Data Recovery in the Event of a Hard Drive Failure

I ran across this article on one of the blogs I frequent. This study tracked specific cell phone models for a year. The results are, well, let's just say I'm glad I didn't get a Blackberry. 

To Your Sucess, 

 Tim

Research group SquareTrade recently released the results of a massive cellphone study. They tracked 15,000 individual handsets over their first year of use, and they found some large discrepancies in reliability. The iPhone malfunction rate sat at a comfortable 5.6%. The Blackberry (in its various incarnations) jumped to 11.9%. But it's all better than the Palm Treo, which malfunctioned 16.2% of the time within the first year.
To be honest, none of these numbers are particularly good, and I have a feeling that there may be a confounding iPhone White Glove Effect—I keep that phone's glass screen in mind every time I put it in the pocket opposite my keys. (Ironically, iPhone users were found 3% more likely to accidentally damage their phones than their Blackberry/Palm counterparts.)
When projected to two years, the iPhone's failure rate jumps to 11% while Blackberries level to 14% and Treos reach a scary 21%. I guess it's a good thing we have those ridiculously binding contracts to bail us out after all. [SquareTrade via CNET]

According to some Internet news reports, McColo Corp., located in downton San Jose, California was shut down a few weeks ago when its two Internet backbone providers finally shut off their Internet backbone connection. McColo is a web hosting provider for many international organizations involved in spamming of everything from pornography to pharmaceuticals. 

The two backbone providers are Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric. It's unclear if the FBI will be pursuing charges against McColo for being partially responsible for the billions of spam messages sent. 

Reports from various Internet security agencies reported varying degrees of a drop in spam. One report showed an immediate 66% drop in unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and another report showed a decline from 40 spam messages/second down to 10/second. 

No matter what the decline actually was, any decline is good news. It's about time. 

To Your Success, 

 Tim

Finally, A Faster USB! For the first time in over 8 years, Universal Serial Bus, or USB for short, is finally getting an upgrade. The non-profit group formed by various manufacturers to set the standard is scheduled to announce the new USB 3.0 standard. 

The difference? About 10 times the speed. The new USB 3.0 standard supports a 10 fold increase in data transfer speeds versus its cousin, USB 2.0. In fact, that's faster than firewire, and could signal the beginning of the end to te firewire standard. USB truly started the plug and play revolution, and has been more widely accepted by computer users than firewire. 

How does this play into your business? Well, your employees won't be sitting around waiting on files to transfer to thumb drives. Which means increased employee productivity. For those of you who utilize external hard drives for backups of server data, now the backups will take considerably less time. This translates into a better chance of having a valid backup since it won't take all night to backup your company data. 

This, is truly good news for the computing industry. 

 To Your Success, 

 Tim

So you want out of your Sprint contract and you don't want to pay the early termination fee? Well, I ran across a post on how to get out of your contract now without paying the fee. It seems Sprint has added a 99 cent administrative fee increase per line will give you the ammo you need to say goodbye. 

Read all the details here. Just in time for Christmas. Now you can use the money you saved to buy that special someone a gift! 

 To Your Success, 

 Tim