Continue reading HEX ships iPod nano watch band, dares you to destroy it (video)
HEX ships iPod nano watch band, dares you to destroy it (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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At the end of the year, it's always fun to look back at the places you've gone and things you've done in the past 12 months, and if you log your comings and goings with apps like Foursquare or Twitter, doing that year in review is even easier.
To use Where Do You go, you've got to log in with your Google Account and authorize it to index your Foursquare check-ins, which gave me pause, since I keep my Foursquare history private. But, the app doesn't publish check-in details, just your past whereabouts in aggregate. You can delete all your data from the app if you want to just try it and bail. If you keep your account, the map updates with each new check-in, but only displays check-ins which are more than 24 hours old for privacy reasons. It's fun to see what areas of different cities you favor most—apparently I rarely travel above 34th street in Manhattan—and it can give you even more motivation to visit areas you normally don't, even in your home city. Someday I hope to get a similar heatmap view in ThinkUp for posts from Twitter and Facebook, too.
In order to keep down your credit card fees, SwipeGood rounds up every purchase you make to the nearest dollar, adding the change from that purchase to your donation, which it makes at the end of the month (instead of after every purchase). If you have a specific charity you'd like to donate to, you can switch your charity any time you want, and they're always adding new ones. And, while in this case it's a good thing that the change from your purchases adds up quickly, you can always set a monthly limit for your roudups so you don't end up donating more than you can afford. Hit the link to read more.
HTC EVO Shift 4G headed for a January 9th launch at $150, according to RadioShack leak originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong.
One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152).
Rabbe kicks off by explaining that a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overheated on Wednesday, December 22.
A number of Skype clients subsequently started receiving delayed responses from said overloaded servers, which weren’t properly processed by the Windows client in question. This ultimately caused the affected version to malfunction.
Initially, users of Skype’s newer and older Windows software, as well as those using the service on Mac, iPhone and their television sets, were unaffected.
Nevertheless, the whole system collapsed as the faulty version of the Windows client, 5.0.0.152, is by far the most popular – Rabbe says 50% of all Skype users globally were running it, and the crashes caused approximately 40% of those clients to fail.
The clients included roughly a third of all publicly available supernodes, which also failed as a result of this issue.
From the blog post:
A supernode is important to the P2P network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients and establishing connections between them by creating local clusters of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode.
Once a supernode has failed, even when restarted, it takes some time to become available as a resource to the P2P network again. As a result, the P2P network was left with 25–30% fewer supernodes than normal. This caused a disproportionate load on the remaining available supernodes.
Rabbe goes on to explain a lot of people who experienced crashing Windows clients started rebooting the software, which caused a huge increase in the load on Skype’s P2P cloud network. He adds that traffic to the supernodes was about 100 times what would normally be expected at the time of day the failure occurred.
A perfect storm in the P2P clouds, so to speak.
To learn how Skype supported the recovery of its supernode network, and what they’ll be doing to prevent this from happening again, I suggest you go read the full blog post.
And major kudos to the company for being so prolific in explaining what happened.
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