Assuming only one of your users (whether you support 1 or 1,000 of them) needs to exchange editable complex documents with a MS Word shop even occasionally. Adobe doesn't cut it, nor do any of the commercial or open products. (Try a complex document with images and outlines within different parts of a table.) Yuk!
So...... if you start by converting your existing base of users to an open product, you are already supporting TWO word processors and the conversion of documents between same.
Now you've got to deal with resentment between those users who think you are "favoring" the ones you "let" buy MS Word. Can you say Career Limiting Maneuver (CLM)? Sure I knew you could.
I don't care if Word costs $100 a year per copy and open is free because the competent support desk resource costs are far and away our resource whose demand far exceeds hours available.
Meanwhile, any external vendor who tries to send us non-MS stuff has never given us grief when we require.doc format of them.
I'm not saying this is fair. I'm not saying this is right. I am saying this is reality.
Either we legally and ethically reverse engineer EACH.doc interface as it evolves or face many slow and painful years prior working toward open products.
I'm more hopeful by colinux (http://www.colinux.org/) where one has a fighting chance of introducing non-MS components (PHP, MySQL, Apache) and running them in tandem with MS office as needed.
????????????? >>Ask to see the breaker box that holds the breakers to your office space. The amperage that will trip each breaker should be printed on it. ?????????????
Really?
If the last electrician "installed" extra breakers in anticipation of future needs, (i.e. you've got switches without connecting wires,) looking at the box won't do you any good.
This is another reason why you should have a licensed electrician test the required electrical capacity prior to signing a lease.
The last two facilities I was involved with had to be upgraded. The first, because when we installed UPS' the heat from the UPS' overwhelmed the air conditioning.
The second because when an open space was suddenly converted to cube space, employees brought in a boatload of space heaters and pop-goes-the-breakers.
With regard to landlords putting guarantees in the lease, good luck. Many will tell you it's between you and the local utility and the most they will do is provide their "best efforts."
What you can OFTEN do is have your licensed electrician kill two birds by scheduling a representative from your local utility to meet with him when he inspects the site. At that time, any problems with the local power distribution grid THAT THE LANDLORD MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT can be identified.
With regard to estimating your needs, a google searches that include btu, kwh, "load estimation", etc. provides lots of links to help you develop a spreadsheet of what you need.
(I should have added to the above: Of course sex and Legos are great geeks gifts. Bundle up a bunch o' Legos in a box and tell him, "These are for the office.")
If you really care and your significant other is really a Geek, a great gift is to let him know what you want him to get YOU on the holiday as well as where to eat.
How can YOU prevent the following conversation?
"Honey," (he begins ever so sweetly), "Where would you like dine?" "Oh, I don't know dear, surprise me." "But dear, my love of food means that there isn't a restaurant on planet earth that I don't like and you were so unhappy the fourth time Christmas week I took you to MickeyDee's, there was no lovin' for weeks after." "Just pick a romantic place, OK?" "Bunchkins, just name one or two or three you like, and I'll be more than happy to pick one." (Tone at this point turns icy.) "That is NOT romantic. I want you to surprise me with a romantic choice." "My love, when I surprised you on your birthday with a McFlurry and a hot McPie with a candle on top, I thought you would appreciate the originality. Instead, I obviously did something wrong when you threw it at me. Please just tell me what you would like." "What I would like is for you to have a romantic thought. And since you want advice, make sure your gift is romantic, but not too flashy or ostentatious." "Dearest, I am just too Geeky to translate the word 'romantic' into the most appropriate gift and dinner. I know you love me despite my geekiness. Couldn't you just give me a note with the details of what to get you and where to take you?" "If you ever want affection even once in you life after the holiday, I suggest you drop this conversation now and do what you need to do." Geek mutters under breath, "I should have slit my wrists a long time ago."
>> Both you and the original poster who claimed that the gopher URL scheme is a security risk have a lot to learn about network security.
Ok. In case you are not trolling, I'll bite with hope of learning something.
1. My post was specifically about the security of Telnet, and that SSH on company servers is a more secure replacement. (I made/make no statements about Gopher.)
