This is just flat out a wrong use of the term dogfooding.
Dogfooding means using your own code to do what it's designed to do, as opposed to relying on external users. For example, if you're writing a web server, dogfooding means using it to host your blog. If you're writing a word processor, it means using that word processor to write all your correspondence. It has nothing to do with eradicating acquired technology.
English words, esp. vernacular, may have multiple meanings.
The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that "someone with access to the servers at the datacenter must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself)."
Wouldn't tape backups be kept off site? Also, there should be three generations of backups. Isn't that SOP?
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.
The modern penchant for dumb conspiracy theories ("hey, what if the CIA killed Neda Agha Soltan? What if the jews were behind 911?") ? this is why so many people have no need of lead poisoning to be brain damaged. They already have whatifblahblahsomenonsense disease!
...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.
The modern penchant for dumb conspiracy theories ("hey, what if the CIA killed Neda Agha Soltan? What if the jews were behind 911?") — this is why so many people have no need of lead poisoning to be brain damaged. They already have whatifblahblahsomenonsense disease!
It is ridiculous to not back up your data. Server-side, client side, wherever you have "invaluable" data, it needs to be backed up. In more than one area. Anything you use that stores data should be backed up, and it should be the first and foremost thought in your mind when purchasing something in a digital world. The mindset of collecting data and not having a backup is outdated and foolish, as evidenced many, many times before.
I just don't understand when someone says "I lost all of my pictures form my drive x and now I'll never get them back". If you plan on storing it somewhere, plan on storing it somewhere else, too. It's common sense, no?
In the case of the Sidekick, there was no technical ability for an end user to backup items locally unless you used a third-party product and happened to be running Windows.
And since Danger/MS marketed the offsite data storage as one of its features, it was reasonable for an end user to expect the company to have sophisticated backup/redundancy in their archival systems.
I agree with everything you're saying... I just don't think it applies in this case. This is like blaming an iPhone customer for having their battery die and being unable to replace it themselves. The inability to do so, in large part, is by design by the original manufacturer.
Put as many "body" on a problem regardless of their qualifications is MS' specialty.
No professional IT person would even consider "sabotage" for their hard work and all the data. Clearly nobody wants to take responsibility for anything.
Letting marketing sets the product release date is simply stupid. You can only dodge the bullet so many times.
Wouldn't tape backups be kept off site? Also, there should be three generations of backups. Isn't that SOP?
that's what i thought, but the new cool thing is disk to disk backups. unless you have a second unit at another location it's very easy to lose years of backups
Listen, I really don't know soup about networks and clouds and SAN,
But really, I find it hard to believe that NOBODY at MS knew anything about how to work on, repair, examine, reboot, backup or whatever a product owned by MS. I mean, NOBODY knew what to do?
I don't believe it.
Look, these MS guys must be paid a buck or two to know their craft, and there wasn't a backroom with a small engineering team that no body wanted to belong to at least keeping the operation running? Sidekick on autopilot? Nobody, but nobody, would run a business like that. Not even Bumbler, or Balmer or whatever his eggheadedness is called. It is completely beyond belief.
And the laughing Pink Lady involved? Please, this thing reads like a soap opera now.
An inside unnamed source? Who knows of details of both problems?
It is so illogical, it can't buy it.
No disrespect. But it defies logic.
No it doesn't. The pretty clear point in the article is that MS bought Danger for it's people or name or customers or something that MS thought would provide it a shortcut. MS, as usual, wasn't interested in learning from the actual solution that someone else built from the ground-up. MS wasn't interested in the details and wasn't interested in maintaining it or letting it inform what they were doing within other groups at MS.
So, no, it is very likely that no-one at MS knew their stuff on this. Oracle is one of MS' arch enemies. MS arrogance says that everything they do is better and that when they take over something that uses a competing tech, they replace it with an MS tech. That is what they do. That's what they did with Sun systems (also in the article). So, yes, "stuck on autopilot". MS didn't put the manpower or resources into that it needed; they were apparently just letting it tick over, hoping that it would take care of itself; and T-Mobile was led to believe otherwise.
The article says Danger folk were busy on fulfilling contractual obligations to customers (presumably customer support and applications as opposed to watching over the databases), and they were not consulted by MS staff as MS went way down the wrong road. Totally believable. This does not defy logic one bit.
