This is what a lot of people’s computer looks like when they open up their email client(for you non-techies, that means program). SPAM has been around for a damned long time. In fact we’re talking 1937! And here most of you thought the Internet was where it originated

Most people generally think it’s a minor nuisance and for the most part, they are right. Those people who actually have to pay for the running of servers on the Internet know the real cost and it ain’t pretty. It seems that the Russians have discovered SPAM and keep at it. It’s almost as bad as those Nigerian Scams. It really does make one wonder why they keep at it? Is there seriously a good return on investment? I recall reading that if a spammer got a 0.001 percent click/purchase that was considered a good income. seems like a dying breed of ‘marketing experts’. My blog seems to be popular in Russia as I have noted many times before at how Russians post up replies to comments with their crap. I have set the site that you have to registered in order to comment and oddly enough, some of those Russians take the time to register.

Let’s take our recent example:

Username: SweetAnnyy
Email: bazaned@mail.ru

The .ru kinda gives away as being a spammer but heck, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and do a Google Search on that email addrress. Well, what do ya know, 89 hits on that email address and msot of them on spam-stopping/reporting sites. So yeah, this guy got deleted.

Do let’s send a message to Russia shall we?

РУССКИЕ СПАММЕРЫ, ЦЕЛУЮТ МОЕГО ТЕХНИЧЕСКОГО ИШАКА!

and in case you didn’t get that, feel free to use Babelfish to translate

Despite all of our technical advances in the last couple of decades, there is still a lot to be said for the simple filing cabinet in your home or office. I mean, when was the last time you needed to defrag your filing cabinet? Or when was the last time it ‘crashed’ and you ‘lost all your files’? Did the latest update break the cabinet too? Seriously, this just never happens. So for someone with simple needs (i.e. single person/home budget), a complex program like QuickBooks is way overkill.

Let’s talk about the durability of media.

Harddrives are lasting about 3-5 years tops. How many of you thought about replacing your HD recently? A better question now to ask is ‘Can you afford to loose every, single piece of data on your hard drive?’. Now, this is only for the end user/home user of computers and mainly the PC people. See, you people cause your own problems. You want it cheaper and cheaper every year but then complain wildly when it crashes in 3 years and you have to replace it.

So people also burn their data to Disks. Well the shelf life of a disk is far from definitive. There are estimate of between 2 years and 50 years. The biggest problem is the environment in which disks are stored. so now even backing up to a CD isn’t all that helpful and apparent there is no data for DVDs as of yet.

So to sum up, you can’t trust HDs for extended periods of time, you can’t trust CDs/DVDs for extended times….what can you trust?

Options:

1/ Buy more expensive HDs and set them in a RAID format. This works great and is exactly what the big companies do. The problem is cost. People simply don’t have enough of an idea to believe they need such expenses even though the durability is significant.

2/ Outsource your storage. By that I mean use other people’s $100,000+ setup. This is the route I chose for my daily uses. I use GMail for all my email communications. Hell, Google makes enough money to afford outrageous machines. Let them worry about backups and data security. The downside, you have no control over where your data is. Hardly a downside for the average person really.

3/ Deal with replacement every 3-5 years of your media. For most people, this isn’t an option but a does to slap in the face reality. They wait till it breaks then call in a tech to fix it. I ended up charging one company $1500 for data recovery because 3 years of financial data was on the failed HD and they HAD to have it. Gues what they got now? An external drive to back up on. Harsh lesson to learn.

Speaking of deleting data. Why can’t people just take the time to think about what they are doing? While working for a company, one guy emails in saying to delete this one particular account. Being the obedient company representative, I diligently follow the client’s instructs and inform him when it was done. To whit he responded “Don’t delete this account.”. Sorry about your luck fella but maybe a few moments of thought before you asked me to delete the account would have been useful.

Upgrades and new software is common place and a given in the IT world. Every year there are tons of upgrades/updates/security patches for just about every operating system. Windows is notorious for their ’security updates’ and usually slow to release them only to find out that those updates have bugs with them as well. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to uninstall IE8 in the past two weeks because of spyware getting past all the ’security updates’. Hell, Microsoft even has a 10 page PDF document tell you how “Internet Explorer 8 helps keeps you safer online“. Opening it up you’ll find on the 2nd page the wonderfully ‘responsibility disclaimer’ clause of “MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.”. Even though they make a claim, they rescind it within the first two pages of their document.

One of the most other common tools used are FTP programs. One of them I used to consider the best out there was FileZilla. That was until an update caused it to stop working. Like the good geek that I am, I researched why this happened and how to fix it. I found out that the author changed something in it to make it more standards compliant. The problem is that because some servers have not implemented this, the FTP program fails to connect.

Now, it is entirely possible to have this ‘update’ as an option and disable it but the author has basically said “tell your stupid server admins to fix the problem. It’s not my fault.”. See, right there is someone with absolutely zero business/customer relations sense. He feels his product works just fine (and for the most part it does) but refuses to listen to people telling him there are problems. He then goes on to tell these people to go back to their ’server admins’ and have them fix it. Riiiiight.

First, most people can’t possibly explain the technical details of why there is a problem in the first place.

Second, most people with the problems are dealing with incredibly stupid tech support with an web hosting provider. The sheer amount of effort to get the problem across to a second level person is staggering and will result in ‘other people are using other programs with no problems. Just switch to another FTP program”

Soo, effectively the author said ’screw you guys, I’m right and you can go pound salt for all I care.”. It was at this point I dumped FileZilla and started using something else. I don’t support people who simply cannot help their clients/customers and tell them to ‘get bent’. What an idiot.