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You don't need a college degree to know how to work a phone. I know the HR hysteria in the USA would have you believe otherwise, but trust me! It's not that hard...

But one of the big justifications for outsourcing call centers to India was that you could get college-educated workers for cheap. If you're going to be staffing the call centers with people who have just a high school education, then you might as well do that in the United States and not deal with the language/accent barrier.

You're missing the cheap part -- highschool grads in India are cheaper than high school grads in the USA. That's why they deal with the language/culture/accent barrier.

Workers without a college degree are cheap enough in America as it is.

Pay range for entry level agents in India is $200 - $350/month. Where are these cheap Americans that will work for $1.75/hour?

Moreover, it's strongly implied that IBM is misrepresenting the educational level of the employees in these outsourced call centers. Regardless of whether workers in call centers should need a college degree, it's not kosher to say or imply that your workers do when in fact they don't.

Where is this implied? I never assume that first level tech support agents will have any kind of relevant college degree - they all seem to follow a script (and I wish they'd just publish the scripts online so I could follow them myself).

In the document, it is stated that Microsoft agrees not to sue Sun for commercial distribution of StarOffice, which is based on OpenOffice.org, but that Microsoft can still seek damages from OpenOffice users or distributors for any copy installed after April 1, 2004.

Watch what happens if openoffice makes any kind of real dent in office's market share. It'll be just like the RIAA going after downloaders...

Well, I had said "If that's the real situation or if the campaign was really doing all the work and he just had the account, then fuck him." I won't defend a guy who really is trying to leverage extortion unjustly, but at the same time do you have any link to articles explaining the events the way you detailed them?

The last story I saw linked on /. was the piece about him having the MySpace since 2004 and them wanting control at which point he asked for $$ and they gave him the finger. I just hit Google News and the top 3 returns were all more-or-less saying the same thing. I don't put a ton of weight in that since they may have all read the same blog post before writing their articles, but I'm not going to sift through all 342 results to find the 1 dissenting opinion.

If I started a MySpace page called "Official Microsoft Windows Add-Ons", worked with Microsoft to give my products credibility...

We both know that MS would never allow such a stupid thing to happen. If Obama's campaign had been remotely responsible they wouldn't have participated in such a way that gave him all the power. They could've easily registered a different MySpace URL and allowed him to access it while they clearly retained control. If he didn't want to participate and wanted to keep doing his own thing all they would've had to do is make sure he explicitely labeled it as "Unoffical". I don't think anybody would have hated them for doing that.

Just out of curiosity, where was your 2000/2001-era Cisco WAP made?

I saw an aritcle (which has since gone offline: Manufacturing: Probably made in China, by someone else) that said Intel made motherboards in Silicon Valley until 1999 or so. The massive movement to Chinese factories was triggered by the need to cut costs at the tail end of the dot-com bubble.

$700 sounds like a price you'd have to charge if you were paying Americans to put your industrial-grade wireless widget together... (I'm assuming your WAP was built like a tank - cisco used to be all about quality, until they bought Linksys for the "consumer grade" product lines.)

I appreciate your sense of humor, but I find it odd that /. would publish this post, which is a clear plagiarism of this article on CRM.

Since the technology bubble burst, "there's been a scramble to move from the high-cost sites [North America/Western Europe -me] to the low-cost sites in China," said Flint Pulskamp, an analyst with the market research firm IDC. "In the late 1990s, Solectron used to make motherboards for Intel right here in Milpitas, in the heart of Silicon Valley. That's unthinkable now."

-http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/44242.html

Who is liable if this, Who is liable if that...

Fuck you
I have heard the same tired fucking argument from every other Senior idiot at the "major corporations" (6 figure # of employees) I have worked at.

As soon as one of you fuckers who keeps yappin' about "who is liable" sues MS for one of their gapping security holes that result in huge (documented) costs and huge losses of productivity then you can ask "who is liable" but don't talk about some pitiful little fucking harmless distributed projects until one of you pussies has the balls to sue - to date the only one I know of is Gore and they sued PeopleSoft et al because the ERP emperors have no clothes (as anyone who has tried to implement an ERP would know).

If the state wanted to run Seti@home on the machines, it would do the appropriate diligence...

I doubt it, the way diligence is done at "major corporations" I've worked for is based on a combination of:
Who the execs are in bed with financially or sexually.
What company the execs college buddies own.
What company that execs golfing buddies own.

After the decision is made based on the above, then "analysis is spun up that justifies the decision.
Just found this, so I guess I can add State of Ohio to the list.

And I don't mean fuck you personally...

Microsoft has sponsored Universities, and gives out Awards to good students. It's important for the University people to keep good relations with their masters so that the money keeps coming. Philip Greenspun knows this very well, so bashing Java (which doesn't bring in the $$$ to the University) and favoring .NET ($$$ to the University) is in line with the policy of keeping the donors happy.