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... less than two years. That's the prediction of Craig Stouffer, marketing vice president at Redline Networks Inc., who claims that multifunction appliances are clearing out the clutter of Web tier front-end systems. Stouffer says that his Campbell, Calif.-based company's release on March 31 of the Redline EX Version 3.3 all but puts the nail in the coffin of single-minded load balancers for large-scale Web operations. Not unlike the folks at Santa Clara, Calif.-based NetScaler Inc. mentioned here last week , Redline is packing SSL acceleration, HTTP security, authentication and authorization features into its box along with caching, connection management and server load balancing. The new release also adds self-healing mesh technology to a rack of up to 64 of these appliances so no site visitor ever loses his place online, even in the midst of entering data on a page. If a Redline box crashes in the middle of a transaction, another slips in to complete the deal. The 3.3 upgrade is free to existing users.

• While on the subject of free, bookmark www.globalspec.com, a great technology information site. Run by GlobalSpec Inc. in Troy, N.Y., the site caters to the engineering-oriented looking for details on all manner of tech gear. It maintains catalog data from 10,000 high-tech firms in its database, which you can search for free. On Thursday, the company will add The Engineering Web to its information motherlode. It indexes 100,000 technology Web sites containing 20 million pages of mind-numbing data that you can't live without. CEO Jeff Killeen says that technologists get frustrated by searching online with general-purpose search engines. "When you do a search on gyros, you don?t want to see information on sandwich shops," he quips. (Of course, that would depend on how hungry you are.) Unlike Google and other search companies that take money from vendors to place their information at the top of search results, GlobalSpec lists its discoveries in alphabetical order. "We couldn't think of a fairer way," Killeen says. Fair enough.

• Need a new hobby? How about spam revenge? That's one of the side benefits behind the release of the antispam tool Spamfire 1.5 for the client, with a server version due by summer and a hosted Spamfire option ready next month. Michael Herrick, CEO of Matterform Media Inc. in Espanola, N.M., said Spamfire can send an untraceable response to spammers, pestering them with a nonsense message every 10 seconds. The software also includes the spam crime reporter feature that manages your endless unsubscribe clicks and tracks down spammers that have illegally ignored your request. As Herrick puts it, "The CAN-SPAM Act actually legitimizes spam," but you can at least use the one tough provision of the legislation, the legal muscle now behind unsubscribe compliance, and get more than simple revenge. You might get some lawsuit money as well.