Category: Digital

People are starting to complain about the quality of Dell's customer service, although not its products. In this recent study, Dell's customer satisfaction is no simply on par with other PC vendors, while Apple has shot to the top of the consumer satisfaction list.

U.S. consumers lambasted Dell Inc. for poor customer service in a survey conducted last quarter, sending the world's largest PC vendor into a virtual tie with the rest of the PC market behind the industry-leading efforts of Apple Computer Inc.

For the second year in a row, Apple received the best rating from PC buyers in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), said David Van Amburg, general manager of the ACSI. The University of Michigan compiles the ACSI in numerous product categories by randomly calling U.S. residents and surveying their buying habits, he said. Apple received a score of 81, compared to an industry average score of 74, in results released Tuesday. The Cupertino, California, company's focus on product innovation and customer service has won it a cadre of famously loyal customers unlike any other PC vendor, Van Amburg said. Apple also received a score of 81 in 2004. Dell, on the other hand, earned a score of 74, down from a score of 79 the previous year.

Read full article: Study: Dell customer rating plunges, Apple leads pack

It's not quite as nice as the days of double-digit growt, but worldwide IT spending is showing a healthy, steady growth that will be sustained through 2009, IDC predicted Tuesday.

Worldwide IT spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 5.9 percent through the end of 2009 to reach $1.34 trillion, up from $1.06 trillion this year, said Anne Songtao Lu, program manager for IDC's Worldwide Vertical Markets research service. "From an IT industry perspective it's quite good," she said. "There's no longer the double-digit growth they saw before 2000, but this growth rate, for a lot of quite mature technologies, is very healthy."

Read full article at InfoWorld

JBoss, the open source J2EE server, is making commercial inroads: 

JBoss on Tuesday will boost efforts to lure users of commercial application servers to its open source alternative. The JBoss Migration Program being unveiled features an assessment to define a migration strategy, an implementation program, and a subscription to the JBoss Application Server. The implementation program could involve partners such as Hewlett-Packard.

Read more at InfoWorld

PayPal's Invoicing service lets you easily send professional business invoices via email. You can:

•  Send an invoice for goods or services
•  Provide detailed line items by specifying quantity, unit price, item description, shipping details, tax, and currency
•  Generate automatically calculated totals
•  Simply fill out the invoice, review, and send
•  Save up to 10 invoices as templates for future use
•  Use PayPal's Invoicing Templates to prefill invoice fields

Currently it does not (as far as I can tell) support recurring invoices, which is the only drawback that I can see at this point.

When 'reblogging' or quoting from another site in your blog, how much cut and paste can be considered fair use? These links give informative information on this important topic:

• Blog's Blog | Copy paste : Why and Why not ?
• Chat, Copy, Paste, Prison
• Copyright.gov FAQs

PHP remains popular, so much so that vendors are either adding tool support for this language, or fighting against it, touting their alternative wares such as Java or Visual Studio. 

If Java developers are indeed picking-up PHP because - like almost anything else it seems - it is simpler to use than Java, then it will hit the marketing wall of Sun, BEA Systems, Borland, IBM and Oracle who either deliver serious Java development tools or application servers. On C , PHP must largely contend with Microsoft's Goliath-like Visual Studio. Idle curiosity could have accounted for the PHP spike EDC identified two years ago as large numbers of developers planned to evaluate or adopt PHP. When it came to using PHP, though, that's where developers probably turned to their familiar tools. While adoption may be slowing, PHP is not going away. With an estimated 2.5m PHP developers and web sites going up on a daily basis that have been built using PHP, the language is firmly ensconced in computing's landscape. The only question seems to be: how deep can PHP go in business computing?

Read more at The Register.

Want to send an alert to someone in a meeting when you know they can't conveniently answer a phone call? Send an SMS message. 

Google Send to Phone for Firefox is an extension that enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. For example, you might text message yourself a phone number, an address, or directions that you find on the Web.

Get the plugin here: Google Send to Phone for Firefox

Just when I was beginning to think my FireFox popup blocker was broken, Pete Bevin pointed out that some clever sites are getting around the Firefox default settings by launching popups from Flash. The good news is you can hack FireFox to prevent these new-fangled popups. To do this:

Fortunately, you can get around it:

1. Type about:config in the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select 'New' and then 'Integer'.
3. Name this new setting privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value of this new setting to '2'.

Original article at petebevin.com

This very cool mini-app for Mac OS X will help clean up your open windows without you needing to do anything! 

Spirited Away is very simple utility for MacOSX. You just start it up and let it run in the background. Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away 🙂

I am playing with the settings, but right now setting it to hide unused apps after three minutes seems about right for me. 

Get it here: SpiritedAway

Looking for a good domain name? Here are some helpful resources:

• Dislexicon -- Takes common words and adds suffixes and prefixes; great for finding short domain names that look like they could be real words.
• JustDropped -- Lets you search for recently expired domain names.
• How to Snatch an Expiring Domain -- Overview of services that you can use to snag an expiring domain name.