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Career Fair, Microsoft Presentation, and Prizes

Started by Jerry, 2006-02-12T21:39:42-06:00 (Sunday)

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Jerry

St Louis Visual Basic Users Group Career Fair and Meeting Next Wed 15 Feb

Free Career Fair at Microsoft, 3 CityPlace 11th floor, close to I270 and Olive, on Feb 15 from 5:30-8:30 PM.
 
The St Louis Visual Basic Users Group is hosting this job fair with ten+ firms for .NET and Java Developers, Data Base Admins, Testers, Project Managers, Business Analysts, SAP, Siebel, Network Admins, System Admins, Windows Server Designers, Active Directory, Email Support, Desktop Analysts and other career paths. Free food, free drink, free parking, free door prizes, casual dress, bring 15 resumes. For the sign up page and the map of the Microsoft office at 3 CityPlace, see: http://stlvbug.net


Presentation:

Shawn Nesser, world renowned technical expert from Microsoft, will talk about SQL Server’s Integration with Visual Studio with respect to Reporting data from databases and pumping data from one database to another.  Demonstrations on how to rapidly build a web-based reporting system as well as demonstrate how to set up data pumps using SQL’s Integration services.

Prizes in hand:
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>From HP:
iPAQ [marketing specs quoted:

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>From Brian Schroer:
1 Year Free Web Hosting (up to $385 value) with Hosting.com.
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Microsoft Software
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Microsoft Programming Books
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Microsoft XBox games
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Shirts
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Frederick J Eccher Jr
MBA
M.S. Management of Information Systems
A.B. Psychology
B.A. Biology
CIO, Community Partners
President, Board of Directors, Saint Louis Visual Basic Users Group Vice President, Board of Directors, Saint Louis Web Developers
rick@stlwebdev.org
medicaltechnologist2000@yahoo.com

"Make a Little Bird House in Your Soul" - TMBG...

Tyler

QuoteJerry wrote:
...
======================
>From Brian Schroer:
1 Year Free Web Hosting (up to $385 value) with Hosting.com.
...

$385 for 1 year of hosting?!?!  I know it says "up to" before it, but that is outrageously expensive highway robbery.  You can get good hosting for no more than $15 a year.   I personally use siteflip which is 99 cents a month.  If you do a search for cheap hosting, you will find comparibly priced hosting.  You shouldn't pay more than a couple bucks a month for hosting.  I'm sure (I hope at least) they offer a few things cheaper companies don't (dedicated ip, secure server, etc), but still, that is HIGH.  :-o
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Jerry

To shorten the post I deleted the specs of each prize - so there may have been more to the webhosting prize other than the usual - possibly some free webpage development.

The post was meant to be more about the career fair than the prizes.


"Make a Little Bird House in Your Soul" - TMBG...

Tyler

Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Geoff Schreiber

Just so other CS majors understand too...  You'll get what you pay for in hosting - I'm from the industry, and have worked for the cheapest host, and one of the more expensive hosts...

for $15 dollars a year, you won't get the reliability, bandwidth, backups or customer support you'll get for the $365 a year.  If you have a site that HAS to be up 99.999% of the time (it's feasible and common), you'll pay for the more qualified host than the guy that has a server in his shed with a fractional-T1 coming to it.  And if your site is ever Dugg or slash-dotted, your host will be no longer, just like your site.  A lot can be said for a quality webhost - if you are a web designer, you better look for a quality one as well, or the sites you design and sub-host will start disappearing when things go wrong, and it doesn't say much for the designer who recommened the host.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Geoff Schreiber
Project Engineer
FASTechnology Group

Jonathan Birch

Does anyone know what sort of work is done at the local Microsoft office?

I have an idea I'll go to this just on the chance that I'll have an opportunity to talk to some of the local MS people. I think that I may want to transfer back to this area after some time, and it would probably be useful to have some connections there.
...

Tyler

QuoteSchreibG wrote:
Just so other CS majors understand too...  You'll get what you pay for in hosting - I'm from the industry, and have worked for the cheapest host, and one of the more expensive hosts...

for $15 dollars a year, you won't get the reliability, bandwidth, backups or customer support you'll get for the $365 a year.  If you have a site that HAS to be up 99.999% of the time (it's feasible and common), you'll pay for the more qualified host than the guy that has a server in his shed with a fractional-T1 coming to it.  And if your site is ever Dugg or slash-dotted, your host will be no longer, just like your site.  A lot can be said for a quality webhost - if you are a web designer, you better look for a quality one as well, or the sites you design and sub-host will start disappearing when things go wrong, and it doesn't say much for the designer who recommened the host.

I'll try not to take offense to the last sentence.  :evil:

I would never claim to know everything about anything, but I do have some real life experience as well.  I am currently 2nd in command for a multimillion dollar internet company, and have worked for this company for about 6 years.  We do business with a few different hosting companies, and to tell you the truth, I can't find much of a difference between the more expensive ones and the ones for $15 a year.  In terms of reliability, I have had no problem with the cheap ones.  They claim they back up everyday.  Now, they have never crashed and had to recover, so I don't know for sure if that is fact or if they are lying to me.  I have been more than impressed with the customer service.  I don't call, I only email, so I can only attest to that.  My email questions are normally answered in less than an hour.  I was impressed with this because I did not expect such quick service from such an inexpensive company.  I will agree on the comment about slashdotting.  If you are working on something like Fortune 500 websites, then maybe you should go with the more expensive hosting that can handle massive bandwidth.  But otherwise, don't waste your money.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Bryan

I agree tyler.  while I was in college I used made2own.com   Cost me $10 a year.  Granted the storage space wasn't the greatest, the bandwidth allotment wasn't the highest, they were rock solid stable and the one time I did have a problem in my 3 years they fixed it real quick.  

i've since moved on to godaddy just because they're prices are nice for higher storage/bandwidth needs.  I must say that godaddy.com SUCKS for hosting compared to made2own.  They don't even support sftp scp.

