We needed to hire someone for half time tech support, half time code maintenance for some VB work that a departing consultant had done. The levels of staggering incompetence in the interviewees was immense.
The only one who actually made it past the tech support portion of the interview was the one we hired. He worked out just great. The others...man.
One guy came in who painted houses for a living and fixed his friends' computers. This was the basis for his "four years professional technical support." I asked him how he'd handle a situation where someone called him, unable to get their email. His solution? Redirect them to me.
Another supposedly worked in tech support in a major computer chain, yet somehow couldn't list the names of two major motherboard manufacturers, nor properly diagnose a computer with a floppy cable inserted backwards. Incidentally, I ran into her at that store, where she was working the sales floor.
The guy we hired is a natural researcher and problem solver. If he comes to me with a problem, I know it's either esoteric or pretty serious and he's not wasting my time. This is the quality I look for in tech workers. Heck, the is the essential quality in any profession: the ability to take initiative, research problems, and find solutions in a methodical and efficient manner. Other skills fall in behind this one.
I'll say with complete confidence that Cisco has never been the slightest bit committed to customer satisfaction in 100% of the times I've had experiences with them. Some examples:
We, the subcontractors, got a new router from a customer to hook up a branch office. Said router had no documentation included with it. I find out later that this is standard for Cisco products. The ISP couldn't get it working and we couldn't get it working, 'cause we had no experience with Cisco stuff at all.
Fine, I'd heard good things about Cisco service. I call up the tech support number and am informed that I have to open a case online. Wisely, I point out that I can't do so, as the location I'm at has no connection. The tech insists that I must create the case before anyone will talk to me, then politely disconnects the call.
I call up our office and walk the bewildered receptionist through creating an ID for Cisco's labrynthine site, then opening a case. Bear in mind this is all new to me, so I'm essentially visualizing the site in my head and telling her what to enter as she reads it to me. We open the case, describe the problem, and wait.
A half hour goes by and the office gets a phone call from a Cisco tech wanting the config file. He refused to call the location where I was, so I drove 45 minutes back to the office (rural area) with a floppy.
Hours go by with no followup. Eventually I hear from the customer that the ISP called back with a minor tweak to the config that fixed it. Note that TOS with the ISP didn't cover customer equipment, while the router had the full installation support from Cisco included.
We recently bought a PIX 501 so a vendor could VPN in. (Again, no documentation included. However, you can order it at...) Their engineer recommended upgrading IOS. To do so, you must register an account at Cisco's site.
Fair enough. I'm employed somewhere else now, so I create a new account and go looking for the upgrade, only to discover that my new account has access forbidden everywhere I go, including the section to open new cases.
But wait! There's a separate form to report trouble using the site! I explain the whole thing, detail which parts of the site show forbidden access, when I registered, what my account is, etc etc etc.
Four hours later I get a canned response telling me that they can't help me unless I open a case, and here's the URL....Never did get that IOS upgrade.
And so on. I have more experiences with Cisco, and in none of them have I found the slightest shred of interest in me as a customer, either in policy, support, or follow-through.
Finally, Integrated Development Environments are covered. While Carl and Michael focus on NetBeans, SunONE Studio Community Edition and Eclipse are also covered.
Earthlink does this as well. I do not know if they allow outbound 25 exceptions, as I've never managed to speak to a clueful Earthlink tech. It took three tries to get actual confirmation that they block SMTP outbound.
Our sales guys use Earthlink for access from the home office and on the road. None of them have the patience or the inclination to learn how to switch the outgoing mail server in their Outlook settings, nor should they. This means I set them up to use Earthlink's authenticated relay at all times.
This would work great, except when their authenticated relay goes down, or is slow, or refuses attachments over a certain size, or...you know. You can also guess who gets the irritated phone call about it.
I know what you're talking about, having researched its capabilities recently. It's still beta and unpolished. I am not trusting a production environment to it.
Those are good reasons to set things up that way. I've done the same thing in small offices. I stress "small" offices.
There are good reasons to do things the other way around. That is, a network of Windows AD servers providing the SSO and Unix clients authenticating against them.
I run a large distributed network where I rely on Windows capabilities to minimize maintenance on client desktops. Group Policy is at the top of the list here. When Linux can natively subsitute itself for an AD controller instead of an NT PDC, and can enforce policies on the domain, I'll give it another chance as a SSO provider.
Yeah, I call bullshit too. I mean, think about this. SMTP was designed to deal with unreachable hosts, which is why most relays will keep trying for five days unless they receive a permanent failure notice (such as a rejection) from further along the chain.
A two day outage might send users into a frenzy, but as far as SMTP is concerned, it's nothing. Spammers wouldn't even notice the server was offline. That's even assuming they're sending directly, not relaying through some schmuck who doesn't know how to secure his mail server.
Seriously, how did this story get approved? It shows a level of uninformed misunderstanding right up there with confusing the Web for the Internet.
Seriously. When I interview candidates for a position, I require likely applicants to write an essay and email it to me later. The topic is usually quite simple and the length is only a few paragraphs.
