You apparently have never filed a FOIA request anywhere. Government is at least as secretive as private industry.
In this case, clearly the police department didn't want to expose things such as 'when' and 'where', just the 'what' and 'who'. Add those other two items, and the 'why' becomes more evident.
"...then lease that to whoever wants to provide service..."
FIXED
That's the kind of thinking that gets you into these constricted agreements.
Perhaps some building owners would like to contract for service. Around here (Phoenix), Qwest bundles DirecTV with DSL and POTS to entice us to jump ship and kiss cable goodbye. A complex could certainly negotiate a deal.
Of course, in Tempe, the municipal WiFi failed spectacularly. The provider didn't complete the network, couldn't bill subscribers, didn't answer the city government, and when they took over the provider took all the equipment they could and left town. Truly an epic FAIL. Chandler was having them build a network also, which predictably stopped when the outfit escaped Tempe.
Municipal systems are not always winners. But contracts always bring problems. Count on it.
"USA, EU, Australia and Russia are too busy sending tax dollars to the rich."
That's funny. Where's my mod points when I need them?
USA and the EU are too busy sending their citizens' wealth to their governments, to be redistributed to anyone with a hand out. The rich are victims also, but shed not a tear for them. It's the middle classes that are being hammered, and of course the poor who can least afford *any* taxes.
"Against such a threat... I think anything is justified."
Public condemnation and exposure is a tactic used by most groups, and particularly favored by those who support Washington Senate bill SB5688, which would institute civil unions in Washington state between persons without restriction on gender.
Somehow, when it comes to 'outing', it doesn't feel very good after all.
I personally believe the law permitting access to the signatures should stand. It was a petition, not a ballot. And you should at least have the courage to proclaim your convictions.
And presenting referenda proposed virtually in secret will lead to more than just increased fraud and abuse of the system. It will virtually invalidate the process.
One more reason I don't sign those well-meaning but misguided petitions that infest balloting places here in Arizona, and didn't when I lived in Maine, where the initiative is the favorite tool of the intense and driven minority that is convinced they are not merely right, but chosen as the singular instrument of justice on Earth. Such pleas are designed to take full advantage of our misinformation culture. A pox on them. Let them eat the same cake they baked.
It was not an oversight. At least call it what it is, misguided, an error, pure mistake, uninformed, oblivious to the facts, but it was NOT an oversight.
An oversight would have been adding an exemption and then leaving it out. And even that is incompetence.
Or perhaps miswording it. Still incompetence.
We let our government off the hook all too easily. They claim to be smart people doing the right thing, or at the very least well-meaning people doing what they see as the right thing.
And their actions have consequences. We shoudl be holding them to account. Even the bureaucrats.
Maybe especially the bureaucrats. No, all of them...
"The government has bailed out homeowners. It's bailed out big businesses. Why can't it also help students?"
Why not, indeed?
Besides the fact that we have no money left, didn't before we started, and have been borrowing all of this, why not help the students?
Well, will someone else please tell them? I'm tired of it. Thanks.
ps - My wife and I paid off her student loans. She had a higher interest rate.
pps - No one is bailing me out of my mortgage on my home which is worth about half what I paid for it in 2005. I owe about %60,000 more than it is worth right now. My property taxes have not gone down a penny, cause everyone else around here is in the same boat. I can't afford to go back to college right now... Loans or not.
ppps - We are not doing a great job of bailing out big business. I work for one, and took a 15% pay cut in April. And I'm thankful to have my job still. Graduates should be thankful if they get a job at all before 2011.
If I call T-Mobile about my G1 and complain that it doesn't actually delete emails that I delete, or that the maps sometimes don't show me where a business is actually located correctly, or that I inevitable have to wipe after an OTA release, I get any of several variations on '...it's not our software, sir'. Of course, I am directed to the forums, where I can bitch and moan, but still, after 4 major releases, POP email isn't actually deleted.
I call Google, and, no, wait, I have only forums and blogs to correspond with Google about this. The issue is known since launch, and still not fixed. Google has no statement about this because they don't even bother to acknowledge the issue 'officially'.
The Open Handset Alliance? Ha! That's funny!
Other releases? I have no idea if Cyanogen's release has a new email app, but I suspect it doesn't. Ditto for JF and the rest.
So holding up T-Mobile for this Sidekick fiasco will be equally pointless.
