Well, apparently someone upgrading this storage area network had confidence in their upgrade, or their data migration. You have to backup your data before an upgrade for many reasons....power failure, corrupted data, hardware failure, etc. It doesn't just have to be bad code. Common sense is to always have backups, especially when upgrading anything, not just software. I hear you that most people don't, but that's not an excuse. You know you should and that's enough for me. If ou don't, tough titties when you lose your data.
My point of all that is these people bought something they couldn't back up anyway, without tricks and hacks, or spending some cash on a third party application. That would be a no brainer, then. Buy the damn software to back up your stuff with the phone, or steer clear of buying such a time bomb.
Not everyone thinks like you and most consumers are not thinking through the process, when they bought a sidekick phone/services, to think backup, backup, backup somewhere else.
Let's not get judgmental at the consumers that have loss their data, since there are many things you do not know, that should be done and are not.
Everyone has their level of expertise and this issue is with MS/Danger/T-mobile (ever though I feel sorry for T-mobile) not the consumer's backup practices.
If your trolling sucks this bad I wonder what it would be like if you even attempted something halfway intelligent.
In no way shape or form is yet another example of MS' galactic incompetence comparable to data loss suffered by a handful of SL users under specific and apparently not easily reproducible conditions.
Galactic. Please, put up the comic books and go to bed. Would that be like Steve Jobs Galactic decision to keep his health condition a secret.
By the way, I wouldn't call anything in tech Galactic. It just reeks of Sci-Fi geeks living in their parents basement.
New article on AI and actually unbiased. I'm surprised.
After reading this story I have a really hard time believing that Microsoft had absolutely no clue how the T-Mobile service ran to the point of not being able to even bring up new servers. I work for a good sized dot com with hundreds of servers across multiple datacenters. I don't think that people entirely grasp the complexity of such a service. It's not just plugging in hardware and installing an OS on it. Massive web applications are beasts. Processing billions of transactions is a tough thing to do and the products to do such a thing involve a ridiculous level of complexity at times.
That being said I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would be entirely clueless about running the service. They may have had everything in a holding pattern, but even day to day operations involves adding, deleting, and migrating systems continuously. I have work orders for a handful of system migrations due to failures and upgrades that will be done in the next few days alone. There is just no way they could not even know how to appropriate new servers. The whole thing would have collapsed long ago from growing pains if that was true.
More likely envision a mass exodus of talent from the Danger team after the Microsoft acquisition. My current employer was acquired years ago by a company who horribly managed our product and day to day operations. After the acquisition our company bled employees and lost an enormous amount of product knowledge as people involved in the engineering as well as operations side of the service left. Without that deep product knowledge your doomed. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person and a good admin, but I'm worthless next to some of our engineers that have been working with the product for nearly a decade. Those people keep the product up. They help with planning to avoid disasters and they're crucial to disaster recovery. If Microsoft ran those people out of the company then they killed the service via bad HR practices not technical or sabotage.
I think the term "unquestionably a safe practice" is more along the lines of everybody else uses the bloody thing ie preserving the status quo. But how anybody would think having your data on a remote server you don't even know well it is managed was a good idea is beyond me. Why would anyone want to go back to the days of dumb terminal connected to mainframe (which is all that this cloud thing is when you get right down to it)
Majority of cloud services have multiple back-ups at different locations. so this issue should rarely happen, This is what surprises me about the entire situation with MS/Danger.
My company is looking at cloud services and a potential vendor has 2 back-ups are in USA (different locations) with a third in Singapore.
There's always paper and pen. If I owned one of these devices I would be furiously scrolling through my contacts writing it all down.
Get a camera and take a snapshot of each contact screen. Saves a lot of time, a second per contact vs. maybe half a minute or more, depending on how much info you have.
Quote:
Originally Posted by l008com
I totally disagree with that. It was their service. If they chose to farm it out to a 3rd party, and they chose to leave it farmed out when that 3rd party got bought out my a... 4th party. Then it IS their fault. They are a service provider. They are responsible for getting service to their customers. They should have done it in-house, or find a successful company to do it.
