Seems that “Mainichi” which is a Japanese paper has some stories that are definitely a little different. This one shows one female politician mom getting into a real political brawl.
This other story has an amusing story on a former porno star watching her past get re-issued against her will. Have no idea about the legalities of all this.
This last one just boggles the brain.
VRlog has a link to a Popular Mechanics online article on a new immersive video camera. Looks very neat. Also looks far out of my price range…. ah well.
I just read GNU’s statement on the Apple Public Source License. The summary of the write up goes like this:
Legally it complies, but we still think it sucks.
Ummm yeah… clear as mud. So much for making things simple to understand. Personally, I love Open Source software however arm twisting organizations or people into it is just plain authoritarian.
“Slashdot” has some coverage on two sides of Tech Support. One of them sounds very business-y and about the general dynamics of the whole tech support industry. You can find that here. There is also a rebuttal from a former tech support person here..
Both articles make for an interesting contrast with one another. However, I think that they both fall on the radical side of the viewpoints on tech support (barring the upper management of the company providing tech support’s position).
I can empathize with the rebuttal from the former tech support position as I have been there. Working in tech support can be mentally stressing. As the other author said, you can get bitten from the customers calling in who can get very nasty when their problems aren’t being helped. And they can also be bitten by management for not following the correct procedures. However, I’ve also been on the customer end and really frustrated when I call in with a genuine problem with some service and I can’t find anyone to help me. I try utmost best to be polite but frankly if I have a problem that only they can fix and they are not helping me their tech support model is broken. Or if I continuously need to raise the issue past the phone rep to a manager this is really stupid.
In my opinion this points to a broken system where the procedures matter more than trying to give good customer service to people calling in. People calling in obviously need help trying to get their computer or software working otherwise why bother calling. Trying to offer some cookie cutter service that ‘hopefully’ reaches out to many users without considering the consequences is in my opinion a horrible growth strategy. This can explain the 3rd party technical support industry that exists because the source companies just cannot handle the possible load they’ve gotten themselves into. One thing that building these great systems to handle ‘call load’ is that it loses the human element of interaction which is another reason the 3rd party technical support exists but in many ways it cannot grow too large since it must keep the human element involved.
Anyone need a freelance tech support guy? I do housecalls 
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