But, I suspect, TMO is seriously reconsidering selling Sidekicks. And Danger is probably begging them to not destroy their business.
And Microsoft will do just fine, no matter what.
This is the treatment you get when the big corps decide 'good enough' is good enough.
Now, will someone further explore why they would consider buying a Hitachi SAN system? I won't. Ever.
But the pushback against using RIM for your corporate services is interesting.
Imagine you're actually using your 'smartphone' for business. With BlackBerry and Google, you get backup of contacts, calendar, email, as well as Web access with Google. Reasonably good availability worldwide, certainly competitive with all but the very best corporate IT efforts.
With Apple?
Palm Pre is still too new to know how reliable it is.
Those Sidekick users who run their business on their phone now know how risky that really is. Suitable for the 18 Twitter crowd, I suppose.
Calling out RIM as a less-than-excellent choice for business phones is missing the mark, IMHO. If I had to depend on my phone for business, it would NOT be a Pre, iPhone, Sidekick, any WinMo model, or my G1. It would be a Curve or Bold, probably the Curve or maybe a similar model. They do get it done.
My G1 is too 'Android' for business reliance. But great fun as a personal phone - updates, wipes, tomfoolery with apps, way fun. I'm gonna root it, right after I study the process and set aside a Saturday afternoon. It really isn;t worth it, except for a curiosity jaunt.
Don't blame the UI designers. Blame whoever designed the display to leave out two digits.
It makes sense, in a way. After all, you rarely turn your oven much over 600 degrees, so a 4-digit display makes little sense. 5 digits? You cook what over 9,999 degrees?
From then on, all other decisions are compromised.
Sometimes, the interface is hamstrung by the device. The Therac-25 might also be such a case. Safety shutters and all...
Many corporations interact with their customers as if they (the customer) are a resource. In this scenario, the resource functions as the primary funding method for their operation. Stockholders for older corporations and *capitalists for younger or startup corporations.
Rather than view the process as devising goods and/or services that are offered to customers in exchange for funding to both repay the financing of the design and manufacture as well as ongoing expenses, some corporations experience the entire continuum of design/build/sell/repeat as if corporations are the whole point - that the corporation is what makes this all work.
Well, it doesn't. None of them do.
If we, the customers, chose to not buy certain types of products, the industries dependent on those products would fail. The classic buggy whip industry example being a good analogy, and portable radios being a current one. Hell, I do still have a little AM/FM radio, but it is now superceded by my Bluetooth headset adapter that includes an FM radio. AM? Not worth it to me. FM? Well, I used to rely on it more, but streaming to my cell phone works. I keep the AM/FM only because of disaster preparedness, and since batteries are finite, it will be a crank-up model. But enough of that. Portable radios as a market are pretty well shot.
And we do choose, though often we choose in response to stimuli - ads.
So when Apple decides to 'shun' independent labels in iTunes by charging them way too much money to be on the platform, they are choosing for us. Just like the grocery store that never has Durkee brand fried onion rings in the can around Thanksgiving, but has plenty of their store brand. Or automakers that no longer make much of a range of options available for their cars - you pretty much get one of 3 trim levels and option packages. Want A/C and a standard transmission? Hope they give you that option... Want steel wheels and leather seats? Sunroof and the smaller engine?
Apple has for a long, long time treated its customers as the resource that funds their intentions. Apple users pretty much get what Apple wants to give them, as ANY corporation does. But Apple has you captive - proprietary software, forced into proprietary hardware, with little real choice. Their insanely great design and above-average execution save the day. If iPods were built like most MP3 players, they would not be popular, battery issues aside.
So you get what you pay for, and you get what you choose.
Me?
I have a Toshiba Gigabeat S60 player, seriously flawed. A T-Mobile G1 phone, also flawed. That Motorola S705 is slamming, though. I just scored a Lenovo X41 tablet PC cheap, used, and better than many a netbook on the market today (IMHO, YMMV, etc). I'm pretty contrary.
But if I had to do it over, I would probably just get an iPod. No, wait, I hate iTunes, and the hassle of fighting a DRM'd solution. Windows Media Player is bad enough. And iTunes doesn't rip at 320kB, anything less is just not good enough for me. So I buy CDs and rip them to my taste. I even re-eq them sometimes to make up for my other and preferred headset, the Backbeat 903. And the G-1's weak player.
