), but because the management instituting a policy that screwed over 90% of the programmers, making their lives harder so that the managers' lives were easier, was an indicator to me that they didn't give a rat's ass about their programmers.
Doesn't make practical business sense (Score:2)
IRNI
Yeah.. Time Waner Employee's are pissed! (Score:3)
You want to go from Notes to plain IMAP? (Score:2)
If you want to give up all of this (or maybe your company doesn't use any of it), you're welcome to connect to a Domino server with your favorite plain IMAP client, and do user lookups with the little LDAP search gadgets in Outlook Express or Netscape 4.x or such.
Or were you thinking more in terms of an Emacs interface? [smirk]
Sell now! (Score:3)
AOL doesn't quite support standard HTML e-mail; instead, it's got its own hobbled rich-text format made from a subset of HTML, so it has a rough time with email from other modern mail clients like, say, 1996-vintage Netscape or 1997-vintage Outlook Express and Outlook.
Send more than one attachment to the outside world, and it gets zipped if you send it from a PC and Stuffed if you send it from a Mac, and godspeed the PC user who gets a binhexed Stuffit file from someone who has no idea this happens automatically.
The whining about use of SecurIDs is a bit of bellyaching, though. More companies should do things like that if they open mail access to machines outside their private network.
Then again, I'm not sure if any of the "AOL Anywhere" clients for access via WAP phones, Palm VIIs, Blackberries and whatnot support SecurID authentication. It sure would suck if all those tens of thousands of employees had no way to retrieve mail from a device smaller than a laptop.
Anyone know if AOL gives employees the ability to do mail forwarding or set vacation messages? AOL customers sure can't.
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
I subscribed to AOL for three years, and I can testify that the people who "love AOL" like that are the ones who can tolerate the piss-poor interface and implementation because they don't know any better.
What they love is the community, the other people they've grown close to. Some of these people are even technically literate, but they place more value on their friendships rather than having a more efficient email system or being able to browse the web like a net_god...
Now, that's not a defense. I can't stand most of these people. They're generally ostrich-minded, single-issue people who you can't talk to without them working in that one pet topic that rules their lives, be it guns or Tolkein... And what's most scary that there are so many of them!
The AOL software is adequate for these people. But you put it in the hands of 86,000 serious, workaholic businesspeople - journalists, many of them - and they're going to scream bloody murder. I predict that within two years, the impact on their business will be such a burden that they will either 1) abandon it, or 2) rewrite it.
And based on my experience with AOL, if they choose 2), it will not be a solution, because management will move on to another "solution" before they get this one right.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think (Score:2)
It's NOT that cumbersome. It's a smart card that fits in your wallet, like any credit card. When you need the passcode, you whip out the SecurID, type in the number it displays, and you're on your way.
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
--
Wow. What a concept! (Score:4)
Must be a slow news day.
[sigh]
--
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
Re:your kidding right??? (Score:2)
Sure there's RFCs 2445-7 (iCalendar), but who the hell has product support? The fact is, if you are developing a scheduling application, you pretty much only have a choice between Outlook (Windows and sorta Mac) and Lotus Notes (Windows and Mac and sorta Unix). That's an ugly reality, and sitting on your butt waiting for a open platform is a stupid business decision, because you'd have been waiting for about 15 years now.
It's also pretty much impossible to create "generic" workflow mail routing applications either (no RFCs that I know of!), etc, etc for other groupware type stuff.
--
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments (Score:5)
Oh, for chrissake.
In the few dozen posts that were up at the time, I didn't see a single suggestion that TW employees should be using pine, or elm, or kmail, or whatever. Mostly, when they've suggested anything, they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange. And the majority of those criticizing the move aren't suggesting a specific alternative: they're just saying that AOL sucks.
And at some level, it's hard to argue with that. In the spectrum of features vs. usability, AOL mail is slanted pretty far towards the latter. That's great for people who don't know anything about applications, but at the corporate level, one hopes (perhaps against hope) that folks can at least, you know, use Office.
You don't have to be a Linux zealot to think that using AOL for corporate e-mail is a dumb-ass move.
