ShadowRAM: November 27, 2006

"What's with the crooked 'E' that has been part of the official corporate logos of both Enron and Dell?"

Hmm. What's that crooked 'E' stand for, anyway? Earnings postponement?

Marketing pitches disguised as press releases are normally aggravating and get thrown out, but one that crossed our desks provided a chuckle. Ontrack Data Recovery, a Minneapolis company that restores data from damaged hard drives, put out its list of the "Top 10 Remarkable Data Loss Disasters" for the year.

Making the list were instances of hard drives being run over by a truck, someone's shampoo leaking over a hard drive in a carry-on bag during air travel and one instance of a banana being left on an external hard drive and leaking all over its internal circuitry. (Either that was one hot hard drive, or the banana was left in place a lot longer than we'd like to imagine.) This one, though, was a keeper:

"A university professor heard a squeaking noise from the drive of his new desktop computer. To solve the annoying problem, he opened the case and sprayed the inside of the drive with WD-40. Although successful at stopping the drive from squeaking, his actions also prevented the drive from booting up. Ontrack got the drive working again and recovered his data."

Sun followed the press conference announcing its GPLing of Java with a more unusual second press conference—this one hosted on Sun's virtual private island, in Second Life. Corporate meetings staffed by avatars are a tad different than those that take place in fleshspace. "The costumes and clothing, for one, are dramatically more interesting," reports analyst Jonathan Eunice. "Tim Bray still wears his hat everywhere, Simon Phipps seems particularly buff, and others try to balance revealing their inner tigresses whilst retaining a professional demeanor."

It turns out the digital realm has its limits, though. While hundreds attended Sun's traditional press conference and Webcast, its Second Life pavilion can only hold 63 avatars. With its GPL move, Sun dramatically carved out a fiefdom in the open-source community. Sounds like it's time for some similar land-grabbing in the metaverse.

Should this Second Life schtick really be named "Mid-Life," as in "midlife crisis," as in "What adult in the business world wants to communicate in a fake world with fake names and avatars besides someone having a midlife crisis?"

OK. Rant over.