Why Email to AOLand Mac.COM (Same thing) Bounces - Finally Understood The Reason.

Lukily I have no friends that use AOL Email, so this has never been an issue for me, but my wife has a few friends, and more often than not our email bounces.

Today I got an email from our ISP explaining what is going on, and it finally made it very clear to me the source of the problem.

The source of the problem are occuring in two steps.

(1) Someone in the same email system on my ISP sets up a permanent forward from their own account to their own AOL account.

(2) The forwarded email contains some SPAMS.

(3) The user marks the SPAM on the AOL side. This causes the users' ISP as the spammer.

(4) This shuts down the ALL of the users on the ISP that is using the same SMTP server.

My ISP said that AOL is not going to fix this issue, and cannot ask users from stop forwarding to AOL voluntarily so they said they won't forward anything to AOL.

Now it makes sense.

SCSI - A Dying Interface?

I have been working on some stuff that happen to require legacy SCSI connections. I have noticed through this experience that SCSI, at the level of consumer level PC, has already died and shortly there will be a time that all of our legacy SCSI devices won't have a way to be connected and retrieved. It will be just a matter of time.

Just take a notebook computer and try to find a way to connect it to a Ultra SCSI device you may have.

First you need to find a SCSI controller, presumably in PCMCIA or CardBUS format. Just about only people who still sell those are Adaptec, but if check the SCSI drivers, they basically stopped working on around 2000, and while their drivers would work on XP, there has not been any updates since.

Surely, there are USB and FireWire converters, but there always will be issues of driver compatibilities and your legacy app will also stop working.

And shortly you wont' be able to plug in a SCSI card to your notebooks because new notebooks will be equipped only with ExpressCARD architecture, which is based on PCI Express (not to be confused with PCI extended) architecture. At this time of writing there is no major manufacturer which makes ExpressCARD format SCSI adaptor.

Even in Enterprise class storage field, things are moving to iSCSI SANs for small SANs and the iSCSI RAID boxes themselves are based on SATA disks. I think SCSI will be around the paradigm shift has already occur ed in the industry at least in consumer and medium business market place, since I either cannot buy them or there are abundance of chaper alternatives already out.

Turn On/Off Services and Drivers on Windows XP

This is just a reminder to myself, as services and driver conflicts happen once in a while that needing this software, and I always forget what that was called.

It is msconfig.exe Just run it from the Start menu.