In related news... (Score:2)
This is so spectacularly dumb that the words to describe how spectacularly dumb it is don't exist.
I mean...they're giving up flexible filtering, the platform-independance of POP3/IMAP, properly-formed headers on messages, and speed...
...for a
Re:Leisure? (Score:2)
Another day older and deeper in debt!
--
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:3)
No mandate on Windows here, you just have to be able to work with your co-workers (at least on a technical level).
---
Re:The AOL advantage (Score:2)
In my opinion AOL is not a robust enough e-mail client due to it's instability, but it does have key advantages. AOL mail allows you to unsend. AOL mail tells you when a user has sent their mail, and when it has been read. You can't do that with pop/imap.
True, but that's a function of the pop/imap protcols, not the client. Pretty much every workgroup/business-oriented email system I've ever seen (Exchange, Groupwise, Banyan Mail) has supported the features you list for ages.
It would be nice to have a common, open mail protocol that supported these features, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd like it for large-scale internet mail. All that extra messaging going back and forth generates additional network traffic, uses more resources on the server, and generally creates the oppurtunity for a lot of stupid exploits, security holes, and general flakiness.
A shock? I think not. (Score:2)
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
Got any facts to back that up?
It's funny you say that... (Score:2)
--
I wonder (Score:2)
Re:Would it kill them... (Score:2)
It's not particularly hard to read your AOL mail with pine if you like. I used to do it all the time while I was there, especially since I ran the SMTP servers in question and liked to know that they were working well.
scott
Re:They're not forced to use it (Score:2)
In any case, AOL has IMAP and SMTP gateways available for employee use. (I should know... I used to run the SMTP ones...) so really, they could use any IMAP software out there.
Re:This is really good! (Score:2)
Re:Security (Score:2)
Re:Nothing wrong with it (Score:2)
Sure, it's not in one big bloated MS client, but it works, and it works pretty well.
scott
Re:Security (Score:3)
Re:Totally reasonable (Score:2)
I find the Fisher-Price toy phones are best for me at work. I never get bothered by anyone, and thus I get lots of work done. Of course, I am NOT using AOL mail.
--
Re:In related news... (Score:2)
What would Time-Warner employees need to do except TRY to swap pictures and other copyright-protected files (and for the average user, that is via AOL mail)? That way they can internally test their copyright protection schemes, and see if the battalion of laywers needs to be notified for rapid deployment to enforce the DMCA.
--
Eating your own dog food (Score:2)
Here's a piece [editthispage.com] about using your software in house - Juno had such a good email client that everyone was using Outlook.
Re:Just goes to show.. (Score:2)
Oh, for $DEITY's sake!
The only thing the article suggested was a problem for Sun employees with StarOffice was exchanging files with shops which used other proprietary 'office productivity' programs, specifically MS Office. The lesson is, don't use proprietary file formats.
No 'office productivity' suite enhances office productivity, rather the opposite. Nothing in the article (or in anything else I've seen) suggests that a StarOffice shop is more (or less) productive than an MS Office shop. Interchange of proprietary data formats has always been a problem. The solution is not to use them.
Put it another way: if it isn't raw ASCII or valid SGML or XML, sending it out of your shop to another shop is just asking for trouble, and it's your fault.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think (Score:2)
But it is, as has been pointed out, not just the email client that's the problem.
The lack of any kind of calendaring and scheduling system is provbably what will hit them hardest operationally. If they weren't using it already, it won't be so bad - but decent calendaring and scheduling can save a company lots of time - and therefore lots of money. Imagine having to email each person individually to find out when they're free, and then collate the results and send out invitations...
I'd hope that the AOL servers are reliable - they run a large chunk of their business, after all. But can they handle the scalability issues that may come up? Joe Bloggs with his consumer AOL account can afford to pull his email down from the server onto his PC - so indexing the mailbox is a simple affair. But for the Time Warner employees, it's not so neat a proposition... Firstly, I'd want my mail stored on a central server for backup purposes. Secondly, there's that "access from out of the office" that's touted in the article - that's nice, but it's only going to work for new mail unless they keep mail on the servers.
