A good friend of mine recently lost a rather good blog post due to a server issue (it was on a Linux box, so I’m not sure how that could ever happen ;^) and there wasn’t a backup.

In a moment of brilliance (or just a misfiring synapse) I suggested he do a Google search for his lost post and see if they had a cached version of it. And low and behold, they did, crisis averted. If I could come up with great ideas like this more often, having a job would be unnecessary :)

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
- Nathaniel Borenstein

“The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier.”
- Bill Gates

“In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.”
- John C. Dvorak

“After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.”
- John Pierce

“Programmer – an organism that turns coffee into software.”
- Unknown

I thought I would let them know they might try having a better selection of smart phones (sorry, 19 different flavors of Blackberry only count as one), letting customers know when more suitable plans/pricing is available and how about the ability to use unlocked, non-Verizon approved, phones.

But when I clicked on the survey link in the e-mail I got this:

No Survey for You!

I guess they really don’t want to know what I think they can do to improve…

This week Microsoft released two critical patches one for Internet Explorer and the other to fix code generated by Visual Studio. Since this is outside of their normal release cycle, it’s definitely time to patch your PC.

And while you are at it, surf on over to see if you’re running the latest Java and Adobe software. As Windows continues to make progress on the security front, hackers have been adapting by using vulnerabilities in Java, Acrobat and Flash; and they also use many others, like QuickTime, so it goes a long way to check that software you use is the latest release.

I guess Google doesn’t need the business since they are pretty much just printing money at this point.

At least someone finds it useful ;-)

1. The Network Sucks – Unless bandwidth is good and no one is running BitTorrent or the like problems will ensure. (VoIP anyone?)

2. There’s No Protection from Government Spooks – The government can get access to all of your data anytime. Do they even need a search warrant anymore?

3. Industrial Espionage is Easy – Depending on the vendor it may or may not be “easy”, but how many public companies and public institutions have been hacked in the last few years?

4. It’s Too Expensive – It’ll start cheap or free, but goes up from there. Anyone that has witnessed an SAP implementation knows this well.

5. It’s Not Mechanisable – People like shrink-wrap, cool graphics and shiny boxes. I suppose the electronics store could have a card to take to the register similar to buying Sudafed.

6. Users Have No Sense of Ownership – People like having things, like books, boxes, disks, etc. It’s just not the same printing a receipt from a website.

7. When Online Software Companies Go Under, So Does Your Software – And you are left with a unusable backup of your data; maybe thousands can be spent getting it converted. Where did the data go the XDrive.com was storing. I had data there, albeit just to test the service, and received no notice when they closed down.

8. Users Are Subservient to Terms-of-Service Agreements – Imagine getting shutout because you violated line 2419 of the service agreement, will you still be in business by the time it gets sorted out. What if a new uglier agreement comes along?

9. Users Have No Control Over Versioning – You get upgrades whether you like them or not. If they break your application or the way you use it, where are you in the support queue? I’m sure they’ll treat a small company the same as a multi-million dollar customer…

10. Potential for Gouging – Sort along the lines of number 4, but if they have you over a barrel and you don’t have the resources to switch to a new provider (or worse they are the only one who offers the service) then start coughing up more money.

Again, I don’t think SaaS and Cloud Computing is inherently bad, but it is something that needs strong consideration before putting all the company eggs in someone elses basket.

On the first airplane leaving SFO I was watching the spinning hourglass on the entertainment screen in the seat in front of me. The captain then told us the system was experiencing some issues and they would be rebooting it.

So they did, three times. I snapped a pic on the second reboot. It finally started working, but a number of the games were broken and unplayable, plus the media (read mp3 player) was all but useless, since I had to manually advance the playlist after each song finished. By the end of the flight, the music stopped playing altogether.

I only bring this up because everyone seems to gloat and post pictures when a Windows system has to reboot in public. My point being, there isn’t a perfect OS and there never will be as long as we humans do the programming. As soon as Skynet is active and creating the programs, it’ll be better for all of us ;-)

“Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.”
– Anonymous

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
– Isaac Asimov

 ”Science is supposedly the method by which we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. In computer science, we all are standing on each others’ feet.”
– G. Popek

“I sit looking at this damn computer screen all day long, day in and day out, week after week, and think: Man, if I could just find the ‘on’ switch…”  
– Zachary Good

Thanks to Guillaume for some of them.

Most of these companies have a full system backup running, but upon complete failure a restore will take a few hours minimum. One such outage and the cost of labor to pay an IT professional to restore a domain controller is about break-even, with an example price of $700+  for a Windows Server license and the cost of a cheap server or desktop. That of course doesn’t really cover the true cost; if you have a company of twenty-five employees sitting around waiting for the server to come back online, now you’re really talking money. With another domain controller present (with sufficient resources), the clients may never even notice the difference should a primary system fail.

Unfortunately, many small companies look at the short term cost of items rather than focusing on the immense cost of a prolonged outage or lost productivity with subpar equipment or dated technology. But in tough economic times many of these choices are made for them.