08-27-2003, 08:00 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 15,171
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ThunderHawk Service Outage
Bitstream's moving offices, and as a result the Thunderhawk browser's web proxy won't be available for most of tomorrow.
"The ThunderHawk servers will be shut down Thursday afternoon August 28, 2003, after 1p.m. EST. We may experience up to 8 hours of down time while the servers are moved to our new offices. Normal ThunderHawk service will be restored as soon as possible after the servers are moved."
For you Thunderhawk addicts out there, I hope you can live without your addiction for one day. 
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08-27-2003, 09:25 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,734
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This typifies the weakness of the thunderhawk model. It is so centralised, that when it does down, the whole user group (10 000's presumably) lose a whole days of productivity.
Much better would have been an outright sale of the software to act as a proxy on your own of the company's broadband connection. That way, if the service goes down, only those local areas are affected.
Also, I think its rather pathetic that a company that charges so much ($50/year) provides such a poor Quality of Service, and can not manage a simple server migration (even to another site) without 8 hours of downtime. There are free services which manage to do better.
As you can guess, I am not a subscriber.
Surur
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08-27-2003, 09:30 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jun 2002
Posts: 129
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they must not have many customers if they're willing to have a planned outage...rather than setup new servers first. business decision...makes sense I guess
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08-27-2003, 09:37 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 15,171
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Surur
Much better would have been an outright sale of the software to act as a proxy on your own of the company's broadband connection. That way, if the service goes down, only those local areas are affected.
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You can indeed buy the software from Bitstream if you're a company who wants to deploy it.
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There are free services which manage to do better.
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Sorry, I disagree there. I've seen nothing on a Pocket PC that comes remotely close to what Thunderhawk offers.
--janak
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08-27-2003, 09:44 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,734
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[quote="Janak Parekh"]
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Originally Posted by Surur
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There are free services which manage to do better.
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Sorry, I disagree there. I've seen nothing on a Pocket PC that comes remotely close to what Thunderhawk offers.
--janak |
I was referring to maintaining uptime, not their font based screen shrinkage, which is pretty unique. Google is free, but the only time it has not been accessible was when my local connection was broken.
Surur
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08-27-2003, 09:46 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 15,171
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Surur
I was referring to maintaining uptime, not their font based screen shrinkage, which is pretty unique. Google is free, but the only time it has not been accessible was when my local connection was broken.
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Google is also 1,000 times bigger. I agree that they should have a better transition in place, but we really don't know the entire set of circumstances as to why they have to take the servers off-line. FWIW, they started notifying customers many months ago.
--janak
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08-27-2003, 10:29 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 72
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In defense of Bitstream, I have no problem with actually having to use PIE for a part of a day. I have found Thunderhawk to be invaluable. It makes GPRS, let alone WiFi, browsing a wonderful experience. I will be going through withdrawls for the few hours that they are offline, but it is worth it to me.
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08-28-2003, 01:44 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2003
Posts: 349
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It really is ludicrous to charge $50 a year for a subscription. Most users that really want to make use of it already have either a per-megabyte or per-minute usage on their cellular/wireless data or WiFI service, so it really adds insult to injury.
What I'm hoping is that they or someone smarter will make software to make their home PC like a ThunderHawk proxy to serve their own PocketPC, or others if they want. Most people nowadays are broadband-enabled, but Bitstream only offers their Enterprise setup for companies' intranet/internet and for thousands of dollars. How about giving a personal solution, Bitstream?
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08-28-2003, 02:51 AM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 15,171
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Raphael143
It really is ludicrous to charge $50 a year for a subscription.
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By whose metric? I don't understand. Bitstream has done something unique, something that no one else has done on any handheld platform. It's supply and demand; if you don't feel it's worth it to you, by all means don't get it. However, obviously enough people think it's worth it such that they've kept the price the same.
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What I'm hoping is that they or someone smarter will make software to make their home PC like a ThunderHawk proxy to serve their own PocketPC, or others if they want.
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People have made proxies, but to combine the proxy with the special font and formatting is very difficult. Bitstream spent considerable $ designing that very, very narrow font. Good font creation is an art, and a very expensive one at that.
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How about giving a personal solution, Bitstream?
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Obviously, they believe that the subscription is the best personal solution. But let's play along with this; say they sell the proxy server for, say, $499. That's very cheap for most proxy server technologies. That's the equivalent of Thunderhawk for ten years, and we're not even taking the cost of version and platform upgrades into account.
--janak
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