And have you ever seen how much email businesses can generate? More than AOL are comfortable with a normal user having in their inbox, certainly. After a year or two, some of their people may have a few thousand business emails - all of which they need to keep for legal reasons etc...
Finally, I suppose I'd like to wheel out the managability issue. I have no idea what AOL's back end is like, but I'm willing to bet it's probably not set up for global business usage. It's set up so that Joe Bloggs can get his email reliably. How do they plan to manage this system without either causing problems for their customers or for their employees? How do they plan to have a company address list? AOL have lots and lots of accounts. Will the next John Smith hired by Time Warner have to be jsmith264@aol.com?
This just seems wierd. The report is very vague on the back end, but I hope they're implementing a seperate one to their normal systems. Otherwise they're going to be the laughing stock of business...
The finest in Slashdot sensationalism (Score:2)
In other words, AOL/TW is not being a bunch of `email nazis' or anything of that sort. They simply changed their internal mail system. Heck, it doesn't even say they banned other systems.
------
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:5)
That's right... while we saw a nice message from the CEO about how all employees should be using our phones, not a competitor's, we refuse to use computers that use our chips. And people wonder why our stock and market shares seem to keep decreasing... (though what I'm working on is actually a good product, and everyone involved gets one of those phones for free, though I wish they'd give us those newly-released Java-enabled handsets...)
---
Good motivation for them to block more AOL spam (Score:5)
I can see it now... "MAKE MONEY FAST, ChrmnSteve78!"
-Mark
Well, sort of. (Score:2)
Does this mean... (Score:2)
Does this mean that all corporate mail from AOL/TW will be in ALL CAPS FROM NOW ON?
there goes my karma...
Re:First hand... (Score:5)
But you DO get five screen names! You can be JoeSmi543879879@aol.com for internal email, thatguyjoeatturner@aol.com for external customers, momslittleangeljoe@aol.com to your mom, homerworks@aol.com for that Simpson's listserv, and teengurl69@aol.com for those chat rooms. It's the perfect corporate system! :)
For those that lack a sarcasm detector, this is humor.
Will they change the mail message? (Score:3)
I know it's a minor thing the the grand scheme of the universe, but that little error in grammar annoys me as much as anything else in the AOL commercials. It should either be "You have mail" or "You've mail", not "You've got mail."
As a general rule, any sentence that uses "got" is probably grammatically in error.
Re:Totally reasonable (Score:5)
Absolutely. And since Fisher-Price produces toy telephones, all of its employees should have to use them for business.
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
Re:Question. (Score:3)
Re:Totally reasonable (Score:2)
Or what about random taste? I personally don't like how Jaguars look, but some people do. Would that make me a bad employee?
-----------------------
All your Email are belong to us! (Score:2)
"All your email are belong to us!"
oof.
E.
-
And two steps back. (Score:2)
Hopefully this will hamper employees at least enough to cut profits.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments (Score:2)
Its stupid, period. And your argument falls on its face because AOL is a consumer product. Its not a corporate product. Corporations by default need something relatively easy to use but they also need lots of features. Thats why lots of larger companies use Outlook and not outlook express. Outlook express is for HOME use, as is AOL.
And to go back to your linux parallel, if it was all about ease of use, companies would have switched to Macintoshes a long time ago. However thanks to "compatibility" and "features" Windows helped dominate because there were more choices to configure systems to do some of the really odd things corporations needed to get done.
If AOL-timewarner really wanted to increase their consumer base (because someone with some importants HAS to know that their email program sucks compared to corporate powertools like Outlook) they would take the carrot approach as mentioned in the article, by giving incentives to employees to use it for their personal email service.
This is why I like working for companies that don't sell directly to consumers
Re: VSS vs ClearCASE (Score:2)
#define __RANT I do know that VSS is probably the _worst_ SCC system currently available today - anyone using it for a project of any significant size and complexity should have their head checked.
-jerdenn
Not to Mention... (Score:2)
On the plus side, you could have real fun trying to find a unique address. Some suggestions:
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:5)
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
Or maybe they weren't fundamentalist idiots about operating systems - like the average slashdotter is - in the first place? Just a thought.
upgrade not completed... (Score:2)
rollouts of the aol mail system have started in NYC HQs and aren't going so well. the rest of us subject companies were slated for june rollouts, and that is steadily getting pushed back.
time for some coffee...
