blogs.conchango.com

Over the last few years, I've been a consultant for a major IT Services company; worked for a UK-based support services company; contracted for Australia’s largest independent magazine distributor; worked in-house designing and project managing a Europe-wide infrastructure refresh for a major fashion design, marketing and retail organisation; and ...

Back in March, I wrote about some new e-mail message continuity services from FrontBridge.  Well, according to a press release just received from Microsoft, FrontBridge is about to become Microsoft's latest acquisition as it steps up its systems management and security capabilities. With the purchase of Giant Company ...

I just read that Jack St.Clair Kilby died last week.  The sad thing is that I'd never heard of Jack until I read his obituary even though his invention - the integrated circuit (IC) - undoubtedly paved the way for the computerised world in which we live today. His former employer, Texas Instruments, have a tribute site.  What I find ...

Last week, I was fortunate enough to be quoted on the front page of IT Week by Martin Veitch, in his article ''Decision Time for Win2000 Users''.  Of course, as my wife is a Public Relations Consultant, I understand (and even expect) only a partial quote when a journalist asks for comment, so I'm using my blog to put this into context, ...

Microsoft and the European Commission have finally agreed on the name for the version of Windows XP with Media Player removed - Windows XP N.  How dull?  I preferred Windows XP Reduced Media Edition (after all, one of the benefits of ''regular'' XP is its improved multimedia capabilities) but the EU were never going to accept that!  I'm not ...

Phishing worries me.  In fact, identity theft in general is one of my major concerns (and is the reason I refuse to do any more business with one of the UK's largest banks, who will not respond to letters or e-mails requesting that they remove my online access even though I have closed all of my accounts with them). According to IT Week: ''The ...

Thomas Lee recently blogged about UK government's security awareness website which is intended to ''provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack''. The government hopes the service will help boost confidence in e-commerce, and at the ...

In my recent post which discussed the perils of blogging I linked to Ray Ozzie's Weblog .  This week, I was interested to read that Ray Ozzie was actually the creator of Lotus Notes and that his company, Groove Networks is to be acquired by Microsoft (who have long since been investors in the firm) and integrated into Microsoft's ...

We are all used to spam arriving in our e-mail inboxes, but now the problem is spreading to other communications methods. Research by Wireless Services Corporation shows almost half of the mobile phone text messages received in the US are spam, compared with 18% a year ago.  Another problem is the growing menace of spam over instant messaging ...

I've seen a lot of press coverage over the last week or so about Microsoft's plans for Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0.  One of the major gripes seems to be that it will require Windows XP service pack 2 (SP2). So what's wrong with that? One of the main reasons that people are moving to other browsers (e.g. Firefox) is that IE is perceived as ...