Tag Archives: internet

Amazon is Down

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It appears that [Amazon][1] is having some issues. Their site has been down for well over an hour now. I can’t imagine how much money this kind of downtime has on a company as large as Amazon. Maybe in the millions by now.

[1]:http://www.amazon.com

![Amazon is down](/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/amazon-is-down.png)

This screen shot was grabbed at approximately 12:10PM PST on 06 June 2008. About 30 minutes ago I was simply getting a “HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable.”

**Update**: I did manage to get the home page at about 12:22PM PST, but after clicking a link, I get the same “We’re Sorry!” page.

[Techcrunch][2] has a post on it as well with a note from Amazon PR (if you can call it a note).

[2]:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/21/amazon-is-down/trackback/

**Update #2**: [Cnet][3] speculates Amazon could potentially have missed out on close to $1.4M USD in the 90 or so minutes they were offline.

[3]:http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html

> Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don’t include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

I feel bad for the poor schmucks who had to sweat this one out.

MPAA Accuses University Laser Printer of Piracy, Printer Goes on Toner Binge

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Is it really that surprising that M.P.A.A, R.I.A.A and others use flawed methods to determine who violates Copyright laws? These are some of the same companies that want to charge you more for a song purchased over a wireless network versus from a computer. Why? Just because. Assholes.

> The researchers rigged the software agents to implicate three laserjet printers, which were then accused in takedown letters by the M.P.A.A. of downloading copies of “Iron Man” and the latest Indiana Jones film.

[The Inexact Science Behind DMCA Takedown Notices - Bits][1]

[1]:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/the-inexact-science-behind-dmca-takedown-notices/

Greenspun on The Old Timers

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Really good article on Internet software patents and how “the old timers” already thought of most of the things we do today.

They couldn’t build our modern world for us back in the 1960s because the hardware hadn’t caught up. If you’d given them 50 million quad-core 2 GHz Pentium with 4 GB of RAM and 30 Mbps Verizon FiOS connections to every home, they would have built you all of the services of the modern Internet and probably many that would have been better.

What would happen if you gave present-day computer programmers those same powerful hardware gifts? We did that experiment. Our modern day best-and-brightest built Microsoft Windows Vista (TM).