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April 22, 2011
 

Skynet not to blame for AWS fail

Skynet

Great example of humor being used in customer service/experience communications. 

While I'm sure Quora, Foursquare et al didn't think the outage at Amazon was all that funny, Amazon is known for being one of the most reliable web/cloud services providers in the world. This outage was the exception, not the rule. As long as this outage doesn't foretell a more serious, long-term degradation of reliability, a little humor can sometimes go a long way toward warming customer relationships back up.
 
Amazon has officially denied that the recent outage of its EC2 and Elastic Block Storage cloud platforms was the result of an attack from Cyberdyne Systems' Skynet sentient computer system, declaring humanity safe after all. Yesterday's outage, which took down the image storage services for a raft of major websites including question-and-answer site Quora, location-based social network Foursquare, and Twitter app Hootsuite, was noted by some to come on the day that Terminator TV spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles claimed would herald the start of Skynet's war against humanity. 

via

Filed under  //   Amazon   customer service   humor   tech  

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August 27, 2010
 

Asteroids!

Beautiful visualization of asteroid discoveries in the past 30 years. Watch the video and be amazed that we haven't had to send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck into space yet. 

via FlowingData

Filed under  //   info-viz   science   space   tech  

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April 18, 2010
 

A room with any view

I'm sure the cool-factor of this would wear a little thin over time, but it's still cool. The aquarium view looks pretty impressive. 

Some other thoughts on this:
  • All you'd need was a web-cam uplink and this could serve as a pseudo x-ray view getting you to the view you want. i.e even if your real window faced the wall of another building across an alley, if there were a camera on the other side of that building that shot live footage of the scenic bay it faced, you could just pipe that in. Even if there were 27 buildings between you and the scenic overlook, all you need is that one camera on the one building that does have the view. 
  • Along those lines, I'm sure it won't be long before you could pipe in live feeds from San Fran, the aquarium, the Taj Mahal. It would take more than one camera to generate this effect (or a fish-eye maybe?), but these several video streams would just need to be stitched together Photosynth-style. The interactivity would be a great replica for the real thing. 
Now we can all have photo-realistic rooms with views. Any view.

via core77

Filed under  //   tech   winscape  

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