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MS Hotmail Offline For Hours
chalker writes "According to CNN, and others, the Hotmail online e-mail service, operated by Microsoft, was down for most of the working day on Friday, affecting 'a significant portion of MS customers.' People are also having trouble accessing products such as the MSN Messenger instant messaging program. The company said it was an internal problem rather than an attack on its system and that it hoped to have service restored by 5:30 p.m. PST. As of 8:15 PM EST, Hotmail appears to be online again."
Perhaps a date in the story would have been more useful, since "As of 8:15 PM EST" is now just highly misleading. That 8:15PM EST was on Friday, March 12. This story is making it sound like it's been down for days, but in reality it was just a few short hours.
This story isn't even relevant at this point.
For those things there is Mailinator.
Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it.
Here is today error message for my hotmail account: It was worst on Friday though: there was not even an error message as loginnet.passport.com was either dead or unreachable.
It's free, but you can pay for it and get extra features, like a bigger mailbox.
:). I run the account in 'whitelist' mode, so everything goes to the 'junk' folder. The only thing I get in my actual inbox is messages from hotmail telling me my mailbox is full :)
I'm jharper@hotmail.com (I'm not afraid of posting the address publicly, i think i'm on every mailing list I could be on anyway
So if I used the account seriously, rather than just as an address I can hand out if I need to hand one out, i'd need the extra space to hold all the spam that built up overnight.
Why do people despise the Mac platform so much?
perceived levels of freedom
Back in the day, both IBM PCs and Apple Macs were closed systems, their internel workings were undocumented to the outside world. There was, however, one crucial difference. PCs set up the hardware with the BIOS and then went to disk for the OS whereas MACs booted from an internal ROM. Compaq succeeded in cloning the IBM BIOS which meant you could put an IBM floppy in a Compaq machine and it would boot. Some companies tried to clone the Mac but were slapped with lawsuits because you couldn't copy the Apple ROM. The company that supplied IBM with the stuff on their floppies was a Washington startup called Microsoft who had cunningly retained the right to ship MS-DOS seperate from a computer.
Consequently the PC Clone market flourished and IBM lost their control over the PC Platform driving down price while driving up incompatibility. Meanwhile Apple continued to develop their platform. It was a technically superior platform with a unified graphical user interface, used Postscript for printing and SCSI for devices. This made MACs expensive when you did CPU Cycles / $. You could walk into an Apple dealer, choose the bits, go home, plug it all together and it worked whereas you would go to a PC dealer tell him what you want and he's spend a few days building it and battling to get the bits talking to each other but when you got it home it worked.
Because it was difficult to build and maintain PCs, their builders and maintainers looked down on the MAC, it wasn't as fast for the same $, was too easy to use, you didn't have to take the case to pieces to add a peripheral and the only people you knew who had them were too rich to deserve them.
As the builders and maintainers of the PCs of everyone in their social circle, the non-techies trusted the techies opinion, parroting the same lame arguments in PCs vs MACs arguments the world over.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It was a .NET Passport outage. Even if you have no clue what this is, you almost certainly have one if you have a hotmail email address, or use MSN, or MS Money, MSN messenger, or a million other services. It's even used for RADIUS authentication of MSN dialup users.
Unlike Hotmail, which still runs primarily on UNIX, Passport is entirely based on Windows servers.
Passport is the authentication / single sign-on system for all these MSN services. If it's down, everything's down. And sadly it has proven a little unreliable recently, for reasons never disclosed.
Actually, MS use UNIX servers for Hotmail
Ummm... no. You have no idea what you're talking about. If you had said "used" (as in past tense), then you'd at least be close. Still wrong, but close. They used one of the BSD's until people called them on it. Hell, for all we know, they still are and just changed the headers that the server hands out to look like a MS box like the other post in this thread shows.
Anyway, you're wrong on all accounts.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Jeez.
