Author Archive

PC Gamer Secrets According to Valve’s Steam Network

Alistair Croll, Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 9:00 PM PT Comments (1)

You can tell a lot from a gamer’s hardware. And in the gaming world, nobody knows more about the platforms on which PC gamers run their games than the Steam game distribution network. In 2000, Half-Life was one of the best-rated, best-selling games of all time. Created by Valve, it was distributed through traditional retail [...]

StackSafe Gives IT a Virtual Sandbox

Alistair Croll, Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 10:30 AM PT Comments (2)

Ask any IT professional what they dread most, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s change. Specifically, the act of putting a new application into production: There’s simply no way to know what will happen.
Companies spend a tremendous amount of time and money in staging environments, trying to see whether or not their new code [...]

I Don’t Want Source Code; I Want App Tone

Alistair Croll, Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 12:40 PM PT Comments (14)

In the software-as-a-service world, source code becomes irrelevant. We don’t want to know how to make a telephone, just a dial tone. With IT, we want app tone.

Netcraft’s April Survey: Google-run Sites Growing Quickly

Alistair Croll, Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 8:21 AM PT Comments (3)

In its April 2008 web server survey, Netcraft reports that Google-hosted developers (largely on the Blogger platform) grew their relative share by more than half a percentage point in the last month, mainly at the expense of Microsoft and Apache-based developers.

Why Fixing Internet Capacity Keeps the Telcos Honest

Alistair Croll, Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 11:45 AM PT Comments (7)

In the debate around Internet regulation and traffic, it’s important to understand the things that drive how much bandwidth we need. Without fixing the bandwidth shortage on the wire or in the protocols, we make it easy for carriers to claim that they need to regulate bandwidth in order to survive. If we can fix [...]

Cable Cut Culprits Caught?

Alistair Croll, Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 10:24 AM PT Comments (5)

Dubai port authorities have impounded two ships, MV Hounslow and MT Ann, believed to be responsible for damage to undersea cables that saw India lose half of its Internet capacity earlier this year, according to India’s Hindu News. Conspiracy theories have flourished about the source of the cuts, which affected the undersea cable network of [...]

Blog Hacks Coming Back to Roost?

Alistair Croll, Monday, April 7, 2008 at 3:22 PM PT Comments (14)

Back in November, we looked at WordPress themes being distributed by third parties who’d embedded hidden code to allow the insertion of arbitrary content. Now a rash of sites are reporting that their blogs have been subverted.
Among them is Deep Jive:
“I was getting listed in Google for all manner of sneaky (and NSFW terms), so [...]

Amazon’s Services Edge Towards the Enterprise

Alistair Croll, Monday, April 7, 2008 at 3:00 PM PT Comments (3)

Recently unveiled enhancements to Amazon’s web services not only give customers more control over availability, they take the services closer to compliance with industry standards, a move that will ultimately make them more appealing to enterprise customers.
Today’s smart startups build their applications using on-demand compute infrastructure. Instead of high capital outlay, they get pay-as-you-go platforms [...]

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