Doomsday Scenario Archive

  • PSA: iPhone 4’s FaceTime won’t use your voice minutes

    PSA: iPhone 4’s FaceTime won’t use your voice minutes

    Posted on June 21, 2010 | No Comments
    We can't even imagine the uproar that AT&T and Apple would be dealing with if FaceTime calls -- which travel over WiFi alone -- siphoned minutes out of your cell plan's voice bucket, but fortunately, that's a doomsday scenario we'll never need to worry about because it's now been confirmed that they're totally minute-free. What's more, when you start by initiating a voice call, it ends as soon as you switch from voice to FaceTime -- so you won't be charged for the portion of the call that's conducted over FaceTime in that case, either. Of course, as long as FaceTime is an iPhone 4 exclusive, it's going to be pretty limited in scope -- but once other vendors start getting in on the open standard (if "standard" is an appropriate term here) it'll get a lot juicier, we suspect.

    PSA: iPhone 4's FaceTime won't use your voice minutes originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Is the Sun about to destroy every single piece of electronics you own?

    Is the Sun about to destroy every single piece of electronics you own?

    Posted on June 7, 2010 | No Comments
    We, and by "we" I mean all life on Planet Earth, owe our very existence to the Sun. It's nothing more than a typical star, really, but without it, this planet would be as barren as the day is long. (CG: Your home for old-timey phrases.) With that in mind, here's what could become a pretty important story as we move forward. NASA now believes that, for much of the modern era, the Sun has been, for lack of a better term, "asleep." What happens, then, to our electricity-based infrastructure when the Sun "wakes up"? The Solar Wind has already blown away the atmospheres of planets lacking a magnetosphere, so what else does the Sun have up its sleeve?

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  • It’s all well and good to demand secure electronic medical records, but when has your data ever been secure in the first place?

    It’s all well and good to demand secure electronic medical records, but when has your data ever been secure in the first place?

    Posted on March 24, 2010 | No Comments
    Pretty much spot-on, this. There's an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that argues that Americans should badger Congress and the president, asking them to hold off on doling out stimulus dollars to electronic medical record systems that don't have appropriate privacy safeguards in place. As it stands, electronic medial records aren't exactly sealed—insurance companies can peek at them, as can pharmaceutical companies. So, let's instead focus on creating an electronic medical record system that's as foolproof as possible. Slight issue: when is your data, medical or otherwise, ever truly secure?

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  • An asteroid almost smashed into Earth, and we only knew about it 15 hours before it happened

    An asteroid almost smashed into Earth, and we only knew about it 15 hours before it happened

    Posted on November 12, 2009 | No Comments
    Did you hear the news? An asteroid passed within 8,700 miles of the planet on Friday. The craziest thing is that scientists only knew about it 15 hours before it flew by. So if you have any confidence that this planet is safe from giant space objects smashing into the surface, possibly destroying all life in the process, well, think again.

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  • Sidekick failure rumors point fingers at outsourcing, lack of backups

    Sidekick failure rumors point fingers at outsourcing, lack of backups

    Posted on October 11, 2009 | No Comments

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    Backing up your personal PC to external media might still be a novel concept for some, but any IT manager fresh out of school can tell you that regularly backing up mission-critical servers -- and storing those backups in multiple physical locations -- isn't merely important, it's practically non-negotiable, and it only becomes that much more critical before undertaking hardware maintenance. Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger's doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which -- for reasons unknown -- fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way rarely seen in an age of well-defined, well-understood IT strategies.

    The coming weeks are going to be trying times for both Microsoft and T-Mobile, a sideline player in this carnage that ultimately still shoulders responsibility for taking users' cash month after month and keeping tabs on the robustness of its partners' workflows. We're betting that heads are going to roll at both of these companies, formal investigations are going to be waged, users are going to be compensated in big ways, lawsuits are going to be filed, and textbooks could very well be modified to make sure that lessons are learned for the next generation of college grads tasked with keeping clouds running. Why there weren't any backups -- even older ones -- that could've been used as a restore point is totally unclear, so we're hoping Microsoft has the stones to come clean for the benefit of an entire industry that wants to understand how to make sure this never happens again.

    Sidekick failure rumors point fingers at outsourcing, lack of backups originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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