"Long story short, if someone did that to me I'd take my business elsewhere, I don't appreciate having my time wasted . Fuck 'em."
We used to have customers like you until we fired them.
The correct protocol (and the one we follow at my company) is to use role addersses such as sales@, support@, info@, etc for things that absolutely must be read by a human being in a timely manner. Think requests for product information, price quotes, requests for technical support, etc.
We guarantee that those addresses will be routed to a person who can respond quickly. All bets are off for personal email addresses, however. I see no harm in asking a requestor to redirect his or her request if a person is away on vacation. Odds are the requestor will appreciate being able to resend it to someone who can respond quickly rather than waiting for the original person to return.
"Great. Here is a stack of 100 letters. I give you 2 seconds to sort them by sender. Go!"
First of all, that's not what faces me when I get back from vacation. I have a stack of flyers, etc. which are nuked very quickly, a few bills, and then (if I'm very lucky) *one* actual letter. Secondly, why would I want to sort them by sender? I sort them by priority and that's really easy to do with physical mail.
"If you don't have separate work and personal email accounts... Oh I see. I'm being trolled."
I have multiple accounts, but I do get some personal email on my work account. I also get email of varying importance at work, ranging from unimportant to urgent, and there's no obvious way to sort it without at least reading the subject and sometimes the body. Why should I have to sift through all kinds of stuff on my return? Once senders know I'm away, I can trust them to refrain from sending me unimportant stuff, and to send urgent stuff to the contact person in my initial auto-reply.
I would not use "Delivery Failed" in the subject line. Most of those are annoying backscatter that just gets deleted. And most of the rest are delivery status notifications in a form 99.9% of people don't understand.
How hard was it to separate out the junk mail vs. scan a large email INBOX? When I get back from a couple of weeks of vacation, the junk mail is gone within about two minutes. It takes me much longer to go through the equivalent amount of email.
Physical email is actually easier to sort than email. Flyers, pamphlets and other junk mail naturally separates itself from the rest. Personal letters are usually very easy to recognize -- much easier than personal vs. work email.
This is only a problem if you don't have a decent anti-spam filter in front of your back-end mail server. Any company that can operate like that has far bigger problems than worrying about what to do with valid inbound email.
No, replying to each and every message is really a bad idea. I worded my auto-reply something like this:
"Hello, you've reached D.... Skoll. I am out of the office until.... Any messages you send me before I return, including the one that caused this auto-reply, will be deleted automatically and I won't see them. For urgent matters, please email.... or call.... Otherwise, please get in touch with me after I return."
Also, in the subject of the auto-reply, I put: "Out of office: D. Skoll will not receive your email" just to make it clear.
Physical mail costs money to send, so you are unlikely to come back from vacation to a pile of 2,000 letters. Email costs virtually nothing to send, so it piles up far more quickly than physical mail.
Also, people who send physical mail tend not to Cc: 25+ recipients just because they can, and there's no physical equivalent of the hellish "Reply to All" button.
I am not a big fan of having the primary documentation for a product off-site. Unless you take a lot of care to set up version-specific pages, people who are running an older version of the product end up reading the documentation related to the current version and get very confused.
A wiki has its place as supplemental documentation to answer frequently-asked questions or to help with troubleshooting.
See my comment above. We generate both PDF and HTML from exactly the same source. PDF sucks for online viewing, but it's great for printing. HTML is just the opposite.
We do something similar in our product. We use LaTeX as the source format for our documentation. This generates a very nice PDF for offline reading. It also generates very nice HTML using htlatex. Finally, we define custom LaTeX commands that link specific sections of the manual to specific pages in our web-base UI. So when you click on the Online Documentation link from any web page, you go exactly to the spot describing that page.
We also have custom LaTeX commands that expand to null commands when generating the PDF, but which embed training videos when generating HTML.
To the OP: I would never use a product that lacked documentation. To me, that shows that the developers are not serious about producing a polished application.
Not everywhere. One free software project has the best documentation I've ever seen. We need to point people at shining examples of excellent documentation so they can realize how important it is.
Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their
dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be
based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full
social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee
full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability
of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter
of the United Nations.
From the Hamas charter:
Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found; unless they obtain security by entering into a treaty with Allah, and a treaty with men; and they draw on themselves indignation from Allah, and they are afflicted with poverty. This they suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed.
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.
Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.
It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.
Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."