2. My post covered security from the perspective of securing data on our servers.
3. Assume we have replaced telnet with ssh on ALL our servers and set up our switches to filter most telnet traffic.
Just how is this bad? Misinformed? Not doing what we should to protect the servers?
If you can take 10 seconds to insult, you might take an extra 10 seconds to explain.
>>I can use telnet to send any string I want to >> any port. Your "security" concerns about >>gopher:// are misguided.
Misguided you may be, Yoda say.
The insecurity of telnet is why you should disable telnet on the servers you support and implement SSH.
My favorite SSH FAQ: http://www.employees.org/~satch/ssh/faq/ssh- faq.ht ml
To quote the faq, "It provides strong authentication and secure communications over unsecure channels. It is intended as a replacement for telnet, rlogin, rsh, and rcp. For SSH2, there is a replacement for FTP: sftp."
/* My posts may sometimes be wrong, but my intent is always sincere and my research only somewhat questionable. */
Many of the replies to this post make my head throb. Why? I've got a similar requirement and have been searching for the solution, and am praying for some kind soul to share a solution with us. Instead, there is a bunch of people with answers that avoid (evade?) the poster's request.
In the olden days, I could use a user-friendly cheap commercial product to drop a small app on the desk of a non-techie who could do REAL WORK with MINIMAL subsequent support required from me.
The user friendly cheap commercial product?: Mostly Q&A, PFSfile, AlphaFour, and FileMaker Pro.
What did a typical app include?:
- a data entry form with field level validation and external table lookups on every field, including drop-down menus.
- If/then/else logic based on field entries for data manipulation and jumping to other form fields
- a couple of dozen canned queries with totals and sub totals, counts, averages, min and max values
- Indexing of any or all fields
- Tables could hold 100,000 records with fast searching and report generation
- Importing of dBase, spreadsheet, column-delimited or tab-delimited data files, including field and record-level error checking.
- Intelligent handling of a kazillion date formats and date logic
- Most of the field-types found today in MS-Access including MEMO
- Both record (form) and table (similar to spreadsheet) views
- Password protection
- trigger-type updating to external tables
- trigger-type lookups from external tables
- Custom menus
Now here is the kicker (listen closely campers): Absolutely everything in the application could be MAINTAINED or ENHANCED by BTEUs (BARELY-TECHNICAL-END-USERS).
In other words, with a single one-hour class, I could teach darn near anyone to use the app. EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY: with between two and four hour sessions, I could teach a BTEU to add fields, logic, reports, ad hoc extracts, and lookup tables.
Today, I have PHP and MYSQL for the small apps my team creates for our BTEUs. What w need is a Q&A-type front-end to MYSQL so give to users so they can do EVERYTHING in the list three paragraphs above.
Don't worry about the apps getting too big or too complex. 99% will have less than 10 tables of less than 10,000 records per table. The 1% of applications whose requirements balloon into ten of millions of records we re-write from scratch in Perl/Oracle or PHP/Perl/Oracle or ColdFusion/Perl/Oracle anyway.
Today, MS-Access enables the BTEU to quickly get in trouble and generate support calls that exceed number of intelligent support hours available in the universe across all dimensions from now until eternity. Most "friendlier" approaches are too complex to enable the BTEU to do their own application maintenance.
Based on the comments thus far, I will be researching:
- http://www.fabforce.net/ -- http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/
- http://www.mysql.com/products/mysqlcc/index.html
- pgaccess
- http://www.rekallrevealed.org/
- http://www.totalrekall.co.uk for pre-compiled binaries
- http://www.rekallrevealed.org for the sources
Actually, one of my brothers became a programmer out of high school and his career included remote monitoring AND ADJUSTMENT of pacemakers for one employer, as well as another gig writing the 911 emergency notification system for a rural county in Pennsylvania. (Both of these systems written in solo contractor environments where he had to check and review his own code without another techie.)
He learned, as many good people in the profession do, by 20 years of continuous reading, practicing, and learning the BUSINESS perspectives of every employer he ever had.
You can offshore-outsource the job of converting specs to code. If you have the business knowledge to create specs AND code AND speak to business people on their own terms, there still looks to be a profession here, as non-techie Joe businessman still needs to talk to a human in person. (Until we finally get a decent videophone, that is.)
