21 posts and columns on crash

News Byte

Sold Out! The $35 Raspberry Pi Mini-Computer.

in News on February 29 at 8:29 am PT

The $35 Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized Linux-based computer originally created for educational purposes, has already sold out after it became available earlier today, following five years of research and development. The surge of traffic to Raspberry Pi’s Web site earlier today forced the company to temporarily put up a static page, where visitors have been directed to Twitter instead. The Verge reports that the $25 model of the mini-computer, which now will have 256 megabytes of RAM, is going into production “immediately.”

Amazon's Cloud Crash Is Over, But the Talking About It Isn't

in Enterprise on April 25, 2011 at 3:45 pm PT

The big crash of Amazon’s cloud that brought down hundreds of other Internet companies that rely upon it is over. Now everyone who was affected in one way or another is comparing notes on how they coped or didn’t. And for cloud providers not named Amazon, there’s going to be an obvious business opportunity.

Skype Postmortem: Overloaded Servers and Desktop Bugs Brought Us Down

in Enterprise on December 29, 2010 at 7:56 am PT

Two problems conspired in a strange confluence of events to knock millions of users off Skype last week.

Skype Is Working, No Explanation Yet for What Happened

in Enterprise on December 24, 2010 at 9:22 am PT

After two days of struggling with an embarrassing pre-holiday system failure, Skype appears to be running again today. The company is offering free service to customers, but hasn’t yet explained what happened.

News Byte

Yahoo Up, But What Brought It Down? [Updated]

in News on October 14, 2010 at 2:59 pm PT

Yahoo’s homepage is back up. An update from Yahoo PR: “For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected.” No word yet on what caused the outage, although sources close to the situation said it was a crash caused by a routine code push. There were some odd occurrences on Yahoo’s domain name system during the outage, but it appears to be cleared up.

WWDC 2010: Steve Jobs on the App Store

in News on June 7, 2010 at 10:34 am PT

In response to a question from Walt Mossberg at last week’s D8 conference addressing criticism about the App Store’s rejection rate, CEO Steve Jobs made a point of noting that Apple supports HTML5, a completely open platform, and that the company supports its own App Store, which is a curated platform. He reiterated that notion in his keynote today: “Guess what? Ninety-five percent of all apps submitted are approved within seven days.”

Voices

Three Tesla Employees Killed in Plane Crash

in News on February 17, 2010 at 2:55 pm PT

Three employees of electric-car maker Tesla Motors Inc. died Wednesday when their small plane crashed in a residential neighborhood in California’s Silicon Valley, causing a major power outage in the city of Palo Alto but injuring no one on the ground.

BlackBerry Figures That Maybe There’s Something to This Twitter Thing, After All

in Media on February 12, 2010 at 8:15 am PT

Are you a BlackBerry user who wants to Twitter, too? Hang tight: Research in Motion promises you’ll have an official app sometime soon.

Voices

Entrepreneurs "Tweet" Their Way Through Crises

in News on September 15, 2009 at 11:00 am PT

Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises. The social-media service–where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages–came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin.

This Just In From the N.S. Sherlock Institute for the Bleeding Obvious…

in News on July 28, 2009 at 2:27 pm PT

…drivers who text while at the wheel are more likely to have accidents than those paying attention to the road ahead. In fact, according to a new $6 million dollar study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, texting while driving increases your chances of crashing by 23 times.
duh-hotel

Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller Out. Here’s the Internal Memo.

in Media, July 15, 2009 at 8:26 pm PT

In Browser Wars, The New Firefox Loses Some Edge

in Personal Technology, July 15, 2009 at 3:02 pm PT

Starz Joins Comcast’s “Web TV You’ll Pay to See” Lineup

in Media, July 9, 2009 at 2:02 pm PT

New iPhone Is Better Model–Or Just Get OS 3.0

in Personal Technology, June 17, 2009 at 10:00 am PT

DailyCandy CEO Pete Sheinbaum Steps Down

in Media, May 6, 2009 at 3:44 am PT

Microsoft Ups Ante With New Browser

in Personal Technology, March 18, 2009 at 6:02 pm PT

Pop.

in News, October 9, 2008 at 12:00 am PT

Fossett Update: Plane Wreckage Found

in News, October 2, 2008 at 11:33 am PT

New Clues About Missing Aviator Fossett–Whom the Internet Has Tried to Find–Discovered by Analog Hiker

in News, October 1, 2008 at 5:32 pm PT

Using a Stylus With the iPhone

in Mossberg’s Mailbox, September 3, 2008 at 4:14 pm PT

Wanna Crash Chrome? Type “:%”

in News, September 3, 2008 at 3:10 pm PT