The Sidekick product was never T-Mobile's making, was it? I don't know if any carrier can commission their own ground-up phone design. They'll generally take variations on what they are offered.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NonVendorFan
Does this apply to why Apple didn't acknowlede the DATA LOSS problem with Snow Vista until today when the press got wind of it.
A fabricated article that is purely a way of diverting the Sheep from Apple's problem today.
The Side Kick Data Loss is about the only thing in this entire article that can be supported by any backup data.
Apple's F up (I did listen moderator) is as bad as Microsoft's Side Kick F up.
At least Microsoft owned up to it on day 1 and T-Mobile stopped selling the problem.
Maybe you like conspiracy stories as much as DED does, but if it's really a diversion, wouldn't it require lots of lame stories to push the story down? The data deletion bug story is the very next story, number three as of right now.
I don't know if you can legitimately say that Apple's screwup is as bad, it sounds more like you don't know how to write non-hyperbolically. Yes, it's bad to lose data, but the circumstances don't compare. You have to have and use a guest account in the first place, and I wonder how many Mac users have guest accounts. I sure don't. In order to compare, Snow Leopard would have to be deleting user data on all computers, and that's not happening by anyone's account.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spunkmeyer
My understanding is that nothing is kept locally. And the reality is, most people don't think of these things until there's a problem.
My knowledge of the Sidekick is pretty limited, aside from the fact that I know it gained a substantial following in the hearing-impaired community when it was released because it offered capabilities that weren't offered by anyone else at the time. These devices, as much as a majority may consider them frivolous, are lifelines for some.
I guess that explains why someone I knew had one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vinney57
You really are a total idiot...
That's a harsher personal attack than is really necessary. How about let's not do that again? I don't like his tone either, but don't break the rules and feed NVF, OK?
I have to wonder, though, with such enormous fiascos that lose literally billions of dollars for the company for no apparent reason. WHY, OH WHY would Steve Ballmer be still CEO? Shouldn't the board of Microsoft kicked him off his perch a while ago for his "stupendous(ly terrible)" performance? Apparently, they're all buddies of Steve Ballmer and are yes men! So this is how Microsoft generally operates...
You must have been out of the office when they circulated the memo detailing the indispensable, nonnegotiable qualification to be Microsoft CEO: Must be Bill Gates' college buddy.
Well, apparently someone upgrading this storage area network had confidence in their upgrade, or their data migration. You have to backup your data before an upgrade for many reasons....power failure, corrupted data, hardware failure, etc. It doesn't just have to be bad code. Common sense is to always have backups, especially when upgrading anything, not just software. I hear you that most people don't, but that's not an excuse. You know you should and that's enough for me. If ou don't, tough titties when you lose your data.
My point of all that is these people bought something they couldn't back up anyway, without tricks and hacks, or spending some cash on a third party application. That would be a no brainer, then. Buy the damn software to back up your stuff with the phone, or steer clear of buying such a time bomb.
Very true. I backed up on floppies, then 100/250 zips, CDs, and currently via Time Machine. Anyone who doesn't back up their important data is is playing Russian Roulette and given that why anyone would go to a system where they have absolutely no control over backing up or even a if power/connection goes down no backup is beyond me.
After reading the article, I too am skeptical of the theory that sabotage killed the Danger cloud system. I have an easier time believing that gross incompetence caused the outage. 10 years ago at my company one of my customers was installing our CRM software. The implementation was a success and they were running it for about six months with live sales data when one day the database suffered a crippling crash. Due to the way the database was setup, the server was impossible to bring back so they ended up going to their backup tapes. But the DBAs were not very skilled and didn't know how to properly do a warm backup of a database. Instead, they backed it up like a cold database, which guarenteed that the files on the tapes were useless...all of the tapes going back weeks! They were in the same situation as Danger/Microsoft where they had a useless corrupt database, and the only data was on local databases with the users' laptops with no way to easily sync that data to something that could salvage it.
In the end, my customer got lucky. The last of our consultants on the project working for them had backed up the entire production database to his PC three days earlier to prototype a new section of code he was writing. It was that backup that we ended up restoring to their production system. In the end, three days of server data was lost and some users lost up to a week depending on how often they were syncing data before the crash. But the incident taught their company a powerful lesson about training and disaster recovery. All your physical backups must be proven to work or else. Cloud computing systems need triple redundant data centers if you want them to be trustworthy. If you cannot guarantee that the data can be recovered from a worst case scenario, turn in your resignation now.