True cost of viruses? Probably less than estimated by the many hysterical "Chicken Littles" on this thread.
Start with people's resources OTHER than PC support:
- My staff levels are appropriate to serve my customers, allow for growth, and enable vacation, training, and new systems development. (We are a 20+ year old accounting software company, the ratio of technical staff to client end users at about 1:10.)
- A certain amount of time will never be directly productive. If someone is robbed of 30 minutes recovering from a virus (if you don't have a disk imaging program, you should), there is just less time to read Slashdot, type this note, read the news etc. We have our goals and adjust our workload accordingly. True cost to the business here? $0.00.
Ok, so a mythical "average" user spends about an hour a month NOT working on something they should have due to virus/spam/spyware, or due to maintaining their PC to prevent such incidents. I'll give you 12 hours per year at a fully loaded $50 per hour or $600 per year per PC user.
- We spend about $100 per year per PC for licenses for anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware, etc. Divide that by the number of viruses and other annoyances this covers, the cost PER INCIDENT (remember the thread topic was cost for treating a single virus) is pretty minimal.
- I guess if you add the burden of this topic on our PC support staff and then divide those hours into the total worked per year, it represents about 100 hours per year per support person divided into the number of PCs supported, amounting about 2 hours per year per PC. Double that number to account for hours walking around and making sure everyone has their protective software installed and up-to-date. Evan at a loaded (with benefits and overhead) outsource cost of $50 per hour, the cost PER INCIDENT is pretty minimal.
Taking daily medication for diabetes, arthritis, etc., is just a "cost-of-living" expense for most people. In the same way, dealing with computer viruses are just a (very) minor expense for most well-run companies. I don't doubt some companies spend too much, but in the long run, the capitalism's "invisible hand" of "creative destruction."
Total labor and software expenditures (software, support labor, user labor) on viruses/spam/spyware per PC (mostly support)?: Probably $400 in real (hard) software and support costs and $600 in maximum theoretical "productivity loss" With an environment where the workers are respected, well supported, and motivated, the "productivity loss" will probably fall to $100.
Assuming you have spent the right amount of money to INCREASE productivity by providing employees with training, technology, better systems, respect, and reasonable workloads, true virus costs "fade into the background" of general business expenses.
Of course that doesn't make for such a snazzy headline.
Land's End (www.landsend.com) has had a jr. version of this for a long time.
The model shows how dumpy I really look, regardless of color or outfit. As a result of experiencing the preview, I haven't bought anything from them in a couple of years.
So using this technology this company is going to sell more clothes why?
Having been on both sides of interview table for technical positions over many years, I understand how tough the resume selection and interview process is for both parties.
In many medium and large companies, resumes are converted to searchable databases. (Or they discard resumes and stick to Monster/Dice/Hot Jobs, etc.)
A technical manager may have THOUSANDS of people to choose from for a given position.
1. Missing the necessary buzz-words to exactly match a job-requirements search in a database? Then you won't even be selected as result of a query and so won't be considered at all.
2. Have too many buzz words NOT a part of the required job? Then the people who seem a "better" match on paper will get the interview. You may be the greatest programmer in the world, but the people whose resume makes it look like they spent 80% of their time in the last 5 years on the one computer language on the one flavor of O/S, building the kind of industry-specific applications required for a job, will get the interview over the people listing competence in twenty buzzwords. You may be that good. But the others will get the interviews. I do have a few mega-buzzword resumes out there. They generated my last two jobs when others searched and THEY FOUND ME. But I rarely send them in to specific posted positions.
Then what is needed? A database of dozens of resumes customized so you can fire off the most likely match for the position you want. So a site like monster.com limits you to 5 custom resumes? Then consider 100 ids, with each one forwarding to a single email address. Seems like too much work? O.K. Let someone else get the job.
If you know you are sending email to an individual (as opposed to an automated job bank or HR department looking for buzz-words), consider the traditional word resume attached to an email whose body is a colorful, well laid out, advertisement for YOU.
All of this assumes you have skills actually wanted by a bunch of employers. I once got a resume from a person who had spent the last twenty years maintaining the single program module that manages one type of payroll deduction for one of the country's largest companies. I can see you rolling your eyes now. "Oh, I'm so much more versatile than THAT." You may be. What message is communicated by your resume?
All this started with a discussion about whether or not to use a cover letter. I feel cover letters are appropriate if any one of several conditions are met. First, use one if the job posting hints you are disqualified from a position without one that contains a specific piece of information such as minimum required salary. (If I can get 200 quality resumes from people who follow my posted instructions, I don't have to look at any others.)
Second, if you are applying to a job where a phone call or email exchange resulted in your having to drive a competitive point home, it couldn't hurt.
For purely technical jobs, I bet the cover letter is likely to be a waste of time if not requested.
The bottom line:
Better to spend your precious minutes making sure the resume version sent matches the requirements of the job in question.
P.S. -
A note in quasi-defense of headhunters:
Of course they ignore your geographic and travel preferences. They're just trying to fill the few job orders they have. Forgive their optimism, and accept those interviews that make sense to you. Play nice with them and SOMEDAY they may play nice with you.
Consider that many companies no longer use headhunters at all as the various job boards are the primary employee-generating tool for many.
You need to spread your bets across headhunters, agencies, job boards, and direct applications.
Slashdot Mirror
If this really works easily and reliably, it can be a road-warrior's dream-come-true.
It seems that when I'm on the road, what is on the radio is the stuff I've already heard or don't want to hear.
In my last job, I commuted 2 1/2 to 3 hours a day for 8 years. Much of that time would have been better spent if I had my favorite NPR shows on CD.
While my current position has a trivial commute, I have had a half dozen driving trips to places 200 to 400 miles away this year alone.
In the last decade, I have listened to more than 100 books-on-tape from the local library, but what pain-in-the butt that bi-weekly trip was.
My last trip was from Philadelphia, PA to Richmond, VA. Know what's on the air in the middle of the night on the interstate in VA? Absolutely nothing.
If the interface is easy and the product works, this is a no-brainer for lots of people.
>>I don't get it. When you employ someone, you pay taxes, they pay taxes. The development has already been taxed.
Assume you own a Taco Bell franchise. You hire an employee and both you and the employee pay taxes on their wages. (FICA, state taxes, etc.)
The employee makes and sells a Taco to a customer. The state may require you to collect sales tax on the taco sale.
Now assume you own a software development company. Your employee develops and sells or leases or licenses software to a customer.
What is going on here is that the state is proposing to tax your software the same way they tax tacos.
Don't try to differentiate between "products" and "services" as there are many states who already tax all kinds of services.
I'm not using this argument to promote new kinds of taxes, just to say that taxing software or software development isn't anything groundbreaking.
/rant on/
.doc format of them.
.doc interface as it evolves or face many slow and painful years prior working toward open products.
/rant>
Haven't we covered this many times before?
Assuming only one of your users (whether you support 1 or 1,000 of them) needs to exchange editable complex documents with a MS Word shop even occasionally. Adobe doesn't cut it, nor do any of the commercial or open products. (Try a complex document with images and outlines within different parts of a table.) Yuk!
So...... if you start by converting your existing base of users to an open product, you are already supporting TWO word processors and the conversion of documents between same.
Now you've got to deal with resentment between those users who think you are "favoring" the ones you "let" buy MS Word. Can you say Career Limiting Maneuver (CLM)? Sure I knew you could.
I don't care if Word costs $100 a year per copy and open is free because the competent support desk resource costs are far and away our resource whose demand far exceeds hours available.
Meanwhile, any external vendor who tries to send us non-MS stuff has never given us grief when we require
I'm not saying this is fair. I'm not saying this is right. I am saying this is reality.
Either we legally and ethically reverse engineer EACH
I'm more hopeful by colinux (http://www.colinux.org/) where one has a fighting chance of introducing non-MS components (PHP, MySQL, Apache) and running them in tandem with MS office as needed.
?????????????
>>Ask to see the breaker box that holds the breakers to your office space. The amperage that will trip each breaker should be printed on it.
?????????????
Really?
If the last electrician "installed" extra breakers in anticipation of future needs, (i.e. you've got switches without connecting wires,) looking at the box won't do you any good.
This is another reason why you should have a licensed electrician test the required electrical capacity prior to signing a lease.
The last two facilities I was involved with had to be upgraded. The first, because when we installed UPS' the heat from the UPS' overwhelmed the air conditioning.
The second because when an open space was suddenly converted to cube space, employees brought in a boatload of space heaters and pop-goes-the-breakers.
With regard to landlords putting guarantees in the lease, good luck. Many will tell you it's between you and the local utility and the most they will do is provide their "best efforts."
What you can OFTEN do is have your licensed electrician kill two birds by scheduling a representative from your local utility to meet with him when he inspects the site. At that time, any problems with the local power distribution grid THAT THE LANDLORD MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT can be identified.
With regard to estimating your needs, a google searches that include btu, kwh, "load estimation", etc. provides lots of links to help you develop a spreadsheet of what you need.
(I should have added to the above: Of course sex and Legos are great geeks gifts. Bundle up a bunch o' Legos in a box and tell him, "These are for the office.")
If you really care and your significant other is really a Geek,
a great gift is to let him know what you want him to get YOU on the holiday as well as where to eat.
How can YOU prevent the following conversation?
"Honey," (he begins ever so sweetly), "Where would you like dine?"
"Oh, I don't know dear, surprise me."
"But dear, my love of food means that there isn't a restaurant on planet earth that I don't like and you were so unhappy the fourth time Christmas week I took you to MickeyDee's, there was no lovin' for weeks after."
"Just pick a romantic place, OK?"
"Bunchkins, just name one or two or three you like, and I'll be more than happy to pick one."
(Tone at this point turns icy.) "That is NOT romantic. I want you to surprise me with a romantic choice."
"My love, when I surprised you on your birthday with a McFlurry and a hot McPie with a candle on top, I thought you would appreciate the originality. Instead, I obviously did something wrong when you threw it at me. Please just tell me what you would like."
"What I would like is for you to have a romantic thought. And since you want advice, make sure your gift is romantic, but not too flashy or ostentatious."
"Dearest, I am just too Geeky to translate the word 'romantic' into the most appropriate gift and dinner. I know you love me despite my geekiness. Couldn't you just give me a note with the details of what to get you and where to take you?"
"If you ever want affection even once in you life after the holiday, I suggest you drop this conversation now and do what you need to do."
Geek mutters under breath, "I should have slit my wrists a long time ago."
>> Both you and the original poster who claimed that the gopher URL scheme is a security risk have a lot to learn about network security.
Ok. In case you are not trolling, I'll bite with hope of learning something.
1. My post was specifically about the security of Telnet, and that SSH on company servers is a more secure replacement. (I made/make no statements about Gopher.)
2. My post covered security from the perspective of securing data on our servers.
3. Assume we have replaced telnet with ssh on ALL our servers and set up our switches to filter most telnet traffic.
Just how is this bad? Misinformed? Not doing what we should to protect the servers?
If you can take 10 seconds to insult, you might take an extra 10 seconds to explain.
>>I can use telnet to send any string I want to
- faq.ht ml
/* My posts may sometimes be wrong, but my intent is always sincere and my research only somewhat questionable. */
>> any port. Your "security" concerns about
>>gopher:// are misguided.
Misguided you may be, Yoda say.
The insecurity of telnet is why you should disable telnet on the servers you support and implement SSH.
My favorite SSH FAQ:
http://www.employees.org/~satch/ssh/faq/ssh
To quote the faq, "It provides strong authentication and secure communications over unsecure channels. It is intended as a replacement for telnet, rlogin, rsh, and rcp. For SSH2, there is a replacement for FTP: sftp."
Many of the replies to this post make my head throb. Why? I've got a similar requirement and have been searching for the solution, and am praying for some kind soul to share a solution with us. Instead, there is a bunch of people with answers that avoid (evade?) the poster's request.
In the olden days, I could use a user-friendly cheap commercial product to drop a small app on the desk of a non-techie who could do REAL WORK with MINIMAL subsequent support required from me.
The user friendly cheap commercial product?: Mostly Q&A, PFSfile, AlphaFour, and FileMaker Pro.
What did a typical app include?:
- a data entry form with field level validation and external table lookups on every field, including drop-down menus.
- If/then/else logic based on field entries for data manipulation and jumping to other form fields
- a couple of dozen canned queries with totals and sub totals, counts, averages, min and max values
- Indexing of any or all fields
- Tables could hold 100,000 records with fast searching and report generation
- Importing of dBase, spreadsheet, column-delimited or tab-delimited data files, including field and record-level error checking.
- Intelligent handling of a kazillion date formats and date logic
- Most of the field-types found today in MS-Access including MEMO
- Both record (form) and table (similar to spreadsheet) views
- Password protection
- trigger-type updating to external tables
- trigger-type lookups from external tables
- Custom menus
Now here is the kicker (listen closely campers): Absolutely everything in the application could be MAINTAINED or ENHANCED by BTEUs (BARELY-TECHNICAL-END-USERS).
In other words, with a single one-hour class, I could teach darn near anyone to use the app. EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY: with between two and four hour sessions, I could teach a BTEU to add fields, logic, reports, ad hoc extracts, and lookup tables.
Today, I have PHP and MYSQL for the small apps my team creates for our BTEUs. What w need is a Q&A-type front-end to MYSQL so give to users so they can do EVERYTHING in the list three paragraphs above.
Don't worry about the apps getting too big or too complex. 99% will have less than 10 tables of less than 10,000 records per table. The 1% of applications whose requirements balloon into ten of millions of records we re-write from scratch in Perl/Oracle or PHP/Perl/Oracle or ColdFusion/Perl/Oracle anyway.
Today, MS-Access enables the BTEU to quickly get in trouble and generate support calls that exceed number of intelligent support hours available in the universe across all dimensions from now until eternity. Most "friendlier" approaches are too complex to enable the BTEU to do their own application maintenance.
Based on the comments thus far, I will be researching:
- http://www.fabforce.net/ -- http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/ - http://www.mysql.com/products/mysqlcc/index.html - pgaccess - http://www.rekallrevealed.org/ - http://www.totalrekall.co.uk for pre-compiled binaries - http://www.rekallrevealed.org for the sources
I pray for some words-of-wisdom. Not let-it-be.
Actually, one of my brothers became a programmer out of high school and his career included remote monitoring AND ADJUSTMENT of pacemakers for one employer, as well as another gig writing the 911 emergency notification system for a rural county in Pennsylvania. (Both of these systems written in solo contractor environments where he had to check and review his own code without another techie.)
He learned, as many good people in the profession do, by 20 years of continuous reading, practicing, and learning the BUSINESS perspectives of every employer he ever had.
You can offshore-outsource the job of converting specs to code. If you have the business knowledge to create specs AND code AND speak to business people on their own terms, there still looks to be a profession here, as non-techie Joe businessman still needs to talk to a human in person. (Until we finally get a decent videophone, that is.)
THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING!
True cost of viruses? Probably less than estimated by the many hysterical "Chicken Littles" on this thread.
Start with people's resources OTHER than PC support:
- My staff levels are appropriate to serve my customers, allow for growth, and enable vacation, training, and new systems development. (We are a 20+ year old accounting software company, the ratio of technical staff to client end users at about 1:10.)
- A certain amount of time will never be directly productive. If someone is robbed of 30 minutes recovering from a virus (if you don't have a disk imaging program, you should), there is just less time to read Slashdot, type this note, read the news etc. We have our goals and adjust our workload accordingly. True cost to the business here? $0.00.
Ok, so a mythical "average" user spends about an hour a month NOT working on something they should have due to virus/spam/spyware, or due to maintaining their PC to prevent such incidents. I'll give you 12 hours per year at a fully loaded $50 per hour or $600 per year per PC user.
- We spend about $100 per year per PC for licenses for anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware, etc. Divide that by the number of viruses and other annoyances this covers, the cost PER INCIDENT (remember the thread topic was cost for treating a single virus) is pretty minimal.
- I guess if you add the burden of this topic on our PC support staff and then divide those hours into the total worked per year, it represents about 100 hours per year per support person divided into the number of PCs supported, amounting about 2 hours per year per PC. Double that number to account for hours walking around and making sure everyone has their protective software installed and up-to-date. Evan at a loaded (with benefits and overhead) outsource cost of $50 per hour, the cost PER INCIDENT is pretty minimal.
Taking daily medication for diabetes, arthritis, etc., is just a "cost-of-living" expense for most people. In the same way, dealing with computer viruses are just a (very) minor expense for most well-run companies. I don't doubt some companies spend too much, but in the long run, the capitalism's "invisible hand" of "creative destruction."
Total labor and software expenditures (software, support labor, user labor) on viruses/spam/spyware per PC (mostly support)?: Probably $400 in real (hard) software and support costs and $600 in maximum theoretical "productivity loss" With an environment where the workers are respected, well supported, and motivated, the "productivity loss" will probably fall to $100.
Assuming you have spent the right amount of money to INCREASE productivity by providing employees with training, technology, better systems, respect, and reasonable workloads, true virus costs "fade into the background" of general business expenses.
Of course that doesn't make for such a snazzy headline.
Land's End (www.landsend.com) has had a jr. version of this for a long time.
The model shows how dumpy I really look, regardless of color or outfit. As a result of experiencing the preview, I haven't bought anything from them in a couple of years.
So using this technology this company is going to sell more clothes why?
Having been on both sides of interview table for technical positions over many years, I understand how tough the resume selection and interview process is for both parties.
In many medium and large companies, resumes are converted to searchable databases. (Or they discard resumes and stick to Monster/Dice/Hot Jobs, etc.)
A technical manager may have THOUSANDS of people to choose from for a given position.
1. Missing the necessary buzz-words to exactly match a job-requirements search in a database? Then you won't even be selected as result of a query and so won't be considered at all.
2. Have too many buzz words NOT a part of the required job? Then the people who seem a "better" match on paper will get the interview. You may be the greatest programmer in the world, but the people whose resume makes it look like they spent 80% of their time in the last 5 years on the one computer language on the one flavor of O/S, building the kind of industry-specific applications required for a job, will get the interview over the people listing competence in twenty buzzwords. You may be that good. But the others will get the interviews. I do have a few mega-buzzword resumes out there. They generated my last two jobs when others searched and THEY FOUND ME. But I rarely send them in to specific posted positions.
Then what is needed? A database of dozens of resumes customized so you can fire off the most likely match for the position you want. So a site like monster.com limits you to 5 custom resumes? Then consider 100 ids, with each one forwarding to a single email address. Seems like too much work? O.K. Let someone else get the job.
If you know you are sending email to an individual (as opposed to an automated job bank or HR department looking for buzz-words), consider the traditional word resume attached to an email whose body is a colorful, well laid out, advertisement for YOU.
All of this assumes you have skills actually wanted by a bunch of employers. I once got a resume from a person who had spent the last twenty years maintaining the single program module that manages one type of payroll deduction for one of the country's largest companies. I can see you rolling your eyes now. "Oh, I'm so much more versatile than THAT." You may be. What message is communicated by your resume?
All this started with a discussion about whether or not to use a cover letter. I feel cover letters are appropriate if any one of several conditions are met. First, use one if the job posting hints you are disqualified from a position without one that contains a specific piece of information such as minimum required salary. (If I can get 200 quality resumes from people who follow my posted instructions, I don't have to look at any others.)
Second, if you are applying to a job where a phone call or email exchange resulted in your having to drive a competitive point home, it couldn't hurt.
For purely technical jobs, I bet the cover letter is likely to be a waste of time if not requested.
The bottom line:
Better to spend your precious minutes making sure the resume version sent matches the requirements of the job in question.
P.S. -
A note in quasi-defense of headhunters:
Of course they ignore your geographic and travel preferences. They're just trying to fill the few job orders they have. Forgive their optimism, and accept those interviews that make sense to you. Play nice with them and SOMEDAY they may play nice with you.
Consider that many companies no longer use headhunters at all as the various job boards are the primary employee-generating tool for many.
You need to spread your bets across headhunters, agencies, job boards, and direct applications.