Falling Debris

Facebook users with female friends (and let's be honest, you probably don't have any) may have noticed a new trend sweeping their news feed, but possibly with no understanding of why. Thursday evening, status messages began appearing as just colors. Only women participated, leaving men stumped and left out in this fun game.

Long story short, it's the color of the bra they're wearing. It's a clever way to promote awareness of breast cancer, apparently originating from the Ann Arbor area. No definite explanation, just another mysterious chain-letter effect that will most likely vanish as quickly as it appeared.

What these clever ladies probably didn't consider is that they're flaunting the fact that they wear bras, bras that mastectomy patients probably don't need anymore. See, a common effect of having breast cancer is a mastectomy, or surgical removal of the breasts. In other words, these ladies, most of whom I'm sure have wonderful pairs of gravity defying sweater puppies, are flaunting their good health, all in the name of awareness for those less fortunate than them. Seems like a backwards way to spread awareness of breast cancer to me.

See, memes are a tricky thing. For one, the instructions directed women to send others private messages with the details, but just publish the appropriate color.

"Something fun is going on," the message reads. "Write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY women no men. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men wonder why the women have a color in their status.....LOL!"

Of course, the burning question is why I would care, one of the most heartless (we don't have an awareness month for that) people in the world short of Dick Cheney. Two simple reasons. My grandma is a survivor and mastectomy recepient. I don't think she keeps up with social networking and memes, but I have trouble believing that she'd feel supported by this demonstration. It doesn't help her, nor does it help any other breast cancer survivor. Come to think of it, Breast Cancer Awareness month... is October! Please, let's keep these awareness months in the right spot, lest we start observing Testicular Cancer Awareness month in... whenever that is (BTW, Prostate Cancer Awareness is September). Also, I believe that supporting awareness of only one type of cancer is preposterous. Cancer should be battled evenly and with equal effort. Men support awareness of breast cancer by volunteering impromptu screenings, even with little expectation for reciprocation. That said, women should leave Internet secrets to men, the ones who created them. We know how to keep things hidden online much longer (many women would do well to learn a lesson). Just give up on the meme business and stop trying to tease us with your bras. We've seen them and would rather see you without them.

For anyone who isn't a math whiz who balances their checkbook everyday, there's a free online service that will help you track your transactions and plan your budget. If you haven't yet already, say hello to Mint.

Mint.com is a website that will track your bank accounts, credit cards and other expenditures and graph them for your planning needs. This is where people get concerned.

"But, but, my bank information! I don't want anyone to have it! Is this site safe?"

Yes, of course it is. You don't actually provide the site with your bank information, just the login credentials to the bank's website. Even from most bank sites, you can't actually do much in the way of moving money, it's just an electronic check book. However, most people (including myself now, I'm a big boy!) have accounts and cards with multiple banking establishments. Mint will aggregate your information with all of them and provide you with a singular outlook on your income and spending.

Now why would anyone need that kind of reminder of how much they spend? It's simple. It's a visual checkbook that breaks down spending and income by categories and specific vendors. You can create rules that say certain transactions are certain categories, and fit them into your budget, while having a graph show how much of your budget you're using.

The biggest concern people are having is privacy. If it's a free service, how do they make money without just selling your data? The advertising is available through the optional links that show you how to save money or other types of investments. But it's all optional. If you don't want to look into types of investment, you won't see anything resembling an ad. Even with that, Mint has recently solved its own financial needs. Mint was purchased by Intuit, the makers of the Quicken software that many use to plan their taxes. Intuit already has an online Quicken service similar to Mint, but it seems that it favors the new service instead. Current users of Quicken Online will be migrated over to Mint, with no real change to the service in the near future. That said, the security that Mint uses is the same as other online banking, now with the credibility of a software company that many give their financial information to, anyway.

So there you have it. A free online financial service that visualizes your budgets, with just as much security as the online banking you already do, owned by a software company that millions already use. There's nothing to be afraid of, so you might as well try it out. If you don't believe me, check out Lifehacker's final review of it.

I've heard about these devices on various shows on the TWiT network, notably MacBreak Weekly, but I've finally investigated them buying one for myself. I'm now putting all of my stuff on a Drobo.

Drobo (Data Robotics) is a computer-independent RAID-in-a-box that has 4 2.5" SATA drive bays. It supports the use of 4x4TB drives, even though the current maximum is 2TB in a drive. Even so, 4x2TB (after the RAID math) gives you 5.5TB of usable "protected" space. Should a drive fail or the full volume require the smallest drive to be replaced with a larger one, the drive can be hot-swapped with a replacement and the volume will immediately begin to rebuild, with all the data still available. Rebuild time varies with volume size and how much data is actually on it, but it's still pretty impressive to know that

The box even has a small battery to finish write cycles, so a power outage won't kill the device before it has a chance to close a write. Not finishing a write cycle can leave your volume open and irretreivable when you power back on and is the most common failure effect from a power outage. It connects via USB to a single computer and mounts as a normal external hard drive. You set up the Drobo to be a certain maximum size, which is reported in the OS, regardless of how much physical space is currently available from the drives. To manage the device, use the Drobo Dashboard software, which doesn't do much, but it does accurately report usage and rebuild time.

The DroboPro is essentially the same, except it has 8 bays (supporting up to 8x4GB drives) and allowing for single-drive and dual-drive failure (which decreases the usable space). The integrated iSCSI-compatible network card replaces the DroboShare, but makes the overall product reach three times the cost of the Drobo, even with just twice the capacity. It's a much more expensive solution for serious enterprise use, but if it's just as useful as the Drobo, it's probably worth it.