The purpose of this exercise is to weed out the functionally illiterate. I can't stand typing shorthand, bad punctuation, or the inability to coherently present concepts without an excess of words. The essay tells me a lot about an applicant's ability to organize thoughts logically and right gude english, to.
Supposedly, yes. I was excited to read that when our site got an upgrade with our site license.
However, it's limited to finding certain malware installations on a full system scan, if you enable that option. It's off by default.
It does not prevent installation of malware in the first place, nor does it use its resident memory scanner to detect infections of anything other than viruses.
I haven't been too impressed with its abilities when manually scanning, either. It's an excellent virus scanner, so that's what I use it for. I keep systems clean with a combination of Ad-Aware, Spybot, and proper user permissions.
How about do what I do: don't frickin' let users be administrators.
Seriously, if you're locked out of your OS internals, there's a lot of damage you can't do.
I realize this is only one layer of defense, since there's a lot of malware (viruses, particularly) that require no user interaction to run, but it's a biggie.
I have two IMAP accounts and one POP3, and all have the option.
Maybe it's a holdover from when I imported my mail from Outlook Express and it's simply not supported under Thunderbird. It would make sense that way, because I did the same import process at home and at work and I had the same filters on both. Strange that it would keep a filter that it didn't recognize instead of deleting it.
Either way, it's a feature I'd reall like to see. Outlook and Outlook Express both handle it easily.
"Body" is one of the options on the drop down when I create a filter. I first noticed it in version 0.8. I looked for it previously but it wasn't available. Perhaps it still isn't fully implemented yet.
What's interesting is that I imported all my mail and filters from Outlook Express when I first made the switch, and the filter based on body content that I had then worked just fine after importing. I've never been able to duplicate it, though.
I'm on a mailing list that, due to its nature, must accept submissions from non-members and has a public address. Naturally, it gets swamped with spam. SpamAssassin catches most of it, but doesn't add headers or change the subject; instead, it politely sends a warning message (I believe report_safe is set to 1) and attaches the original message.
Since I have no headers to work from, I have to create filters based on body content. Simple enough, right? If it contains words foo bar baz, delete the message.
Except it doesn't work. Didn't work in.8, doesn't work in.9. In fact, when I go back and try to edit the filter to figure out why it's failing, Thunderbird has changed the Body check back to Subject and lost the condition check. This is highly annoying.
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No. That's the validation tool, not the notification tool. They are two separate things.
I wonder if she's ever dealt with BT?
We needed to hire someone for half time tech support, half time code maintenance for some VB work that a departing consultant had done. The levels of staggering incompetence in the interviewees was immense.
The only one who actually made it past the tech support portion of the interview was the one we hired. He worked out just great. The others...man.
One guy came in who painted houses for a living and fixed his friends' computers. This was the basis for his "four years professional technical support." I asked him how he'd handle a situation where someone called him, unable to get their email. His solution? Redirect them to me.
Another supposedly worked in tech support in a major computer chain, yet somehow couldn't list the names of two major motherboard manufacturers, nor properly diagnose a computer with a floppy cable inserted backwards. Incidentally, I ran into her at that store, where she was working the sales floor.
The guy we hired is a natural researcher and problem solver. If he comes to me with a problem, I know it's either esoteric or pretty serious and he's not wasting my time. This is the quality I look for in tech workers. Heck, the is the essential quality in any profession: the ability to take initiative, research problems, and find solutions in a methodical and efficient manner. Other skills fall in behind this one.
The purpose of Vin Diesel is to flip out and kill people.
First the expose on the BSA, and now this.
When did the Economist get taken over by dirty hippies?
Presumably someone turned you into a newt?
"I read too damn much David Eddings."
Now those are choices I can, er, support.
- We, the subcontractors, got a new router from a customer to hook up a branch office. Said router had no documentation included with it. I find out later that this is standard for Cisco products. The ISP couldn't get it working and we couldn't get it working, 'cause we had no experience with Cisco stuff at all.
- We recently bought a PIX 501 so a vendor could VPN in. (Again, no documentation included. However, you can order it at...) Their engineer recommended upgrading IOS. To do so, you must register an account at Cisco's site.
And so on. I have more experiences with Cisco, and in none of them have I found the slightest shred of interest in me as a customer, either in policy, support, or follow-through.Fine, I'd heard good things about Cisco service. I call up the tech support number and am informed that I have to open a case online. Wisely, I point out that I can't do so, as the location I'm at has no connection. The tech insists that I must create the case before anyone will talk to me, then politely disconnects the call.
I call up our office and walk the bewildered receptionist through creating an ID for Cisco's labrynthine site, then opening a case. Bear in mind this is all new to me, so I'm essentially visualizing the site in my head and telling her what to enter as she reads it to me. We open the case, describe the problem, and wait.
A half hour goes by and the office gets a phone call from a Cisco tech wanting the config file. He refused to call the location where I was, so I drove 45 minutes back to the office (rural area) with a floppy.
Hours go by with no followup. Eventually I hear from the customer that the ISP called back with a minor tweak to the config that fixed it. Note that TOS with the ISP didn't cover customer equipment, while the router had the full installation support from Cisco included.