I don't know if you can legitimately say that Apple's screwup is as bad, it sounds more like you don't know how to write non-hyperbolically. Yes, it's bad to lose data, but the circumstances don't compare. You have to have and use a guest account in the first place, and I wonder how many Mac users have guest accounts. I sure don't. In order to compare, Snow Leopard would have to be deleting user data on all computers, and that's not happening by anyone's account.
Also given how cheap external HDs are now you would have to be a fool not to invest about $150 in making sure you have an external back up for when things go south.
It keeps your head in the sand and still lets you drink the Kool Aid.
Can the Apple Sheep now be called Apple Ostrich because if you don't acknowledge a problem it doesn't exist?
You do know that ostriches don't really stick their heads in the sand? It detracts from your credibility when you misuse analogies (even if a lot of people are under the same misconception)?
You know, this is an interesting question. My recollection is that by the time Rome actually 'fell', the people of Rome itself (the city rather than wider empire), were completely in apathy of their plight. No heroic last-stand battles (again, in Rome itself), just a city laid bare 'civically', (a term which itself is ironic).
Of course, in Rome at the time, there were no doubt heroes to whom the general condition of apathy could not have applied, people who were passionate for Rome and their fellow citizens. This is no doubt true of Microsoft today! \
There's a lot of belief that lead poisoning was a major cause of the fall of Rome. They used lead pots to cook sugar to add to wine and food, and the lead intake of the rich and powerful Romans was extremely high. Lead poisoning causes mental illness (gout is also a sign of lead poisoning), and several of the later Roman emperors were major alcoholics (thus ingesting a lot of lead), including Claudius, Caligula and Nero.
"It is therefore clear that a great deal of lead-poisoning and ensuing lack of mental health that was common in the Roman Empire. Gout would not have affected only the Emperors, but any wealthy Romans, including those in important decision making areas, including those who would serve in the military. While a direct causal link is not available between lead-poisoning and the inability to make good decisions regarding the fate of the Empire due to the lack of hard evidence, it is clear that lead-poisoning was certainly a factor in at least its moral decline, if not leaving it more internally vulnerable."
- Jerome O. Nriagu. "Saturnine Gout amoung Roman Aristocrats" New England Journal of Medicine. March (1985): 660-3
Thanks "elroth" for making it worth my while to follow this thread for so long Learn something new every day... considering I just had this conversation with my 81 year old dad a couple of days ago. That is, likening America to the Fall of Rome. Naturally, we never considered lead poisoning in our conversation, but will next time
I would guess it's "dogfood" poisoning though as it relates to this article. Since I am intimately connected, and have had experience with some T-Com divisions and subcontractors here in Germany, T-Online should have seen this coming, since they "eat" this themselves.
What if this whole fiasco is a cynical ploy to pre-empt and derail the Chrome OS and everything Google. After-all, Sidekick is not Microsoft and no one using Widows is going to quit over this.
Putting the fear of cloud computing into the general population may very well be worth a billion or so to MS, who are used to paying damages to maintain their position in the market.
Maybe they fear Google's plans more than they let on.
There's a lot of belief that lead poisoning was a major cause of the fall of Rome. They used lead pots to cook sugar to add to wine and food, and the lead intake of the rich and powerful Romans was extremely high. Lead poisoning causes mental illness (gout is also a sign of lead poisoning), and several of the later Roman emperors were major alcoholics (thus ingesting a lot of lead), including Claudius, Caligula and Nero.
"It is therefore clear that a great deal of lead-poisoning and ensuing lack of mental health that was common in the Roman Empire. Gout would not have affected only the Emperors, but any wealthy Romans, including those in important decision making areas, including those who would serve in the military. While a direct causal link is not available between lead-poisoning and the inability to make good decisions regarding the fate of the Empire due to the lack of hard evidence, it is clear that lead-poisoning was certainly a factor in at least its moral decline, if not leaving it more internally vulnerable."
