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Software "Upgrades"

I know that software engineers or programmers or whatever they call themselves need to justify staying on the payroll by producing things.  Really, I do understand this concept.  But why do they insist on "improving" products that work perfectly already?  If you try to improve something that is already RIGHT in every way then you can only make is LESS RIGHT!  Two examples I've encountered recently are the Thunderbird email program, the one I'm using at this very moment and Mozy online back up, which is running in the background right now. 

Thunderbird went from being slick and fast to being grindingly slow after the last "upgrade" they did.  Now it does some nonsensical thing that serves no purpose I can discern called "indexing" that supposedly allows me to find emails better, though it doesn't actually do that.  They were easier to find in the previous version with a simple key word search.  Now the program sucks resources and almost stops downloading new emails while it "decides what to index".  Really?  Who cares?  I just want to read my email, NOW!

Mozy went from having a pretty informative interface that told you an estimated time for the backup it was doing, to an interface that might as well not be there at all for all the info it gives.  Plus I'd swear the downloads are now taking at least twice as long but that could be due to new files being generated by the stupid "INDEXING" that Thunderbird is doing. 

Both of these programs were better six months ago than they are now after being "IMPROVED"  Thanks for nothing guys.

BUT, they are still way better than other programs that claim to do the same thing... they just aren't as good as they once were. 

Oh, and then there is Virus Protection Software.  I think the biggest and nastiest VIRUS out there is McAfee itself!  And that is the better of the choices between the biggest 2 - Norton and McAfee, at least in my experience.  The darned thing buts in and updates every single day, sometimes more than once and last night it made me restart my computer to finish the upgrade.  I am not convinced that there are that many dedicated virus makers out there that make such dangerous computer viruses that the stupid program needs to slow my computer down daily for minutes at a time, usually when I'm busy with something else.  I suspect that it's like the BART station agents who, I'm convinced without real evidence, work closely with bike stealing gangs, in exchange for cash or something, to get bikes ripped off from inside BART stations!  I'm also convinced, without evidence, that McAfee and other virus protection makers, actually are the source of 99.9% of the computer viruses they "detect" out there.  So there.  :-P

Posted via email from The Angry Gnome

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