Gripe Line: “Today’s gripe is a tale about HP and the grueling support gantlet a reader and her son were forced to run to get a broken computer fixed,” Ed Foster begins An HP support nightmare and customer recourse. At issue: they sent back the PC which kept turning on and off and flashing green lights across the screen, only to receive it again with the same problem. Oh, and a few scratches here and there, compliments of HP, of course. Repeat. 25 hours on phone support. Still an unusable PC. “I want to emphasize that it could just as easily be about Dell. Or Gateway — except if it were Gateway, we probably would not have as happy an ending as we can relate here.” Podcasts: Full-contact SOA. Sounds a tad extreme sports-like, perhaps, but it was the topic of David Linthicum’s keynote presentation at last week’s InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. Now it’s online. “I’m not going to play the entire hour … just the most interesting part.” Tune into The SOA Report here. Columnist’s corner: More “goldfish in a Dixie cup,” than big fish in a little pond, our Off the Record author served as MIS manager in a small shop — where a fateful box turned a monitor blue. (And no, not as in the Blue Screen of Death.) VGA blues. “After months of perfectly ordinary days, the receptionist called me, frantic. When she started her system that morning, the monitor had a horrible tinge to it…” Live Chat: Let me clarify: this one is actually the full transcript of an archived chat that took place leading up to the Open Source business conference. Doug Dineley and Matt Asay host. That means its chock full of opinion, mostly about Novell, Microsoft and the current state of open source, not to mention irony and debate about whether applications that run on Linux and Apache are, by nature, open source. Discussion also touches upon how open source winds its way up to the CIO, gains leverage, and the worst thing about proprietary products for customers. Technology Industry