If you're just into buying it on daddy's credit card, plugging it in, giving up a modest amount of personal data, and paying as much for 10 songs as you would for the whole CD and avoiding having to skip over 3/4 of the songs cause they just suck, well iPod is for you.
Just don't feel too offended when I can't bear to hear your complaints about being taken advantage of by corporations.
ps- We do need to strip corporations of the individual rights they have been granted. They are not people.
"The Pre syncs contact/calendar/etc. data with several popular online services (and Microsoft Exchange)."
- Assuming you set those up...
"It also performs an automatic daily backup (turned on by default) to Palm's servers."
- We now know to trust the vendor's servers as far as we can throw them. History is no guide.
"All of your important data is stored in 3 places. On the device, on the service provider, and on Palm's servers."
Uh, 'on the device' is not a backup. That's the 'data'. Make that 2 places, more if you use multiple online services/Exchange.
"(As an added precaution, I like to backup my Google contacts directly from Google on a monthly basis)."
I save my POP mail to Google and Yahoo! daily or more often. Contacts ditto. I actually have 4 email accounts with copies of 3 spread around. I also export from my Outlook client at home, andthen distribute the CD ISOs around to three different places, all encrypted with the name of the file as the hint. I copy my SMS into Gmail, and from there it goes to 2 other servers, and is part of the Outlook export.
I have email so old I cannot really read it in anything but a text editor. Elm barfs on some of the old MBox stuff, which is probably just corrupted, and the old Eudora stuff is pretty much done for I think. I lost some AOL mail, but that was mostly noise and spam anyways.
Oh, and up to 2005 I saved spam. I have a great collection. Stuff you would have to pay for nowadays:)
After 1.6 (Donut) all Search activities caused an aCore force close - even searching within browser, the widget, or an app that supported global search. The TMO rep I spoke with confirmed it also affected his device.
After 1.5 (Cupcake) Google Maps force closed, the udpated Maps also did. Power Manager Free force closed as did many other apps, and because of these apps even uninstalling them did not resolve the issues. After a week of deathly slow performance and losing >35MB of space that could only be reclaimed by uninstall/reinstall of several apps DAILY, a wipe fixed everything. Three TMO reps said wipes should be expected. My version of akNotepad could not save to the Sd card, and I lost all notes. And I lost all SMS messages and call logs.
RC33 also caused me a wipe, Power Manager had to be reinstalled but still force closed.
You may have escaped, but I'm just sharing the reality of my experience.
I'm a TMO subscriber, and I love them, so this is painful. And my sister-in-law is a longtime Sidekick user, so she's in a special agony.
But T-Mobile is in a potentially no-win situation. They obviously have to believe Danger/Microsoft that they have good processes to avoid and recover from such failures. They didn't, and now TMO is probably going to take the hit. On one hand, they should - if the service is important, take responsibility and ensure management. On the other hand, they have good assurances, so hey, how much is enough?
BlackBerry users, you should take note. Rim differs only in scale. Ahd, you hope, depth of resilience. Not that RIM hasn't had outages, though not total failure yet.
TMO may have to tell their Sidekick users to be prepared for the inevitable restore, and of course, work with Danger/Microsoft to re-establish service (even though they don't provide service, D/M does), and of course some money compensation no matter how inadequate.
And maybe offer them shiny new myTouch3Gs to give the disillusioned Sidekick users an option with a marginally better track record.
No, wait, that isn't right. I've had to wipe my G1 every update, and some apps don't have a way to save data. They just don't.
I'm glad I never got on the Sidekick train, but I have no hope that this won't some day hit me. Do you suppose the next major Sidekick update will include data backup?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Generally, when I see a 'reinvention' start off with new committees, I get sleepy.
Then I look around to see where the ad hoc committee in charge of making sure nothing gets done is.
When I find that, I gauge if there is any chance of disbanding that committee...
If not, time to move on.
Forgot to RTFA, eh?
....that P2P software would 'used' as a tool of democracy and open government?
Didn't see that coming.
You apparently have never filed a FOIA request anywhere. Government is at least as secretive as private industry.
In this case, clearly the police department didn't want to expose things such as 'when' and 'where', just the 'what' and 'who'. Add those other two items, and the 'why' becomes more evident.
Good job, though. Hope it works out for him.
As opposed to using the standalone GPS while you are on your phone.
Yep, the silence is deafening.
