Best of the blogs: Dell’s Support Center 2.0 helps support Dell support, in the words of Ed Foster. A reader received an alert from Dell saying he needed to upgrade but after doing so a blank pop-up DOS screen sprang into his screen every five minutes, and with each log on came the Dell support folder rearing its head. Dell said the problem was probably a virus. But when our reader explained his upgrade predicament, the rep informed him it would cost $29.95 to continue the conversation. “I guess this is a good way for Dell to earn a little extra money — have everyone install a buggy Support Center upgrade and then charge them all when they call to report the problem,” the reader writes. In this Gripe Line post Foster adds that the reader is not the only one to encounter this. “It’s one thing for a vendor to take an aggressive approach to helping its customers, but it’s quite another if the aggression is really aimed at drumming up business for its paid support.”Green IT: Digital Realty became the first company to earn LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for its datacenter facility. But what’s most interesting about the achievement is that the building was constructed in 1917 as a printing plant. “Like so many sustainable technology efforts, a LEED endeavor results in significant long-term cost savings through waste reduction,” Ted Samson explains in Taking the LEED on building green. Digital Realty is not alone, either. Adobe and Qualcomm, for examples, have both enjoyed significant savings from reduced energy waste. “One of the common threads among these projects is the IT components, such as tools for monitoring and managing heat and lighting through a network. Once again, it demonstrates just how critical a role IT plays in helping organizations undergo green transformations.” Notes from the field: Donning a Paul Revere cap and cloak, Robert X. Cringely calls out a similar warning, albeit of the cyber sort: the e-jihadists are coming, the e-jihadists are coming! In which Mr. Cringely is referring to Electronic Jihad 2.0. “Despite the software’s silly name, I was curious whether this might be something worth worrying about. So I did a little more digging. The software is real — in fact, I downloaded a copy of it yesterday off an archived copy of al-jinan.org. But if this is a serious terror threat, I’m Arnold Schwarzenegger.” Instead, Cringe muses, it could be a publicity campaign, a recruiting tool for noobs, or even an attempt to prove just how gullible we Westerners truly are. Technology Industry