Pushed Too Far, or Just Ungrateful Whiners?

An interesting drama has been playing out on the Broadbandreports.com forums int he past week or so.

A anonymous poster claiming to be an employee of ClientLogic, who supplies tech support for Bell Canada, posted a message stating that employees were fed up and looking to unionize so they could immediately strike, and sharing what working conditions were now like at his particular call center. The poster states that their gripes have nothing to do with any animosity towards Bell Canada or the customers.

What followed was a lengthy thread with people arguing both sides of the issue -- that if everything is as portrayed the agents have a very good argument and reason to unionize and strike. Others argued that they shoudl shut up and enjoy the decent job they have instead of working manual labor for minimum wage, or even being unemployed in the current economy.

Others still pointed out that the ClientLogic call centers perform very poorly, and that if they want management to stop hounding them maybe they should raise their centerwide performance and statistics.

Then yesterday, another post hit detailing a purported-to-be internal memo from ClientLogic. The memo appears to be a direct response and plea against the idea of unionizing, if it is in fact true and accurate.

So just what is going on here?...

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The Open Source Inquisition

Nobody expects the Open Source Inquisition.

And yet, that's exactly what happens now if you dare question ANYTHING regarding open source.

Howls of outrage are heard, you are branded a heretic, and then summarily publicly burned alive at the stake without trial.

But... Dvorak is the one off his rocker when he suggest that the open source community has gone completely out of its mind...

I used to joke about open source simply being another cult. Now... it's not much of a joke anymore...


-- Prmis.

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Wishing for An Ugly NBA Work Stoppage

ESPN.com NHL columnist/pundit John Buccigross has a rather-candid comment regarding the NBA's current labor mess:

" I am praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, and praying for an NBA work stoppage. I long for the polls saying nobody cares about the work stoppage, that the fans are apathetic and think the owners are greedy and the players are selfish. Of course they will leave out the declining NBA ratings, and the fact there is a scoring problem in the NBA, and they will never say the NBA overexpanded, or that there are too many foreigners with names people can't pronounce. Let's see if they bash the NBA like they are bashing the NHL."

Spot on, of course.

The people who have an axe to grind against the NHL have taken this work stoppage to do so, repeatedly, and often. However, they've also put themselves in the awkward position of now having to face the exact same set of circumstances (with the same set of annoying and self-righteous parties) in the NBA. And I guarantee they'll refuse to bash the NBA the way they have the NHL.

The dirty little secret in all of this? The NBA isn't faring so well either. Want an example?

In the first round of this year's NBA Playoffs, a Wizards-Heat game on ABC was outdrawn by not only the Kentucky Derby, but also by a NASCAR Nextel Cup Race and the PGA Wachovia Championship. NBA Playoff ratings are down 34% so far in a year when the NBA has no NHL Playoff competition to go up against. That's not at all flattering. While getting outdrawn by events like the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby is expected, getting outdrawn in viewership by NASCAR and the WWE should be a wake-up call.

If you wanna' be a NHL Hata'... be an NHL Hata' I guess. But don't pretend to be the voice of reason when doing so -- the NBA is god-awful right now in both its situation and product and I don't hear the projections of its imminent demise.

Wouldn't it be a nightmare situationfor the NBA if the NHL came back next season, with an improved product even (as it will when it returns -- the new rules have already been approved), and there were no NBA? And the NHL ratings and interest began to surge?

It's not at all far-fetched. The NBA should be scared out of its mind by this imminent-seeming work stoppage. They made no ground during the NHL stoppage, and could lose ground during their own. The NHL can survive such a mess because it fanbase is inherently hardcore -- they've been told for years that their sport is not a major sport and yet there they are equal to or outdrawing outdrawing the NBA in attendance year after year... NBA fans are much more-fickle.

Buccigross, while being a bit mean-spirited, is right though. The NBA gets a free pass for some reason, and everything the NHL does is wrong in some eyes.

We'll see come this fall what transpires, and who jumps on and off what bandwagons all of a sudden.


-- Primis.

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Newsflash: Support Reps Can't Support Products That Aren't Theirs!!!

Broadbandreports.com currently has an incredibly-stupid item running that was apparently meant to somehow poke fun at Comcast's online and phone support. The headline on the story is a mocking "Quality Tech Support", clearly meant as a jab at Comcast for not providing good support.