- Jerome O. Nriagu. "Saturnine Gout amoung Roman Aristocrats" New England Journal of Medicine. March (1985): 660-3
My understanding is that the levels of lead in the bodies of many ancient Romanites(?) often exceeded levels found today in those who have suffered from high intake due to pollution (reference needed).
Lead is a very interesting study because it has 4 stable isotopes that often permit it to be traced from the source mine to the grave (so to speak)!
...Looking back through the ages, our scientists studied the downfall of modern Rome (Roman-MS). By studying the 4 stable isotopes and the 3 unstable isotopes of the element 'high-profile project (Hpp)', these being Zune, Pink, Vista, WinMobile, IE, XBox and Bing, they were able to determine the source of the madness that brought Roman-MS to its knees.
At the time of its fall, Roman-MS had adopted a very strong Pink hue. Fake Vista(s) were also prominent, visible from many Windows (sorry!). Many of the fertile offices and labs had been inundated by (sandy-coloured) Zune(s). Further, a low-level though persistent 'Bing-Bing' noise could be heard practically everywhere. The city was littered with XBox consoles, none of which were active (many, many half-lives had passed obviously!).
The isotopes WinMobile and IE gave off slight activity but only just above the background noise.
Evidence abounded of wild parties (orgies in fact), celebrating the impending downfall of a neighbouring state, whose future seemed sealed when they put their trust in new weapons, the names of all of which commenced with a little 'i'. These parties had gone on for ages and eventually lead to the trashing of every corner of the Roman-MS empire. All the while, the emperor fiddled.
From what I've observed the past couple years regarding the Sidekick and T-Mobile, Motorola is the likely candidate to take over the Sidekick brand after this Microsoft debacle. They did do a phone a couple years ago and no doubt learned a great deal about how cloud services enable real social networking applications for mobile users.
However, if I had to take a guess, T-Mobile will likely just quietly put the Sidekick brand to sleep as it transitions it's user to the Android based Motorola CLIQ. Similar to the Danger Software based Sidekick devices, the CLIQ's social networking / messaging capabilities are enabled by a the MotoBLUR cloud service. However, the MotoBLUR service by itself offers very little from what I've read. Instead, it seems to aim more at aggregating or pooling together data from multiple services (SMS, MMS, IMAP, POP, Exchange, GMail, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Picasa, Photobucke, etc.) into a unified layout. This seems like it would be a much better evolution of what the original Sidekick cloud service attempted in order to meet today's social networking needs.
Comments
Well, apparently someone upgrading this storage area network had confidence in their upgrade, or their data migration. You have to backup your data before an upgrade for many reasons....power failure, corrupted data, hardware failure, etc. It doesn't just have to be bad code. Common sense is to always have backups, especially when upgrading anything, not just software. I hear you that most people don't, but that's not an excuse. You know you should and that's enough for me. If ou don't, tough titties when you lose your data.
My point of all that is these people bought something they couldn't back up anyway, without tricks and hacks, or spending some cash on a third party application. That would be a no brainer, then. Buy the damn software to back up your stuff with the phone, or steer clear of buying such a time bomb.
Not everyone thinks like you and most consumers are not thinking through the process, when they bought a sidekick phone/services, to think backup, backup, backup somewhere else.
Let's not get judgmental at the consumers that have loss their data, since there are many things you do not know, that should be done and are not.
Everyone has their level of expertise and this issue is with MS/Danger/T-mobile (ever though I feel sorry for T-mobile) not the consumer's backup practices.
If your trolling sucks this bad I wonder what it would be like if you even attempted something halfway intelligent.
In no way shape or form is yet another example of MS' galactic incompetence comparable to data loss suffered by a handful of SL users under specific and apparently not easily reproducible conditions.
Galactic. Please, put up the comic books and go to bed. Would that be like Steve Jobs Galactic decision to keep his health condition a secret.
By the way, I wouldn't call anything in tech Galactic. It just reeks of Sci-Fi geeks living in their parents basement.
New article on AI and actually unbiased. I'm surprised.
That being said I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would be entirely clueless about running the service. They may have had everything in a holding pattern, but even day to day operations involves adding, deleting, and migrating systems continuously. I have work orders for a handful of system migrations due to failures and upgrades that will be done in the next few days alone. There is just no way they could not even know how to appropriate new servers. The whole thing would have collapsed long ago from growing pains if that was true.
