Brain Freeze

No offense but why the hell run a website if you aren’t going to support what you write and manage? I’ve had two absolutely awful experiences with “support” of two different Yahoo products…one of which I pay for and one which I don’t.

The pay-for incident is with Yahoo Music Engine and the Yahoo Unlimited music service. For starters their player is absolutely awful and they made it worse with the second release and the fugly theme/skin/whatever. But what really pisses me off is their incredible lack of notification of changes to the system either on their website or in the application itself.

Example: I had quite a few Eagles tunes in my playlist. One day I started the application and tried to play one of the songs and nothing happened. Tried agian and there was just a short flash on the screen and then nothing. No error messages. Just a whole lot of nothing. I try a few other songs with the same results. No errors…no nothing. I go into the Unlimited catalog and find that now every single Eagles song is only available as a 30 second sample. Nowhere can I find any information about this so I finally write to their tech support. The response I received indicated that a cookie was corrupt in Internet Explorer (its embedded in their music player). I was told to delete all cookies and try again. Of course I’m thinking this is bullshit but I try anyway with the same results. I respond to the support email and now about 2 weeks later I still have not heard back from the simple question asked of “is the Eagles catalog no longer available for streaming?”

This isn’t the first time this has happened either. I’ve routinely had stuff in my playlist no longer play only to find out that the song is only available as a 30 second sample but available for purchase…just not streaming. At the time I just assumed it was 1.0 quality software.

Whoever is writing this software, and furthermore running the music service as a whole, really needs to learn how to write software properly and how to keep their customers informed of changes like this. Its a nightmare and I’m getting exactly what I’m paying. With cheap service comes a real lack of customer service. They can keep it…..I didn’t have these problems with Rhapsody.

What else is Yahoo doing to piss me off? Not supporting Intellisync for Yahoo. I realize its a freebie but for crying out loud provide some support for the application. It refuses to connect to my main Yahoo account tho it works just fine with one of my sub-accounts. Yes I’ve verified the account and password. After writing support I get a note back telling me basically to go to hell. Why are you people even bothering with this crap if you’re not going to support it????

I just read an article titled "Red Hat Seizes An Opening" in the 4/17 issue of Information Week in which Charles Babcock talks about whether the Red Hat/JBoss merger is enough to do battle with the likes of IBM, etc. He harps on several things that annoy me because they really are non-issues. For instance:

"The JBoss stack doesn't have its own webserver"

Neither does Websphere or Oracle Application Server. They're both based on Apache. Is there some reason why Apache isn't also suitable for use as a web server in the RH/JB stack? That being said JBoss has their own web server project in the works so what is the issue?

He also notes that the JBoss stack doesn't have its own ESB. Given the open source nature of both Red Hat and JBoss I see no reason why using one of the open source ESBs such as Mule is not an option. The article claims that JBoss is writing their own. Not sure I understand why they would do that given the availability of projects like Mule but even given that there are open source ESBs available for use in the RH/JB stack.

Seems like a bunch of noise to me. I wonder why they call this garbage journalism.