Time Warner Cable - NYC (Score:2)
As you can imagine they are not happy but they are used to it. Apparently AOL/Time Warner doesn't consider email an important tool. It has gone through so many changes that no one really relies on it. The business cards I have even have their private netcom addresses on them.
/Duncan
Duncan Watson
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
Whoa!
That's pretty damn progressive thinking!
What's with it with that behemoth megacorp?
Are they finding it necessary to create a nice working environment or something?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
Bad Idea (Score:2)
I wonder... (Score:2)
I hate to see where this is going, Road Runner (owned by time warner) is already slower than hell in answering their email.
____________________
Remember, not all
This is really good! (Score:2)
This is akin to what most other companies already do - have the employees be the most critic users.
Smart move.
Over there... (Score:2)
It is a GOOD analogy. Manual transmissions are more fuel efficient, and therefore, if you care about fuel costs, you get them. Higher fuel-costs => bias towards manual transmissions.
A Linux corporate desktop (I'm sorry, but bleah... MS owns this one, Mac is a bit behind, and the Linux solutions aren't close... know what market you're good in, and corporate desktops ain't it) is less expensive than a MS one (cheaper hardware needs, and price out: W2K, O2K-Pro, Visio, Exchange CAL, NT CAL, random shareware utilities to be able to open, say, a zip file, etc., other software... $1000-$2000/workstation). So in an environment where these costs matter more (either lower margin business, or country with a bad exchange rate with the dollar) than the productivity difference, you go with that solution.
Alex
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:4)
That is mandating Windows. You have a corporate workstation for corporate resources. If you need additional machines, fine. However, I'm certain there is a bias for the 12 MS employees that aren't coding to do MS only.
However, in the AOL Time Warner case, while AOL does have a massive e-mail system, it isn't a corporate groupware system. I'm actually shocked that AOL employees use AOL internally. I had assumed that while the company grew, a corporate system was put in place.
In all honesty, I think that AOL has an impressive product. The people that I know that use AOL LOVE AOL, in a way that nobody LOVES their ISP, and the way that some of us LOVED the BBSes we used to call. And it isn't a AOL=Internet thing, they run AOL at the office. They use a real web browser, but they like to check their AOL e-mail, IMs (don't like AIM for whatever reason), maybe pop into a chat room, who the hell knows.
Some people REALLY love AOL, but it still isn't a corporate system.
Alex
Does this mean... (Score:4)
And we complain about Micro$oft! (Score:2)
technological solutions (Score:2)
Paul
I can back this up (Score:2)
Anyways, back in December all employees were given a special version of AOL that would give them and their family free access for as long as they're an employee. They were told to immediatly install and get comfortable with the software because they'd be using that exclusivley in the near future.
Well, last week when I went home to visit my parents I asked my dad how things were going since the merger. He said mostly things are good, he hasn't noticed alot of things change, but they are starting to make the switch from Lotus cc:Mail to the AOL platform. He said they're supposed to abandon cc:Mail totally by July/August and rely totally on AOL's system, IIRC.
There you have it... an inside scoop from an AOL-Time Warner son.
Change the notification sound... (Score:2)
Rich
"You've got mail" is grammatical in ISO English (Score:2)
not "You've got mail."
I'll parse "You've Got Mail®" using traditional ISO English grammar: "You": pronoun, subject; "'ve got": verb, present perfect of "get"; "mail": noun, object; "®": YOU'VE GOT MAIL is a registered trademark of AOL Inc. Literally, it means "You have received mail"; it's not redundant because the "got" specifically refers to the act of receiving a message.
"Have got" is grammatical (Score:2)
"You have got mail." It should be either "You have mail" (if referring to the potential status of mail's existence) or "You have gotten mail"
Except "have got" for "have received" is valid English [patchword.com]. Some dialects don't even have a word "gotten."
And even if you are, it sounds goofy as all hell.
Especially when Big Bird sings it at the beginning of the song "Everyone Makes Mistakes [nbci.com]": "I've a special secret children ought to know..."
