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11/25/09
This is because they make great targets.
11/24/09
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11/17/09
Before I got the Sidekick, I'd only used regular cell phones with the number keys and wanted something better. The sidekick was my gateway smartphone to bigger and better. #sidekick
11/17/09
;-) #sidekick
11/17/09
11/17/09
I'd bet 90% of today's self-described "computer geeks" don't even know what is a TSR program.
I used Sidekick all the time, and heavily used it's editor (with Wordstar's commands) for dBASE III programming. #sidekick
11/18/09
11/17/09
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11/17/09
Why? They're user-friendly and have great support from various IP Relay providers.
[en.wikipedia.org]
"Access to direct TTY and Relay Operator communications has allowed the Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick and similar devices to, in many cases, replace the use of standard TTY/TDD machines, and its dominance is clearly illustrated by the evolution of its own sign in American Sign Language, made using both hands to mimic the opening of the rotating screen." #sidekick
11/17/09
10/20/09
It's an oddity how many IT folks preach about backups, disaster recovery, and the like yet walk back into their glass house every single day and fail to practice what they preach.
It doesn't just apply to backups either. Password expiration, weak passwords, bad permissions, one time fixes, and the rest seem to be common place. It's absolutely amazing how lazy IT folks can be when it comes to doing their own job.
10/20/09
And then the disaster hits, and you check your backups... oh, ooops. That 9-track tape you had your data on was failing silently. Ooops, the offsite data got overwritten because your software was buggy. Dang! That disaster recovery plan forgot to actually TEST the backup hardware...
The problem with backups and disaster recovery is that if ANYTHING goes wrong, AT ALL, and there's lots that can go wrong, you look completely incompetent for all that look, even if it was a good plan. Because there's no difference between "it SHOULD have worked but the vendor-provided backup solution had a minor bug which erased your data" and "there was no chance in hell your data was surviving, and those of us over in IT are laughing our asses off at you" to the end user. #tmobile
10/20/09
10/20/09
Why? Because backing up Petabytes is HARD. It takes a long, long time. Testing it takes even longer. If there's corruption in a backup, sometimes even an otherwise good testing routine can miss it. Sometimes, hot-swap hardware is tested and verified, but fails because the data is bad. Sometimes the hot-swap hardware is tested and verified, but fails because it wasn't used for so long, dust built up and caused a short.
And if ANYTHING goes wrong, at any step, you look like a fool. If you pronounce a firm 'recovery' deadline, and miss it because of an unforeseen problem, you look like a fool. Not to mention, on top of this, you have an expectation of staying within budget, and doing it right is EXPENSIVE, but not everybody can afford multiple redundant servers separated geographically, with multiple ISPs, redundant power supplies and power sources, extensive testing of the tape backups, et cetera. When the boss turns any one of those, and it results in downtime, YOU still look like the fool. The user is still out their data.
It's easy to say "they preach it, but don't follow it", but in reality, they preach it because they understand how very, very hard it is, and most people don't understand that.
Wow, that went long. Anyway, long story short: I don't work with backups, and dear god am I glad I don't... #tmobile
10/20/09
I don't question the difficulty because I've been there (not on that scale obviously), but that is what you're paid for and if you can't do the job correctly or have the balls to tell the bosses what more you need, you have no business being there. #tmobile
10/15/09
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10/14/09
So... assuming that was technically possible, part of the timebomb then looked and functioned like the backup software, but erased the tapes while reporting that it was backing up data, and did this far enough in advance that all of the sets of tapes were wiped?
Could happen... in theory... but it would take a hell of a lot of work and understanding of the systems they were working on - deep enough to send commands to the tape drive from an original program, or maybe run some console/invisible instance of the real backup program with instructions to silently wipe tapes, while the frontend displayed normal status.
...or they sat there themselves some time and wiped every tape manually - ideally from someone else's account or an admin/service account to defeat the audit logs.
I don't buy it though - that would be some unprecedented malice, risk, and orchestration to make it come together.
10/14/09