"...then lease that to the telcos and ISPs..."
FAIL
"...then lease that to whoever wants to provide service..."
FIXED
That's the kind of thinking that gets you into these constricted agreements.
Perhaps some building owners would like to contract for service. Around here (Phoenix), Qwest bundles DirecTV with DSL and POTS to entice us to jump ship and kiss cable goodbye. A complex could certainly negotiate a deal.
Of course, in Tempe, the municipal WiFi failed spectacularly. The provider didn't complete the network, couldn't bill subscribers, didn't answer the city government, and when they took over the provider took all the equipment they could and left town. Truly an epic FAIL. Chandler was having them build a network also, which predictably stopped when the outfit escaped Tempe.
Municipal systems are not always winners. But contracts always bring problems. Count on it.
"USA, EU, Australia and Russia are too busy sending tax dollars to the rich."
That's funny. Where's my mod points when I need them?
USA and the EU are too busy sending their citizens' wealth to their governments, to be redistributed to anyone with a hand out. The rich are victims also, but shed not a tear for them. It's the middle classes that are being hammered, and of course the poor who can least afford *any* taxes.
"Space is a frontier for our great-grandchildren to consider"
We will always have the poor.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Statements such as these:
"Against such a threat... I think anything is justified."
Public condemnation and exposure is a tactic used by most groups, and particularly favored by those who support Washington Senate bill SB5688, which would institute civil unions in Washington state between persons without restriction on gender.
Somehow, when it comes to 'outing', it doesn't feel very good after all.
I personally believe the law permitting access to the signatures should stand. It was a petition, not a ballot. And you should at least have the courage to proclaim your convictions.
And presenting referenda proposed virtually in secret will lead to more than just increased fraud and abuse of the system. It will virtually invalidate the process.
One more reason I don't sign those well-meaning but misguided petitions that infest balloting places here in Arizona, and didn't when I lived in Maine, where the initiative is the favorite tool of the intense and driven minority that is convinced they are not merely right, but chosen as the singular instrument of justice on Earth. Such pleas are designed to take full advantage of our misinformation culture. A pox on them. Let them eat the same cake they baked.
Information wants to be free...
It was not an oversight. At least call it what it is, misguided, an error, pure mistake, uninformed, oblivious to the facts, but it was NOT an oversight.
An oversight would have been adding an exemption and then leaving it out. And even that is incompetence.
Or perhaps miswording it. Still incompetence.
We let our government off the hook all too easily. They claim to be smart people doing the right thing, or at the very least well-meaning people doing what they see as the right thing.
And their actions have consequences. We shoudl be holding them to account. Even the bureaucrats.
Maybe especially the bureaucrats. No, all of them...
(what was i thinking?)
You must not be very familiar with California...
Wasn't the Newton discontinued? Does Apple know you're doing this?
Sooner or laer, you're gonna pay...
"The government has bailed out homeowners. It's bailed out big businesses. Why can't it also help students?"
Why not, indeed?
Besides the fact that we have no money left, didn't before we started, and have been borrowing all of this, why not help the students?
Well, will someone else please tell them? I'm tired of it. Thanks.
ps - My wife and I paid off her student loans. She had a higher interest rate.
pps - No one is bailing me out of my mortgage on my home which is worth about half what I paid for it in 2005. I owe about %60,000 more than it is worth right now. My property taxes have not gone down a penny, cause everyone else around here is in the same boat. I can't afford to go back to college right now... Loans or not.
ppps - We are not doing a great job of bailing out big business. I work for one, and took a 15% pay cut in April. And I'm thankful to have my job still. Graduates should be thankful if they get a job at all before 2011.
We're teaching them well. Just the wrong lessons.
If I call T-Mobile about my G1 and complain that it doesn't actually delete emails that I delete, or that the maps sometimes don't show me where a business is actually located correctly, or that I inevitable have to wipe after an OTA release, I get any of several variations on '...it's not our software, sir'. Of course, I am directed to the forums, where I can bitch and moan, but still, after 4 major releases, POP email isn't actually deleted.
I call Google, and, no, wait, I have only forums and blogs to correspond with Google about this. The issue is known since launch, and still not fixed. Google has no statement about this because they don't even bother to acknowledge the issue 'officially'.
The Open Handset Alliance? Ha! That's funny!
