The latest inductee in my "somebody got fired for that" hall of fame is the guy who accidentally cut a power cable in Los Angeles on Monday, plunging parts of the city into darkness and causing fender benders and assorted freak-outs. Here in the tech universe, we call that a "user error." A big one.

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Now that the Rokr phone has launched to mediocre reviews, analysts are already starting to speculate about when we can see the real thing--a true Apple-designed cell phone. The big proof? Apple owns iPhone.org. But the analysts say we shouldn't expect anything soon--at least not until everyone's had a chance to bag on the Rokr.

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eBay just bought VoIP provider Skype for $2.6 billion, with an option for another $1.5 billion. Skype? Expected to make $60 million this year. I hope eBay has a really good plan for it. What's that? Real-time auction chatting? Oh. Well, um, that's a plan, anyway.

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In an unexpected move, Microsoft, which instituted a second Tuesday monthly patch release cycle about one year ago, has decided not to issue a security bulletin for the month of September. The software giant had posted a preview announcement as late as last week identifying one critical patch within Windows that would require rebooting. Apparently, the patch isn't ready for prime time--which leaves everyone scratching their heads: why should we remain vulnerable to a critical flaw without so much as a workaround or an option to turn off (if possible) the flawed serivce or application? But security researchers downplayed the announcement, saying the lack of specifics keeps our current level of Windows security status quo; there's too much code in Windows for criminal hackers to waste their time looking for the one thing that's known to be broken.

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CNET's own News.com is reporting that auction giant eBay has agreed to purchase Internet telephony company Skype. While the move left industry watchers scratching their heads, the head honchos of both companies say the acquisition makes perfect sense: currently, eBay buyers can e-mail sellers questions about their merchandise, but Skype will allow a faster connection through Skype's click-to-call functionality, while letting both parties remain anonymous. The burning question remains, though: will eBay pay through PayPal?

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There has been much speculation among the chattering classes about Windows Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, and the various versions that will be available to the public. The initial conventional wisdom was that rather than having different products--like XP Home, Pro, Media Center Edition, Tablet, and so on--Vista would condense the SKUs to one or two at most.

Now, just before the start of this week's Professional Developers Conference, well-known tech blogger Paul Thurrott claims that that Vista will be divided into two major product lines, with several SKUs in each. The Home and Pro lines will become Home and Business, with Starter, Basic, Premium, and Ultra versions of Home, and Small Business, Professional, and Enterprise versions under the Business tag.

What's the difference between all these? It's still speculation at this point (including whether these are the actual final designations), but in a nutshell, Vista Home Basic is the mass-market version, with Premium adding Media Center functionality. That's different from the previous theories that Microsoft would fold Media Center into the mainstream version of Vista. Check out Thurrott's breakdown for his take on each of the seven possible versions.

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Netgear announced its new Storage Central product today, which is networked storage, but not like the network-attached storage devices we've seen so far. It's more like a storage-area network device. It comes without drives (it's the casing plus software), and you can add either one or two 3.5-inch IDE hard drives of any capacity. After you connect the Storage Central to your router via an Ethernet cable, a wizard helps you set up your volumes, which you can change at any time, and the drive immediately shows up as a letter drive on every PC on your network; you don't have to map the drive. You can set up striping or mirroring to protect your data, and the storage capacity is almost infinitely expandable, either by swapping out larger hard drives or by adding more Storage Centrals to your network. While this sounds like an expensive proposition, the cost of two IDE drives plus $129 for the Storage Central (MSRP) will almost always work out to be less than the cost of a NAS box.

How well does it work? We can't say just yet, but we're going to have a full review of the Storage Central, so check back soon.

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