Archive for May, 2010

You may have seen his show on HGTV, if not you need to check out this cover-all wearing, one-man B.S. detector.

Mike Holmes is a contractor whose core principal is that “things should be done right the first time.”

It struck me that home contractors and network support companies are much the same; we both provide a service for customers that is very hard for the average customer to inspect properly and next to impossible to compare to alternate providers.

Nobody wants to get ‘taken for a ride.’

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Don’t believe for a second that there are companies willing to rent office space, hire staff and pay oodles in development costs to develop software for you to use free of charge without something being in it for them.

While we are bumping down the road towards socialism, we ain’t there yet. Most folks still have to earn their way into a nice house and good food.

There is always one of three angles being played with free software (sometimes all at once)

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I constantly run into this issue…

Business owners don’t understand the TRUE costs of down time.

Ask a business owner what their last computer problem cost them and they will more than likely pull out the bill from their ‘IT guy’ and point to the total.

Trust me; this ain’t a drop in the bucket.

Get out your pencil, paper and calculator and let’s do some cypherin’.

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We all know spam is a huge problem. One that small businesses need to address.

While spam can take many forms from news group postings to blog comments; most folks see the spam they receive through email as the worst.

I know government is fixing the problem as we speak; after all, CAN SPAM was enacted in 2005 and was supposed to correct all our issues. Not sure what the heck the government is getting involved with spam for but since it is doing such a fantastic job of riding the Internet of spam I guess our tax dollars are really paying big dividends.

For those of us in the real-world (everyone outside of Washington, DC), we still have to fight for our lives to keep our email servers from choking on the never-ending onslaught of spam.

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It doesn’t seem fair does it? Why should you have to have a problem fixed that was not of your making, was completely unplanned and even after you pay to have it fixed; there is no guarantee that it won’t come up again.

You probably have read about the recent snafu by McAfee where their anti-virus software mistakenly identified a Windows update file as a threat and quarantined it; causing untold XP workstations to go into a continual reboot loop….by some accounts ‘tens of thousands’ of workstations.

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