Two Possible Outcomes: (Score:5)
The Ideal outcome- Yes, AOL mail has some shortcomings; however, I imagine that a few months of in-house usage could really help them find and eliminate a lot of problems with the program.
The Likely outcome- AOL will fall far short of employee's requirements, productivity will plummet, and AOL/TW will spend millions trying to make it work, followed by more millions going back to the old system.
Are they expecting employees to use the "home" version of AOL or is there a new corporate version?
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:3)
in house testing (Score:2)
We'll test it on our employees.
(read: We think our employees are idiots.)
Credibility (Score:2)
As a rule, the company's own employees should use their products. But, what happens when the product undermines the confidence of a of the customers. Think of passing out at the circus and the doctor at Ringling Brothers is wearing a clown outfit.
I can see it now. (Score:2)
Manager: Fine, but where's the coffee cups?
Re:Would it kill them... (Score:2)
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Bad analogy (Score:2)
Why its unacceptable (Score:2)
-Compenguin
Aolmail vs Outlook (Score:2)
Someone must have decided that this was a good trade off.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
I've .. (Score:5)
Re:First hand... (Score:2)
What about prefixing your corporate initials on the address? It's more likely that TBJohnSmith@aol.com (or some variant) is untaken. Ideally, if you could get your entire department (or even more people) to use a consistent prefix ('TB', 'TBS', 'Turner', 'Trnr', and 'AOLTW' all come to mind, either with a '_', a '.', or just capitalization separating it from the rest of the address), it'd present a nice, consistent image.
Of course it certainly could be worse. The article mentions that at Sun, they force their poor employees to use StarOffice.
Re:Security (Score:2)
Let's also not forget the security risk of having your corporate email share the same domain with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got a "700 free hours" CD in the mail. When you consider the namespace saturation of AOL's account pool, the odds of accidentally misdirecting an email go up rather sharply. When that misdirected email might wind up with someone who isn't even at the company, you're just asking for trouble.
Furthermore, since AOL has open registration, if someone discovers the AOL accounts of various "higher ups" (not too hard -- I'm sure most employess would have access to this information), they could easily register nearly identical accounts. This would be easily easy given the frequent numeric tags seen at the end of account names -- transpose two numbers and wait for someone to get it wrong.
sounds like a bad move.... (Score:3)
TWAOL employees will now have so much spam to sort through that they won't be able to get any work done. I bet their stock drops.
Re:Totally reasonable (Score:2)
Second, I can't imagine anyone outside of R/D at Microsoft or AOL wanting to plunk down hard-earned company profits to buy software from some other company. They get their own software at no charge. In the case of AOL mail, I'm surprised they don't let people use Netscape mail, but from what I understand AOL mail has a unique server component to it, whereas Netscape Mail relies on mailboxes. AOL probably already owns servers running AOL Mail, whereas they'd have to set up extra/different servers to allow some other mailboxing scheme. This is inefficient.
Finally, allowing employees to buy workstations and software with no central standard practically guarantees that a lot of hardware and software will be wasted if the employee leaves. I mean, what good is your G4 with Yellow Dog Linux, when I'd much rather have Windows 2000 on a Pentium machine? I guess we'll have to throw it away. How economical!
kernel (Score:2)
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org originating posts
Speaking of the first time your sound card
overloaded and caught on fire! =)
So do they... (Score:2)
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
Seriously, I worked at an ISP. We made all the employees use the service because we wanted them all to know exactly what our customers were seeing. If they hated it, then our customers probably did also, so they were motivated to fix it.
Re:Would it kill them... (Score:2)
I have to use Outlook for email at work (don't even get me started); this, despite several virus problems work has had over the past year. And yes, they check to see what you are using.
BTW, those spare AOL CDs make cool mini flowerpots when you melt them in the microwave.
~sabine
"You've got pink slips!" (Score:5)
This is almost as ridiculous as what some people plan to do about California's Impending Energy Craptasm [ridiculopathy.com].
Just goes to show.. (Score:2)
Just goes to show that the correct response is to use the best tool for the job, not the in-house brand.
