[ale] OT: offline malware removal tool for windoze

[Jeff Lightner]

Funny about the charging people to make them learn.  I once had a job
doing support for a company that made hotel software.   There was a
nightly maintenance job the end user's (called night auditors) had to
run but it could only be run once per night (because it tallied the
day's business as well as moved the "business day" ahead by one). 

On occasion we would get a site that would run it twice despite
admonitions not to do so for one reason or another (it was taking too
long so they aborted and restarted or some other crazy reason).  We
would:
1) Make them restore the previous night's backup.
2) Make them re-input all transactions for the time since that backup (a
day)
3) Charge them a fee for "assisting" them with the above since it was
deemed "user error".

Despite all the above there was at least one user site that every 2
weeks (at a minimum) would run this process not just twice but multiple
times before calling us.   Some people NEVER learn not matter how
painful the lessons are.


-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
To: ale at ale.org
Robert Reese
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 3:56 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: offline malware removal tool for windoze

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
On 8/16/2007 at 3:32 PM Jeff Lightner wrote:

>Of course turning off the preview pane helps.  I use Outlook on my
>company provided desktop and have yet to see it open a link on which I
>didn't click.
>
>I've always thought it should be called preview "pain".  To me such
>previews are annoying as hell and take up screen real estate.  If I
>can't tell from the sender and subject whether I want to open it (sorry
>my Paypal account alert isn't going to be opened since I don't have a
>Paypal account) then I simply delete it.


Yes, you are absolutely right; in fact one of the single biggest good
things someone who is so much at risk can do is turn off the preview
pane.  Unfortunately, MS makes it incredibly difficult to discover where
to turn it off in some of its products.  Just as bad is they make html
the default format to read *and* send and make they make turning off
HTML either impossible or at the very least rather difficult all the
while hassling you about the supposed advantages of html.

It's not all MS's fault, though.  Too many people think Outlook Express
(OE) is the *official* email program of the world _and_ they think
reading their email via the preview pane is the way you are supposed to
read it.  Heck, I've met too many people that had no clue that you could
double-click on a message and it would open in its own window.  Of
course, once I showed them they didn't like it because it was too much
of a pain to go from one message to another that way.  I learned out a
long time ago not to feel sorry for ignorant people (ignorant in the
true meaning where they have been exposed to information and choose to
_ignore_ it) and charge them accordingly.  I figure either they'll get
clued in and not want the expense of repair, or they won't get it and
I'll have another payday from them at some point.  I do cover my karmic
butt by giving them the aforementioned information. ;c)

Cheers,
Robert~

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