Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
Nokia unveils N97 Mini, plus Netbook pricing
September 2nd, 2009 | 
Author: Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cell phones, on Wednesday announced new phones loaded with more music features and better integration with Facebook, as well as pricing for its upcoming Netbook.
Nokia N97 Mini
(Credit: Nokia )
The company announced the new phones and services at its Nokia World Conference in Stuttgart, Germany.
Tops on the list of new phones is the N97 Mini, a slightly smaller version of Nokia’s existing flagship N97 smartphone. This new, smaller N97 has a shorter battery life than the earlier device and also less memory (8GB compared to 32GB), and a smaller touch-screen display. The device is expected to ship in October. Its list price at 450 euros, or about $639, is not much less than that of the full-fledged N97, which initially went on sale in the U.S. for $700.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10331767-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
More on today’s Gmail issue
Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.
However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.
The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.
What’s next: We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html
Sony shipping Chrome on Vaios
Google promised earlier this year that a major computer maker would start to ship its Chrome browser.
Sony’s the one.
Sony’s Vaio line has begun carrying the browser in the U.S., the Financial Times reported late Monday.
According to a Dow Jones report, all Vaio-branded PCs are now using Chrome as their default browser. A Sony representative told Dow Jones that there are no plans to add Chrome to Vaios outside the U.S.
Vaios will continue to come with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in tandem.
The Financial Times also reported that other companies are in talks with Google about Chrome and that the browser will also be promoted to Internet users who download RealNetworks’ RealPlayer media-streaming software. Google has previously said it’s in discussions with Dell about bundling the software.
To date–a day before the first anniversary of its launch on September 2, 2008–Chrome has around 30 million active users or around 3 percent of the global market. This makes it the fourth most-popular browser after Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s FireFox, and Apple’s Safari.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10322884-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
TweetSaver makes a personal archive of Twitter
I’m always intrigued by backup tools for Web services that don’t really need backup. TweetSaver is no exception. This paid service backs up (almost) everything you’ve ever posted to Twitter, along with private messages and replies from other users. It then adds an extra layer of utility on top of it, like a search tool that’s limited to just your messages, simple sharing options for each message, as well as a way to assign a tag to each tweet for categorization.
Of course the usefulness of all of this hinges on Twitter being down and/or somehow losing all of your data. However, based on Twitter’s uptime over the past year, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth the cost of $20 a year. That’s pretty steep considering there are some free Twitter backup solutions like TweeTake and TweetBackup that do many of the same things.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10322626-248.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, Internet, software, Twitter | 
Tags: archive, TweetSaver, Twitter | 
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Google reforms Chrome for Snow Leopard
Google released an update for Chrome to fix compatibility problems with Snow Leopard on Monday, which along with other fixes shows the gradually maturing state of the Mac OS X version of the browser.
Chrome 4.0.203.4 for the Mac is only a couple notches up the version ladder than the version 4.0.203.2 it replaces, but there are some significant changes in the developer-preview software. For Snow Leopard compatibility, programmers fixed a garbled text bug, said Jonathan Conradt, a Chrome engineering program manager, in a blog post Monday.
Google began Chrome on Windows but has been gradually moving it to Linux and Mac OS X. Those versions so far are still only developer-preview incarnations not ready for prime time yet, though I find myself gradually slipping over to Chrome on my Mac system now that it’s getting mature enough for me. I suspect a beta version isn’t far off.
Google is fleshing out some basic features, though. One user-interface tweak enables support for command- and shift-clicking.
Another feature coming to the Mac is support for the tab-to-search feature in the omnibox. That lets you perform a site search directly from the address bar by typing a URL, for example news.cnet.com, then the tab key, then search terms.
Tab-to-search also works with Amazon, Google, Google News, and Yahoo, The New York Times, but not Bing yet. I search a lot, and this saves me one step and waiting for a page to load just so I can click in its search bar.
The tab-to-search feature has arrived on Chrome for Mac OS X, too.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The most annoying issue I’ve found–and let me know if I’m missing something obvious here–is that I lose the file-upload dialog box while using Gmail with Chrome on Mac OS X if I switch away from the application while halfway through. If I don’t attach a file immediately, that tab’s instance of Gmail becomes useless because I can’t get back to it.
Performance still is an issue with the Mac version, though. I was pleased to see some work on new-tab creation speed, with programmer Mark Mentovai using various changes to work the time from 1-3 seconds down to a fifth of a second.
Google is working hard to spread Chrome, though it has small market share at present. It’s now installed as the default browser on some Sony laptops, as Endgadget noticed in July with the Vaio NW, and I heard about earlier in August.
Google has been advertising the browser as well and is at work making it the foundation of its Chrome OS.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10322746-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20