I think the article made that clear. Sun doesn't use MS office, but it hinders their productivity and makes it more difficult for their customers. MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
It seems to me the best shop would be one that had different computers for different jobs. End users will probably get Windows, because that's what they're used to and that's what will make them most productive. Servers might be Unix or Windows, based upon need. Designers might get Macs. Admins or competent users might choose Solaris 86 or Linux (Or Windows with VMWare running Linux, as I do) based upon corporate need and individual desire.
Use it because it makes sense, not because of some misplaced loyalty.
Sean.
Re:Wow. What a concept! (Score:2)
I'll bet Sun at least uses their own stuff internally. If I ever get to make or influence a decision to buy HP or Sun Unix hardware, I'm definitely picking the company that at least believes in what they make.
If this trend continues... (Score:5)
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think (Score:2)
--
Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think Not (Score:5)
As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft has one of the best Enterprise email systems right now. Granted, it doesn't scale vary well and it's tremendously expensive when compared to SMTP based systems, but it does have comprehensive groupware features. The other possibilities would have been Lotus CC:Mail or Novel Groupwise which are both far past their prime and either in need of being severely overhauled, or End-Of-Lifed by their companies.
The final class of mail system are those new
In any case, AOL has chosen the worst of a set of halfway decent possibilities - Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com [iplanet.com] which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products -. There is something to be said for promoting your own products (at my company we use the telephones we produce, and the switching systems we produce) but in cses where use of your own company's product will impact your productivity, or otherwise negitively impact the work of your employees, it would be a severely misguided decision.
--CTH
--
Re:Good motivation for them to block more AOL spam (Score:3)
Well, that's actually what I was thinking too. AOL mail sucks. Speaking as someone who has used Outlook/Exchange, Notes/Domino, Groupwise, and AOL mail, I have to say that AOL mail doesn't support 1/10th of the features found in the least capable of the other three. You don't even have to get into the whole "spam" argument before you start to question somebody's sanity in making this decision.
However, if you think about it logically, they probably aren't going to be using strictly AOL mail. I dunno because I couldn't get to the article, but I imagine that they'll be using an enhanced version that is aimed more towards a business environment. Heck, maybe they're working on a Netscape Communicator/AOL mail hybrid. But realistically they can't use AOL for all the workers at each site, even from just a performance standpoint. They'll want/need local mail servers at each location (anoyone who has tried accessing a mail server over a WAN link will understand why...don't even think about attachments), and AOL Mail probably won't do that very well. AOL mail has none of the groupware features common to all of the business oriented email solutions, and a mail migration of that size would cost millions of dollars. I'm sure that would give AOL/TW all the incentive that it needs to start making improvements in the mail system.
Re:"You've got mail" is grammatical in ISO English (Score:3)
Break out the contraction. "You've got mail" translates to "You have got mail." It should be either "You have mail" (if referring to the potential status of mail's existence) or "You have gotten mail" (when describing an action). That condenses to "You've gotten mail" or "You've mail." However, I'm pretty sure that you are not supposed to use the "have" contraction unless there's another verb in after it. I don't think that you are allowed to contract the active verb from "have" into "'ve". And even if you are, it sounds goofy as all hell.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments (Score:3)
That's bull^H^H^H^Han oversimplification. Though it is true that a command line interface is not appropriate for the average user, pure existence of a command line is by no means a sign of user-unfriendlyness. There is not even a contradistinction between command oriented user interfaces and graphical ones. The paradigm of graphical user intarfaces rather includes all the less powerful paradigms invented before, e.g. command oriented, forms based, and menu based interaction, and adds further means of expression (direct manipulation, visual affordances, etc.) for the designer as well as for the user.
This is the major reason why GUIs survived for 20 years -- they do not inhibit experienced users by forcing them into newbie-style interaction, but provide expert-friendly interfaces which are learnable to newbies; at least the better ones do. And there is the only flaw of command line interfaces: they require a huge amount of learning and don't help the user with it.
Oh, by the way, the Windows 2000 thing that came with my laptop computer has a command line, too. Are there people who do not use it because of that?
Security (Score:4)
Whoopee! I Can't Wait!!! (Score:5)
They're not forced to use it (Score:5)
Leisure? (Score:3)
---
Living is a way of life