Re: Graduates paying for IT training before employment

Howzit?

I phoned them but they said, "You had to have been in the UK for two
years or more.", when I explained that I was from South Africa and had
been working in IT for a few years.

Meskien was hulle bang? 
(Maybe they were scared?)
<g>

Cheers
Liam

> > I realise this thread is the best part of two years old - but does anyone
> > remember the outcome?  I am meeting with ICS tomorrow.
> 
> For a job interview? Leave your chequebook, debit card, credit card and
> so forth at home.
> 
> I was going to add a smiley, but anyone who expects prospective staff to
> pay for training on the companies internal training programme is well
> over the line, IMNSHO.
> 
> Ask them for the name of a reputable university that offers comparable
> training as part of a degree course, then go there instead.
> 
> cheers, rich.
> 
> > Thanks,
--

-- 

Re: Web hosting

Mike Leigh wrote:

>Martyn Drake wrote:
>  
>
>>1&1 are THE most outrageously inefficient web hosting company 
>>(apart from Fasthosts) that I've ever come across.  Bytemark, 
>>PI, or anybody else for that matter (even Hosteurope!), would 
>>make for a better hosting provider than 1&1.
>>    
>>
>I honestly can't complain about the support or reliability I have received
>from fasthosts.  I have a dedicated server from them and so far the
>performance has been really good (no one uses it though) and I have not
>suffered any downtime that I am unaware of.  My server runs FC3 and has most
>of the tools you will need to start with.  Of course its your server so you
>can pretty much do what you want with it.  The matrix control panel is a
>little strange at first and their FAQ's / tutorials are non existant.  The
>only time I have dealt with their support team so far is to do with some DNS
>records that were not configured correctly which was not their fault.  They
>still helped me resolve my issue with my domain provider.  Now from what I
>can tell that seems to be pretty good support.
>
>  
>
\begin{rant}

When I had a re-seller account with fasthosts they were the biggest 
bunch of monkeys ever,
the support people would often say things like "you cant get on our ftp 

spamassassin v bogofilter

i've been using/testing/playing with spamassassin for a while and the only
thing that bothers me about it is that it is damned slow and nails processing
time. to my mind it a great solution apart from this drain on my limited
resources. so, i googled for alternatives and have turned up bogofilter.
i have been unable to find a decent comparison between the two. has anyone
used bogofilter? is the performance of bogofilter a trade off for its
effectiveness, for example? is it as easy to maintain/train as spamassassin?

thanks, craig
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Re: Graduates paying for IT training before employment

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 09:00:30PM -0000, Andrew McGregor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I realise this thread is the best part of two years old - but does anyone
> remember the outcome?  I am meeting with ICS tomorrow.
> Thanks,
> 
> Andy
> 
> 
> http://lists.gllug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/2003-August/038041.html

Something else that I remember a few years ago were companies that put employees
through training courses as part of their employment, but then demanded that
the employee repay the cost of any training if they left within 3 years.
This meant that to leave the company someone had to pay several thousands for
courses - some of which they never wanted to go on in the first place.

Does this sort of thing still happen ?

-- 
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256

#include <std_disclaimer.h>

--

-- 

Re: phone memory stick

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 08:23:37PM +0100, Christopher Hunter wrote:
> On Tuesday 31 May 2005 09:44, Alain Williams wrote:
> 
> > I left the shop after telling the manager that I was not going to buy there 
> > since his salesmen lied. Phones-4-u I think it was.
> 
> You shouldn't be so hard on clueless sales-droids!  They will tell you 
> ANYTHING to make a sale, as their weekly pay is directly proportional to 
> their personal turnover.  

That is exactly WHY we should be hard on these people. Lying to get a sale is theft.
Why should we tolerate it ? It isn't OK just because it happens a lot - think car,
insurance, pension, ... salesmen.

Another way of putting it is that is that it is a con trick.

Maybe the moron did not know the answer - but he knew that he did not know and should
have said so. There is no excuse.

Sorry: dishonesty/lies is something that I really hate.

