Archive for the ‘Da 'Net’ Category

Rackspace experienced an outage yesterday–a recurring issue this year for the hosted data center provider–which took down a number of high profile sites including the popular blog site TechCrunch. No network is impervious to outages, but a company like Rackspace needs to provide consistent and reliable service.

The Official Rackspace Blog explains “On December 18, 2009 between 3:37 p.m. and 4:12 p.m. CST, Rackspace experienced network connectivity problems.” The timeline doesn’t jive with the fact that the timestamp on the TechCrunch report on the Washington Post site says 12:17pm. Assuming the TechCrunch timestamp is Pacific time, it would mean that the outage began more like 2pm Central time, or possibly even earlier.

It would be nice if we could get insurance quotes for site outages, you know to help compensate those sites that go down for extended periods. Everyone things about the money they lose during downtime, don’t they?

Things are going to get very interesting around the internet, very soon.

The body in charge of assigning the world’s Internet users their online addresses on Friday said it had agreed to allow the use of any of the world’s scripts, no longer just the Latin alphabet.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which approved the change at a meeting in Seoul, said in a statement it could lead to a dramatic rise in the number of Internet users.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” ICANN’s President and CEO Rod Beckstrom was quoted as saying.

I hope this doesn’t interfere with finding the best best wrinkle cream on the internet. I am getting old you know.

You can find anything using Google. You can find good restaurants, you can find doctors, heck, you find a place that does a good colon cleanse if you want too. I’ve seen homes of the rich and famous, and I have seen lots of other things using Google Maps, why not some of the poor areas of the world?

Rio’s favelas are home to a third of the city’s population, but are almost invisible on maps — a situation five young women are trying to change with the help of GPS and the Internet.

Rafaela Goncalves da Silva, 21, has lived in the Santa Marta favela, a poor and dangerous slum that was recently the target of a police pacification operation, since she was two years old.

There seems to be some debate about Google’s “founding” date.

Google’s actual founding date is subject to debate. There are those who think that Google should bring out the cake on the September 4, the day in 1998 that Google filed its incorporation papers and officially became Google, Inc. Still others think that Google should recognize September 15, 1997 as its founding date, as that is when Google registered the google.com domain. But despite the debate, Google has celebrated its anniversary on September 27 for the past few years now, making the date somewhat official.

Does it matter? Not really. Unless you’re trying to prove how much time you had on the job in order to collect social security disability or something, there’s no reason it couldn’t be celebrated in July if they wanted too.

In the past eleven years we’ve come a long way. Eleven years ago, many people used IRC, now they’re using Twitter. We’ve gone from the world of text editors for web design to WYSIWYG editors that could blow your mind.

Google has come a long way in its eleven-year history, from its humble beginning as a Stanford University research project in 1998, to the global, multi-billion dollar online presence Google enjoys today.

Before, we had word of mouth, now we have web directories and tools to help you find anything you may be looking for. I wonder what’s going to happen in the next 11 years?

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa is suing the social-networking site Twitter, claiming an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.

…

The lawsuit claims that someone created a false account under La Russa’s name and posted updates, known as “tweets,” that gave the false impression that the comments came from La Russa. The suit said the comments were “derogatory and demeaning” and damaged La Russa’s trademark rights.

Oh, boo hoo, so someone on Twitter created a fake account. How is this a bad thing? Sure, the pretender was a bit rude and such, but what a great opportunity for the long time manager to sieze the moment, grab the spotlight, and gain a large Twitter following.

Instead, he decided to be a cry baby, grab his ball and bat, and go home. What a shame. How insecure can you be?

Have you Bing‘d yet?

Yahoo Inc. limited co-founder Jerry Yang’s 2008 compensation package to his customary $1 salary during his final year as chief executive, a tumultuous reign that unraveled after he rebuffed Microsoft Corp.’s $47.5 billion bid to buy the Internet company.

That seems a bit high, doesn’t it? Considering what’s happened to the company under his reign.

I’m kidding. He deserved every penny. Literally.

Bad news for GeoCities users…

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it plans to close GeoCities, a Web site publishing and hosting service it bought in May 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom for around $3 billion in stock.

The service will be shut down later this year. Visitors to the site now see a message that says new GeoCities accounts will not be available and gives them the option to sign up for Yahoo’s Web hosting service for $5.98 a month.

So what’s doing to happen to all the people pushing their wares like spray on hair and Ferrari parts on GeoCities?

Wow. 1 million followers. Do you really think Ashton Kutcher even sees what you say on Twitter? If he does, do you really think he cares what you say on Twitter? If so, you need to get a life.

For now, Ashton Kutcher is the king of Twitter. But there is a new challenger — Oprah.

Kutcher triumphed over CNN in their much ballyhooed race to be the first to reach a million followers on the microblogging Web site. Kutcher surpassed that benchmark in the early morning hours Friday, narrowly edging out the breaking news feed from the Time Warner Inc.-owned network.

50% of the people are watching for great tv deals, and 26% of the people reading this said, “Huh? What’s Twitter?“