Well, it’s almost the end of the year, so in every industry it’ll be Lists and Resolutions for a while now…

The constant dross is on the goggle-box, designed either to make you conform, or simply to confirm that 99% of viewers are brain-dead like…

• 100 most unappaling songs ever
• 100 mind-numbing sports personalities
• 100 most repeated comedy moments
• 100 innuendos from a-n-other gay icon
• 100 worst farts left in a lift
• 100 ways to kill yourself over a list

etc.

Now normally I have enough to-do lists of my own to worry about, and that kind of cr@p gets well avoided, however the annual round-up of business c*ck-ups from Fortune magazine does at least hold some elements of humour… And CNN have kindly stuck it online for those of you who don’t normally read mags - the ones with *those* pictures in doesn’t really count as reading now does it - no matter how good the articles

#16

While working on an article about Microsoft, Wired contributing editor (and former Fortune writer) Fred Vogelstein receives a 13-page dossier about himself, describing him as “tricky” and his stories as “sensational.” The document, prepared by the company’s public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, as background for Microsoft executives, was sent inadvertently to the writer

Quoted from CNN/Fortune Magazie

Fortune and The Business are well worth the ~£3/issue - go on, skip a starbucks to buy a copy and get some knowledge inside you, rather than brown slop that tastes like tarmac.

#3 Serverbeach

During a storm a power feed failure lead to the ServerBeach datacentre to switch onto generator power.
Sadly at SB the generators didn’t cover the aircon units, just the servers.
Internal temperatures quickly soared to 60+ degrees in the DC, meaning everything had to be immediately shut down to save the building catching fire.

Time for a design rethink lads ?

#2 Rackspace

Rackspace gets a lot of business out of their ficticious claims of 100% uptime, yet regularly suffer outages (as do all hosts).
In one peculiar incident a truck drove into their transformers, causing everything to switch to generators (like Serverbeach)
The RS back-up generators unfortunately lacked the proper cooling needed to sustain the power creation and so were pulled offline, taking all the websites with them.

The fanatics on the live-chat tried to lie about it, but the news was already public knowledge

#1 DreamHost

No list of DC fvckups could be complete without the multiple outages at DH - and my personal fave of 2007 the datacentre is on fire.
Apparently after a power problem, DH switched to generators which then caught fire. This tends to mean power stops
Servers start to go down, email stops, websites vanish - and not just a few - a serious number of customers found themselves without their hosting in the fire-prone DC, leading to several hundred angry clients posting negative feedback on the DH-Blog

Does no-one in the US actually *TEST* generators ?

In anticipation of the major marketing machine and hype engine gearing up for next years Windows 2008 launch, MickeyMouseSoft
have announced a plethora of versions and licences designed entirely to confuse you …

There will be ELEVEN versions of W2k8-Server

1. Standard 32bit
2. Standard 64bit
3. Standard 64bit with Hyper-V support
4. Enterprise 32bit
5. Enterprise 64bit
6. Enterprise 64bit with Hyper-V support
7. Datacenter 32bit
8. Datacenter 64bit
9. Datacenter 64bit with Hyper-V support
10. Web 32bit
11. Database 64bit

The Hyper-V support is for virtualisation technologies, and is already a confusing area for licencing - to run a few windows VM’s on a Dual-Quadcore server currently needs about £450/month of Win2K3 licences - one per cpu, one per VM per core - so to run 3 VM’s each able to access all 8 cores requires a total of 26 licences @ £15/month each !!!

Microsoft also released the pricing list for the retail box versions, mostly averaging £2,500 a licence - watch out for the TV ads explaining how i’ll cure colonic cancer, be so easy even a feaus will be able to use it, and save you so much money over better open-source solutions that just by queuing up on launch day for 22 hours in he rain outside PC-Grotto, you’ll earn more money Donald Trump has ever seen…