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Survey: Spam Costs Add Up
Dealing with the spam that floods workers e-mail in-boxes can cost companies lots of money.
Thats from an internal study conducted by Activis. The managed security services company surveyed employees in its offices worldwide to find out how much time they spent reading, forwarding and deleting spam. Executives also tried to calculate the amount of storage resources wasted.
Businesses with 1,000 employees lose $25,000 per month—or $300,000 a year—in worker productivity, according to the survey.
Gaming Gorilla Goes Online
Network managers who noticed an unanticipated jump in network activity last week should look in their traffic logs for forward passes and field goals.
Sony last week introduced a network adapter for its PlayStation 2 game console that allows gamers to battle one another across the Internet. To celebrate the launch, the company held a tournament, with customers in New York squaring off against enthusiasts in San Francisco on two PlayStation 2 titles: NFL Game Day 2003 and Special Forces on SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs. Sony plans to launch 13 online games this year.
Sony Pulls Betamax Plug
The Betamax is going the way of the vacuum tube switch. Sony last week reported that it will stop making the venerable videotape machines at the end of the year.
The company said it was not folding the Betamax tent as a long-anticipated acquiescence to videotape rival JVCs VHS format but said the market was moving to newer technologies such as DVD. Even VHS is suffering, as retailers such as Circuit City move toward stocking more DVDs.
Betamax-format videotapes hit stores in 1975 and boasted sales as high as 2.3 million units in 1984. Last year, Sony built 2,800 Betamax units.