Technology

Editor's note: More than 50 years ago, at the dawn of the computer age, Patrick J. McGovern founded International Data Corp., and, later, International Data Group (the parent company of Computerworld, which he started in 1967). From that small beginning, McGovern, who passed away in 2014, would go on to create a global publishing and data empire.

That empireeventually grew toincludesome 300 publications in 97 countries, 460 websites and 700 eventsfocused on all aspects of the IT industry. And in 2000 it allowed McGovern to work withMIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Pilot fish returns from an extended holiday weekend to find his inbox full of spam -- and for once, dozens of the messages seem to be related.

"I was curious, so I didn't delete all 50 of them right away," says fish. "The first one was obviously spam -- a 'Hi, do you remember me, can we talk' message with a phishing link.

"But the first reply was from an autoresponder at a legal-services company: Thank you for your email. You have reached the email inbox for Please let us know if you have any questions."

The next message is from another autoresponder, replying not to the spam but to the first autoresponder: Thank you for contacting us. This is an automated response confirming the receipt of your ticket. Our team will get back to you as soon as possible.

Most enterprises will now adopt a once-a-year upgrade model for Windows 10, finally getting some relief from the pressure of seemingly endless rounds of testing and deployment, a Windows expert said today.

"I think enterprises will fall into an annual cadence," Stephen Kleynhans, a Gartner research vice president, said in an interview. "With 30 months of support, you get to choose when to start rolling out [the upgrade]. You may say, 'We'll start kicking tires in January, piloting in March, deploying in June.' That's a nice window."

Kleynhans was referring to the changes he expects enterprises to make following Microsoft's announcement last week that it is extending support of Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education to 30 months. The additional support - previously maxed out at 18 months - will be awarded only to the fall feature upgrade, the one each year labeled xx09 in Microsoft's yymm format. Windows 10 Enterprise 1809 (and the matching Education edition), slated to release later this month or early in October, will be the first to get two-and-a-half years of security patches and non-security bug fixes.