You can pick up an empty Drobo off Amazon for pretty cheap, but for those looking for something in between, Drobo just recently announced two new products, the 5-bay Drobo S and 8-bay dual-ethernet DroboElite. They may seem expensive, especially compared to consumer NAS products, but these are truly all you need.

It was the most dramatic controversy to affected ratio event of the year, but thankfully it's now over. The T-Mobile Sidekick feature phone, made by Danger (which is owned by Microsoft now), experienced a huge data loss when the Danger servers crashed at HQ, taking client data with it. It's an unusual data relationship for mobile devices, especially non-smart phones. However, the phones copy all their saved data to the cloud for backup purposes, but for some reason, the cloud has priority in case of emergency (probably if the phone was blank, the cloud would restore). This means that the cloud restored the NOTHINGNESS on its drives onto the phones should the phones ever power off/on. the best case scenario was if users kept their phones alive as long as possible.

The cause? Between the phone's manufacturer and its recent owner, it's looking like a failure to accurately organize data infrastructure and identify possible points of failure in case of an emergency. After all, the whole fiasco affected all of 10 people. Some accusations are even pointing to some form of data sabotoge from the inside. Regardless, that didn't stop users from blaming the people they pay (T-Mobile) and filing a class action lawsuit. From left field, mobile device maker Peek offered their product to Sidekick owners for free as a way to get them off T-Mobile (even though you pay for the Peek service).

Within hours, users were reporting that their phones' data was gone, including contacts, messages and apps. All major blogs were talking about it, making obligatory 'Danger' references. After the fun was had at MS's expense, a small number of users were reporting that their data was returning. That's good, I guess, not that anyone was hoping to use this as an excuse to get an actual smartphone. Merely days later, Microsoft announced that "most, if not all" data had been restored to all devices. That's a pretty dramatic change from the earlier "all your data is gone" status. The reasoning behind MS's determination to restore service lies in the SLA that it acquired when it acquired Danger. Danger has a 99.5% uptime SLA with T-Mobile, and should uptime fall below that, the penalty is $700,000/day in T-Mobile's favor. That hefty fine certainly answers how T-Mobile was able to 'apologize' to its users by not only crediting them for a month of service, but also giving them a $100 'customer appreciation card' to be used however they wish with T-Mobile. How is this affected by the fact that people are getting their data back? Maybe they won't get that apology from T-Mobile after all, and maybe that class action suit won't fly in court. Only time will tell, but in the mean time, the rest of the world will be using modern phones.

It's been over a year since Blu-ray won the HD format war, but people still aren't biting. Many in the US who have HDTVs watch standard def broadcasts and DVDs because they don't care and/or don't see the difference. Or is it simply a perspective issue, since DVDs and Blu-ray are so similar.

There was an interesting episode of the TWiT podcast recently, where the panel debates why Blu-ray is still the red-headed step-child of home theater. Even though many are purchasing HDTVs, it's only because those are the only TVs to buy; their purchase has nothing to do with HD performance. These expensive devices are being used to view standard definition cable and DVDs because of an apathy toward superfluously high quality. As Robert Llewellen (Crichton of Red Dwarf fame) explained, Blu-ray isn't game changing. It didn't shift the paradigm that DVD did to VHS. After being amazed by the optical disc technology that required no rewinding and took up less space, the physically similar Blu-ray disc left much to be desired. To fully appreciate Blu-ray, both a high definition TV andsound system are required, making the entire experience a costly one.

If so many viewers aren't concerned with 1080 progressive lines of resolution, then maybe the next format shouldn't be concerned with quality and more with physical convenience. Anyone that has collected large amounts of media knows that it stacks up pretty fast. Hundreds of CDs, DVDs and other obsolete media have little resale value once the medium has been replaced and end up eating up space. Blu-rays are the exact same dimension as DVD - 12cm diameter, taking up almost exactly amount of space on a shelf, short of slimmer cases. Discs still need to be inserted into players and swapped for different content, all with the risk of irreparable damage to the media. Standard Blu-ray holds 25GB per layer and most discs have two layers (just like DVDs; 4.7GB per layer). The high quality of the video and audio (with multiple audio tracks), added with the supplemental features, usually utilizes most of this space.

Even though the music industry is well on its way to exclusive digital distribution, retail stores manage to find ways of selling digital music. Common examples are gift cards to online stores, just as iTunes and Napster, but some of these cards actually "purchase" specific albums or other collections of music. Similar forms of distribution are being investigated for feature length movies, but downloading that much data takes too long on standard US broadband (which pales in comparison to some EU and Asian markets).

The H.264 codec has become the standard in compressing video for online transmission. It's very efficient and is an open and easily supposed standard. A feature film of DVD quality (or better) could easily fit in under a gigabyte. With consumer flash drives easily reaching 16GB at an affordable price, multiple movies could be included at a "standard" quality, or a single movie at a higher quality. Some companies have recently announced plans to distribute films in this manner, but providing copyrighted material in such an easily shareable format will lead to equally inconvenient DRM scheme in the player. Disney has announced plans to test the waters of flash media movies in Japan, on microSD instead of USB drives. National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean are among the first titles to pilot the program.

No word yet on what people think about movies on flash media rather than downloadable content, but that may be just because most people don't care or understand the technology. Boiled down, the choice is now "all digital, no physical media, download on demand", or "physical media, instant playability, collectible".