A reminder that Windows XP availability is nearing end of life, and will not be available after June 30 2008.
Now Dell in the US have announced that they will be offering Windows XP pre-installed after June 30 2008 via the Vista Business/Ultimate "downgrade" feature, but there is no equivalent noises being made by Dell UK at this moment.
To avoid any problems, if you are considering buying a new PC in the near future and you wish it to have Windows XP installed, then I would advise you to buy now to avoid any uncertainty
RunPCRun participated in Crusaid's Walk for Life on Sunday 10th June. We raised a total of £748 ($1,470).
So a big "Well Done and Thank You" to everyone that sponsored us.
If you still have some money burning a hole in your pocket, feel free to donate to our favourite charity - The International Community of Women with HIV/AIDS
We've been receiving a few emails from customers about the spam they've been receiving recently.
We currently already filter all the email for spam. According to our reports, 9 out of 10 messages we receive are spam and are removed with a 0% false-positive rate. Unfortunately we cannot "machine-filter" more than this without potentially making mistakes.
You can attempt to further filter them yourselves by using the scoring mechanism our anti-spam mechanism uses by reading and using these instructions.
However, whether it would meet with much success these days is a different matter, as the few spam emails that do make it through are doing so by using some clever techniques to make it look (to a machine) similar to legitimate email (at the moment they use normal text unrelated to the spam and an image that contains themessage they are trying to send, usually with imperfections to stop any form of OCR being performed on the image) as well as looking like and acting like a proper email server from the email servers perspective to prevent techniques like greylisting.
Unfortunately the specifications for the email protocol were created in 1982 (even though email was used in various forms before this) and has changed very little since then. Email was originally conceived as a method of sending messages between academics, not as the business medium it has turned into today.
There is a war going on between spam and the anti-spam programs, and just as in nature there is an element of survival of the fittest. A lot of spam will die, but some will always make it due to the sheer volume and the ingenuity of the people that generate it.
So I'm afraid some spam emails will always get through, and you can see this at places like Hotmail and Google mail to see that even with the huge resources that these businesses have to draw on, they cannot solve this problem, and I'm afraid we have no "magic bullet" either.
WalkPCWalk
As mentioned elsewhere, RunPCRun do voluntary work for ICW , promote HIV causes and donate spare equipment when available.
Now RunPCRun are participating in Crusaid's Walk for Life on Sunday 10th June. The entry and walk for life page has been handled by my lovely wife and can be found here.
http://www.walkforlife.co.uk/geeksandtheirchicks
"Crusaid is a leading UK charity dedicated to helping poor and
marginalised people affected by HIV and AIDS. Providing support,
awareness, education projects and hardship funds, for the last two
decades Crusaid has worked to enable individuals and communities to
regain their dignity and improve their quality of life.
Charity Registration No
1011718"
So if you have any spare cash or have found the information on this site useful then please dig into your pockets and sponsor us (UK residents get 28% added to their donation) and help make the world a better place.
We are trialling a new webmail interface that we'd like to roll out as an alternative to Shinymail and Squirrelmail. Called Roundcubemail, it's faster than Shiny, slicker than shiny or squirrel, but doesn't quite have as many features as Shinymail.
Feel free to test it and let us know what you think of it.
Having worked in the past for IPPF as well as currently helping design and maintain ICW's website on a voluntarily basis, we are helping promote World AIDS Day via the Virtual Red Ribbon campaign.
The aim is to get 7,000 Virtual Red Ribbons worn online by 1 December 2006, one for every person who will be newly diagnosed with HIV this year. Please help achieve this target by wearing a ribbon on your website or promote it via your email signature.