I will concur that in general "you get what you pay for" is generally the rule to go by.  However I will also say

assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.


edit: if I hadn't of prepaid for a year i would be dropping godaddy.  I can live for now though.

edit2:  and for $385 a year you better be getting unlimited bandwidth and a full dedicated server.  I can't find ANY place that is that expensive.
Bryan Grubaugh
Quickly aging alumni with too much time on his hands
Business Systems Analyst, Scripps Networks.

Tyler

I do think you get what you pay for.  The only problem is that I don't know what you could ask for besides more disk space, more bandwidth, dedicated servers, and better support.  Disk space, maybe.  Hard drives are cheap.  Bandwidth, I'll give you that.  Dedicated IPs, I'll give you that, at least for SEO purposes.  Better service, maybe.  For that much money, you better have someone waiting to answer your phone calls and know you by name.

I'm a little surprised by your dissapproval of Godaddy's hosting.  I'm a big fan of their domain registration (I have all of my domains there, and a few work ones), and I'm extremely pleased with them in that regard.

Just goes to show what you can get away with when you have an awesome domain (hosting.com).  I guess that's business.  You charge at least what you need to and then what you can get away with on top of that.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Geoff Schreiber

Well, I'm glad you didn't mention who you worked for, as I would avoid your "multi-million dollar" internet company if they did any hosting with ANY of the named webhosts...  The way to find a GOOD webhost is by talking to the people who have HAD sites go down from poor hosting - I used to work for a company who claimed daily backups, but didn't - and when a RAID failed, or a site was hacked, and someone needed a backup that wasn't there, lied through their teeth to get around it.

As far as not finding anyone who charged rates such as $385 a year, check out CrystalTech, Interland, RackSpace, Chicago Webs, DataPipe, Media3, Verio, etc.  You can find plans that EASILY qualify for that rate if you get into a site that has a decent database backend, high bandwidth, etc.

At the same time, you can find companies to host for $12.00/year, but you lose a lot of the benefits - if it's a personal site, fine, but if you just designed a site for any business that is expecting to sustain a profitable internet presence, you need to look around and check into the security of the host, of the files, and reviews of the host in general.

I'm not trying to offend anyone, my comments are simply made to make you think - I've been the designer of sites who didn't take my advice and were down for 3 days while a server was rebuilt, and at the same time, I have had clients who over the past 8 years have never had a lick of downtime.

For a list of decent->good hosts, I would recommend the following:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_16477
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Geoff Schreiber
Project Engineer
FASTechnology Group

Tyler

As I did say, I can't personally attest to daily backups, because it hasn't had any problems in the 5 years we've been with them.  Now, of course tomorrow could be the day there's a catastrophic failure, but probably not.

I will admit we don't have database intensive content, so the traffic we do get isn't that great of a bear on the server, but I can attest to the reliability of it for a few (4 I think) of our sites for the last ~5 years.

The really sad part is that the difference between $12 a year and $385 a year is really pretty slim in terms of tax writeoffs of a reasonably sized company.  It just really rubs me the wrong way when people charge for more than what they give.  We have competitors that sell the same product for 50% more, but some people just don't know any better.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Bryan

My place of business (www.perficient.com) is in the process of doing business with Tyler's company.  I'll leave it unnamed as he hasn't named it.  They're business is security, not electronic security, but the all too often overlooked phsyical security.  I can attest that they really know what they are doing.  If their website went down tomorrow I don't think they'd be any worse off.
Bryan Grubaugh
Quickly aging alumni with too much time on his hands
Business Systems Analyst, Scripps Networks.

Tyler

Thanks for that vote of confidence, Bryan,

I will say, as an internet company, if the main site (we have quite a few to help against any downtime, among other things) went down for awhile, it would hurt business, but nothing detrimental.  We might lose profits for a half or quarter day.  Yes, it would suck, but worse things have happened. Fortunately repeat customers help out with that.  They'll put up with almost anything.  It's amazing what customer service will help you get away with.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Geoff Schreiber

I agree completely with that - the previous hosting company I worked with was hit in a major way by a DDoS attack from sources in Japan and China, and last I heard the FBI was looking into it - but this attack not only took down our network, but half of pipe of our facility in Chicago as well.  Due to this, half of the time you could find your site, and half the time you couldn't depending on the load of the network and how the F5 switches were running.  The amazing thing was that due to customer support, we had clients buying our T-Shirts in support of US during the downtime...

Anyways, I didn't mean to start a long drawn out argument - just make sure that everyone realized there WAS a major difference (in most cases-there are some hosts that are just crooks) in annual fees for hosting.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Geoff Schreiber
Project Engineer
FASTechnology Group

Bryan

T-shirts..interesting.


I kind of went off there at your comments, I'm sorry.  I just had broad sweeping generalizations about things.  While I'm on my soap box I will say that GoDaddy is BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.  avoid!  www.dreamhost.com for the win! complete with 97 day money back guarantee (that's over 3 months people)
Bryan Grubaugh
Quickly aging alumni with too much time on his hands
Business Systems Analyst, Scripps Networks.