Written February 2007
by Cliff Feldwick
As winter approaches (somewhere – it’s still hovering in the 50’s and 60’s as I write, and last weekend I ate outdoors), people find ways to block out the clamminess and cold. Some pop away to cruises or Florida spots, others use mental means by anticipating the start of baseball training season and exhibition games. Myself, I like to look at the lengthening days (even if it starts slowly with only seconds per day), as daylight creeps in earlier in the mornings and there are less days driving home in the darkness. In an effort toward energy conservation, Congress last year passed legislation to add four more weeks to Daylight standard time. So what does this have to do with computers? Remember that little pop-up you get twice a year from Windows saying that it has changed the clock to meet the time changes? It’s going to be messed up this year because the “old” version is programmed in. So your e-mail time stamps (and even more importantly, billing programs) will be off.
How to change this? Fortunately, the crew at Microsoft has issued an article, snappily entitled “How to configure Daylight Saving Time for the United States in 2007”, dealing with changing times from the simple one-computer user to enterprises dealing with thousands of machines. For most of us, visiting their site at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387 will let you download the Time Zone editor (tzedit.exe) utility, which works just fine. Just remember that the new settings are 2nd Sunday of March till 1st Sunday of November. You’re welcome.
Time ticks on two
In the heyday of computer resellers, every week brought forth an edition of Computer Reseller News. Often weighing in (literally) with several hundred tabloid-sized pages, it was spawning ground of new technologies and small companies selling all manner of parts and systems. It was pretty well impossible to go through it before another arrived. In a definite sign of the times, the newest edition of CRN (as it now is called, probably to hide its origin), has only 78 standard size pages, few devoted to the component ads that were used to find vendors we all used for parts to build our own “white box” (as in vanilla) systems. Ads by too well known vendors take what space there is. So what gives? The computer industry is in the midst of yet another wave of consolidation and buyouts. HP and Dell battle for number one status (although Lenovo – IBM with a Chinese hat – is gearing up for a push into mainstream desktop markets), vendors such as Cisco buy out security innovators, and hard drive manufacturers combine, even if different brand names appear (just the same owners). The only chance for true innovation (as opposed to the “love your monopoly” slogan by Microsoft) will be if the crop of techno-wienie millionaires created by all these buyouts gets restless and starts new small companies. Fortunately, equipment prices will probably continue to fall, as competition between Intel and AMD for processors and other vendors for flat screens continues.
More spam please
Yes, there’s even more spam oozing its way into your inbox. One security company estimated that the volume rose from 63 billion spam messages per day in October to 75 billion in November, with peaks of 85 billion by month’s end. And more of it is getting past the filters, thanks to use of images rather than text. Simply put, a spammer will convert his message into an image that is sent as one piece, rather than text that can be easily scanned and discarded by the incoming mail server. Newer filter programs have to use complex rules to distinguish the text hidden in the image, and then judge for pork content based on that score. Since the spammers are always finding new ways to sneak past the gatekeepers, and since security is primarily reactive, it’s only going to get worse. Another threat is directory harvest attacks, or attempts by spammers to obtain proprietary e-mail addresses or other corporate directory information. Attempts have held steady at about three million per week, which is incredible if you think about it. Putting your e-mail address out on your web site is pretty much an open invitation for the web robots to add you to their lists. Ah, the joy.
Visual spam
The sign-stickers are at it again. You know, the stick-em-by-the-roadside, until someone cleans them up type of sign that pollutes neighborhoods. To name the guilty (as they should be named), today I rode past signs from Wells Fargo home mortgage, Windows Plus, and four bright yellow, view obstructing signs from an apartment complex that have been gracing (disgracing) the corner of Stevens Forest and Broken Land for at least a month. I’ve been trying to understand if they are a sign of the economy (especially the mortgage sign), where increasingly desperate people go searching for business and don’t care where they get it. And who would actually call someone who puts up such a sign? The grass mowers usually end up discarding them in the summer, but who grabs them in wintertime? Personally, I think a wonderful hobby for someone retired and pugnacious would be to collect them and stick them back into the front yard of the companies that use them. Any volunteers?
Cliff Feldwick is president of Riverside Computer Consultants and provides PC troubleshooting and network setups for small to medium sized companies, provided they don’t stick signs in his lawn. He can be reached at 410-880-0171 or at cliff@feldwick.com.