The Islamic Resistance Movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. The Movement adds its efforts to the efforts of all those who are active in the Palestinian arena. Arab and Islamic Peoples should augment by further steps on their part; Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best-equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
No, it's not "fine" and not everything Israel does should be defended. But we must ask why Israel is singled out when there are so many far worse atrocities going on. And if you think it has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Israelis are Jewish, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.
It *used* to be that the religious issues were just a distraction, but that is no longer the case. Islam is reverting to what it was originally: A fascist political movement aimed at world control, masquerading as a religion. It is utterly impossible to compromise with hard-line Muslims because their very religion rejects the idea of compromise with non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are to be killed or subjugated; that is prescribed directly in Islamic religious writings.
On the Jewish side, there has been a similar move to hard-line positions, though to a less dangerous degree than in Islam. The hard-line Jewish extremists want to take over the whole of "Eretz Yisrael." They are not interested in subjugating the entire world.
LibreOffice can do most of that, with the exception of integrated calendars. Claws Mail has a plugin that can generate and accept Outlook invitations. Also, our CRM tool, (SugarCRM) has a usable shared calendar; it was pretty easy to hack to to generate Outlook-compatible invitations for our external partners.
We use Subversion for revision control and collaboration. My first choice would have been git but I realize there are limits to what you can expect non-technical people to learn.:)
I don't believe there's anything magical about MS Office that couldn't be done with open-source alternatives. MSFT just does a very good job of marketing. Also, people are lazy and go with the familiar.
In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop. Here are our answers:
Time to learn a new system: It took my employees maybe a day to learn LibreOffice (they already new MS Office). Anyone who needs more than a day to come up to speed with casual use of LibreOffice is too stupid to be employable, IMO.
Reintegrating mail onto a new client platform: Well, I just said "Here's your email program" and gave them Claws Mail. They were up and running in about 30 minutes. Again, anyone who cannot learn a simple graphical mail client in a day or so is too stupid to be employable.
Keeping patches up-to-date: One word for you: apt-get
Slashdot Mirror
"Long story short, if someone did that to me I'd take my business elsewhere, I don't appreciate having my time wasted . Fuck 'em."
We used to have customers like you until we fired them.
The correct protocol (and the one we follow at my company) is to use role addersses such as sales@, support@, info@, etc for things that absolutely must be read by a human being in a timely manner. Think requests for product information, price quotes, requests for technical support, etc.
We guarantee that those addresses will be routed to a person who can respond quickly. All bets are off for personal email addresses, however. I see no harm in asking a requestor to redirect his or her request if a person is away on vacation. Odds are the requestor will appreciate being able to resend it to someone who can respond quickly rather than waiting for the original person to return.
"Great. Here is a stack of 100 letters. I give you 2 seconds to sort them by sender. Go!"
First of all, that's not what faces me when I get back from vacation. I have a stack of flyers, etc. which are nuked very quickly, a few bills, and then (if I'm very lucky) *one* actual letter. Secondly, why would I want to sort them by sender? I sort them by priority and that's really easy to do with physical mail.
"If you don't have separate work and personal email accounts ... Oh I see. I'm being trolled."
I have multiple accounts, but I do get some personal email on my work account. I also get email of varying importance at work, ranging from unimportant to urgent, and there's no obvious way to sort it without at least reading the subject and sometimes the body. Why should I have to sift through all kinds of stuff on my return? Once senders know I'm away, I can trust them to refrain from sending me unimportant stuff, and to send urgent stuff to the contact person in my initial auto-reply.
I would not use "Delivery Failed" in the subject line. Most of those are annoying backscatter that just gets deleted. And most of the rest are delivery status notifications in a form 99.9% of people don't understand.
How hard was it to separate out the junk mail vs. scan a large email INBOX? When I get back from a couple of weeks of vacation, the junk mail is gone within about two minutes. It takes me much longer to go through the equivalent amount of email.
Physical email is actually easier to sort than email. Flyers, pamphlets and other junk mail naturally separates itself from the rest. Personal letters are usually very easy to recognize -- much easier than personal vs. work email.
This is only a problem if you don't have a decent anti-spam filter in front of your back-end mail server. Any company that can operate like that has far bigger problems than worrying about what to do with valid inbound email.
No, replying to each and every message is really a bad idea. I worded my auto-reply something like this:
"Hello, you've reached D.... Skoll. I am out of the office until .... Any messages you send me before I return, including the one that caused this auto-reply, will be deleted automatically and I won't see them. For urgent matters, please email .... or call .... Otherwise, please get in touch with me after I return."