More likely envision a mass exodus of talent from the Danger team after the Microsoft acquisition. My current employer was acquired years ago by a company who horribly managed our product and day to day operations. After the acquisition our company bled employees and lost an enormous amount of product knowledge as people involved in the engineering as well as operations side of the service left. Without that deep product knowledge your doomed. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person and a good admin, but I'm worthless next to some of our engineers that have been working with the product for nearly a decade. Those people keep the product up. They help with planning to avoid disasters and they're crucial to disaster recovery. If Microsoft ran those people out of the company then they killed the service via bad HR practices not technical or sabotage.
I think the term "unquestionably a safe practice" is more along the lines of everybody else uses the bloody thing ie preserving the status quo. But how anybody would think having your data on a remote server you don't even know well it is managed was a good idea is beyond me. Why would anyone want to go back to the days of dumb terminal connected to mainframe (which is all that this cloud thing is when you get right down to it)
Majority of cloud services have multiple back-ups at different locations. so this issue should rarely happen, This is what surprises me about the entire situation with MS/Danger.
My company is looking at cloud services and a potential vendor has 2 back-ups are in USA (different locations) with a third in Singapore.
Not a very good year for Microsoft?
Xbox RROD:
Zune Meltdown Day:
IIS Market Share:
Windows Mobile:
Vista:
IE:
Netbooks:
Bing:
SilverLight:
You forgot the big one that turns Microsoft's 'bad' year into a disastrous year of biblical proportions --
Ballmer: Still the CEO.
There's always paper and pen. If I owned one of these devices I would be furiously scrolling through my contacts writing it all down.
Get a camera and take a snapshot of each contact screen. Saves a lot of time, a second per contact vs. maybe half a minute or more, depending on how much info you have.
I totally disagree with that. It was their service. If they chose to farm it out to a 3rd party, and they chose to leave it farmed out when that 3rd party got bought out my a... 4th party. Then it IS their fault. They are a service provider. They are responsible for getting service to their customers. They should have done it in-house, or find a successful company to do it.
The Sidekick product was never T-Mobile's making, was it? I don't know if any carrier can commission their own ground-up phone design. They'll generally take variations on what they are offered.
Does this apply to why Apple didn't acknowlede the DATA LOSS problem with Snow Vista until today when the press got wind of it.
A fabricated article that is purely a way of diverting the Sheep from Apple's problem today.
The Side Kick Data Loss is about the only thing in this entire article that can be supported by any backup data.
Apple's F up (I did listen moderator) is as bad as Microsoft's Side Kick F up.
At least Microsoft owned up to it on day 1 and T-Mobile stopped selling the problem.
Maybe you like conspiracy stories as much as DED does, but if it's really a diversion, wouldn't it require lots of lame stories to push the story down? The data deletion bug story is the very next story, number three as of right now.
I don't know if you can legitimately say that Apple's screwup is as bad, it sounds more like you don't know how to write non-hyperbolically. Yes, it's bad to lose data, but the circumstances don't compare. You have to have and use a guest account in the first place, and I wonder how many Mac users have guest accounts. I sure don't. In order to compare, Snow Leopard would have to be deleting user data on all computers, and that's not happening by anyone's account.
My understanding is that nothing is kept locally. And the reality is, most people don't think of these things until there's a problem.
My knowledge of the Sidekick is pretty limited, aside from the fact that I know it gained a substantial following in the hearing-impaired community when it was released because it offered capabilities that weren't offered by anyone else at the time. These devices, as much as a majority may consider them frivolous, are lifelines for some.
I guess that explains why someone I knew had one.
You really are a total idiot...
That's a harsher personal attack than is really necessary. How about let's not do that again? I don't like his tone either, but don't break the rules and feed NVF, OK?
I have to wonder, though, with such enormous fiascos that lose literally billions of dollars for the company for no apparent reason. WHY, OH WHY would Steve Ballmer be still CEO? Shouldn't the board of Microsoft kicked him off his perch a while ago for his "stupendous(ly terrible)" performance? Apparently, they're all buddies of Steve Ballmer and are yes men! So this is how Microsoft generally operates...
