The news comes just weeks after another big player in the email security market, Webroot, announced they would be exiting the scene completely.

Google’s announcement isn’t quite as severe but is no doubt significant. In a statement on their Website they promise that Google Apps will now offer the same level of features as Postini built right into the Apps product.

This is good news for Apps users, but for those using the standalone Postini service, many questions still remain. Google are saying that these ‘Classic’ accounts are no affected by the transition, but this leaves business with concerns they are paying for a mothballed service. There is no word from Google on whether they will be offering a new standalone email security product for these users.

One thing is clear, business users will be forced to manually update their MX record, which will cause an unwelcome headache for administrators and potential email disruption for many as DNS changes propagate.

With the demise of Webroot’s email security service and this latest news from Google, the SaaS email security market is feeling very unstable. Without doubt the likes of other providers such as Symantec.Cloud (formerly messagelabs) will be waiting in the wings to scoop up any disillusioned customers.

There is a bigger elephant in the room here, that has so far gone unnoticed; Has the SaaS email security market reached vendor saturation? Margins appear to have withered away, perhaps due to intense competition, and there seems to be a shift towards services protecting endpoint computers rather than at the network level. Maybe this is just diversification by providers in tough economic times. The spam threat certainly hasn’t gone away, but by all accounts profitability has – it seems this cash cow may have almost dried up.

For more information on the Postini situation visit the Google FAQ

I tried everything – disabling wireless encryption on the router and so on. Nothing made any difference.

I decided to go for a software upgrade on the Kindle. Out of the box it had version 3.03.

I downloaded 3.1 from here, placed the file on the device via USB and then selected update from the Kindle menu.

This took about 10 minutes to run.

Following the update I was able to connect to the WRT160N with WPA encryption enabled.

My position as an IT consultant has given me an birds eye view of laptop lifecycle, a continuous process where a laptop goes from birth to death. The full cycle usually takes about 5 years, which means the average human being will own about 12 laptops in their adult life.

We can draw many parallels between our own lives and that of a laptop. They come in many shapes and sizes, some are small and thin, others are fat and heavy. Some will catch diseases (malware), others will die young (hard drive failure). A few lucky ones will grow to be old and extraordinary slow.

Fortunately the life of a laptop is much less precious than that of a human. Eventually there is a strong enough driver to go and find a new laptop. Experience tells me that the first factor 95% of people consider is price. For example, a large majority of the population want to spend less than £400 (including VAT) on their laptop. Understandably, in tough economic times people want value for money, and even the big manufacturers recognise there is a market for cheap laptops.

However, the market has undergone a substantial squeeze in order to accommodate this price bracket. It might surprise you to learn that the main reason a laptop can be offered so cheap is that many large software firms have effectively subsidised it by paying the manufacturer to have their software pre-installed. This gives the software firm a foothold over their competitors. This is the reason you’ll often receive a free 30 day antivirus subscription. A lot of people will simply renew the product without shopping around. For the software firm, it only takes a small percentage of people to buy their software for the initial investment to pay off. This is just one example. Typically a cheap laptop will come with at least 10 preinstalled unwanted applications – every single one is a revenue generating opportunity for the software firm. To an experienced eye, these unwanted applications can easily removed, but usually people find it hard to identify the wheat from the chuff, and besides they don’t want to spend 3 hours removing software from their brand new computer.

The second most important (and expensive) consideration for a lot of people is Microsoft Office. Your £400 laptop certainly won’t come with bundled with a free copy. In fact you may even cry when you discover this software costs more than a quarter of the total cost of the laptop. There are cheaper Home and Student editions available, but beware these editions only contain the basic applications, such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For business you usually want Outlook and that comes at a higher price.

This brings us to another business based consideration. Cheap laptops arrive with a watered down version of Windows. Be warned, this will not work well with a typical business network. The reason being that Microsoft removed several features that allow the computer to be part of a business environment. Most businesses need a laptop with the more expensive Professional version.

People often overlook the core components which go into a laptop – the most significant being the processor. It’s easy to be drawn in by offers of large amounts of storage and memory. Remember that these are upgradable components, where as the processor is not. Within the sub £400 price bracket you can expect to receive a very basic processor. It will likely be produced by AMD who dominate the lower end of the market. The speed (measured in Ghz) is often advertised but this is of limited importance. This makes comparing different models difficult. Generally Intel processors offer as much as twice the performance for around an extra £100. This should be a strong consideration as it could mean the difference between a laptop which runs smoothly over it’s lifetime and one that doesn’t fulfill that dream.

In conclusion, a cheap laptop is often a false economy. The £400 laptop exists to feed a market of people who only vaguely understand what they’re buying. The truth is the cheapest laptop is unlikely to satisfy. Unless you are seriously strapped for cash, go for a more expensive laptop and you will enjoy a better experience over a longer period of time.

In other news, I’ve been working on some new features for the ever popular PHP Unserializer! It will now give you the option to make changes to your data and put it back into a serialized format. Currently it only works with arrays that don’t have any sub-arrays, but I will gradually expand it to cover these too. We hope it’s of some use.

For whatever reason, it’s quite possible to end up with a Symantec AntiVirus client which isn’t talking to the server – You may have accidentally uninstalled Symantec AV from you’re server, reinstalled the server or moved it on to another server. So how do you get those SAV clients to re-register in the console?

Well, I decided to use a logon script to sort out a number of clients in one hit. Download the following av-fix batch file:

Download: av-fix.bat

In the case of SBS 2003 – you need to place this file in the netlogon folder. Once in place, open up the file and place your Symantec server name in the correct place, replacing “\\yourserver”.

To make the logon script silent, I decided to use a small program called hstart. Download it from here and place in the netlogon folder. My script uses the widely available robocopy, so get yourself a copy of that and place it in the same folder.

Now, from your main logon batch script you just need to insert the following line:

hstart /NOCONSOLE “av-fix.bat”

This executes the batch file in hidden mode (the user won’t notice anything)

The av-fix.bat file places a grc.dat in the correct place on your client machines. It also updates the pki directory.

It’s tested to work on XP (but I’m unsure about Vista…)

Sit back and watch the Symantec Console repopulate as the clients login. Beautiful! I hope you find it useful!

Secondly, Henry has installed a new theme. It’s only one from the WordPress Themes catalogue, but a very nice one at that. We could really use a nice logo for the top left now, and possibly a change of name too?!

http://192.168.1.1/setup.cgi?next_file=adsl_driver.htm

This should give you:

DSL Noise Margin

DSL Attenuation

DSL Transmit Power

I’d like to take a moment to thank Chris & co at Kernow broadband for providing a dedicated internet connection for the camera. Stefan at Davey electrical provided his cherry picker on which we mounted the camera. Without the fantastic help of these people the camera wouldn’t have been possible!

We hope to be back next year to provide even better coverage of the grounds.

Update: I’ve discovered that Outlook 2007 works fine if you switch the networking options in virtualbox from “NAT” to “Bridged”. It also fixed some other issues I was having (mapped network drives and group policy didn’t get applied. For reference the domain controller is a Windows 2008 SBS server.

The camera will be capable of panning a full 360 degrees and will be positioned some 30 feet above the showground. The live stream will be viewable for the duration of the event on www.showgroundlive.com

We hope you enjoy the show, even if you’re not there!