2008 just started strong with probably one of the most important acquisitions of the year, taking us all by surprise. According to Swedish media, the acquisition fee was $800 million in cash and $200 million in options.
Considering that MySQL powers some of the largest sites, this might be a nice strategic move to get a foot into the RDBMS game and wag it back to the likes of Oracle and M$. However, I hope they keep it alive and healthy for the open source community. For I cannot imagine LAMP without the strong “M” in it.
Who is Sun Microsystems?
Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees
Wordpress is one of the top free blogging platforms out there. And as of recent the guys at WP decided to surprise their users even more and throw in a surprising 3GB of storage. Compared to the former 50MB this is lavish in deed. Not only that, but compared with other free online blogging platforms, Wordpress does pretty good. For example Google only gives you 1GB of storage space.
And if you need more than 3GB you can also upgrade to 5GB ($20), 15GB ($50), or 25GB ($90) per year. This is pretty good compared to the $300/year TypePad users have to pay to get 3GB of extra space.
In the end Wordpress is one of the best free blogging platforms out there, and it seems they try hard to keep it that way.
If you’re one of the few humans on the planet lucky enough not to have a copy of Microsoft Word on their PC, you can occasionally find yourself in a bit of a bind when someone sends you a document which was created with Microsoft Word.
Luckily, this is one of the rare times when Microsoft comes to your rescue — without asking for your credit card details.
Microsoft distributes a free Microsoft Word viewer, along with viewers for many of their other popular applications.
After experimenting for a few months with various ways to introduce ads in their videos, YouTube is finally launching a video ad platform. The current format is represented by a strip which occupies 20% of the video. The ad appears only after 15 seconds of the movie have passed and if the user clicks the ad, the video is paused and a new window opens for the ad. If the user does not click the ad, it’s displayed for 10 seconds and then it disappears.
As for the pricing, Google choose to apply a 20$ fee for 1000 impressions. Although it’s a little weird they use this instead of the Google classic Pey Per Click system, but Google officials think that safer CPM model will be better for their customers.
So having YouTube as a constant user-generated content pool, Google can provide extensive coverage for publishers and interesting ways to financially attract advertisers. But for now the platform has to be tested to eliminate eventual bugs and to attract publishers.
When Google launched their new Google Gears service a couple of months ago, I was sure online-based applications will make full use of it. And that’s just the case with Zoho, one of the most popular online office suite and a direct contestant of Google Docs.
The fact that they used Google Gears to provide offline availability for Zoho Writer before Google did is funny in a way. But for now only Zoho Writer will be accessible offline, the rest of the Zoho suite is going to be made available in weeks to come, and besides that the documents will be read-only when offline.
After the install of the Google Gears plugin a “Go Offline” button will be enabled, not that this only works with Internet Explorer 6 or higher or Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Zoho lovers should be pleased, as this is only the beginning and other features will become available in the following 4 or 5 weeks.
It seems that the problems Skype users were experiencing were over as of yesterday. For the moment Skype officials only posted a brief notice, promising to give more details on Monday.
Hello friends,
Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.
On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.
We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!
Yesterday the service came back online, first the VoIP calls an then, the presence and chat services became available. Skype blames the outage on “a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software”. The latest news is that this fault was present in every copy of Skype downloaded since 2003 until now. Although nobody seems to know why the failure of the system occurred now, since it was present since 2003, some say that it has something to do with the Skype network infrastructure that relies on high-bandwith peers. When several of these peers go down the whole network becomes unstable.
For short there’s no exact answers and we’ll have to wait until Monday to find out more.
As you all know, various complaints started flowing in since Thursday, that Skype users were not able to login to their VoIP sessions. Skype promptly posted an official statement on their company blog:
Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.
So it seems it’s a software issue and not a hacking/exploit bug. Rumors say that the service will not be functional throughout the week-end, despite of the official announcements. I just hope that Skype will be back to normal soon as they currently sum up 220 million users.
The weird thing is that the code renders correctly in Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE7, but when accessed with IE6, it pops in a fatal error mshtml.dll. Special thanks to Hamachiya2 (a Japanese blogger) who actually discovered this.
Nintendo Wii’s Shopping Channel was unavailable for three hours or so earlier. It was a sign. It seems that Nintendo updated the Wii firmware in order to include a few small but very nice features. Some sources report that an increase of the User Interface’s speed is in place.
See this report on the full features implemented with this Firmware upgrade, and you can see some interesting screenshots from the referred source.
I myself own a Nintendo Wii and I will update it to the new features as soon as I have some free time
