Red Hat Diaries/0005

Reliance

Let's get one thing straight: The reason we're 36 hours away from two Apple laptops is not that OS X is the operating system of the future.

Oh in many ways it is - it's NeXTSTEP basically, an OS that ten years ago was already ahead of what Windows (and the Linux GUIs) is today. But that's not the reason.

The reason is we need boxes we can depend on, and everything being sold in the Wintel arena today - whether it be for Windows or Linux - is junk, junk and more junk - pure junk - and the unethical and incompetent companies selling this shite are more worthless than the junk they sell. Gateway can't find its own butthole and literally wouldn't know it from the proverbial hole in the ground, Dell is no better and quite possibly even worse, and we sure aren't buying any Fujitsu Toshiba Kamikaze Sushi Teriyaki Sukiyaki boxes either. Hey quick money! Windows! We sell Windows! Quick - out with the junk and flood the market. Ugly boxes that are going to fall apart in no time flat - and what pleasure do they bring? Is Windows XP a pleasure? To the masochistic perhaps. To those used to the weeping and gnashing of teeth, perhaps. But it's the same old song with a different beat is all. We need hardware we can depend on, and OSX ain't that bad at all. It's pleasurable.

• Chris Pirillo made the mistake of ordering a laptop from Dell. He already paid - but they can't find it. It can't be tracked. But Dell already has his money.
• Our own order with Gateway was ignored for ten days until we tired of them and demanded they cancel - and then and only then did they try to take our money, fully aware we called to cancel. They then lied and claimed they had not attempted anything at all, but our bank told us the truth - in fact Gateway, whether it be out of desperation or revenge or both, tried to debet our account for three times the amount of the order we called to cancel. (Luckily our bank smelled fraud and refused the transactions.)

This is scary stuff, but this is the nature of online transactions with the big Wintel hardware suppliers today. Dell have been taken off the Consumer Affairs 'good guys' list and Gateway, who have never been on the good guy list, have now been cited by the US Federal Trade Commission - and recently put on the 'junk' list by Wall Street's Moody.

Click here »