Other releases? I have no idea if Cyanogen's release has a new email app, but I suspect it doesn't. Ditto for JF and the rest.
So holding up T-Mobile for this Sidekick fiasco will be equally pointless.
But, I suspect, TMO is seriously reconsidering selling Sidekicks. And Danger is probably begging them to not destroy their business.
And Microsoft will do just fine, no matter what.
This is the treatment you get when the big corps decide 'good enough' is good enough.
Now, will someone further explore why they would consider buying a Hitachi SAN system? I won't. Ever.
Let's pile on here.
My wife's Curve has WiFi, but doesn't make calls on it.
My G1 ditto.
It would be interesting to do P2P, especially when she asks again how to put 'music on her phone'.
And for you pirate-baiters, it's HER music. Written, produced, and performed by her.
Android has Google.
Is that better than RIM? wow. Good question.
But the pushback against using RIM for your corporate services is interesting.
Imagine you're actually using your 'smartphone' for business. With BlackBerry and Google, you get backup of contacts, calendar, email, as well as Web access with Google. Reasonably good availability worldwide, certainly competitive with all but the very best corporate IT efforts.
With Apple?
Palm Pre is still too new to know how reliable it is.
Those Sidekick users who run their business on their phone now know how risky that really is. Suitable for the 18 Twitter crowd, I suppose.
Calling out RIM as a less-than-excellent choice for business phones is missing the mark, IMHO. If I had to depend on my phone for business, it would NOT be a Pre, iPhone, Sidekick, any WinMo model, or my G1. It would be a Curve or Bold, probably the Curve or maybe a similar model. They do get it done.
My G1 is too 'Android' for business reliance. But great fun as a personal phone - updates, wipes, tomfoolery with apps, way fun. I'm gonna root it, right after I study the process and set aside a Saturday afternoon. It really isn;t worth it, except for a curiosity jaunt.
Um, of course it has a display. It's probably analog.
Kinda sad when dials are virtually ignored. Everyone wants 7-segments.
Don't blame the UI designers. Blame whoever designed the display to leave out two digits.
It makes sense, in a way. After all, you rarely turn your oven much over 600 degrees, so a 4-digit display makes little sense. 5 digits? You cook what over 9,999 degrees?
From then on, all other decisions are compromised.
Sometimes, the interface is hamstrung by the device. The Therac-25 might also be such a case. Safety shutters and all...
You mean they should get worse over time?
... and to really 'get it'.
Many corporations interact with their customers as if they (the customer) are a resource. In this scenario, the resource functions as the primary funding method for their operation. Stockholders for older corporations and *capitalists for younger or startup corporations.
Rather than view the process as devising goods and/or services that are offered to customers in exchange for funding to both repay the financing of the design and manufacture as well as ongoing expenses, some corporations experience the entire continuum of design/build/sell/repeat as if corporations are the whole point - that the corporation is what makes this all work.
Well, it doesn't. None of them do.
If we, the customers, chose to not buy certain types of products, the industries dependent on those products would fail. The classic buggy whip industry example being a good analogy, and portable radios being a current one. Hell, I do still have a little AM/FM radio, but it is now superceded by my Bluetooth headset adapter that includes an FM radio. AM? Not worth it to me. FM? Well, I used to rely on it more, but streaming to my cell phone works. I keep the AM/FM only because of disaster preparedness, and since batteries are finite, it will be a crank-up model. But enough of that. Portable radios as a market are pretty well shot.
And we do choose, though often we choose in response to stimuli - ads.
So when Apple decides to 'shun' independent labels in iTunes by charging them way too much money to be on the platform, they are choosing for us. Just like the grocery store that never has Durkee brand fried onion rings in the can around Thanksgiving, but has plenty of their store brand. Or automakers that no longer make much of a range of options available for their cars - you pretty much get one of 3 trim levels and option packages. Want A/C and a standard transmission? Hope they give you that option... Want steel wheels and leather seats? Sunroof and the smaller engine?
Apple has for a long, long time treated its customers as the resource that funds their intentions. Apple users pretty much get what Apple wants to give them, as ANY corporation does. But Apple has you captive - proprietary software, forced into proprietary hardware, with little real choice. Their insanely great design and above-average execution save the day. If iPods were built like most MP3 players, they would not be popular, battery issues aside.
So you get what you pay for, and you get what you choose.
Me?
