Last week, Michael Jackson's death caused sites to fail left and right. Today, it's a very different problem. The hosting service Rackspace has been completely down for the past 30 minutes or so. Don't believe us, just listen to Justin Timberlake or Michelle Malkin, both of which have sites on the service and took to Twitter to complain.
Apparently, it’s an entire network outage and so the usually very responsive Rackspace team cannot even respond to emails or tweet (though I’m sure we’ll be seeing some updates from smartphones shortly). Along with sites like Timberlake’s and Malkin’s, the popular event site, Everbrite, is apparently down as well.
Update: Here’s the status from Rackspace via Twitter“We are having an issue that is affecting part of our DFW data center. No details yet. Will update as we get more information.”
Update 2: It looks like a lot of the sites on Rackspace are finally coming back up — including Rackspace own website. Downtime looks to have been about an hour. And here’s the all-clear from Rackspace itslef:“All power is restored to the DFW data center - all devices affected are starting to come on-line. Details to follow.”
(article taken from Techcrunch)
The site is bringing together mobile devices and multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, into a very visual platform. As well as integrating YouTube video onto their Google map, they’re pulling in partners including pictures from Mobypicture and live video from Bambuser. It will also pull in geotagged content from YouTube and news alerts from media such as CNN and Reuters.
Launched today at TechCrunch Europe’s Geek ‘n Rolla tech startup event in London, the site is not just a mashup. The business model is that you can buy a location on the map, so for instance, we can own the venue on the map for our Geen’n Rolla conference and brand it how we like.
CEO Frank Schuil reckons “By showing users this is where you are, right here, right now on the planet, we can create true presence that you can’t find on any other social network.” Now of course, the question is, are people going to put their real location on the map? They may not have a choice of course if they absent-mindedly click the ‘allow location’ on their iPhone Twitter application. Users will also be able to show their precise location through Wi-Fi positioning withLoki.
That aside, the advantage is that you can see both Twitter and Facebook friends location on a map and anything they may be uploading at that moment.
IRL Connect is also providing its own geolocation data to provide context to the video through location. Developers can apply for an API key at api.irlconnect.com. The privately funded company is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with an office in China."
According to a report published by computer antivirus and spam filter seller McAfee, the annual sending, receiving and hand-deleting of 62 trillion email spams consumes 33 terawatt hours of energy every year. Producing that energy emits about 20 million tons of greenhouse gases.
In the translational shorthand of environmentalism, that's enough juice to power Chicago for two years, and the greenhouse equivalent of driving 1.6 million cars around the Earth.
The findings have met with a mixed reception. The report "strikes me as reminiscent of those insipid lost-productivity studies that blame the global recession on March Madness office pools," wrote Paul McNamara at Network World. "I'm just not ready to translate every human endeavor into an environmental forum."
Though nobody likes having every last decision turned into a morality play, there's nothing good about spam. March Madness pools at least make office life a bit more fun. Spam, on the other hand, is entirely worthless, and it accounts for between 85 and 97 percent of all email activity. And though worrying about spam's environmental impact is a bit like complaining about the Titanic's deck chairs, it's still worth fixing. Eradicating spam might not save the polar ice cap, but the world would be a bit cleaner without it.
Naturally, McAfee didn't commission the report out of charity. They say more than half of spam's carbon footprint is produced during its end-stage, when users scroll through messages and delete the junk. That's exactly where their product offerings fit. The report claims that spam filtering reduces end-stage energy consumption by nearly 75 percent.
But that confluence of interest doesn't necessarily invalidate the findings. My own spam filter — which is not, for the record, a McAfee product — has already plucked 22 messages out of my email stream today, and saved me the trouble of deleting them manually.
"It's not just a nuisance, it's not just clogging your inbox. It has a quantifiable environmental impact," said McAfee researcher Dave Marcus. "This is a different way of looking at something people can take control of.
