James E. Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area. Gaskin has been helping small and medium sized businesses use technology intelligently since 1986.
This blog covers IT news, views, and product info with the small business angle in mind.
Write him at readers@gaskin.com.
E-mail Archiving Stupidity
I live in the Dallas area, but not in the city of Dallas. That means my children were outside the horribly mis-managed Dallas schools, but we're still under the thumbs of idiotic Dallas County officials. How idiotic? How about this recent story, “E-mail Deletion Plan Criticized,” about officials wanting to delete e-mail after 90 days. Have none of them heard of all the new regulations about e-mail archiving?
Disk Storage Drops to Dime per Gigabyte
Combining constantly dropping hard disk storage pricing with the holiday desperation on the part of retailers everywhere gave me a sign I've been anticipating: a 1TB (yes, one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes) hard disk drive with a $100 or less price tag. I saw an ad for a 1TB Samsung hard disk for $99.
Can Endicia Make the Post Office Palatable?
Small businesses tend to forget about the US Post Office for shipping once they get past a handful of packages per week. And if you deal with the Post Office as a consumer, or your particular Post Office treats consumers like annoyances, you run happily to FedEx or UPS and never look back. So I was surprised to hear from a company called Endicia that can make the Post Office a viable shipping option for businesses, including services like volume rebates, flat rate shipping, and Saturday delivery for no extra charge.
Cyber-criminals Get Organized
Symantec just released a new way to make us lose sleep at night, called the Symantec Report on the Underground Economy. In case you weren't depressed enough by the regular economy, Symantec will be happy to bum you out about the increasingly organized world of hackers, spammers, and phishers.
