I’ll be honest with you; not demeaning or trollish. There are three things I really want to point out to you, Mr. Gerwitz. I’m doing it as an open letter at my blog (LINK: http://bit.ly/r21MJU) because I believe my observations are sound. I think that pointing out these three things can help others avoid making their own mistakes. Once I’ve pointed these out, I’ll have one further encouragement, as well. This is in the spirit of constructive criticism, and I hope it is taken as such.
Your rant is first of all demeaning and trollish itself, possibly in an attempt to vent frustration with a healthy dose of humor. I say “possibly” because I want to give you the benefit of the doubt (“maybe he didn’t know he was being trollish… oh well, I’ll keep reading his article”). Many of the observations (read “jabs”) you make about Linux users can be said about Windows users. It is sad to me to see a professional such as yourself blog in this most unprofessional manner. The comments littered throughout your rant will only fan flames.
Second, you seem to display a lack of redundancy and good testing practices. You admit to not having backed up your installation before updating. Even Windows creates a restore point prior to updating (yes I know it is automated). Then there’s the issue of no local machine test. If you want robustness, test on a physically present machine before deployment. There are countless times when the experience you’ve had deploying your code is one I’ve had attempting to deploy code on a Windows server. That one little nagging update to an API I needed to call making the whole mess of it unusable.
Thirdly, your expectation is for a system (Windows currently, formerly Linux) to be fine, robust, and flexible. No system can be all three without taking appropriate steps to account for the human equation. It’s people who mess up (in my opinion, your ISP is one of those people). With Windows and any other OS, it’s only fine if you’ve taken good security measures; robust when you test code prior to deployment; flexible when configured for the intended task. Each of these things take vigilance on the part of humans who use. I think you have a great point when you say “ the problem with today’s modern Linux is that it’s more than just the kernel.” The problem is a subculture of laziness where, as soon as disinterest sets in, documentation falls apart and code gets “crufty.”
I would encourage you in the future to post your updates at the head of your blog posts. This is more a design issue due to pagination at ZDNet. Even just a short shout-out like “Please see updated story at end of post.” This may help some already heated folks who visit your ZDNet blog to quickly see good reason behind the rant. I know the update was certainly helpful in understanding further the remarkably heated frustration on display in your rant.
Just as full disclosure, I work with Windows, Mac, and Linux on a daily basis, and have an interest in seeing each of these systems continue to grow into their huge potentials. They all have different strengths and weakness, but they all share many of the same pitfalls, as well.
Til next time, fellow traveler.
|