The Mandelbear's Musings

Lots of tasty link sausage this morning:

For the cloud skeptics and former Sidekick (l)users, a good opinion piece:

Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it's the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger's been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.

My real question is how much is your data worth? Not the cost of the data streams you pay each month, but how much value does your data have to you personally? Recently, when I visited a client, I was asked to check my laptop at the door and I was asked how much my computer was worth. The guard was somewhat surprised at my stated value of my system. "Is this computer really worth a two million dollars?" he asked. "No," I replied. However, the information on it is worth that and perhaps more to me. Could you re-create every document or email you've ever written? Re-acquire every song in your collection or re-take every photograph in your catalog. Perhaps you could, but even if so, at what cost and what effort?

For the furries reading this, a robotic tail. Here's another article.

For the filk videographers, the Zoom H2 is now available almost everywhere for $250. Must... not... click... buy... button...

For those of you who are worried that the publishing industry may go the way of the music industry, here's more to worry about. Probably 99% of my reading is on the web these days, so, yeah.

... And here's an article on file-sharing sites teaming up to promite indie films.

More links on the T-Mobile/Sidekick disaster.

This article on Engadget is probably the best of the lot -- it blames it on Microsoft outsourcing an upgrade to the storage-area network without making a backup first. You would think... And there may be another disaster in the making, if their $50 all-you-can-eat plan comes out and people who haven't learned from the Sidekick debacle (or know how to run rsync on their Android phones) pile on and suck up all their bandwidth.

And here's Gizmodo saying that, whatever you may have heard from T-Mobile, your data is probably G O N E.

Good luck.

From this post by tagryn, a cautionary tale of the of relying on third-parties to store your important files and email: When Google Owns You.

One of my coworkers had an equally bad experience with Netscape Calendar: one day it was just gone. Not only had they cancelled the service, but they'd deleted all the user data. They had been careful not to tell their customers of this plan, because they "didn't want anyone to complain."

I'd been contemplating switching some of my domains over to Google for email -- Dreamhost makes it easy to set that up. Maybe not.

Yeah, almost all of my websites are third-party-hosted now. But the hosts are nothing but a mirror for the various internal working directories. And they're going to stay that way. If I can figure out how to do that with some Google's services, I may consider using a few of them.