Spam = 94% of all e-mail in December

Nice summary-of-a-summary piece from Information Week, reporting on Postini's report. Of course, Postini has everything to gain from singing from the mountaintops about today's spam crisis.

It is something we get asked about frequently: controlling, filtering, and handling spam. I've seen Postini's service and it is quite nice, though not very reseller-friendly (minimum 250 seat commitment) so Foxtrot's not reselling.

One nice solution we do use is Sunbelt Software's Messaging Ninja. Formerly called I Hate Spam, Ninja basically sets up an SMTP sink in MS Exchange that traps, scans and sorts spam right into each user's Exchange folder structure (in a designated spam folder).

We've also done some work with Symantec's Anti-spam plug-in for Mail Security, and it works similarly-well. Actually, we had to have a customer show it to us, but Symantec has a great suite combining Enterprise Antivirus and their Premium Anti-Spam product in one bundle for only about $30 per user (~$150 for a 5-pack).

I've always wanted to set up a dedicated Linux SMPT spam filter (have seen good things from Spam Assassin), but the one person I had interested in doing for Foxtrot wound up leaving town. Might be interested in picking it up, if anyone's out there and is interested.

What's the difference between CAT5 and CAT6 cabling?

Sorry for the uber-nerdy post here, but I had this question come up recently and thought this was a really nice technical summation of it.

Lifting the lid on the next-gen Intel CPU

Dailytech.com publishes an interesting "interview" (though there are few actual direct quotes) with a couple Intel execs.

Intel is just another great example of the wonders of Capitalism at work. Intel was fat and happy, resting on its laurels for a good five years (2000 - 2005). AMD, with its Athlon and Opteron CPUs, started winning the speed wars and a resulting increasing marketshare.

Voila, just like that Intel completely ditches the over-heating and under-performing Microburst architecture. They created the new "Core" (Conroe) series of CPUs, have a repeatedly-demonstrated performance advantage. And, this article is proof they are not going to rest on their laurels, but rather continue to push the envelope of smaller, faster, more efficient chips.

What people must realize is that, in that five year hiatus from meaningful new product development, a lot of Intel's focus was on its manufacturing capacity. They pushed from 130, to 90, to 65nm . . . and are now poised to convert plants to 45nm and (apparently) continue the pace every two years. Meanwhile at AMD, while their Athlon and Opteron chips were gaining market share and out-performing, their manufacturing advances lagged. Now, they're just getting to 65nm process and anything smaller than that is but a pipe dream.

So, the lesson is that Intel is a much stronger company - and we consumers are getting a better product - as a result of AMD's competitive influence. Beautiful!

Dispute over wiki.com

Some interesting wrangling going on between MindTouch (a company Foxtrot has done a bunch of business with) and Wikia. Seems we're a little short on details as to what exactly went wrong with wiki.com that has everyone being pushed over to wik.is.

I check with MT to see what the deal is, but have not yet heard back. Will update as I learn more . . .