What I’ve read this week… er, this past month

A sunny day and expecting more sun this weekend. Here are a few articles from the reading file and ones read during the commute over the last few weeks (thru August 9th – I will post the rest as I have time). Thankfully, most are available for download, making it easy to save for later reading on mobile devices.

Have a good weekend.

Hack Attack: One-click DVD rips (Lifehacker)  Purely for educational purposes, this is information on a one-click solution for ripping content, including menu structure, directly to your hard drive.

Virgin America takes off (USATODAY)  By Dan Reed, USA TODAY, Aug 7, 2007. Backers of Virgin America, the USA’s newest airline, spent several years trying to convince federal regulators that the carrier isn’t simply an extension of British billionaire Richard Branson’s worldwide aviation empire.

Customer service standards are vital for an organisation (Cybernoon.com)  Jagdeep Kapoor, Tuesday, August 07, 2007 12:12:54 IST Customer service standards must be set first so that can be constantly improved upon

Cisco optimistically looks to the future (CNET News.com)  August 7, 2007 4:08 PM PDT Posted by Marguerite Reardon. Cisco Systems’ CEO John Chambers said the networking equipment maker is poised to see meteoric growth over the next several years as the Internet enters a new phase.

Sony’s Stores, Web Site Offering Back-To-School PC Promos (TWICE)  By Alan Wolf — TWICE, 8/7/2007 11:21:00 AM San Diego — Sony has launched a back-to-school promotional program for its Vaio PCs exclusively through the vendor’s company-owned stores and e-commerce site.

Market Wire Business News: The Evolution of the Contact Center – MSN Money   In a recent survey conducted by Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), 97% of Best-in-Class companies that strive to improve call center quality report an increase in customer satisfaction.

Xbox repair process leaves gamers in a fix (CNET News.com)  Microsoft’s announcement that it will spend $1 billion to fix problematic Xbox 360s seemed like a step that would assuage disenchanted customers. Nearly a month later, however, some console owners are still less than pleased. By Erica Ogg, Staff Writer, CNET News

Kittens — the solution to spam? (InfoWorld News)  An executive at Microsoft has an unusual idea for beating spammers. Powerful software tools and supercomputers aren’t involved, but kittens are. By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service, August 03, 2007

64-bit PCs: Drivers wanted (Cnet news)  By Tom Krazit and Ina Fried, CNET News.com, Published: August 3, 2007, 4:00 AM PDT Now that they’re 64 (bits, that is), personal computers are still searching for developers to need them and feed them.

Fake Steve Blogger comes clean  For the last 14 months, high-tech insiders have been eating up the work of an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive and one of the world’s most famous businessmen. Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes

Tote a Small Library to the Beach (washingtonpost.com) Summertime: Time for the beach, and time for some beach reading. This year, I did my vacation reading the gadgety way, on Sony’s Reader, a device the consumer electronics giant hopes is an early draft of how the world will read books in the future.

A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators – washingtonpost.com   At the Yearly Kos Bloggers’ Convention, a Sea of Middle-Aged White Males By Jose Antonio Vargas, August 6, 2007; Page C01 CHICAGO, Aug. 5 — It’s Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers…

How I produce my audio shows, by Xbox Live’s Major Nelson I have been producing blogcasts (I call them blogcast since people think you need an iPod if you produce a podcast, and calling them blogcasts made a little more sense to me) since December 2004.

Catch Wii if you can: Do Sony and Microsoft have a chance? (The Utility Belt)  080307: Sony (SNE) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) long international nightmare isn’t coming to an end. Nintendo’s Wii console continues to clobber the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, with the latest numbers showing the Wii outselling number-two PS3 by a 4-1 ratio.

For Adobe, a tough lesson in (open-source) diplomacy (The Utility Belt)  080307: Adobe placed a little link in its popular Acrobat digital document software allowing users to automatically send print jobs to the closest FedEx-Kinko’s (FDX) location.

Survey: Amazon, Best Buy treat customers best online (computerworld)   August 02, 2007 (Computerworld) — Amazon.com Inc. and Best Buy provide customers the best overall online experience, according to a survey released by Keynote Systems Inc., a Web site performance measuring company. By Linda Rosencrance

How would you change the OLPC XO? – Engadget

Software Assurance and a case of denial | NetworkWorld.com Community  Submitted by Micronet on Tue, 07/31/2007 – 4:54pm. Microsoft insists that Software Assurance is achieving record renewal rates from enterprise customers, reports VNUnet.com.

NewsFactor Network | When ‘Getting Human’ Isn’t Enough   By Michelle Goodall Faulkner August 1, 2007 10:10AM Digg It! Bookmark to del.icio.us It is clear that to ensure the quality of the customer experience and to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction…

What’s Next: Ask, and You Shall Be Misled, Customer Service Article – Inc. Article  Customers can tell you a lot. But sometimes they don’t know what they’re talking about. By: David H. Freedman

PS3 to receive tuner, DVR capabilities before March 2008 (Engadget)   It’s been rumored before, now Sony’s marketing manager for Computer Entertainment in New Zealand has apparently, and likely pre-emptively, unveiled Sony’s intentions to turn the PS3 into a digital video recorder.

iPhone sales highlight Apple woes (Australian IT)   The iPhone is not just the most heavily hyped gadget in the fairly brief history of personal information technology, it’s also the target of obsessive scrutiny from Wall Street types paid to prognosticate on Apple’s shares…

Circuit City CEO Pitches Concept Stores (Multichannel News)  The CEO of Circuit City Stores pitched cable-operator partnerships here, describing the concept stores the retailer is testing in partnership with companies including Comcast and Ethan Allen furniture stores in an effort to provide a more complete custome

How I gave 640 people greener grass (Inside Office Online blog)   As I have blogged earlier, one of my favorite things here is how customers can upload their own templates. I noticed several were simple images (along with the Excel charts, Word resumes, and the like). So for fun–and to see how it worked

Off The Record: Panic mode (InfoWorld)   Lack of knowledge + heat of the moment = bad decisions By anonymous, July 31, 2007 03:00 AM

More information on the Microsoft Canada Development Centre in Vancouver (MS Canadian UX Blog)   As Qixing mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft is opening up a Development Centre in Vancouver. This presents an amazing opportunity for many talented designers and developers to join the Microsoft team and have an impact on the products…

The Man Who Could Kill YouTube (Esquire on MSN Lifestyle) Bob Tur is the little guy who is suing one giant (Google) to do what another giant (Viacom) probably never will — shut YouTube down. By Matthew Belloni

Hey!Cast  Hey!Cast is the ultimate tool to create video podcast powered by Hey!Watch. Quick, simple and intuitive.

My Pipeline Is My Inbox (alik levin’s blog)  I decided that the simplest way to focus one my action items is get them into one place – my Outlook Inbox. My customers send me emails, my friends send me emails, my manager sends me emails, my colleagues send me emails.

Software Notebook: Google revenue edges past Windows’ (Seattle PI)  For the first time, Google Inc.’s revenue edged out Microsoft Corp.’s sales of Windows for PCs in quarterly results reported by the companies last week.

Microsoft reveals specific product revenues (Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog)  This might have gotten lost amid the flood of data yesterday at Microsoft’s annual meeting with financial analysts, but some particularly revealing numbers emerged during a presentation by Chris Liddell, chief financial officer.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Shutdown, restart, and sleep Vista from the keyboard – Lifehacker: One of the first things keyboard fans noticed of Vista is that familiar keystrokes no longer work. The How-To Geek details how to access this menu from the keyboard in Vista.

Tags: misc, articles, what I read.