Falling Out of Love With Linux
Dear Linux,
I love you, or rather, I used to love you. However, lately I’ve been having an affair.
You knew that I’d been keeping Windows around, He’s like my drinking buddy. He plays all my games and we like to hang out on the weekends. It was never a “love” thing between us, just a way to escape. Besides, he’s one of the guys.
But no, lately I’ve had a new fling. I met Mac.
Actually, we’re old friends, I knew her all the way as a baby Apple II and we practically grew up together. She’s always been dependable, stable and competent, but she also grew up into something quite beautiful. We started dating a few months ago and, well, it’s getting serious between us.
Sure, she’s not perfect and I can’t say if I really love her or not, but we have to face it, things aren’t the same between us anymore and, well, she and I have been enjoying each other’s company a lot more these days.
Still, I am a gentleman and, as such, I have to be honest with you. Perhaps you can grow from this and, perhaps, some day, we can get back together again.
But first you have to listen to me.
Gizmo Has Gremlins
Dear Gizmo Project,
I have a bone to pick with you. Sunday morning I had a podcast to record and, well, Gizmo Project is my main VOIP tool. Your built in call recording and overall good audio quality makes it a logical choice for these P2P calls.
However, Sunday morning, your entire service was down. Not only was it down, but had been down for at least about an hour remained down a two hours afterward. We tried to jerry-rig something using Skype but we ran out of time before we could get everything completely in place.
However, what bothered me about the whole ordeal wasn’t that Gizmo Project and your SIP server went down at an inopportune time, but that no one at Gizmo Project was doing a damn thing about it. Sure, there was a forum posting about the outage, one started by a user and maintained by other users, but no one from Gizmo Project itself posted on it until today, over 24 hours AFTER the outage was resolved.
Still worse is that there is no system status indicator. Skype has one. even Cox Communications, the bane of my customer service existence, has one. Why don’t you?
However, the ultimate slap in the face is what happens when you Google for “Gizmo Project” and “System Status”. You find this forum post where an admin tells a user requesting a system status feature that “We are NOT going to create a public status page any time in the near future.”
That, my friends, is bullshit and I’ll tell you why.