You must have been out of the office when they circulated the memo detailing the indispensable, nonnegotiable qualification to be Microsoft CEO: Must be Bill Gates' college buddy.
You forgot the big one that turns Microsoft's 'bad' year into a disastrous year of biblical proportions --
Ballmer: Still the CEO.
Ballmer is a great saleman, thats why he still at MS, just look at this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZvhPGXrg0g
here some favorites of mine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ3y_QopcuQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgriTO8UHvs
http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads...luescreen1.png
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sckba-EX5MM
Lets look at recent one http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads...bluescreen.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFx62_Iadjg
My personal favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo
Not to leave Apple out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnVUvW42CUA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVRgVPrGlQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os
Well, apparently someone upgrading this storage area network had confidence in their upgrade, or their data migration. You have to backup your data before an upgrade for many reasons....power failure, corrupted data, hardware failure, etc. It doesn't just have to be bad code. Common sense is to always have backups, especially when upgrading anything, not just software. I hear you that most people don't, but that's not an excuse. You know you should and that's enough for me. If ou don't, tough titties when you lose your data.
My point of all that is these people bought something they couldn't back up anyway, without tricks and hacks, or spending some cash on a third party application. That would be a no brainer, then. Buy the damn software to back up your stuff with the phone, or steer clear of buying such a time bomb.
Very true. I backed up on floppies, then 100/250 zips, CDs, and currently via Time Machine. Anyone who doesn't back up their important data is is playing Russian Roulette and given that why anyone would go to a system where they have absolutely no control over backing up or even a if power/connection goes down no backup is beyond me.
In the end, my customer got lucky. The last of our consultants on the project working for them had backed up the entire production database to his PC three days earlier to prototype a new section of code he was writing. It was that backup that we ended up restoring to their production system. In the end, three days of server data was lost and some users lost up to a week depending on how often they were syncing data before the crash. But the incident taught their company a powerful lesson about training and disaster recovery. All your physical backups must be proven to work or else. Cloud computing systems need triple redundant data centers if you want them to be trustworthy. If you cannot guarantee that the data can be recovered from a worst case scenario, turn in your resignation now.
I don't know if you can legitimately say that Apple's screwup is as bad, it sounds more like you don't know how to write non-hyperbolically. Yes, it's bad to lose data, but the circumstances don't compare. You have to have and use a guest account in the first place, and I wonder how many Mac users have guest accounts. I sure don't. In order to compare, Snow Leopard would have to be deleting user data on all computers, and that's not happening by anyone's account.
Also given how cheap external HDs are now you would have to be a fool not to invest about $150 in making sure you have an external back up for when things go south.
It keeps your head in the sand and still lets you drink the Kool Aid.
Can the Apple Sheep now be called Apple Ostrich because if you don't acknowledge a problem it doesn't exist?
You do know that ostriches don't really stick their heads in the sand? It detracts from your credibility when you misuse analogies (even if a lot of people are under the same misconception)?
Ballmer is a great saleman, thats why he still at MS, just look at this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZvhPGXrg0g
here some favorites of mine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ3y_QopcuQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgriTO8UHvs
http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads...luescreen1.png
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sckba-EX5MM
Lets look at recent one http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads...bluescreen.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFx62_Iadjg
My personal favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo
Not to leave Apple out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnVUvW42CUA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOVRgVPrGlQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os
Like I said before .... Ballmer = Matt Foley from SNL.
You know, this is an interesting question. My recollection is that by the time Rome actually 'fell', the people of Rome itself (the city rather than wider empire), were completely in apathy of their plight. No heroic last-stand battles (again, in Rome itself), just a city laid bare 'civically', (a term which itself is ironic).
Of course, in Rome at the time, there were no doubt heroes to whom the general condition of apathy could not have applied, people who were passionate for Rome and their fellow citizens. This is no doubt true of Microsoft today!