What utterly defies logic is that people still use MS products after it has been shown time after time how MS operates. No disrespect to you, but MS does deserve disrepect. MS is extremely sickening on many levels.
I don't feel anything but my ribs hurting from laughing so hard. Why would you get involved in a phone that didn't let you back up your data? Seriously, BitPIM couldn't do it? Databases in quasi-volatile memory? If it's written into flash, why would it reset on power loss? That is stupid.
i read in another story that Danger was started by a lot of ex-Apple people back in the day when you could only use Apple products with other Apple products and that's how they came up with this crazy system where nothing is stored on the phone
Apple's F up (I did listen moderator) is as bad as Microsoft's Side Kick F up.
No way are these equivalent. M$ unrecoverable DATA LOSS of a million users data by professional paid to protect that data vs. the rare data loss of local personal data by individual users who ignore warnings to backup before installing a new OS and somehow choose to first startup from a Guest Account.
I hope they recover the data, but it doesn't matter, serious damage has been done to the credibility of MS Operations, no matter how you splice it.
I side with most folks on the issue of what really caused the problem, I don't see lack of foresight as the culprit to this set back. I see it as a confluence of events, people, and corporate culture that brought the house down. The time bomb was invisible...
OS X SL bug is definitely not on par with this catastrophy, stop trolling! If I'm an apple sheep cause I own the best technology products in the market - a few bugs here and there don't matter to me, better to have a few bugs in the best products, then a few bugs in mediocre products.
i read in another story that Danger was started by a lot of ex-Apple people back in the day when you could only use Apple products with other Apple products and that's how they came up with this crazy system where nothing is stored on the phone
Actually, it is unlikely that it was feasible at the time that the Sidekick was developed to get that kind of storage into a phone. Ironically, Apple is the one that got the capacity into the phone. They leveraged their iPod experience to dramatically increase capacity.
From today's perspective, the concept behind Danger seems ludicrous. But within the limitations of the hardware, it was a workable concept. At least until MS got involved... Today, we can have local storage in the handset; so it IS crazy to trust the cloud completely.
Yes, I have ignored that tekstud guy. This guy too.
I don't understand why people that are not great fans of Apple come here. I don't go to any Microsoft themed websites to give their boards a hard time. Oh well.
Hi Dan, really appreciate the work you do on these stories.
Had to reference your article in a recent complaint I made to the BBC about persistent anti-Apple / pro-MS bias. The lead tech story this afternoon on the Beeb's news website is about the Snow Leopard guest user data loss ("Users of the new Apple operating system Snow Leopard are experiencing massive data losses when logging into their machines under a guest account..."). Strangely enough, a search for "sidekick" on the Beeb only gives this story and one other, where the Sidekick outage is described as a "glitch".
Anyone with time on their hands please complain to the Beeb - it's not the first time they've exaggerated Apple's failings whilst hiding MS's heinous crimes...
Hi Dan, really appreciate the work you do on these stories.
Had to reference your article in a recent complaint I made to the BBC about persistent anti-Apple / pro-MS bias. The lead tech story this afternoon on the Beeb's news website is about the Snow Leopard guest user data loss ("Users of the new Apple operating system Snow Leopard are experiencing massive data losses when logging into their machines under a guest account..."). Strangely enough, a search for "sidekick" on the Beeb only gives this story and one other, where the Sidekick outage is described as a "glitch".
Anyone with time on their hands please complain to the Beeb - it's not the first time they've exaggerated Apple's failings whilst hiding MS's heinous crimes...
The Head of Microsoft UK is ex. BBC.
Anyway.
Back to the story: if it was sabotage, how can this be reconciled with reports of users data starting to come back?
This is just flat out a wrong use of the term dogfooding.
Dogfooding means using your own code to do what it's designed to do, as opposed to relying on external users. For example, if you're writing a web server, dogfooding means using it to host your blog. If you're writing a word processor, it means using that word processor to write all your correspondence. It has nothing to do with eradicating acquired technology.
blue_sky is correct. Dogfooding has a well established meaning in tech circles, and the sense in which this article used the term is certainly not it.
If anything, dogfooding is complimentary, not pejorative. It's the very opposite of the outraged software user asking whether the developers had even bothered to use their own crappy software.
Comments
At least Microsoft owned up to it on day 1 and T-Mobile stopped selling the problem.