I have a Toshiba Gigabeat S60 player, seriously flawed. A T-Mobile G1 phone, also flawed. That Motorola S705 is slamming, though. I just scored a Lenovo X41 tablet PC cheap, used, and better than many a netbook on the market today (IMHO, YMMV, etc). I'm pretty contrary.
But if I had to do it over, I would probably just get an iPod. No, wait, I hate iTunes, and the hassle of fighting a DRM'd solution. Windows Media Player is bad enough. And iTunes doesn't rip at 320kB, anything less is just not good enough for me. So I buy CDs and rip them to my taste. I even re-eq them sometimes to make up for my other and preferred headset, the Backbeat 903. And the G-1's weak player.
If you're just into buying it on daddy's credit card, plugging it in, giving up a modest amount of personal data, and paying as much for 10 songs as you would for the whole CD and avoiding having to skip over 3/4 of the songs cause they just suck, well iPod is for you.
Just don't feel too offended when I can't bear to hear your complaints about being taken advantage of by corporations.
ps- We do need to strip corporations of the individual rights they have been granted. They are not people.
"The Pre syncs contact/calendar/etc. data with several popular online services (and Microsoft Exchange)."
- Assuming you set those up...
"It also performs an automatic daily backup (turned on by default) to Palm's servers."
- We now know to trust the vendor's servers as far as we can throw them. History is no guide.
"All of your important data is stored in 3 places. On the device, on the service provider, and on Palm's servers."
Uh, 'on the device' is not a backup. That's the 'data'. Make that 2 places, more if you use multiple online services/Exchange.
"(As an added precaution, I like to backup my Google contacts directly from Google on a monthly basis)."
I save my POP mail to Google and Yahoo! daily or more often. Contacts ditto. I actually have 4 email accounts with copies of 3 spread around. I also export from my Outlook client at home, andthen distribute the CD ISOs around to three different places, all encrypted with the name of the file as the hint. I copy my SMS into Gmail, and from there it goes to 2 other servers, and is part of the Outlook export.
I have email so old I cannot really read it in anything but a text editor. Elm barfs on some of the old MBox stuff, which is probably just corrupted, and the old Eudora stuff is pretty much done for I think. I lost some AOL mail, but that was mostly noise and spam anyways.
Oh, and up to 2005 I saved spam. I have a great collection. Stuff you would have to pay for nowadays :)
After 1.6 (Donut) all Search activities caused an aCore force close - even searching within browser, the widget, or an app that supported global search. The TMO rep I spoke with confirmed it also affected his device.
After 1.5 (Cupcake) Google Maps force closed, the udpated Maps also did. Power Manager Free force closed as did many other apps, and because of these apps even uninstalling them did not resolve the issues. After a week of deathly slow performance and losing >35MB of space that could only be reclaimed by uninstall/reinstall of several apps DAILY, a wipe fixed everything. Three TMO reps said wipes should be expected. My version of akNotepad could not save to the Sd card, and I lost all notes. And I lost all SMS messages and call logs.
RC33 also caused me a wipe, Power Manager had to be reinstalled but still force closed.
You may have escaped, but I'm just sharing the reality of my experience.
I'm a TMO subscriber, and I love them, so this is painful. And my sister-in-law is a longtime Sidekick user, so she's in a special agony.
But T-Mobile is in a potentially no-win situation. They obviously have to believe Danger/Microsoft that they have good processes to avoid and recover from such failures. They didn't, and now TMO is probably going to take the hit. On one hand, they should - if the service is important, take responsibility and ensure management. On the other hand, they have good assurances, so hey, how much is enough?
BlackBerry users, you should take note. Rim differs only in scale. Ahd, you hope, depth of resilience. Not that RIM hasn't had outages, though not total failure yet.
TMO may have to tell their Sidekick users to be prepared for the inevitable restore, and of course, work with Danger/Microsoft to re-establish service (even though they don't provide service, D/M does), and of course some money compensation no matter how inadequate.
And maybe offer them shiny new myTouch3Gs to give the disillusioned Sidekick users an option with a marginally better track record.
No, wait, that isn't right. I've had to wipe my G1 every update, and some apps don't have a way to save data. They just don't.
I'm glad I never got on the Sidekick train, but I have no hope that this won't some day hit me. Do you suppose the next major Sidekick update will include data backup? :)
In the absence of any further evidence, think of it as an innuendo... :)