On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 07:29:59 -0800 (PST) in Ted Byers wrote:

It isn't a question of being stuck. I have years of experience using
Outlook Express. I just hate it because of the extent it wastes
resources such as hard disk space, and it's interface leaves much to
be desired. A web interface is preferable (if well designed) since
the data remains on the host, always viewable, and consumes minimal
resources on the client machines. Web technologies are just more
flexible that nntp allows.

Outlook is a festering pile of feces, and always has been.
OTOH, an NNTP client need not be more than netcat and a pad
of paper to track last read articles...
And while most NNTP servers are configured to discard articles after
a period of time or quantity of storage space, they don't have
to be configured that way.
A single web host has the disadvantage that it can be shut down
and lost with one warrant or lawsuit.

Granted, things have gotten better, we're back to normally having web
pages where I can click on a specific blog entry and get a URL I
can send to someone else and 1) it'll work 2) It's human readable
and less than 80 characters long....
But it's a UI nightmare to shuffle between live journal,
various software blogs, launchpad.... And maintaining state about
what's read and unread and what was marked as unread so it
could be reread, is pretty much non-existant.

Plus I'm horribly biased from 11 years of dealing with incompetent
websphere developers mixed with cargo cult PHP developers
and my normal inspiration being to go build a raised bed
instead of writing something that sucks less :-).


--
Chris Dukes
davej eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I have two. Bullshit.