Matthew Thomas wrote: >Just like Samba did, and WINE is doing. Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible. > There are more worthwhile tasks.
Note that WINE is *far* from being useful, at least for me. For normal users, there is no chance at all to run many apps (like almost all games) other than "shutting off" Linux and running Windows. There is no competive game for Linux (apart from a handful by Loki) which we could buy. Samba belongs to another generation, when competition wasn't that ugly. Hotmail bases on Passport. (That might already hold true for the OE<->Hotmail protocol.) That was years later, around the time AIM's protocol was developed. Anyways, such projects need skilled developers, which usually have an urgent need *themselves* to make it work. They just don't exist in the case of Hotmail - they go the saner route and run away from Hotmail quickly. If somebody really, really wants to keep Hotmail, they just have to pay us a certain 5-digit sum and we'll implement the OE<->Hotmail protocol in Mozilla for them. Of course, no garantee that it still works in 2 months. My opinion is that: When people subscribed to Hotmail, they knew it was going to be temporary, because their email address ends in @hotmail.com. They'd be at @hotmail.com's mercy. Despite all that "Email address for life" blabla (which company lasts forever?). (If they didn't think that far, chances are that we don't even reach them.) Just subscribe to another service and tell your friends the new address. Everybody accepts that they have to change their phone number when they move. >They can't >change the protocol itself, because if they did, people with existing >Microsoft e-mail clients (Outlook Express, Entourage, etc) would no >longer be able to check Hotmail accounts. > Do you remember the AOL AIM vs. MS Messenger game a year or so ago? OK, MS might not have been that smart/evil when developing the OE<->Hotmail protocol. >Can you imagine the uproar if they did [force people to upgrade]? > Since when does MS care about its customers? MS customers baught different things already. "Just download and install that little fix, and all will work well again. It's just 5 minutes and you'll get Hotmail Plus with an extra 5 MB of storage and many other exclusive features, like a FREE movie from Madonna's Ray of Light. Get it NOW!". (Now, my post will hang in some spam filters ;-P) >Especially if Microsoft had no excuse for asking such >users to upgrade to the next version of Outlook Express, other than >`well, we had to change the protocol so that Netscape users couldn't use it'? > MS is quite creative at crafting shoddy excuses, er reasons. Even if our hack lasts 2 years and it costed 60 hours (*if* that is enough), that's already a too high investment IMO, considering what is still to be done in Mozilla anyways. >Yes, but people want to use a dedicated mailer to check it instead >because (even in Mozilla) it would be more usable to do that than to use >the browser interface. > Fine. Get a real POP account and pay 3$/month for it. Why should I spend my free time for people who subscribe themselves to Microsoft just to save a few bucks and then refuse to take any inconvience to remedy their fault?
