Feeding The Machine » Epic Fail

What does that cloud look like to you?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:24:00 +0000

So, the Internet has been full of people from all sides talking about what I’m beginning to think of as the most ironic IT failure ever. I mean really, would you trust your data to a company called “Danger”?

For those not paying attention, last week someone attempted to do some work on the servers that hold the data of every T-Mobile Sidekick customer. That person or persons really dropped the ball, and all that data is gone, possibly for good. This is clearly a pretty big deal. Lots of questions are being asked, one of the more amusing ones being, “Who is really responsible? T-Mobile or Danger / Microsoft?”. That should be entertaining to watch shake out. A lot of people are also arguing over whether or not calling this a “Cloud failure”, as in “Cloud Computing” as in “The Cloud” that everyone is supposed to be buying into, is fair or not.

The opponents to this view are saying that the infrastructure in question was not a cloud infrastructure, so this is not a cloud failure, but simply a very visible normal IT failure. And technically, they’re right. But guess what? That doesn’t matter. This feels like a cloud failure. The service is the model of a cloud application. I have my device “here”, but all my data, all the stuff I really care about is “out there”. Where supposedly it is getting taken good care of. Not the case this time.

I really feel for the people who are investing a lot of time and effort into getting cloud computing into the mainstream. Seeing this labeled a cloud failure must be infuriating. Because it’s not. But very few people, especially tech news people looking for headlines, are going to care about that. The Sidekick model is undeniably a “cloud” model, even if it’s got normal IT guts. Maybe that is why this is a cloud failure. It’s not a failure of a cloud computing infrastructure, but a design failure where a cloud application was run on a non-cloud infrastructure?

In any case, the whole cloud concept just got a big black eye, deserved or not, and it’s going to take a lot of work to shake it off. Particularly in the minds of the people who matter most, the non-techies who ultimately pay the bills.

Now that’s a good deal!

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:26:00 +0000

I got a promotional email from Lenovo today, and being the unashamed Thinkpad lover I am I went to their site to check out the deals. After poking around a bit, I found this:

That’s right, according to this they will pay me $111.00 to take a SL500 off their hands. Woohoo!

Upon further digging it became clear that someone just botched the config for that system and got it listed with no components at all. Every category said “NA” and had no specs at all. The price quickly jumped up to normal levels once you started customizing and added, you know, actual parts to the machine. Too bad, I was gonna order a baker’s dozen…

Oh noes

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:15:00 +0000

(08:04:15 AM) qhartman: ugh
(08:04:18 AM) qhartman: I feel so dirty
(08:04:40 AM) qhartman: I finally buckled and signed up for facebook and myspace accounts
(08:04:57 AM) qhartman: My only consolation is that I had to do it to test stuff at work
(08:05:02 AM) qhartman: but still
(08:05:08 AM) qhartman: *unclean*
(08:05:23 AM) ***qhartman keeps washing, but the blood just won’t come off

And People Wonder…

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:51:00 +0000

…why I’ve become ashamed to be American. Look at this. I suppose the upside is that at least they’re trying to codify what has been the de-facto practice for the last 7-odd years. How has our society fallen so far that something like this can even be entertained?

Shoot me in the face

Fri, 23 May 2008 04:52:00 +0000

So, I got an HP 2133 mini-laptop from work. Very cool little machine. Well, after a couple weeks, the battery died. Totally failed. After a week running around with HP support, they replaced the whole thing, and even gave me a substantially upgraded model. Great, right? Well, it started acting funny today. I initially blew it off as just Vista BS since I had not yet gotten Ubuntu onto it. No such luck. The problem really felt like a hard disk problem so I ran a diagnostic on it. Yup, dead drive. I can’t really blame either problem on HP, but this is seriously getting ridiculous.