GuysBlog

According to an article in ZDNet dated November 24, 2003:

After receiving customer complaints, Dell has stopped sending U.S. technical support calls for two of its corporate computer lines to a Bangalore, India, call center.

The brief article is followed by some discussion threads.

Update: Yahoo has a somewhat longer report on Dell’s action. According to that story, the news broke in the Austin American Statesman on Saturday 11/22.

Bulletin: A story from Sify New (apparently in India) reports:

“…we are not shifting the work. Dell is committed to India and are growing,” a spokesperson for the Bangalore-headquartered Dell India operations told PTI today.
and that “About 54 per cent of Dell’s 44,300 employees are overseas.”

Other news as it happens….

Dave Winer pointed out a nice story about Art Carney, who died this week. According to a posting in
“Bob Stepno’s Other Journalism Weblog,” Art was a genuinely nice guy.

Some 25 years ago, Stepno was working for the Hartford Courant newspaper. He published a photo of Art leaving a local hospital after a several-day stay being treated for a heart problem. Stepno created a caption about Carney saying farewell to the hospital. The photo appeared to show Carney thumbing his nose. Art phoned to say it really was a great place. Stepno published a correction. Carney sent him a thank you note.

We’ll miss you, Art.

Oh. My. God. I took this test:

Welcome to The Political Compass.

There’s abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’ , established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape. For example, who are the ‘conservatives’ in today’s Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher ?

I’m in the same category as Dave Winer: Libertarian Liberal.

US workers see hard times
High-tech firms tout outsourcing as crucial to survival ( second of three parts )

“My view is you should not start a company from scratch in the United States ever again.”

“Software engineers - India produces about a million of them a year - are a commodity.”‘

Jobs gone to Ukraine, Russia, India … “exploring an expansion into China and Bangladesh.”

Part 1 was yesterday, Nov 2. Judging by their search box, only “today’s” and “yesterday’s” articles are accessible except to subscribers to their archives, so get it while it’s hot. I’m keeping copies, but will not violate copyright by posting their entire text here.

“Quirksmode is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam,” begins the home page of an extensive site that explores CSS (1, 2, and 3), JavaScript, and browser incompatabilities.

He uses (oh, the horror) Frames, and cogently explains why. Makes sense to me.

He has a “JavaScript News” section, and solicits input for it.

He has a section about browsers that includes their history as well as a series of pages discussing the five most-current browsers (excluding Mozilla Firebird, except for a rant about the Mozilla team’s penchant for obscure and changing names).

I hope he has a search capability on there somewhere — but I guess I can use Google and limit its domain to quirksmode.org.