In the story in question however, a Comcast user who was having problems with his Vonage VoIP service is ... *gasp*... shocked to discover that Comcast High Speed Internet can't troubleshoot his Vonage VoIP problems!!

No, really? Who knew?!

Maybe you should... call Vonage for your Vonage problems?

This is realy disappointing. I expect better out of BBR than this. This is one of those things that's so stupidly-obvious I can't believe it ever got posted to the front. I realize BBR is not 100% impartial at all times... but that's just ridiculous because the BBR community is not stupid. If the guy in question had some very good, hard proof that it was a QoS issue on Comcast's end he could then present it to them and see what happened to improve his line's QoS. Even then though, Comcast is by no means under any obligation whatsoever to make any changes because an unrelated outside service (the VoIP in this case) isn't working right. it's called "Comcast High Speed INternet", not "Comcast High Speed Voice Over IP". And if it were Comcast VoIP... you'd still call Comcast VoIP, not Comcast High Speed Internet. And I'd bet his ToS makes that more than clear.

There is no amount of tech support available to counter total and complete stupidity on the user's end. And the Terminally Stupid really shouldn't be saved from themselves.


-- Primis.

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Firefox: Too Big For Its Britches?

Firefox continues to take a considerable pounding in media now after their short-lived darling status.

The latest stain comes from an article in The Inquier which suggests that the Mozilla Foundation has already had its small success completely go to their head, and they've become very anti-competition, publicly bashing other projects and companies including both Netscape and AOL (which they owe a great deal of gratitude for their very existence).

The Netscape thing in particular is very poorly chosen. Yes, Netscape screwed up badly (as I mentioned and pointed out here). However, for anyone even remotely associated with the Mozila Foundation to come out and publicly bash Netscape while pimping their own flaw-ridden, still-problematic browser is just ridiculous. The new Firefox "company line" seems to be "We patch quicker than anyone else!". Between that and the constant quoting of (purposely-inaccurate) download counts, Firefox really does make me sick lately.

Amusingly enough, the Mozila Foundation wants people to forget that Netscape 8.0 is based heavily on Firefox 1.0.3's code. So Netscape 8.0's flaws were Firefox's same flaws just days before.

Also, Firefox has the same problems Netscape used to -- slow load time, resource hogging, memory leaks, and random crashes. These were problems and complaints back in the late 90's when Netscape was still fighting off the eventual surge of Microsoft's IE.

And here we are, the year 2005, and we have the EXACT SAME PROBLEMS with a browser from largely the same area of people. And better still, they're trash-talking everyone else.

The common disclaimer I hear from people is "Well, these sort of things can't and don't represent the open source community" or "...s/he doesn't represent Firefox or Mozilla.... Ummm, yes they do, whether people like it or not. Just like the annoying 13 year-old in a forum gushing about lInux and atatcking anyone else suggesting it's might not be the greatest thing ever *is* a representative of the Linux community.


And the open source world has clearly gotten very self-centered, selfish, and childish lately.

"Weck up to thees".


This is going to be a very bad year for Open Source... it's already been awful and we're not even halfway through it yet. It's not like they weren't warned though.


-- Primis.

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Netscape 8.0: 44 Holes in 24 Hours

Less than 24 hours after releasing Netscape 8.0, word comes that 8.0.1 has been released which fixes a whopping 44 security holes in the new browser.

Yes, you read that right... 44 security holes.

In other words, Netscape willingly released a product knowing full and well that it was unfinished and full of security holes.

Though if you're brainwashed by the Firefox no-lifers, "fixing" 44 holes in such a small span must mean a such a CLEARLY superior product that all the other browsers may as well give up. Because all that matters is response time, right?... Well, one could always do with getting it right the first time, but we can't have that now can we?

This is all getting very, very old.

Fixing holes "quickly" is not an answer, nor is it acceptable (especially so quickly after a major release). Not having the holes in the first place *is*.

As Firefox has now clearly proven, there is no "secure" web browser. Firefox is now popular enough that it's coming under the microscope, and not faring quite so well. If security through obscurity is really the only way to go, the worst thing that can happen to a browser is for lots of people to begin using it.

Netscape though has different issues. Once kings of the web, they have to be asking themselves how they can gain a sizeable share back. However, they now have a legacy to overcome -- one of a buggy browser that was also a complete resource-hog prone to memory leaks (hmmm, sound familiar?).

