"Zappos is known for service…and for letting their service agents “be themselves”. I put this to the test tonight and threw a curveball or two at the guy helping me in a Live Chat. I used the name “Timmy” as my alias and asked a totally random question about a random product. See actual chat log below. Zappos rocks! I could not even make this stuff up, I swear."

Found this hilarious - if only customer service was like this all the time. Sucks that shipping + exchange rate makes it unviable here.

"GNOME engineering team comes with a pretty daunting plan to introduce a fairly massive reworking of the GNOME interface for GNOME 3.0 (2.30)... the most user-visible one is of course the reworking of the interface, thanks to a project called GNOME Shell... Another major pillar of GNOME 3.0 would be Zeitgeist, a new approach to managing and finding files by using tags, bookmarks, and timelines..."

Finally, a Linux DE that is actually significantly different (and hopefully better) than the rest out there... let's hope they deliver.

click to play

"We took 24 256GB Samsung MLC SSD's and put them in RAID to make this awesome computer! See how we did it, and what the results were!"

Pretty cool stuff, wouldn't mind them in my computer at all. Just wished they used a redundant RAID setup so they can yank out random drives and see how it recovers :)

"As part of our annual internship program, an intern will often start working on an internal app to get familiar with our development environment, coding practices, etc. This year, star intern Andrew Canby was given the task of overhauling our current lunch ordering system. This is no easy task either, hell hath no fury like 12 hungry nerds so bugs or downtime are no an option!"

That's the kind of internship I'm looking for :)

"A member of the California assembly has tabled a bill that would force mapping companies to blur out millions of images in case they aid terrorists... "All I'm trying to do is stop terrorists," Anderson told AP."

That reason again. Anyone could use that reason to make anything legitimate; could you not come up with something that shows some more thought? The final paragraph is very true too.

"Extensive cloud-computing functionality will be built into Karmic Koala, the next version but one of Ubuntu, Canonical has announced."

Meh, sounds like a pretty boring strategy, one mostly done already. The power management stuff is mildly interesting.

"The overall look of the distribution is also likely to be refreshed. "Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options," Shuttleworth noted."

This is the best news in the article - the brown has to go, for the same reason the Zune's brown just didn't work - brown = uncool, and well shit really.

"Tech Wired today learned that the Australian Government will release its secret National Broadband Network Report if paid fees of up to $3,631.99. Just yesterday we reported on the progress of a Freedom of Information application put forward by Tech Wired to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE). "

Check out this series of posts - 3k+ for an already prepared document? And what are they really hiding. So many questions, but at least hopefully the document is finally coming - but possibly too late...

"DocVerse brings online collaboration / sharing of Microsoft Office documents to your office and mobile workers, allowing user level access, and single file management. The beta version of DocVerse only works with PowerPoint 2007 for the time being..."

This is neat. Work real-time in the same file in actual Microsoft Office, not a web-based imitation app that doesn't really cut it. Neat that it even works for those who don't have Microsoft Office. Can't wait for it to work in Word too.

"A protest has been created by the Creative Freedom website against the Section 92A law that instructs internet service providers to cut a user's connection if a music company accuses them of copyright infringement, that is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party."

And I thought the NZ had the more sensible government in this part of the world. Soon they'll be exchanging ideas, and we'll get it as well, while they can get the awful firewall. Yuck.