billso.com

This just in from HowToWeb: a stunning 95 percent of all e-mail is unsolicited commercial e-mail.

This Washington Post article from May details an anti-spamming effort that went awry when spammers retaliated.

Spam counts have continued to rise as more e-mail administrators choose passive management approaches such as filtering. On my e-mail servers, the most obvious spam is scanned, identified and tagged by programs such as SpamAssassin. My servers then send the high-scoring spam directly to the trash without delivering these messages to an inbox. This process eliminates most of my incoming spam.

Because I have many international students, I don’t filter messages by top-level domain, language or code pages. But many companies do use these criteria as filters. A mainland company that has no Korean customers or suppliers can afford to dump any e-mail message from South Korea. That country has been a popular mailing point for spam messages, as it offers a high concentration of broadband subscribers.

I still agree with Joi Ito’s statement from three years ago - e-mail is broken.

From the Washington Post: Microsoft has finally ended Windows 98 product support in North America. Rob Pergoro of the Washington Post discusses some inexpensive, legal alternatives to a Windows XP upgrade.

Anyone who is still running Windows 98 needs a reality check. The first version of Windows 98 didn’t support USB, and this is a key reason many users have upgraded over the years.

Now that Microsoft has stopped issuing patches and security updates, any computer running Windows 98 is a potential entry point for viruses, worms, and Trojans.

One final reason: any computer that is running Windows 98 is likely to be several years old right now. On average, desktop computers seem to last a few years. Notebook computers have an even shorter life span. Yet according to this article, 3 percent of computers are still running this operating system.

Windows 98 is an example of legacy software that is more of a burden than a benefit in most organizations.

This Business Week article includes a nice slideshow of some prototypes and new products.

The next iPod is rumored to have a full-panel display and a virtual click-wheel. There’s not much reason for a cell phone to have real buttons, especially since the screen could display any buttons needed.

Also, buttons are a key failure point in computer hardware. Dust and moisture can kill a device quickly.

Sometimes students ask me for examples of “white papers”. In IT, a “white paper” is an article or a case study that is posted or distributed by a hardware or software vendor. It usually features at least one happy customer, and discusses the positive points of specific products and services in glowing detail. I often lump corporate web sites into this category.

I usually tell students to avoid citing white papers and marketing literature in their assignments, because these sources are almost always biased towards the company that paid the writers.

This Apple page is a good example of a white paper. I’m surprised that there are no easy-to-find links to PDF or printable versions of this article.

I can’t imagine walking into a business meeting armed with ‘facts’ I found in white papers. That’s the perspective I take when I’m grading - I’m a CXO. That’s one reason why industry magazines are helpful, as their reviews tend to compare products and services on an equal basis. Occasionally, we might see white papers that read like industry research, including comparisons with products and services from other vendors.

Until someone rigs up a crapometer to detect marketing blather, it’s really up to the reader to determine how much trust they will place in a white paper. For my part, I find white papers interesting and funny, but I need to see more authoritative sources before I make up my mind.