* Posts by mfwiniberg

4 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2016

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

mfwiniberg

Thunderbird!

I realise that enterprise users will have a different take on this, but as an avid user of Outlook since it first appeared, and despite experimenting with the likes of Scalix etc, I never found a real competitor.

However, as MS continued to remove useful features, meaning using even more COM addins to get them back, and with the effort that was put into Thunderbird, I decided to give Thunderbird a try. It has progressed to the point now where, with just one extension, it does everything I used to use Outlook for and more. As a result I abandoned Outlook some 2 years ago, and haven't really missed it.

I use TB with both google workspace, POP3 and Exchange accounts without problems.

MS Mail etc were worse than the very earlist mail clients I ever used (and I've been around since before the internet existed!) Nothing I see here convinces me they are significantly improved.

Just saying...

Identity disorder: Does UK govt need Verify more than we do?

mfwiniberg

As I've said to their face before now (via Twitter and on-line fora etc) if GDS spent as much time developing its services as it does tweeting about how wonderful it is, or running workshops for people to come and learn about how GDS works, maybe they could rediscover their reason for existence.

Voter registration site collapse proves genius of GDS, says minister

mfwiniberg

I've been waging a bit of a one man campaign against the self-congratulatory GDS team for some time. If site testing was done with real users eg from the target audience for the sites and without IT skills, or with reading or sight difficulties etc, then the contrast between the GDS world pictured via their self-promoting tweets and blogs and the reality of the dysfunctional pages often encountered on GOV.UK wouldn't be so great.

A better example of an organisation that has evolved to grow itself rather than serve its original purpose would be hard to find.

Scary RAM-gobbling bug in SQL Server 2014 exposed by Visual Studio online outage

mfwiniberg

Re: How do you mess that one up?

Some time ago I came across a 'feature' of SQL 2014 where SELECT TOP 1 returned two or more rows. If SELECT TOP 1 doesn't then wouldn't that cause the cardinality estimation to fail?

Mike