Also, in the subject of the auto-reply, I put: "Out of office: D. Skoll will not receive your email" just to make it clear.
If a sender does not pay attention to my message, then why should I pay attention to the sender's message?
If I send something important and then soon afterwards get an out-of-office reply, I certainly read it.
Physical mail costs money to send, so you are unlikely to come back from vacation to a pile of 2,000 letters. Email costs virtually nothing to send, so it piles up far more quickly than physical mail.
Also, people who send physical mail tend not to Cc: 25+ recipients just because they can, and there's no physical equivalent of the hellish "Reply to All" button.
I did this once and it worked really well. However, in order for it to work, you need a couple of things:
1) The auto-reply needs to be very clear that the original message was discarded and will never be read.
2) The auto-reply must contain contact information of a person who can help out with urgent matters.
It was so relaxing to come back from vacation and not have to face an inbox with 1000 messages...
I find a lot of developers need a recliner like this one.
I am not a big fan of having the primary documentation for a product off-site. Unless you take a lot of care to set up version-specific pages, people who are running an older version of the product end up reading the documentation related to the current version and get very confused.
A wiki has its place as supplemental documentation to answer frequently-asked questions or to help with troubleshooting.
See my comment above. We generate both PDF and HTML from exactly the same source. PDF sucks for online viewing, but it's great for printing. HTML is just the opposite.
We do something similar in our product. We use LaTeX as the source format for our documentation. This generates a very nice PDF for offline reading. It also generates very nice HTML using htlatex. Finally, we define custom LaTeX commands that link specific sections of the manual to specific pages in our web-base UI. So when you click on the Online Documentation link from any web page, you go exactly to the spot describing that page.
We also have custom LaTeX commands that expand to null commands when generating the PDF, but which embed training videos when generating HTML.
To the OP: I would never use a product that lacked documentation. To me, that shows that the developers are not serious about producing a polished application.
This is why people buy from spammers.
Not everywhere. One free software project has the best documentation I've ever seen. We need to point people at shining examples of excellent documentation so they can realize how important it is.
Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.
From the Israeli Declaration of Independence:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
From the Hamas charter:
Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found; unless they obtain security by entering into a treaty with Allah, and a treaty with men; and they draw on themselves indignation from Allah, and they are afflicted with poverty. This they suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed.
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.
Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.
It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.
Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."
The Islamic Resistance Movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. The Movement adds its efforts to the efforts of all those who are active in the Palestinian arena. Arab and Islamic Peoples should augment by further steps on their part; Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best-equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
No, it's not "fine" and not everything Israel does should be defended. But we must ask why Israel is singled out when there are so many far worse atrocities going on. And if you think it has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Israelis are Jewish, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Or to clarify GP: Israel uses missiles to protect its civilians. Hamas uses civilians to protect its missiles.
Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.
It *used* to be that the religious issues were just a distraction, but that is no longer the case. Islam is reverting to what it was originally: A fascist political movement aimed at world control, masquerading as a religion. It is utterly impossible to compromise with hard-line Muslims because their very religion rejects the idea of compromise with non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are to be killed or subjugated; that is prescribed directly in Islamic religious writings.
On the Jewish side, there has been a similar move to hard-line positions, though to a less dangerous degree than in Islam. The hard-line Jewish extremists want to take over the whole of "Eretz Yisrael." They are not interested in subjugating the entire world.
LibreOffice can do most of that, with the exception of integrated calendars. Claws Mail has a plugin that can generate and accept Outlook invitations. Also, our CRM tool, (SugarCRM) has a usable shared calendar; it was pretty easy to hack to to generate Outlook-compatible invitations for our external partners.
We use Subversion for revision control and collaboration. My first choice would have been git but I realize there are limits to what you can expect non-technical people to learn. :)
I don't believe there's anything magical about MS Office that couldn't be done with open-source alternatives. MSFT just does a very good job of marketing. Also, people are lazy and go with the familiar.
I'm curious as to what documentation the CA's required for you to prove that you own localdomain or 192.168.2.22.
In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop. Here are our answers:
Time to learn a new system: It took my employees maybe a day to learn LibreOffice (they already new MS Office). Anyone who needs more than a day to come up to speed with casual use of LibreOffice is too stupid to be employable, IMO.
Reintegrating mail onto a new client platform: Well, I just said "Here's your email program" and gave them Claws Mail. They were up and running in about 30 minutes. Again, anyone who cannot learn a simple graphical mail client in a day or so is too stupid to be employable.
Keeping patches up-to-date: One word for you: apt-get