Can you provide a link to where Microsoft "owned up?" Didn't think so....
This is just flat out a wrong use of the term dogfooding.
Dogfooding means using your own code to do what it's designed to do, as opposed to relying on external users. For example, if you're writing a web server, dogfooding means using it to host your blog. If you're writing a word processor, it means using that word processor to write all your correspondence. It has nothing to do with eradicating acquired technology.
English words, esp. vernacular, may have multiple meanings.
Take the word: f*ck.
The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that "someone with access to the servers at the datacenter must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself)."
Wouldn't tape backups be kept off site? Also, there should be three generations of backups. Isn't that SOP?
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.
The modern penchant for dumb conspiracy theories ("hey, what if the CIA killed Neda Agha Soltan? What if the jews were behind 911?") ? this is why so many people have no need of lead poisoning to be brain damaged. They already have whatifblahblahsomenonsense disease!
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.
Apple's problem was from a handful of users and no common reason. Microsoft's problem effected EVERY sidekick user. Small difference.
Apple users most likely have a backup, Time Machine, and if you were not backing up... Your own damn fault.
Microsoft MAKES backup software for the SERVER OS it was residing on. They had no backup, their damn fault.
That's the way I see it.
...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.
...sigh - back to work.
Nice...
But they are fun.
It is ridiculous to not back up your data. Server-side, client side, wherever you have "invaluable" data, it needs to be backed up. In more than one area. Anything you use that stores data should be backed up, and it should be the first and foremost thought in your mind when purchasing something in a digital world. The mindset of collecting data and not having a backup is outdated and foolish, as evidenced many, many times before.
I just don't understand when someone says "I lost all of my pictures form my drive x and now I'll never get them back". If you plan on storing it somewhere, plan on storing it somewhere else, too. It's common sense, no?
In the case of the Sidekick, there was no technical ability for an end user to backup items locally unless you used a third-party product and happened to be running Windows.
And since Danger/MS marketed the offsite data storage as one of its features, it was reasonable for an end user to expect the company to have sophisticated backup/redundancy in their archival systems.
I agree with everything you're saying... I just don't think it applies in this case. This is like blaming an iPhone customer for having their battery die and being unable to replace it themselves. The inability to do so, in large part, is by design by the original manufacturer.
No professional IT person would even consider "sabotage" for their hard work and all the data. Clearly nobody wants to take responsibility for anything.
Letting marketing sets the product release date is simply stupid. You can only dodge the bullet so many times.
Wouldn't tape backups be kept off site? Also, there should be three generations of backups. Isn't that SOP?
that's what i thought, but the new cool thing is disk to disk backups. unless you have a second unit at another location it's very easy to lose years of backups
Listen, I really don't know soup about networks and clouds and SAN,
But really, I find it hard to believe that NOBODY at MS knew anything about how to work on, repair, examine, reboot, backup or whatever a product owned by MS. I mean, NOBODY knew what to do?
I don't believe it.
Look, these MS guys must be paid a buck or two to know their craft, and there wasn't a backroom with a small engineering team that no body wanted to belong to at least keeping the operation running? Sidekick on autopilot? Nobody, but nobody, would run a business like that. Not even Bumbler, or Balmer or whatever his eggheadedness is called. It is completely beyond belief.
And the laughing Pink Lady involved? Please, this thing reads like a soap opera now.
An inside unnamed source? Who knows of details of both problems?
It is so illogical, it can't buy it.
No disrespect. But it defies logic.
No it doesn't. The pretty clear point in the article is that MS bought Danger for it's people or name or customers or something that MS thought would provide it a shortcut. MS, as usual, wasn't interested in learning from the actual solution that someone else built from the ground-up. MS wasn't interested in the details and wasn't interested in maintaining it or letting it inform what they were doing within other groups at MS.
So, no, it is very likely that no-one at MS knew their stuff on this. Oracle is one of MS' arch enemies. MS arrogance says that everything they do is better and that when they take over something that uses a competing tech, they replace it with an MS tech. That is what they do. That's what they did with Sun systems (also in the article). So, yes, "stuck on autopilot". MS didn't put the manpower or resources into that it needed; they were apparently just letting it tick over, hoping that it would take care of itself; and T-Mobile was led to believe otherwise.