But news of 44 bugfixes in 24 hours won't do anyting to lure back users, I can assure you.


-- Primis.

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Fresh Potpourri - 5/19/05

Since multiple items are currently of interest, here we go.

* Steve Ballmer questions Google's long-term viability.
* New "Trackerless" BitTorrent release.
* Israel resumes retaliations against Palestinians.
* NBA work stoppage all but a certainty.
* Kellen Winslow Jr. out for season; this is a recording...


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John C. Dvorak: "Linux Community Represented By Lunatics".

In one of the most-scathing and -inflammatory Linux-related opinion pieces I've read in some time, PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak has apparently had it with Linux and the Linux community in general and vents in an article entitled (gee doesn't this sound familair?...) "Linux Community Implodes".

Dvorak states that the most-visible representatives of the Linux community are "paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga", and also calls out the Linux community for seeming to have an ever-growing policy of "Too nutty even for the Mac community? We welcome you!".

Furthermore...

"If anything is going to kill Linux and the open-source movement, it's the presence of certifiable lunatics in the ranks representing the users... I can tell you this much: Normal people do not like being associated with fanatics and lunatics. Once Linux gets the image as the OS for the criminally insane, it's a dead duck. Unless the community gets a handle on this, grows up, and rebukes the extremists, the trash heap of history is where this is all headed."

So to any of you who've been denying that the Linux community anymore being OUT OF ITS FRIGGIN' MIND.... wake up. This is not a "What If?". This is already an ever-growing truth as to how the world in general views it all. Whether you like it or not. And your unwillingness to do something about it only cements that opinion.

Is ANYONE in the Linux or Open Source community not ok with being represented by society's most-dysfunctional, least-intelligent, and saddest?

Cause it sure looks like you're all okay with it, so long as they're railing on MS or the other so-called "evil empires".

I said this before on BBR the other day, and I'l say it again -- Microsoft is honestly now beginning to look like the Good Guys in comparison.


-- Primis.

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Open Source's Continuing Path to Self-Destruction

I've been trying for some time now to convince people that the entire open source movement is heading down a path of self-destruction due to the inability of the community to wrangle in the fascists amongst their own. We seem to have further proof of that today.

Sveasoft is third-party commercial firmware for Linksys routers based on code that Linksys has GPL'd.

Apparently part of the open source community have taken it upon themselves to crack Sveasoft to remove the 5 MAC limit and change a few other things. The cracked software is then being distributed freely on P2P networks currently.

The reaction from the community naturally is one of victory and praise over some "evil" entity who "violated the GPL".

So what we have here now are representatives of the open source community taking it upon themselves to decide what should be free and what shouldn't, and if they don't like something not being free they're going to get into the code and make it free anyhow. Needless to say, this is incredibly dangerous and an enormous black eye for the open source community...

How far are the extremists in the open source community willing to go, and how far exactly are the others in the community willing to knowingly let them go with a snicker and a wink? You can make all the claims you want about how what Sveasoft is, and was doing is wrong... but how is enacting your own brand of vigilante justice any less-wrong? Hiding behind the claim of the GPL doesn't fly because I sure haven't seen anyone make an effort to enforce the GPL with Sveasoft yet. If the GPL is supposedly binding, there would be other methods or making things right.

That's the problem though -- these people don't' want to make things right the right way, they merely want things free (as in beer) and they want them NOW. And that's all that matters to them...

There's a serious, SERIOUS problem with hypocrisy and self-righteousness in the open source community and I think we're closing in on a period now where the community inevitably turns upon itself. When you begin letting things like this go, or even champion things like this, you're inevitably breeding a culture that will come back to bite you. And that's what I see happening. If this sort of thing is tolerated, what real difference will there be between the open source community and the warez scene? The excuse of "it's supposed to be free, it wants to be free" isn't real justification for going in, cracking something, a redistributing it -- at last check you can't just redistribute commercial software for free, regardless of whether or not you agree it should be commercial.

It's really quite pathetic what people will do in the name of "free, open source software". Apparently, rules and morals only apply when you feel like following them.

Welcome to anarchy -- the downfall of open source. The entire argument for this sort of thing is that things like Sveasoft are a "violation of trust".

Well what the heck do you call cracking commercial software and freely redistributing it on P2P networks?


-- Primis.

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