Support forums such as Computer Hope are not intended to provide support to corporate IT departments.
It pretty much says that in the rules. It doesn't <forbid> it, of course.
Tell that to the "Windows Server" section of this site...
Really? Having windows server automatically means it's a business? Who's making assumptions
now? I run an SVN server in my house, do I count as a business?
Having said that, if an IT professional chooses to ask a question on our forum there is no reason we shouldn't do our best to help.
That's exactly what happened here! When asked where they ISO came from, if it WAS legitimate they would have said where they got it- IE: the MS site/technet, etc. but instead they fly off the handle about being interrogated. If that doesn't set off any red flags for people then I don't know what would. If they had actually said where they got it <instead> of flying off the handle- I doubt it would progressed in the manner it did. And making assumptions that <they> got the attitude (What attitude? How is "Where did you get the ISO" Attitude? It's a bloody question! And a legit one at that.
I don't buy the whole "I'm able to get an ISO off the VLK site but my first stop when trying to put it on a flash drive is a forum I've never posted at before" That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Most IT folks (techie or not) would probably google first something like Windows 7 Volume licensing +USB installation
and would you look at that! the first link is what they need. They might not include the "Volume licensing" bit, of course, so they would end up with the first link as this MS link
http://store.microsoft.com/help/iso-tool that pretty well addresses the same thing.
People who know what they are doing generally are able to do some searching on their own, they would post on a forum after not having any luck, or in an attempt to clarify what they've already discovered.
It's really quite the same as a lot of people who post in the programming forum with semi-advanced questions; they seldom get a response, and if they do it's usually nonsense or not completely what they were after- thing is, this isn't really a programming forum, some of the members already know how to program and can offer help, but that's purely coincidence.
Because of this, if I ever get to the point where my attempts to implement ISerializable in my "BASeBlocks" game for level saving/loading are fruitless, I'd be much more likely to post a question on one of the other, specifically programming forums I am a member of. This is not because the question is particularly "advanced" but because it simply doesn't meet what I think would get a useful response here (if any at all). This isn't a negative reflection on the site itself insomuch as it reflects on what the site is for- it's for "free computer help" in the tune of "I can't get my webcam working", not something like this:
I've got 2 projects, in the same Eclipse (3.2 if it matters) workspace (set up by someone else, so I'm stuck with it). One is under Clearcase and the other under Subversion. The Clearcase plugin was installed first, then the Subversion plugin.
Now I am unable to access any of the Clearcase actions via Eclipse's team menu (it keeps trying to do it via Subversion, even for the Clearcase project.
Can anyone offer any advice on how to make these two work for the resepective projects? Or can you only use one source control plugin at a time with Eclipse?
Thanks.
While I don't doubt that there are at least a few people who use Eclipse here, I highly doubt more then about 5 percent even know what "clearcase" is, and chances are any prospective helper would need to google it. It's highly unlikely they would even have access to a working installation. The site where this question was posted, on the other hand, is filled with people who actually have development jobs and work in a "team" setting and deal with source control, so the chance that somebody is familiar with Clearcase and eclipse is about a million times higher then it is here.
The above doesn't mean we
shouldn't have a programming forum, just like the site not being particularly aimed at IT professionals doesn't mean there shouldn't be any "server" type forums. But like I said- if I had a serious programming problem I probably wouldn't post it here, simply because the number of people who would be able to respond to it would be much lower then on one of the other forums I am a member of.
One can extend this to "IT professionals" wether they are techie or not they almost always are a member of some other site; such as, for example, Serverfault (which for those types of questions often comes up in a google). So the question then becomes "why post the question
here?" It's not meant as a knock of this forum insomuch as it is merely stating that there is a specific set of questions where the help acquired will be extremely optimal; unbootable windows installations, virus problems, driver issues, and pretty much any
end-user issue. But when you start asking about corporate IT deployments and Network installations and Big O() notation problems in Scheme you're going to start hearing crickets pretty quickly.
