web sounds:
Honey, I shrunk your data.
2009-10-13
Honey, I shrunk your data.
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I don't think we're in the food chain anymore, Dorothy."
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
T-Mobile has stopped sales of its Sidekick phones listing all
models on its website as Temporarily
Out of Stock in wake of a massive and, so far, unexplained
server failure.
Sidekick phones, produced by a subsidiary of Microsoft, are made to send e-mail and text messages quickly. The phones link to a service operated by Microsoft that maintains a backup of their owners’ data.
Microsoft’s servers failed on Oct. 2, cutting off Sidekick users from e-mail, Web browsing and most other services apart from voice calls and text messages.
Those services were restored over the next week. But in the process, data on the Sidekick server and its backup server became corrupted.
As
reported, someone else's data center may not always be the
best place to keep your calendar,
contacts, photographs and messages, if you do not have your own
back-up and your data is not in a
open format you can readily move.
Reuven Cohen
points out how such incidents such as this crash may
not be the end of cloud computing,
but point to the importance of being able to take your data
somewhere else:
This failure hits at the heart of why interoperability and data portability is so important. It comes down to bad things happen and I should have the ability to take the data that is mine if I choose to do so, easily.
Microsoft bought the Sidekick maker Danger last year as a
defensive move against Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry.
Several of Danger's original developers had been recruited by
Apple and co-founder Andy Rubin
joined Google as director of mobile platforms.