CNet reports today that many of the e-mail viruses now infecting systems worldwide may have been created by spammers as a means for creating relays for sending spam. Since the anti-spam software has been pretty effective at stopping spam from specific servers, the next step for spammers is to try and get control of home user systems for sending out more spam. Using a virus to do that is a natural.

Let this be a fair warning to all of you to install anti-virus software. I can tell you from experience that this new Sobig virus is hammering my servers because of the dolts out there who don’t protect their systems.

I don’t know what else to say about this except that it’s really cool and worth the visit.

Yes, the fifth Builder.COM article was finally published. It took months of discussion over the content, but I’m pretty pleased with the results. The article is called “Follow these tips to help sales boost revenue” and discusses how software development managers can help the corporate sales team be successful. It’s an important article because I’ve been in too many meetings where a deal was screwed up because someone failed to act appropriately. Sofware technologists like myself often do not receive sales training, yet are expected to perform when called into a sales situation. This article will hopefully begin to smooth those rough edges.

Enjoy and, as always, send me your feedback!

Yet another sign of the declining software and information technology industry comes today from News.COM where we read that fewer college students are studying computer science. This is exactly the right thing to happen now — the job market was flooded for a while with college CS graduates who were expecting to get rich on the Internet bubble. Now that the industry is bottoming out, it’s time for the labor market to shift also. I’m not suggesting that those of us who are software developers need to get out, but the demand for software engineers is down and adding new college graduates to the mix doesn’t help.

A similar thing happened in the 1980s with lawyers. For a while, that was the profession to pursue, but soon the market was flooded with lawyers. Eventually things corrected themselves and the number of new lawyers out of college experienced a sharp downturn. Today I expect the same sort of thing in the software industry — in a few years things will stabilize and we’ll be at the right production levels for new software engineers.