On my last blog post [Is this what HDS tells our mainframe clients?], I poked fun at Hu Yoshida's blog post that contained a graphic with questionable results. Suddenly, the blog post disappeared altogether. Poof! Gone!

Just so that I am not accused of taking a graph out of context, here is Hu's original post, in its entirety:

At this point, you might be wondering: "If Hu Yoshida deleted his blog post, how did Tony get a copy of it? Did Tony save a copy of the HTML source before Hu deleted it?" No. I should have, in retrospect, in case lawyers got involved. It turns out that deleting a blog post does not clear the various copies in various RSS Feed Reader caches. I was able to dig out the previous version from the vast Google repository. (Many thanks to my friends at Google!!!).

The graph itself was hosted separately has been deleted, but it was just taken from slide 10 of the HDS presentation [How to Apply the Latest Advances in Hitachi Mainframe Storage], so it was easy to recreate.

(Lesson to all bloggers: If you write a blog post, and later decide to remove it for whatever legal, ethical, moral reasons, it is better to edit the post to remove offending content, and add a comment that the post was edited, and why. Shrinking a 700-word article down to 'Sorry Folks - I decided to remove this blog post because...' would do the trick. This new edited version will then slowly propagate across to all of the RSS Feed Reader caches, eliminating most traces to the original. Of course, the original may have been saved by any number of your readers, but at least if you have an edited version, it can serve as the official or canonical version.)

Perhaps there was a reason why HDS did not want to make public the FUD its sales team use in private meetings with IBM mainframe clients. Whatever it was, this appears to be another case where the cover-up is worse than the original crime!

technorati tags: HDS, Hu Yoshida, VSP, EAV