Technology

Last week, I noticed that my laptop’s fan didn’t seem to work and my computer was running much hotter than usual. I booted up into the Apple Hardware Test, and ran a test. It quickly gave me an error (4MOT/1/40000002: Exhaust-0) that essentially means, “Your fan is dead. And you might want to check on your logic board, too.”

Since my computer is under warranty, I brought it to an Apple store and let them deal with it. They confirmed that the fan wasn’t working and that I needed another one. They warned me that it could take up to 5 days before they were done with the repair. They weren’t sure if they would also need to replace the logic board, but they would go ahead and order both parts anyway.

It ended up being much less of a hassle than I expected it to be. All they needed to do was replace the fan so I got it back a couple days later. Everything has been working fine ever since!

Things get juicier and juicier, via AppleInsider, who apparently keeps up with Microsoft news (emphasis mine):

An act of sabotage “would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),” one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.

The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that “someone with access to the servers at the data center must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself).”

The tipster goes on to state that on the Microsoft side, they were clueless about Danger-related technologies. As such, the signs all point to a Danger (ex-)employee committing sabotage.

Well, this makes it more interesting. When it comes to a choice of Whimper vs Bang, I’d prefer to go with the Bang. I don’t want to have lost my data service access or all my contacts because someone tripped over a power cord, I want some massive drama along with it. I want the place to have burned down while suffering a Godzilla attack, that kind of thing.