The article says Danger folk were busy on fulfilling contractual obligations to customers (presumably customer support and applications as opposed to watching over the databases), and they were not consulted by MS staff as MS went way down the wrong road. Totally believable. This does not defy logic one bit.
What utterly defies logic is that people still use MS products after it has been shown time after time how MS operates. No disrespect to you, but MS does deserve disrepect. MS is extremely sickening on many levels.
I don't feel anything but my ribs hurting from laughing so hard. Why would you get involved in a phone that didn't let you back up your data? Seriously, BitPIM couldn't do it? Databases in quasi-volatile memory? If it's written into flash, why would it reset on power loss? That is stupid.
i read in another story that Danger was started by a lot of ex-Apple people back in the day when you could only use Apple products with other Apple products and that's how they came up with this crazy system where nothing is stored on the phone
Apple's F up (I did listen moderator) is as bad as Microsoft's Side Kick F up.
No way are these equivalent. M$ unrecoverable DATA LOSS of a million users data by professional paid to protect that data vs. the rare data loss of local personal data by individual users who ignore warnings to backup before installing a new OS and somehow choose to first startup from a Guest Account.
I side with most folks on the issue of what really caused the problem, I don't see lack of foresight as the culprit to this set back. I see it as a confluence of events, people, and corporate culture that brought the house down. The time bomb was invisible...
OS X SL bug is definitely not on par with this catastrophy, stop trolling! If I'm an apple sheep cause I own the best technology products in the market - a few bugs here and there don't matter to me, better to have a few bugs in the best products, then a few bugs in mediocre products.
i read in another story that Danger was started by a lot of ex-Apple people back in the day when you could only use Apple products with other Apple products and that's how they came up with this crazy system where nothing is stored on the phone
Actually, it is unlikely that it was feasible at the time that the Sidekick was developed to get that kind of storage into a phone. Ironically, Apple is the one that got the capacity into the phone. They leveraged their iPod experience to dramatically increase capacity.
From today's perspective, the concept behind Danger seems ludicrous. But within the limitations of the hardware, it was a workable concept. At least until MS got involved... Today, we can have local storage in the handset; so it IS crazy to trust the cloud completely.
Hey what does this ignore button d...
Yes, I have ignored that tekstud guy. This guy too.
I don't understand why people that are not great fans of Apple come here. I don't go to any Microsoft themed websites to give their boards a hard time. Oh well.
Gabe
Had to reference your article in a recent complaint I made to the BBC about persistent anti-Apple / pro-MS bias. The lead tech story this afternoon on the Beeb's news website is about the Snow Leopard guest user data loss ("Users of the new Apple operating system Snow Leopard are experiencing massive data losses when logging into their machines under a guest account..."). Strangely enough, a search for "sidekick" on the Beeb only gives this story and one other, where the Sidekick outage is described as a "glitch".
Anyone with time on their hands please complain to the Beeb - it's not the first time they've exaggerated Apple's failings whilst hiding MS's heinous crimes...
Hi Dan, really appreciate the work you do on these stories.
Had to reference your article in a recent complaint I made to the BBC about persistent anti-Apple / pro-MS bias. The lead tech story this afternoon on the Beeb's news website is about the Snow Leopard guest user data loss ("Users of the new Apple operating system Snow Leopard are experiencing massive data losses when logging into their machines under a guest account..."). Strangely enough, a search for "sidekick" on the Beeb only gives this story and one other, where the Sidekick outage is described as a "glitch".
Anyone with time on their hands please complain to the Beeb - it's not the first time they've exaggerated Apple's failings whilst hiding MS's heinous crimes...
The Head of Microsoft UK is ex. BBC.
Anyway.
Back to the story: if it was sabotage, how can this be reconciled with reports of users data starting to come back?
This is just flat out a wrong use of the term dogfooding.
Dogfooding means using your own code to do what it's designed to do, as opposed to relying on external users. For example, if you're writing a web server, dogfooding means using it to host your blog. If you're writing a word processor, it means using that word processor to write all your correspondence. It has nothing to do with eradicating acquired technology.
blue_sky is correct. Dogfooding has a well established meaning in tech circles, and the sense in which this article used the term is certainly not it.
If anything, dogfooding is complimentary, not pejorative. It's the very opposite of the outraged software user asking whether the developers had even bothered to use their own crappy software.