“Hi, I’m a PC.” “Hi, I’m a Mac.”

Nope, not today. Steve and Bill were quite chummy on stage, but no parody of the mac commercials. Maybe someone told Bill that he might actually blue screen and then everyone would know Bill is not a real human. Instead if is Window BE (bill edition).

what’s the greatest misunderstanding about your relationship with each other? Steve: We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade. Nice Steve, Nice.

Steve and Bill married.. talk about dysfunctional family!

D5 — All Things Digital

Well, it never fails when you talk about how you like one service over another, the other service fails!

Apparently Vonage has encountered a serious services outage. Vonage is aware of the problem (as noted by logging into your dashboard — if you can):

At this time some customers are experiencing intermittent issues receiving incoming calls. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience in this matter and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Apparently around 2ish today the service went back down after coming up this morning.

You can follow the drama over at the Vonage Forum: No Dialtone!! Anybody else having this problem this morning?

Don’t we all love technology. Too bad this one is completely on Vonage side and not a “user config” error.

I love the message is putting out on incoming calls now:

The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this moment. Please try your call again later.

Please stand by……

UPDATE:

If you can get logged into Vonage dashboard you will now see:

We apologize for any inconvenience, but we are currently
upgrading to provide you with better and faster service.

Better and faster, how about just service in general today guys.

In a post Skype Increases Cost of Calls, Silently? at Chris site, he brings to the front the nice thing Skype is doing to its users.

Chris pointed out Stuart post over at SkypeJournal the entire nastiness in “Skype Raids its Customer Base“.

Pssst, don’t tell anyone (we aren’t — Skype) we are going to tack on a few cents to each Skype call and call it a “connection fee”. No one will notice, since everyone makes long duration calls right! NOT

I guess they figure, someone has to pick up the tab for paying those Oompa-Loompas* to make your connection.

As a Vonage backer these days, I feel two things:

1. Vonage better not pull this trick, good thing I am on the buffet plan.
2. I knew there was a reason I didn’t go with Skype and now I have another.

Skype folks, doesn’t this pretty much steam you glass?

The irony I find in this entire thing is summed up in:
A communication company… has done a very lousy job communicating with their customers! Imagine that?

Skype, I give you a F for today and no star for you and go to the back of the line.

*No, Oompa-Loompas do not work for Skype and none were injured in the creation of this article.

TGDaily has a nice article on all the buzz coming out of Intel and their Terascale project. 80 Processors on a single chip to produce 1.8 TeraFlops.

If you are a tech head or a hardware slut, you have to check out the article. This is not the future processor, but a prime example of processor level of “networked computers” all on a single wafer. Not that this actual chip will be our future, but this kind of design I can only imagine we will see more of. Interconnected processing units all interconnected for the ultimate benefit of the whole.

Intel squeezes 1.8 TFlops out of one processor

Hey can anyone think of a few similarities if you add some AI to these wafers!

Skynet
TitanNet
Self-Aware AI

We all laugh about these things (heck we make movies about them) but heck back in 2000 Billy Joy, Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems at the time. In Wired magazine article, stated “Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans a endangered species.”

How many more years does it take before this really does become a concern. Just something to ponder. I don’t think Sony’s Ibo is going to take over the kids, but when do we past that point of no return. Hmmmm

Ok, this is really open for comments here.. but after I noticed a UK article was now showing up on Reuters, it has caused a little concern in people and technology.

Obedient motorist crashes on satnav command

Are we this incapable of deciding whether little Johnny should jump (or in this case drive his car onto a railroad) off a bridge?

Or have the Germans become this reliant (and I only refer to Germans since this is what the article is referencing) that they can no longer even drive their car using their own brains?

Here is another article from Dec that seem to be providing proof of this navigation brain drain!

Crash, bang with satellite navigation

Does this concern anyone else? Has anyone else actually did what their nav system told them to do and it was really wrong?

I have followed the storage industry now for over 10 years. It has really evolved (in the enterprise realm) and even in the home market with NAS products. However, the limiting factor has always come back to the actual base product the actual drives.

Well Seagate has done it today. World fastest drive that is actually smaller and 30% more energy efficient. Now that is a change. Check out their press release:

Seagate Introduces First Small Form Factor 15K Enterprise Hard Drive – Savvio 15K – The World’s Fastest Drive

“The Savvio 15K drive’s unique combination of features including its 70 percent smaller size, lower power consumption (30 percent lower than any other 15K drive), industry’s fastest seek time and the industry’s highest reliability, make it the ideal storage solution for all server platforms.”

In large install bases this can really add up to a savings in the enterprise arena. Something HP has been chomping at since 2005. It only took a couple more years.

I would expect to see greater SAN products with greater densities with smaller physical and energy footprints to come out this year as a result. This could be a huge win for Seagate if the wish is really true!