Fair enough. I'm employed somewhere else now, so I create a new account and go looking for the upgrade, only to discover that my new account has access forbidden everywhere I go, including the section to open new cases.
But wait! There's a separate form to report trouble using the site! I explain the whole thing, detail which parts of the site show forbidden access, when I registered, what my account is, etc etc etc.
Four hours later I get a canned response telling me that they can't help me unless I open a case, and here's the URL....Never did get that IOS upgrade.
One part vodka, two parts OJ, one part milk of magnesia.
A Philip's screwdriver.
"Ctrl-F"
Heh. You even top posted.
Earthlink does this as well. I do not know if they allow outbound 25 exceptions, as I've never managed to speak to a clueful Earthlink tech. It took three tries to get actual confirmation that they block SMTP outbound.
Our sales guys use Earthlink for access from the home office and on the road. None of them have the patience or the inclination to learn how to switch the outgoing mail server in their Outlook settings, nor should they. This means I set them up to use Earthlink's authenticated relay at all times.
This would work great, except when their authenticated relay goes down, or is slow, or refuses attachments over a certain size, or...you know. You can also guess who gets the irritated phone call about it.
I know what you're talking about, having researched its capabilities recently. It's still beta and unpolished. I am not trusting a production environment to it.
Thanks, though.
Those are good reasons to set things up that way. I've done the same thing in small offices. I stress "small" offices.
There are good reasons to do things the other way around. That is, a network of Windows AD servers providing the SSO and Unix clients authenticating against them.
I run a large distributed network where I rely on Windows capabilities to minimize maintenance on client desktops. Group Policy is at the top of the list here. When Linux can natively subsitute itself for an AD controller instead of an NT PDC, and can enforce policies on the domain, I'll give it another chance as a SSO provider.
90%. See Sturgeon's Law.
djb doesn't come across as the nicest of gentlemen, but he's no thief.
Yeah, I call bullshit too. I mean, think about this. SMTP was designed to deal with unreachable hosts, which is why most relays will keep trying for five days unless they receive a permanent failure notice (such as a rejection) from further along the chain.
A two day outage might send users into a frenzy, but as far as SMTP is concerned, it's nothing. Spammers wouldn't even notice the server was offline. That's even assuming they're sending directly, not relaying through some schmuck who doesn't know how to secure his mail server.
Seriously, how did this story get approved? It shows a level of uninformed misunderstanding right up there with confusing the Web for the Internet.
Seriously. When I interview candidates for a position, I require likely applicants to write an essay and email it to me later. The topic is usually quite simple and the length is only a few paragraphs.
The purpose of this exercise is to weed out the functionally illiterate. I can't stand typing shorthand, bad punctuation, or the inability to coherently present concepts without an excess of words. The essay tells me a lot about an applicant's ability to organize thoughts logically and right gude english, to.
However, it's limited to finding certain malware installations on a full system scan, if you enable that option. It's off by default.
It does not prevent installation of malware in the first place, nor does it use its resident memory scanner to detect infections of anything other than viruses.
I haven't been too impressed with its abilities when manually scanning, either. It's an excellent virus scanner, so that's what I use it for. I keep systems clean with a combination of Ad-Aware, Spybot, and proper user permissions.
Thank you!
This is supposedly a techie forum. How come no one else seems to understand this simple concept?
How about do what I do: don't frickin' let users be administrators.
Seriously, if you're locked out of your OS internals, there's a lot of damage you can't do.
I realize this is only one layer of defense, since there's a lot of malware (viruses, particularly) that require no user interaction to run, but it's a biggie.
I have two IMAP accounts and one POP3, and all have the option.
Maybe it's a holdover from when I imported my mail from Outlook Express and it's simply not supported under Thunderbird. It would make sense that way, because I did the same import process at home and at work and I had the same filters on both. Strange that it would keep a filter that it didn't recognize instead of deleting it.
Either way, it's a feature I'd reall like to see. Outlook and Outlook Express both handle it easily.
"Body" is one of the options on the drop down when I create a filter. I first noticed it in version 0.8. I looked for it previously but it wasn't available. Perhaps it still isn't fully implemented yet.
What's interesting is that I imported all my mail and filters from Outlook Express when I first made the switch, and the filter based on body content that I had then worked just fine after importing. I've never been able to duplicate it, though.
At least, filtering based on Body content.
.8, doesn't work in .9. In fact, when I go back and try to edit the filter to figure out why it's failing, Thunderbird has changed the Body check back to Subject and lost the condition check. This is highly annoying.
I'm on a mailing list that, due to its nature, must accept submissions from non-members and has a public address. Naturally, it gets swamped with spam. SpamAssassin catches most of it, but doesn't add headers or change the subject; instead, it politely sends a warning message (I believe report_safe is set to 1) and attaches the original message.
Since I have no headers to work from, I have to create filters based on body content. Simple enough, right? If it contains words foo bar baz, delete the message.
Except it doesn't work. Didn't work in