> It gives rise to the stupidities you see in PC World - "You can't return that 
> faulty CD drive as you probably virussed it" was one I heard recently.
> 
> Chris
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spamassassin v bogofilter

i've been using/testing/playing with spamassassin for a while and the only
thing that bothers me about it is that it is damned slow and nails processing
time. to my mind it a great solution apart from this drain on my limited
resources. so, i googled for alternatives and have turned up bogofilter.
i have been unable to find a decent comparison between the two. is the
performance of bogofilter a trade off for its effectiveness, for example?

thanks, craig
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RE: Web hosting

Ian Norton wrote:
> When I had a re-seller account with fasthosts they were the 
> biggest bunch of monkeys ever, the support people would often 
> say things like "you cant get on our ftp server because you 
> aren't using internet explorer"...
This I have heard rom other people.  I have not yet met any of those support
people during my conversations/emails with them.
> While experimenting with ASP (spit) I noticed thier ASP 
> test/tutorial server had the old ASP upload/download bug 
> where you could use thier example scripts to 
> upload/download/overwrite any file on thier system. A 
> friendly email pointing out that the server was vulnrable 
> resulted in a rather nasty email threatening termination of 
> our account*. They even went as far as saying that it was not 
> a security issue and that resellers had access to that machine...
Hhmm they could have responded differently on that.  Like thanks for that
info we will correct it or something more appropriate :)

Well I have not had a reseller account and before I chose fasthosts I did my
usual Google hunting for bad reviews.  I found that most of these bad
reviews were over 2 years old and there was not very much recently.  So I
decided to take the plunge and pay for a years dedicated hosting.  So far
their support/uptime has been/is better than my existing host.  I am still
moving domains/dns entries to fasthosts and from what I have seen first hand
I can honestly praise fasthosts.  This is from a dedicated server point of
view as I have not dealt with them for reseller accounts or shared hosting.

Mike
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Re: spamassassin v bogofilter

On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 00:52 +0100, Craig Millar wrote:
> i've been using/testing/playing with spamassassin for a while and the only
> thing that bothers me about it is that it is damned slow and nails processing
> time. to my mind it a great solution apart from this drain on my limited
> resources. so, i googled for alternatives and have turned up bogofilter.
> i have been unable to find a decent comparison between the two. is the
> performance of bogofilter a trade off for its effectiveness, for example?

I use both.  Each catches things that the other misses.

Are you dealing with a very large volume of e-mail, to the extent where
the CPU load of SA is overloading your system?  Yes, each individual
e-mail takes a while to process, but I find the delay in reception
perfectly acceptable.  If my system weren't filtering e-mails it would
be staring into space and twiddling its thumbs.  Is the load produced by
SA preventing your system from doing other constructive work?

Are you using spamd?  That can help speed things up.

John

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Re: spamassassin v bogofilter

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 07:45:12AM +0100, Craig Millar wrote:
> i've been using/testing/playing with spamassassin for a while and the only
> thing that bothers me about it is that it is damned slow and nails processing
> time. to my mind it a great solution apart from this drain on my limited
> resources. so, i googled for alternatives and have turned up bogofilter.
> i have been unable to find a decent comparison between the two. has anyone
> used bogofilter? is the performance of bogofilter a trade off for its
> effectiveness, for example? is it as easy to maintain/train as spamassassin?

I don't have a quantative comparison between the two but I have used
both. I found spamassassin resource intensive so tried out bogofilter,
which seemed less aggressive and gets the job done well. I haven't had
any false positives and get a couple of items marked "unsure" per day.

Overall I'm happy with bogofileter (run via procmail) and haven't had to
think about it since I installed it ages back.

ben.

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Re: Graduates paying for IT training before employment

On 6/1/05, Alain Williams <addw <at> phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 09:00:30PM -0000, Andrew McGregor wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I realise this thread is the best part of two years old - but does anyone
> > remember the outcome?  I am meeting with ICS tomorrow.
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andy
> >
> >
> > http://lists.gllug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/2003-August/038041.html
> 
> Something else that I remember a few years ago were companies that put employees
> through training courses as part of their employment, but then demanded that
> the employee repay the cost of any training if they left within 3 years.
> This meant that to leave the company someone had to pay several thousands for
> courses - some of which they never wanted to go on in the first place.
> 
> Does this sort of thing still happen ?

Dunno.  We do a lot of training.  Until recently this was all paid for
up-front by the company.  The accountants have spotted this, and now
require employees to pay for their training and then expense it.  The
idea, presumably, being that people will either not bother at all, or
forget to claim.  I think its also designed to ensure a higher 'pass'
rate - if the employee has to pay for the exam themselves, they'd
better be sure they'll pass first time.

I'm not especially happy about it.... some things (eg Oracle exams)