This past week I had two very interesting customer service experiences -- interesting because of just how different they were.

I spent probably 5 to 7 hours on the phone with HP technical support last week, trying to get them to assist me with a problem we were having with a pair of ProLiant servers. I was shuffled around to multiple departments (and, judging by the various accents, I would say I was probably shuffled to multiple continents as well), each one telling me that the next guy was the right guy to talk to about our issue (which of course he wasn't). This was for a fairly simple question about the functionality of one of their server administration tools, that no one seemed equipped to answer.

Conversely, we also had a hard disk in a ProLiant server go bad. With the serial and part numbers in hand, I was able to get a replacement shipped within 10 minutes.

The two completely different experiences I had suggests to me that when companies get large, they get very good at handling the common support problems, like bad hard disks. They develop procedures that save both the company and the customer lots of time, and are relatively painless. But what's lost is the ability to handle the out-of-the-ordinary service needs that customers have; the company is just too big, and the support guy (let's be frank, in some call center in India*) just doesn't have the resources or the knowledge to handle the problem. This leads to a frustrating experience -- whereas in a small company, these things tend to be handled quickly, because the support guy can escalate easily.

*HP doesn't even try to hide that their support is outsourced to India. If you log-on to their professional support, you can tell right away by the names.

Because as a child, didn't you want to be an astronaut?

OK, so you didn't actually become one. But didn't it help to spark your interest in science and technology?

Are you using a beta version? There was a bug like that a while back, but it's been fixed for a while now. I have no problems with 5.0.375.70

I would imagine that until now, Foxconn's bean-counters had done the math and figured out that it was cheaper to simply build a factory in China and use cheap labor to make their products. But now that their labor is causing PR problems, demanding raises, and killing themselves for insurance payouts, the bean-counters redid the math and figured out hey, if we keep this up, it would be cheaper just to move to Taiwan and have robots do most of the work. So that's what makes sense, and that's what they'll do.

I'm not talking to the ethics of the matter, just the fundamentals of the situation, which is that whichever course of action is best for profits is the one that will be taken. Just because labor wants more, and maybe even deserves more, doesn't mean that when they ask for more they won't be thrown out on their asses.

I hate to ask the obvious question, but the article doesn't address it -- could this be intentional, or is it accidental?

I would imagine that some shady overboss would be willing to pay a relatively sizable amount of money (especially considering that the amount of money you'd have to pay someone in a Chinese factory to do this would not be very high) for the opportunity to infect potentially tens of thousands of computers.

This will probably wind up getting funding for one reason -- national security. It's vital to defense to be able to monitor (and to a large degree, predict) the weather. Think multi-billion dollar supercarrier fleet accidentally heading into a hurricane.

Or does the defense department have their own weather satellite network?

I completely agree about the slide out keyboard. I had a BB Curve a while ago, and I loved the hard keys. I moved to the BB storm because I desired a touch screen (I feel like a touch screen enables a smartphone to be anything, since it can turn the UI into anything), which was nice, but I greatly missed the hardkeys when typing out a necessarily long email while on the go. I moved to the Palm Pre Plus largely for this feature, and I absolutely love it.

I've seen a few devices of this size (the Archos 7 comes to mind; and I've seen them on the internet, not in person, mind you) and I think it's interesting to watch the industry try to figure out the correct form factor for this new niche that is emerging. Obviously it is going to be something larger than a cellphone and smaller than a laptop -- but what, exactly?

This Dell Streak, I think, is the exact wrong size. It's quite a bit larger than a phone, and it doesn't look like something that you want to carry around all day in your pant pocket. One of the reason cellphones have become so popular is because they are so small (and light-weight). Remember that for several years, the major thing about cellphones is that they were getting smaller and smaller? Compare a phone from, say, 2000, with a phone from today. Why would anyone want to reverse direction on that? It's too large for a phone.

On the opposite end, it looks too small to do any actual work. A netbook-sized screen is good for emails and browsing, but it's not very useful for doing serious business. And this thing is much smaller than a netbook. I don't think that's the aim, of course -- I think it's more aimed to the niche that the iPod targets; gaming, "always-on" style internet access, etc.. But I have to wonder if the device is too small for these things, as well. I think it might very well be.

But the overwhelming thing we seem to be seeing is that there are plethora of devices being released, each being in some significant way different from the next; companies are trying to find out what consumers want in a device like this. Maybe Apple has proven it with the iPad, given its popularity; they did that with the iPod, and now the market is full of MP3 players which are essentially iPod clones. But remember when MP3 players were first coming to market, there were many different form factors, many different storage devices (Sony had that thing with the mini CDs, for example), until it became clear what consumers want. The same thing should/will happen here; and I believe it's quite possible it's already happened with the iPad, and anyone making anything substantially different will wind up falling behind.

The one site that I can think of that actually does use a webcam/mic via flash is ChatRoulette. So we might all be better if we don't have cam/mic support....

The author mentions the disk access for deduped primary storage (he points out (rightfully so) that deduped primary storage will perform slower than non-deduped primary storage), but he failed to mention what I think is an important point when discussing deduplication and network performance/bottlenecks.

If you dedupe your backups (the author mentions, for example, a VTL solution), you then gain the ability to replicate only the unique data to your DR site. In terms of saving bandwidth, this can be an absolutely huge savings. Imagine if you backup to a VTL, and with dedupe you get an average 25:1 ratio; that means that, for the purposes of DR, you can replicate 25x more data through your pipe than you would have been able to, without dedupe.