There's a lot of belief that lead poisoning was a major cause of the fall of Rome. They used lead pots to cook sugar to add to wine and food, and the lead intake of the rich and powerful Romans was extremely high. Lead poisoning causes mental illness (gout is also a sign of lead poisoning), and several of the later Roman emperors were major alcoholics (thus ingesting a lot of lead), including Claudius, Caligula and Nero.
"It is therefore clear that a great deal of lead-poisoning and ensuing lack of mental health that was common in the Roman Empire. Gout would not have affected only the Emperors, but any wealthy Romans, including those in important decision making areas, including those who would serve in the military. While a direct causal link is not available between lead-poisoning and the inability to make good decisions regarding the fate of the Empire due to the lack of hard evidence, it is clear that lead-poisoning was certainly a factor in at least its moral decline, if not leaving it more internally vulnerable."
- Jerome O. Nriagu. "Saturnine Gout amoung Roman Aristocrats" New England Journal of Medicine. March (1985): 660-3
Most users are dumb and don't watch the news and never read the trade mags or forums.
That brings back memories. I haven't read a trade magazine about computing since I got the Internet at home.
I would guess it's "dogfood" poisoning though as it relates to this article. Since I am intimately connected, and have had experience with some T-Com divisions and subcontractors here in Germany, T-Online should have seen this coming, since they "eat" this themselves.
Putting the fear of cloud computing into the general population may very well be worth a billion or so to MS, who are used to paying damages to maintain their position in the market.
Maybe they fear Google's plans more than they let on.
There's a lot of belief that lead poisoning was a major cause of the fall of Rome. They used lead pots to cook sugar to add to wine and food, and the lead intake of the rich and powerful Romans was extremely high. Lead poisoning causes mental illness (gout is also a sign of lead poisoning), and several of the later Roman emperors were major alcoholics (thus ingesting a lot of lead), including Claudius, Caligula and Nero.
"It is therefore clear that a great deal of lead-poisoning and ensuing lack of mental health that was common in the Roman Empire. Gout would not have affected only the Emperors, but any wealthy Romans, including those in important decision making areas, including those who would serve in the military. While a direct causal link is not available between lead-poisoning and the inability to make good decisions regarding the fate of the Empire due to the lack of hard evidence, it is clear that lead-poisoning was certainly a factor in at least its moral decline, if not leaving it more internally vulnerable."
- Jerome O. Nriagu. "Saturnine Gout amoung Roman Aristocrats" New England Journal of Medicine. March (1985): 660-3
My understanding is that the levels of lead in the bodies of many ancient Romanites(?) often exceeded levels found today in those who have suffered from high intake due to pollution (reference needed).
Lead is a very interesting study because it has 4 stable isotopes that often permit it to be traced from the source mine to the grave (so to speak)!
At least the Romans had a good excuse.
At the time of its fall, Roman-MS had adopted a very strong Pink hue. Fake Vista(s) were also prominent, visible from many Windows (sorry!). Many of the fertile offices and labs had been inundated by (sandy-coloured) Zune(s). Further, a low-level though persistent 'Bing-Bing' noise could be heard practically everywhere. The city was littered with XBox consoles, none of which were active (many, many half-lives had passed obviously!).
The isotopes WinMobile and IE gave off slight activity but only just above the background noise.
Evidence abounded of wild parties (orgies in fact), celebrating the impending downfall of a neighbouring state, whose future seemed sealed when they put their trust in new weapons, the names of all of which commenced with a little 'i'. These parties had gone on for ages and eventually lead to the trashing of every corner of the Roman-MS empire. All the while, the emperor fiddled.
...sigh - back to work.
http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=1157
However, if I had to take a guess, T-Mobile will likely just quietly put the Sidekick brand to sleep as it transitions it's user to the Android based Motorola CLIQ. Similar to the Danger Software based Sidekick devices, the CLIQ's social networking / messaging capabilities are enabled by a the MotoBLUR cloud service. However, the MotoBLUR service by itself offers very little from what I've read. Instead, it seems to aim more at aggregating or pooling together data from multiple services (SMS, MMS, IMAP, POP, Exchange, GMail, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Picasa, Photobucke, etc.) into a unified layout. This seems like it would be a much better evolution of what the original Sidekick cloud service attempted in order to meet today's social networking needs.
http://www.motorola.com/motoblur