Wednesday, August 20, 2008

'Spam King' Dead in Murder / Suicide

I am not a fan of spam. I try to keep things in perspective though. It is just email. I have filters that move it to my Junkmail folder without... Read More

For July, Microsoft released only 4 new Security Bulletins and none of them were Critical. Actually, all 4 were rated as Important, which typically means they are serious, but that... Read More

At some point, the United States Customs and Border Patrol decided that the current administration's blatant disregard for the Constitution of the United States trickles down to them as well... Read More

A lot of things are happening at Vodafone on this very special day:

It's not surprising that ihug will soon be completely part of Vodafone (rather than the current rebranding) as this fully makes their fixed line products to become part of Vodafone, and reduce confusion.

Things to note:
  • Phone numbers won't change
    Here are the numbers, just for reference:

    Residential: 0800 438 448
    Business: 0800 438 458
    Red network: 0800 800 215 <- they finally release this!
     
  • Billing is still separate, but pay Vodafone New Zealand Limited directly
    Currently, we get a statement which needs to be paid to ihug Ltd, even though it's completely branded Vodafone
I better hope that they clean up the My Vodafone interface as part of this, as it's currently quite messy and unprofessional compared to other ISP account management sites.


The webpage with the information about this changed from welcome to our place to our place is your place:




The Internet Home Users Group
IHUG

ihug / The Internet Group

(1994-2008)


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How well companies that offer something for "free" can do with a subscription option?

When there are so many "free" things on the web, one has to wonder how companies can keep their products up and running (or even if they can manage to get out of beta).

Some companies just don't. They close the service and tell the customers to get out of here:


Personal Media: Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures will be sunset. These consumer storage products haven't gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation. We have found that building media management applications within the context of a social experience is a more rapid and effective way to grow the business. For example, today the Bebo audience is uploading over three million photos per day. To effectively grow the XDrive online storage business we would need to focus on subscription revenues vs. monetizing through advertising revenue, and this business model is not in strategic alignment with our company's goals. We are exploring plans to migrate our users assets to ensure the best possible transition experience.


This is part of the memo AOL sent out to staff explaning the end of some of their services - including Xdrive an on-line storage service that offered 5 GB of storage free to anyone.

There's a reason why people buy external drives for home or buy Windows Home Server or NAS boxes. First broadband speed sucks around the world. Then the services don't work as expected or not as easily (Xdrive is only one that I know that could be mounted as a drive on your OS so you could just copy things from and to instead of having to open a browser window). And even so it was very unstable.

Which leads me to the next one: the on-line service businesses seem to be quite unreliable - unless they are a subscription service with a SLA, not a freebie. But even so sith happens.

When there are lots of free things, some won't last long.

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When you go out shopping, or to a baseball game, or wherever, odds are fair that you lock your car doors when you leave. You probably want to protect your... Read More

Significant competitive move from VMware to counter the threat of Microsoft Hyper-V . . . not that 3i was expensive before, but this price is certainly better :) This is part of a new strategy kicking in after co-founder Diane Greene's departure. ex-Microsoft exec Paul Maritz is running the show now.

Read more in this article at Redmond Channel mag.

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Windows Vista includes a variety of security features not found in previous operating systems such as Windows XP. One of these features is ASLR. ASLR is like a shell game... Read More

... and by poor proof reading:


- from the Vodafone website.

It's been up there for a few days since they changed their little advertisement blocks into images...

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