Twitter goes down (again) but will it soon be counted out for good?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that. (more…)

Norton makes oi larf

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

This week I have mostly been in Madrid, trying not to laugh when someone said: “Security products are too slow” or, and this one is worth waiting for, “People shouldn’t tolerate a security product with poor performance.”

The reason for my exercise in ROFL-stifling being that the person saying this happened to be none other than Rowan Trollope, the Vice President of Consumer Business at Symantec. In Madrid to oversee the official launch of Norton Internet Security 2009. (more…)

Steve Ballmer to retire

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Yes, it is true, Steve ‘Barmy’ Ballmer the exuberant Microsoft CEO has confirmed that he is to retire. The 52 year old originator of the Monkey Dance as performed in tribute by Ricky Gervais during an episode of The Office, was speaking to an audience in Washington earlier in the week when he let slip the big decision: he will be stepping down from his role as big cheese of the biggest software company on the planet.

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Yahoo SearchMonkey is simply bananas

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Look, everyone who has ever read any of my PC Pro columns over the years will know that I am something of a Firefox Fanboy, just like anything that makes my web browsing more efficient and effective. Which is probably why I think the whole Yahoo SearchMonkey thing is just simply bananas.

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Moving to Windows 7 will be just as bad as moving to Vista, says Microsoft

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Forgive me if I have misread the ‘Business Value of Windows Vista‘ paper that Microsoft has published in an attempt to convince the corporate user to switch to Vista now instead of waiting for the arrival of Windows 7 instead. However, the way I read it, it seems that Microsoft, when it says users jumping from XP to Windows 7 will have “a similar applications compatibility experience… as exists moving to Windows Vista from Windows XP” are actually saying that both migrations are pretty dire.

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Get orf moi broadband!

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Michael Phillips, the Product Director at ConsumerChoices.co.uk, has today called for Government action to redress the balance between townies and rural users when it comes broadband. He says that “recent analysis has shown that we have a distinct first and second class society in the UK when it comes to Broadband speeds. Rural areas are getting a raw deal when it comes to their home broadband service and coupled with the ‘out of area’ service charges many broadband providers apply, they are suffering a double whammy.”

Well, I am a rural broadband user and while it did, I have to admit, take a couple of years longer to arrive in my village than in the nearest market town a few miles away, it is here now and working well. I get an average speed of between 3000 and 3500kbps, which is not stellar by any means but god damn if it isn’t fast enough for sending my email, browsing the web and even streaming the (very) odd bit of video when the wife is out.

My ISP, Zen, do not apply any additional ‘out of area’ service charges just because I chew straw and eat with my hands, and I do not feel like a second class netizen it has to be said.

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Buzzword Bingo is back

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

For anyone who had hoped that Buzzword Bingo had jumped out of the same 10th floor window as the dotcom investors who excelled in playing it when the bubble burst a few short years back, sorry but I have bad news: it is alive and kicking. The proof can be found within my email inbox every single day as there is always at least one press release that dispels the notion that given enough time monkeys and typewriters can produce meaningful prose (with apologies to sign-reading chimps everywhere.)

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Google Earth gets Google News

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Any Google Earth fans out there? Good. Now how about Google News fans as well? Excellent. Ever thought how cool it would be if you could combine the two? No, neither had I to be absolutely honest. However, this kind of maps and events mashup is something that has been happening for some time now. Myself and a mate even created something using Google Maps and BBC traffic news a couple of years ago that did just that, overlaying traffic reports onto a Google Map of the UK. All quite cool and interesting at the time, although now a long since forgot about project. Oh yes, back to the point of this posting. Well now it seems that Google itself has gone and produced a Google News layer for Google Earth.

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Meet Edd Hifeng, AI powered Second Life avatar

Monday, May 19th, 2008

It had to happen at some point, and now an AI powered avatar is being tested within the Second Life virtual world by its creators, researchers at the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory. According to reports, Edd Hifeng has a mental age of about 4 years and is capable of only basic AI reasoning. As such he can engage in simple conversations such as where are you from, but only if the question is put in English and even then only if it has previously been translated into a mathematical logic so that Edd understands it. Not exactly cutting edge of AI is it?

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Irony alert: South London teens use mobiles in project on tackling violent crime

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Please forgive me for falling into the stereotype trap here, but in my defence I was born in South East London so feel I do have some right to pass judgement on the place. Anyway, the thing is I got this press release today which was bigging up (that’s me trying to be street, or something, and obviously failing) the use of mobile technology as part of a South London college project to tackle gun and knife crime. The LIFEWISE collaboration involves no less than 200 young people from South Thames College as well as six secondary schools across the London Borough of Wandsworth, who were given 200 Vodafone v1615 handsets with unlimited Internet mobile data access to help them work collaboratively on the project.

Very commendable, but am I the only person wondering how many of them still have those handsets? If the reports that hit the headlines only yesterday are anything to go by, then the answer should be 160, as 40 of them are statistically likely to have been nicked during a violent street mugging. The Design Council survey, on which the headlines are based, revealed that 1 in 5 of youngsters aged between 11 and 16 in London had been victim of a mugging where an item of mobile personal electronics (mobile phone or iPod essentially) had been nicked.

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