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Date:      Wed, 3 Apr 2002 19:36:49 -0800
From:      William Carrel <william.a@carrel.org>
To:        <chat@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix
Message-ID:  <322A2C5F-477D-11D6-8361-003065B4E0E8@carrel.org>
In-Reply-To: <00b201c1db61$825e66e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com>

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On Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 02:47 PM, Anthony Atkielski wrote:

> Microsoft does not hire high-school students for technical support, as 
> far
> as I know, not even for first-line support.

http://www.microsoft.com/jobs/support.htm

The "premier support manager" manages a team of "Technical Account 
Managers".  These TAM's are the people that you actually talk to about 
your "Premier" support problems.  If you look at the job requirements 
for the Technical Account Manager on the same page, there is no mention 
of a need for any sort of university degree.  That means high-school (or 
a GED or perhaps nothing at all) is good enough.

Gather 'round kids, it's story time...

About 6 months ago, I had the unhappy pleasure of working with my 
company's "Premier" support contact over at Microsoft.  The result was 
that they first blamed the problems I was having with on Apache and 
FreeBSD for 2 weeks.  Then, when I finally managed to get escalated 
enough to get someone who knew the code, they said they were aware of 
the problem, but that I should work around it.  They agreed that the 
workaround that I had already found was probably the best way to go.

The problem (which hasn't yet been fixed AFAIK) is that when 
Cache-Control is set to no-cache, and the URL happens to be 
application/msword or some other type that MSIE wants to use Office to 
display inside it's window, MSIE downloads it, then immediately expires 
the file (deleting it from its cache), then starts up MS Word pointing 
at where the file used to be, MS Word fails (because the file was 
deleted), lastly MSIE brings up a erroneous and highly misleading dialog 
that says "Server not responding."  In fact, the server *did* respond, 
but MSIE threw away the response.

With this explanation in hand, the service rep told me the problem was 
first with FreeBSD and then with Apache.  (Yes, these were all 100% MS 
employees, no contractors to blame.)  So hopefully you'll understand 
that I find your claims difficult to believe.

 From anecdotal evidence of several dozen of professional colleagues I've 
interacted with, my experience was certainly not atypical.

On FreeBSD on the other hand, I've found little nitpicky bugs here and 
there, and generally had prompt resolution once I actually got someone 
to look at the PR. *wink wink*  Generally the people answering my PR's 
have not blamed other products for the trouble I've had.


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