It amazes me how stupid some people in IT development are. Excluding myself for a change.

First, how could anyone ever have believed that banner-ads of any kind would work? I could have told them at the start they wouldn’t. When you’re on the internet you’re busy reading or looking at or for stuff, you have certain goals while surfing, sometimes vague, but they are always there in the back of your head, there’s absolutely no way you’re considering 1 click on some nervous monkey or some pushy browser-window with nothing but “ass-fucking teen” links on it.

Second; Whatever happened to the meaning of the word “free”? Why do they say “free download” when no downloading is ever free? And when you’ll only be able to use the downloaded stuff for 30 days? How are things “free” when they use it to put commercials inside? Why do they say “free trial-version”? Do they think anyone in their right mind would want to PAY to try out software? Then there’s Linux and even FreeBSD, while being advertised as completely “FREE!” operating systems, we need to pay to get it on CD now. And the cost is way up there with Windows these days, you’re not just paying for the CD now are you? And if you download the ‘free’ CD’s for it, you’re wasting your money on bandwidth-cost, and that’s not free either.

Third, I’ve been looking for a decent mailserver program for almost a month now, there are about 200 different mailserver-packages out there, but I have yet to meet a good one! Here’s the deal: Long time ago I was asked by a group of non-connected students to connect their home-PC’s to 1 internet account. So I did, and it still works, and it can’t be changed into open source material for reasons I will not mention here. So I used to have Winroute Pro installed on the internet-connected PC, which functioned as a router, proxy and mailserver just fine. But now they have a hardware router, which basically means Winroute is a goner and I need to install a small 8-user mailserver on their network (replacing Winroute’s internal mailserver), because they have a huge amount of pop-servers to collect their mail from, and they don’t wanna use multiple accounts on their PC’s anymore. Ever since I installed Winroute and solved that ‘problem’, they have gotten used to that. So: Words cannot express how good Winroute’s internal mailserver is, compared to the 50 different mailserver-packages I’ve already un-installed by now. They’re wasting your memory away with at least 2 MB while running, which is about 4 times what Winroute’s mailserver used for the exact same functionality. Or they simply have such terrible user-interface design or such impossible config that I wind up cursing the creators of the software. Or they suffer from creeping featuritis; they really needed to implement a web-mail http-server, mailinglists, IMAP, virus-checkers, even news! Hell, I’ve encountered ‘mail’servers that somehow think you’d want an integrated FTP-server. And to think I’d want to pay for such crappy software. Really, hats off to TINYsoftware, not one package comes close to the mailserver they created to be part of Winroute Pro. Makes me want to cry.