I really have a hard time with people saying that Office-Exchange is a killer app...

Now that everyone wants a copy of their email on every possible device they own, I find it a million times easier to have the mail hosted somewhere using Google Apps or outlook.com or any other mail service you prefer. For around 50$/user/year, small and medium-sized companies have absolutely no reason to buy and maintain expensive servers just for Exchange. Support technicians that specialize in Exchange are usually hard to find and/or very expensive, it also requires massive backup infrastructure on antiquated tapes and in case of a crash, restoring is simply painful. Simply not something that I would recommend unless they have full time IT employees (even then).

Then you need static IPs, have to check constantly to make sure you are not on someone spam black list and usually need an ultra-fast connection too for all the people that are on the road to receive and send mail at reasonable speed. Then that still won't protect you if you've got some sort of power failure or internet failure at the office and then nobody is able to receive/send emails until that's solved.

Maybe it still makes some sense for very large organization with full time IT employees but for everybody else, there's the cloud.

Just as other tech companies were able to switch their main focus from hardware to software for example, Microsoft will stay well alive and switch from an operating system company to just a regular software company and/or service company.

As their consumer market becomes fragmented, it will not make sense anymore to restrict Office, SQL and other products to one and only platform (windows). SO they will make money with the office360 and hosting emails/cloud servers with their outlook.com platform.
Maybe continuing working on embedded devices like the XBOX and specialty hardware. As more and more devices use some kind of Linux flavor, Windows-based OS will become the odd ball so game development will become more standardized around OpenGL and maybe Wayland and other derivatives.

Even if they get a decent market share in phone and tablet devices, they will probably never reach a dominant position so they might as well release their money-making products and gain some market share across other platforms instead of closing the market to Windows-only devices and waiting for the next competitor to release a one-for-all-platform solutions and take over.

I think people complaining about details such as the Start Button on Windows 8 and the Metro interface are missing the big picture here. The tech world is changing because of more open platforms everywhere and not having a monopoly-ish position in any market changes their game completely.

Just my thought.

That might have more to do with the limitations on the server side than on the client side.

Zimbra currently has the same issue with Shared Contacts for example. The contacts can be shared but the labels attached to each one of them is treated locally so every user in the office has to build their own labels. Not very efficient.

I posted a bug about this a few years ago and apparently it's still not fixed. Priority is given through voting and apparently not enough people care about this feature.

Maybe you missed the function but AFAICR the function has always been there.

Tools -> Account Settings -> Under Outgoing Server on the left, you can enter all the SMTP servers you need to use. You can select a default one over there.

Then you simply click on any account (click on the HEADER where the name is just above the Server Settings of each account. At the bottom of the window on the right, you will see "Outgoing Server (SMTP)" from which you can leave the default one selected or select a specific one to be used (from the list of SMTP entered above).

Also worth mentioning, Thunderbird is free. Exchange/Outlook are no. Plus using Outlook in an IMAP environment as always been a pain since it has to create an additional data file (so a different "tree" hierarchy in the folder view distinct from the main one) because the IMAP data file can not be used as a "default" delivery. Outlook will then maintain his own main data file on top of the IMAP one resulting in non-imap SENT and JUNK folders for example.

I believe that is accurate information on at least Office 2007 maybe even in 2010. It might be possible to tweak the settings and make it work more seamlessly but that's the default behavior when you add an IMAP gmail account for example. You don't have to deal with those annoyances with Thunderbird.

I guess results may vary.

Despite the lack of an easy way to sync contacts, calendars and others with a smart phone which may be a show-stopper for some, Thunderbird is an overall excellent mail client. The funniest thing, is that my two main "selling" points with Thunderbird are exactly the speed at which the searches are executed and returned (which in my experience are so much faster in Thunderbird than in Outlook that I can't believe people Microsoft doesn't improve their software). The resulting behavior is that nobody typically uses the search in Outlook, they simply rather sort their inbox by sender, press the first letter of the sender and then scroll until they reach it. Not the most efficient way in my opinion.

The other killer feature for me in Thunderbird is a recent one, when a large file is attached to an email, a notice will show up at the bottom and will ask you to use the Filelink feature which will basically use UbuntuOne, Box.com and another service to automatically store and link files using one of these services. It is really a life saver for average non-geeks users which can seem to make a distinction between a 75k thumbnail JPG file and a 150 megs PDF catalog with pictures.

My typical user (used to) uses Outlook on a standalone computer using POP3 hosted on a third party company. No exchange. So if you want to compare apples and apples, I would say Thunderbird is faster at indexing, searching and display results than standalone Outlook. Maybe you are using Exchange in your example with the searches being indexed and returned from the server resulting in a faster execution?

I just realized while reading TFA that at these prices, it won't even come with the keyboard included. So add another ~100$ for the touch or type cover!

That's what I was about to say. Knowing the algorythm, they should brute force it and look at the results. Even if the results are impossible to detect automatically, this is when slashdot citizens come in and sort through the information. :)

Actually, unless you already know the company, neither the logo nor the writing is especially recognisable imho. The logo look like a cardboard color print test and because now the writing is in a simple font, it could be anything. Hardly recognisable to me. At least the previous logo and font were unique (or at least somehow distinctive). It almost seems as if after trying to copy iOS from Apple, they were now after the Google logo and color branding.

Apparently this is the "less is more" philosophy... but at the same time, it is plain and unimaginative. Isn't it bad for a company that aims to prove that they can reinvent themselves?

I don't own the energizer duo (and now won't even think about getting one either) but I own some Energizer AA batteries (2500 mAh) and their charger just sucks. It takes 16 hours to charge 4 batteries... I bought like 16 USB Cells and use them everywhere in the house for remotes and Rockband accessories. Using them side by side with the Energizers in Guitars and all, you couldn't tell they don't last as long as the other ones. Also if people are coming in for a jam and the batteries are a bit low, it only takes an hour to recharge the USBCell ones...

Sometimes price is not everything...

Why would you need a USB charger when you can have the batteries charge themselves through USB?

http://www.usbcell.com/

Why did you have to give it in the first place?

This might be a US thing I guess but here in Canada only your boss and the companies you required financing with are required to have it. I can't think of opening an internet account that requires a SSN....

Yes that is great news indeed!

I am looking to replace an onboard (Asus / nVidia) video card by an ATI.

That might be contrary to what most people say around here, but I've always had more luck on Linux with the ATI drivers than the Nvidia driver.

Rep