From AppleInsider | Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage:

"On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with 'the cloud" [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac," a source explained.

'Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn't try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up." [emph mine -R]


So first, I guess we can say not only did MS screw Sidekick owners, so did the Danger folk that created a system without adequate backups. Ever since I started working with databases, I've said, "If you don't have your data three places, you don't have it at all." The iPhone apparently has this -- your home computer, the cloud (potentially), and your iPhone. Only a complete dope would have a cloud system where you could lose more than an hour's worth of data.

Honestly, what's happened to Microsoft? Can we directly connect this to Gates leaving? This, the Pink fiasco, the Xbox 360 build issues, Windows Vista (which wasn't that bad an OS, imo, but has serious flaws. "I know/worked with Win2k. You, sir, are no Windows 2000."), the .NET mess whose core really doesn't improve on the techs that came before it in any impressive way (no matter how much I like C#)... who is driving their bus?

I've thought for a while that Gmail was going to lose, say, three emails from 5% of their customers' accounts, and as people slowly discovered it, they were going to go ballistic. Never did I figure some cloud provider would screw up this badly. And if someone did, I would have expected Apple to do it, as they seem sometimes seem to be doing software dev on a shoestring and without the resources needed to match, well... it used to be "to match Microsoft," but I guess the king is dying a slow, painful death.

(The latest OS on a shoestring move... (Appleinsider.com):

Since Mac OS X 10.6 launched in late August, numerous reports online have detailed the issue, which is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account on a Snow Leopard machine. Upon logging back in to their regular account, users will find that it has been wiped of all data.


How does Apple get away with this crap? Microsoft has had some security issues, but they usually only hit those who weren't careful with their computers. The SQL Server worm sucked, but even then those that got hit hardest weren't particularly sharp developers -- or at least not deliberate ones. This Snow Leopard account erasure bug strikes without any warning. You could have a computer unattached to the Internet and lose everything. And Apple doesn't have a quick fix released two months later?

Shoe, meet string.)

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