No, Im not a blog dropout. I dont have many readers, but some of you may have noticed that I skipped posting last week and am several days late this week. Sometimes, life just gets in the way of all our best intentions! I actually had to choose paying work over the fun of blogging, and this being tax time, guess which direction I went!
So this weekend, I am catching up on my tech reading which always inspires my tech (or not so tech) blogging. On weeks I am able to keep up, I usually closely scan about a half dozen tech magazines. Some of the information is very technical and makes my brain freeze, but usually I am able to glean thoughts and trends and tidbits that I think are interesting enough to share. Since I got behind on everything including my blogging and reading, I have a lot of notes, so bear with me. We may have to cover this over a two week period! Lets get right to it.
Vista has been out for a little over three months now. The biggest problems (no real surprise here) are the lack of drivers for older hardware and the compatibility problem with older apps. Specifically, owners of many large format printers and industry specific software such as AutoCAD are either not happy with Vista or are avoiding it all together. There has also been some frustration with video cards and software.
The Department of Defense and the FAA (which is part of the DOD, but managed separately) have both announced that they are placing an indefinite moratorium on upgrading to Vista. This affects approximately 60,000 federal computer users, but is apparently not considered a major problem by Microsoft who has no comment. No doubt, as drivers become available, new hardware is purchased and minor glitches are patched, these government departments will come around. As Windows 98 and 2000 support falls by the wayside, Windows XP becomes the veteran. This cycle will continue and Vista will become the accepted standard until the next big thing comes along.
Spam Redux – For the majority of my users, spam and the time it takes to deal with it is a major time waste, so my antenna perks when I see interesting statistics published. A company called MessageLabs handles approximately 180 million emails daily, and on their website they have an interesting graph which dynamically shows what percentage of that is mail they consider to be spam. Its worth a visit just to confirm your own feeling that most of what you see is junk! Check it out at:
http://www.messagelabs.com/publishedcontent/publish/threat_watch_dotcom_en/threat_statistics/DA_112495.chp.html
And while on the subject, another tech site, http://www.theregister.co.uk/ reported on just one spammer out of many. Im going to type the zeros in the numbers. Im wondering if the punishment fit the crime.
Sent 9,000,000,000 (thats billion) messages in 14 months.
Apparently earned $52,000 from that spam.
Was fined $97,000.
Last but not least – I have some strong feelings about the net neutrality question that is being brought before our lawmakers, but have not really tried to put those thoughts down on paper. Now, I dont need to, because I read an article that brings it to the user level quite nicely. Heres a link: