It seems to me that the poster might benefit more from a project management system than a trouble ticketing system. I'd see if dotProject would do the trick. It does have a rudimentary ticketing module to assist interaction with customers, too - FWIW.
I have Vonage and have had to call 911 -- someone broke down the door of my apartment at 5AM in September of 03 (thought there was no one home, took off running once he realized I was there).
I had pre-configured my address as their documentation states. My call was routed to a PSAP. An operator responded, I told her what happened, and she said "hold on a sec - this isn't usually where 911 calls come" and got me to the right person very, very quickly -- maybe a 5-10sec delay. My address was available to them, they read it off to me, I said yes, that's correct, and they said that they were dispatching the police.
90 seconds later I had six patrol officers, a sargeant, and three cop cars outside. While there was some slight delay as the PSAP operator figured out why she got my call rather than going directly to 911, she knew what to do with it.
And before anyone asks, this is in NYC, and no, I don't live there anymore.:-)
...For the various embedded devices out there running NT 4.0... First thing that comes to mind is every single MetroCard vending machine in the NYC subway (keep an eye out for the guys servicing them -- when they're opened up theres a keyboard clipped inside and you occasionally see them reboot with the standard NT 4.0 startup screen). We know those are networked; hope they've keep up with the security patches up 'til now. I just don't see it being cheap or easy to rebuild a semi-embedded environment such as that to run in Win2k or something else.
I can also think of at least one service industry corporation that built their CRM and ERP frontend from the ground up on NT 4.0. Literally tens of thousands of terminals would have to be migrated to something else.
We equipped a fleet of vans with this kind of thing in the mid 90's. Seemed like a great idea -- GPS antenna and the van would radio its position to a central computer. We could tell which van was closest to a given job and assign it; the vans had laptops wired in as well.
Everything went great until the first guy got fired because he was caught fishing (seriously) while on the clock.
Shortly thereafter the techs realized the system could be defeated by wrapping the antenna atop their vans with tinfoil. Management surrendered. Gave up on the idea. I think they probably wasted a couple million on it by that point.
I worked for a startup cablemodem ISP. This was the mid-90's, before DOCSIS; we used proprietary equipment.
We discovered and hounded the vendor relentlessly about the fact that the modems had a serial port for dial-upstream service. If you jumped a couple pins on the serial port, reset the modem, and plugged in a serial line 9600/8/n/1 you'd get the modem's diagnostics (password protected, albeit with a very weak password).
The things you could do from the diag screen were downright scary. All this and more. You could determine the downstream and upstream freqs; you could also set the modem to transmit on any upstream frequecncy at any level up to 60dB. We played around with it for a bit. We set up a test modem and had it transmit for a second at 60dB on one of our upstream freqs; it took out ~400 users' service for about a half hour. Had we done it on the PPV freqs, it would have taken out PPV for a few thousand people. Fun stuff.
This does work. Don't know why. I can't explain it, but I think I can prove it in a slightly different manner.
In the middle of October I deleted from my mail server a user who received a ton of spam (approaching 100%). I went back and grepped my logs for that user. Each file is a week, higher numbers going backwards a week.
Nothing else on the server has changed other than the deletion of this user. Mail addressed to this user but rejected for nonexistence would still be logged. I would think the same things others have said about spammers not checking bounces, and I don't know that I 100% accept the explanation offered, but... could be possible?
...At least 10 years. It's on Michigan Avenue 'roundabout Ohio or Ontario Street.
I used to go there in HS to gaze on all the pretty electronics that I could not afford. It was really more of a showcase than anything else. I don't think I once saw anyone buy anything there.
...In fact, they're something old -- Macs once upon a time used laptop-sized SCSI disks; so did Sun's SPARCstation Voyager. In the case of the Voyager, a few were made with a 1GB 2.5" (laptop form factor) SCSI disk (the rest had 340MB and 520MB).
I think the push for IDE came around this time and the market died for 2.5" form factor SCSI. Nice to see it's being revived.
Wish I still had my trusty old Voyager - because it'd be fun to see if I could get one of these newfangled drives working in it with some sort of an adapter!
I've had Vonage for a little more than a year. In that time there have been -reported- outages -- none of which affected me. My phone has had dialtone every time I've picked it up and I've had to do basically nothing special to get it working. My service even worked during the Aug 2003 blackout in NYC -- had my Vonage box and cablemodem on a UPS and everything worked fine.
The one time I've had occasion to dial 911 was at 5 in the morning when someone attempted to break into my apartment when I was in it asleep. 911 location is set up via Vonage's web interface; when I called 911 the operators were a little confused -- something about how the call came into them -- but the location was passed along and I had three cop cars in my door in 30 seconds flat. I perceived no difference between Vonage and a traditional land line.
In short -- couldn't be happier. Works great for me. Little perqs like being able to get your voicemail e-mailed to you as a wav is fantastic -- as is being able to take the box with you and have free phone service anywhere you have ethernet.
...All of which means that Red Hat did NOT just buy all of the fun and interesting products that iPlanet produced -- Messaging/Calendar/et al are actually useful, mature, stable products -- but instead bought a stable LDAP server whose codebase probably hasn't changed much in several years.
Yeah but at least Fry's has cool and useful shit. When you need fairly specific gear on short notice, Fry's can be a lifesaver. Best Buy on the other hand just carries a bunch of consumer garbage.
For the safety of everyone else, they meant to put him on the no DRIVE list. It was an honest mistake.
Re:It looks nifty, but its not a sniper rifle
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 1
...Aiming the rifle from an 11th-floor window of the Aladdin hotel at a taxi stand across the street in Las Vegas...
Sure, but given the prevailing climate of fear in the United States these days I would say that leaining out a hotel window aiming something that looks like a BIG GUN at passers-by is a textbook example of a very bad idea.
Obligatory me too.
It's also quite amusing to note how even IE on Mac (which is no longer developed, if I'm not mistaken) is not vulnerable to most of these issues.
So Microsoft's Mac browser is better than their Windows one. Unbelievable.
An acquaintance of mine actually owned (probably still does) hell.org.... His personal email address was spam at hell dot org. You can see all the fun this would lead to for him when people use this as a dummy address...
One might also say that if you're expected to pay for broadband etc and be able to do work from home, then you keep a home office for the benefit of your employer. That makes you eligible for the home office deduction - which means you can deduct a portion of your rent based on the percentage of your home that makes up your "home office." You can also deduct certain utility bills.
AT&T and other telecom companies are regulated by the FCC not the FTC like other businesses. Since the do not call list is an FTC creation, AT&T isn't required to obey it.
I could be wrong -- when the list came online there was talk of the FCC tying into it but I never heard that anything came of it.
I live in one of the most densely populated communities in the United States (NYC, NY).
I'm 3900 feet from my CO.
I cannot get DSL.
Yes, that's right - I cannot get DSL, because the area I live in is fed by DLC equipment that cannot support DSL. My good friends at Verizon can give me zero information as to when I might be able to get DSL. Of course to even get this far (figure out that I can't get DSL), I had to order a Verizon phone line, which cost about $100 to install and is $22 a month if I don't even make a call.
I applaud the bells in rolling out higher speeds. But getting the network to all their subscribers still has to be addressed. I don't think anyone's complaining about the speed at this point, but it'd be really nice if they can solve technical (DLC) and logistical (make me order a phone line to learn all this) issues before worrying about higher speeds.
You know, as a Vonage customer (and a NYer), I can't help but wonder if this relates at all to the fact that they (again) just dropped their prices not TWO DAYS AGO. When I first signed up for service, it was $39.99; it then dropped to $34.99. I just got an email Tuesday that they've again dropped, now to $29.99.... So regulation could be in response to how much Vonage is trying to undercut their competitors.
That being said - the service is fantastic, and I see no need for regulation. It "just works" and it "just works" all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that the poster might benefit more from a project management system than a trouble ticketing system. I'd see if dotProject would do the trick. It does have a rudimentary ticketing module to assist interaction with customers, too - FWIW.
I had pre-configured my address as their documentation states. My call was routed to a PSAP. An operator responded, I told her what happened, and she said "hold on a sec - this isn't usually where 911 calls come" and got me to the right person very, very quickly -- maybe a 5-10sec delay. My address was available to them, they read it off to me, I said yes, that's correct, and they said that they were dispatching the police.
90 seconds later I had six patrol officers, a sargeant, and three cop cars outside. While there was some slight delay as the PSAP operator figured out why she got my call rather than going directly to 911, she knew what to do with it.
And before anyone asks, this is in NYC, and no, I don't live there anymore. :-)
I can also think of at least one service industry corporation that built their CRM and ERP frontend from the ground up on NT 4.0. Literally tens of thousands of terminals would have to be migrated to something else.
Everything went great until the first guy got fired because he was caught fishing (seriously) while on the clock.
Shortly thereafter the techs realized the system could be defeated by wrapping the antenna atop their vans with tinfoil. Management surrendered. Gave up on the idea. I think they probably wasted a couple million on it by that point.
We discovered and hounded the vendor relentlessly about the fact that the modems had a serial port for dial-upstream service. If you jumped a couple pins on the serial port, reset the modem, and plugged in a serial line 9600/8/n/1 you'd get the modem's diagnostics (password protected, albeit with a very weak password).
The things you could do from the diag screen were downright scary. All this and more. You could determine the downstream and upstream freqs; you could also set the modem to transmit on any upstream frequecncy at any level up to 60dB. We played around with it for a bit. We set up a test modem and had it transmit for a second at 60dB on one of our upstream freqs; it took out ~400 users' service for about a half hour. Had we done it on the PPV freqs, it would have taken out PPV for a few thousand people. Fun stuff.
And to my knowlege, they never fixed it.
I mean, that's all I use google for anyway...
In the middle of October I deleted from my mail server a user who received a ton of spam (approaching 100%). I went back and grepped my logs for that user. Each file is a week, higher numbers going backwards a week.
syslog: 0
syslog.0: 9
syslog.1: 17
syslog.2: 18
syslog.3: 9
syslog.4: 22
syslog.5: 16
syslog.6: 28
syslog.7: 1819
Nothing else on the server has changed other than the deletion of this user. Mail addressed to this user but rejected for nonexistence would still be logged. I would think the same things others have said about spammers not checking bounces, and I don't know that I 100% accept the explanation offered, but... could be possible?
See here for more information or check Google News.
I used to go there in HS to gaze on all the pretty electronics that I could not afford. It was really more of a showcase than anything else. I don't think I once saw anyone buy anything there.
I think the push for IDE came around this time and the market died for 2.5" form factor SCSI. Nice to see it's being revived.
Wish I still had my trusty old Voyager - because it'd be fun to see if I could get one of these newfangled drives working in it with some sort of an adapter!
I've had Vonage for a little more than a year. In that time there have been -reported- outages -- none of which affected me. My phone has had dialtone every time I've picked it up and I've had to do basically nothing special to get it working. My service even worked during the Aug 2003 blackout in NYC -- had my Vonage box and cablemodem on a UPS and everything worked fine. The one time I've had occasion to dial 911 was at 5 in the morning when someone attempted to break into my apartment when I was in it asleep. 911 location is set up via Vonage's web interface; when I called 911 the operators were a little confused -- something about how the call came into them -- but the location was passed along and I had three cop cars in my door in 30 seconds flat. I perceived no difference between Vonage and a traditional land line. In short -- couldn't be happier. Works great for me. Little perqs like being able to get your voicemail e-mailed to you as a wav is fantastic -- as is being able to take the box with you and have free phone service anywhere you have ethernet.
...All of which means that Red Hat did NOT just buy all of the fun and interesting products that iPlanet produced -- Messaging/Calendar/et al are actually useful, mature, stable products -- but instead bought a stable LDAP server whose codebase probably hasn't changed much in several years.
Yeah but at least Fry's has cool and useful shit. When you need fairly specific gear on short notice, Fry's can be a lifesaver. Best Buy on the other hand just carries a bunch of consumer garbage.
A friend reported to me that they're opening or have opened a Fry's in suburban Chicago.
For the safety of everyone else, they meant to put him on the no DRIVE list. It was an honest mistake.
Sure, but given the prevailing climate of fear in the United States these days I would say that leaining out a hotel window aiming something that looks like a BIG GUN at passers-by is a textbook example of a very bad idea.
Yeah but who would go see a hardcore gay movie with the words "Micro" and "Soft" in the title? That's just bad marketing...
Obligatory me too. It's also quite amusing to note how even IE on Mac (which is no longer developed, if I'm not mistaken) is not vulnerable to most of these issues. So Microsoft's Mac browser is better than their Windows one. Unbelievable.
An acquaintance of mine actually owned (probably still does) hell.org.... His personal email address was spam at hell dot org. You can see all the fun this would lead to for him when people use this as a dummy address...
One might also say that if you're expected to pay for broadband etc and be able to do work from home, then you keep a home office for the benefit of your employer. That makes you eligible for the home office deduction - which means you can deduct a portion of your rent based on the percentage of your home that makes up your "home office." You can also deduct certain utility bills.
The interesting thing is almost all of those phone queues have different numbers you can call into which will lead to different results. Sprint is a great example; someone put together a with information as to different phone numbers to call to be bumped to the front of the call queue. When I worked in telecom, our customer support was the same -- call the 800 number and get dumped in the queue, or call a special local phone number and get one ring, then music, then the first available rep. No prompter, no nuthin'...
AT&T and other telecom companies are regulated by the FCC not the FTC like other businesses. Since the do not call list is an FTC creation, AT&T isn't required to obey it. I could be wrong -- when the list came online there was talk of the FCC tying into it but I never heard that anything came of it.
I live in one of the most densely populated communities in the United States (NYC, NY). I'm 3900 feet from my CO. I cannot get DSL. Yes, that's right - I cannot get DSL, because the area I live in is fed by DLC equipment that cannot support DSL. My good friends at Verizon can give me zero information as to when I might be able to get DSL. Of course to even get this far (figure out that I can't get DSL), I had to order a Verizon phone line, which cost about $100 to install and is $22 a month if I don't even make a call. I applaud the bells in rolling out higher speeds. But getting the network to all their subscribers still has to be addressed. I don't think anyone's complaining about the speed at this point, but it'd be really nice if they can solve technical (DLC) and logistical (make me order a phone line to learn all this) issues before worrying about higher speeds.
You know, as a Vonage customer (and a NYer), I can't help but wonder if this relates at all to the fact that they (again) just dropped their prices not TWO DAYS AGO. When I first signed up for service, it was $39.99; it then dropped to $34.99. I just got an email Tuesday that they've again dropped, now to $29.99.... So regulation could be in response to how much Vonage is trying to undercut their competitors. That being said - the service is fantastic, and I see no need for regulation. It "just works" and it "just works" all the time.
Not to mention a TB is still at least four disks (4x250GB)... That's an awful lot of noisy spinning platters...