Building a computer from parts might be easy for you, but that does not make it "easy". Most people can't handle it. They want to buy a computer and take it out of the box and plug it in and turn it on. This goes for PCs or Macs.
Have you used a Mac that was manufactured in the past half decade? You can use any USB mouse with them, including your seven-buttons-with-scroll-wheel optical mouse. They use PCI, AGP, ATA, and USB for expansion. They have a "taskbar", it's called the Dock.
Windows's popularity is entirely attributable to Worse is Better.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
One irony is that the original Apple II came with a schematic of all the circuits.
Apple was very innovative, but made a number of large mistakes that really hurt them in the market. While software for the IBM PC focused on business applications (DBASE and Lotus), the Mac focused on paint programs. It is no surprise that today artists still like Macs.
Apple made some very questionable hardware decisions. They made the original Mac non expandable (no slots, you even needed a special tool to open the case, didn't change until the Mac II), even though expansion was a key to the Apple II's success (they totally ignored their hacker roots). They did thing like use a self ejecting floppy drive, which was patented by Sony and drove up the price. They had a one button mouse and a keyboard where a lot of keys were unsupported (including the forward delete key). They made their own networking hardware (localtalk) which although cheaper was slow, and had connectors which were non-locking (causing endless technical support problems).
Sure, you could go into a store and by Mac bits, and they would all work, but that is because they had a lock on the hardware and the software. The Mac has had its share of low level problems and incompatibilities. Some of the famous ones include a bad virtual memory implementation (which was so bad most users turned it off) and 28 bit vs. 32 bit addressing (it broke a lot of badly written software so there was a switch to turn it off). Imagine using a machine where you had no virutal memory, and running out of memory becuase you opened and closed programs in a certain order.
In the beginning (pre 1995), Apple had a better operating system than Windows. They innovated the GUI, and they had technical advantages, such as things like a flat address space. But Windows caught up and overtook the Macintosh, both in terms of user interface and developer tools. Before OS 10, the mac was still mostly 68k assembly, and was very difficult to program and debug on. Also, until OS 10 there was no protected memory, meaning it was easy for one badley behaved program to take down the system.
When Apple moved to the Power PC in about 1995, instead of porting their operating system, they ran most of it in emulation. Which ment slower speeds and more difficult debugging for developers.
While Apple patched and limped along, Microsoft built Windows NT from the ground up, written mostly in C (so it was portable). While previous Microsoft operating systems were more like the Mac, NT had protected memory and preemptive multitasking, two features that are critical to a modern, stable operating system.
So while Apple had the early lead, they had a wealth of technical problems and poor hardware choices which hurt their platform.
A recent cumulative update patch for Internet Explorer browsers removes support for the user:pass@www.site.com basic authentication method for HTTP and HTTPS URL's - a response to widespread misuse of the functionality to spoof web addresses to trick unsuspecting users into revealing personal information to a dubious third-party. However, a side effect of this patch includes intermittent clobbering of hidden form fields used to maintain state or session on sites that do not implement cookies. This will render most script driven web sites useless.. Also, installing this patch clears out and resets any internal IE cache of username and password combinations used on frequently visited sites, causing people to have to enter these details anew.
It is likely that this issue may be responsible for the recently reported Hotmail and MSN related outages (CNN) and a variety of increasing problems on many other web sites as users continue to install the update patch into their IE browser over time. A MS TechNet article describes this problem and proposes workarounds - one is to uninstall the patch, or install a new patch to fix the previous patch for users of IE 6.0 and higher. Web site operators are also encouraged to increase the server KeepAlive connection timeout, although a specific numeric suggestion isn't proposed. There is an informative thread on this topic available in the Google Groups UseNet archives. Apparently this issue has been growing more problematic over the past five weeks, and will continue to effect sites and users unless steps are taken to address it.
IMHO: An illustrative analogy to this problem would be like your automobile manufacturer determining that accidents are caused by vehicles in motion. As a solution, all tires will be removed, thereby preventing accidents. What a great cure.