It's The End Of The Year As We Know It...And The Net's Been Down

December 28th, 2007 by Justin Ryan

Let's face it: If the internet is a series of tubes, well, sometimes the tubes get clogged. When that happens, sites go down, and edgy users get out their torches and pitchforks.

As the year comes to a close, the guys over at Pingdom — while on a break from relentlessly monitoring the web's uptime — have put together a listing of the web's biggest blowouts of 2007. Among our favorites: the Microsoft-spawned Super Skype Shutdown; the recurring Blogger Breakdowns, especially Google's spamdown of their own Official Google Blog; and the Truck+ Transformer Takes Out Rackspace Rundown.

In the end, one is left to wonder: Why can't this stuff ever happen to the stuff we'd like to see die?

Read more.

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Justin Ryan is News Editor for LinuxJournal.com.
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From the Magazine

August 2008, #172

There's nuttin like a Cool Project to give you some relief from the summer heat, so get out your parka cuz we got a bunch of em. First up is the BUG, not a bug, The BUG. It's got a GPS, camera and more, in a hand-sized package that's user programmable. The BUG does everything. It's both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Get one now. Need a software version of a Swiss Army knife? Take a look at Billix, and don't leave home without it. Then, chew on this one, an X server on a Gumstix device driving an E-Ink display. Need more storage? How about 16 Terabytes? Can do.

And, of course, we have the usual cast of characters: Marcel, Reuven, Dave, Kyle, Doc, plus the new kid on the block Shawn Powers. But it doesn't stop there: build a MythTV box on a budget, build your own GIS system, set up the tools to monitor your enterprise and more. Finally, remember The War of the Worlds? Now you can play too.

Read this issue