Slashdot Mirror
BBC News Under The Bonnet
diodesign writes "BBC News has revealed that Linux and Apache power its popular news website, along with a modified DNS server and machine farms in New York and London. At peak times, the site serves over 4 million users and 50 million page impressions a day. It's a pretty well explained guide to producing a regularly updated content based website that scales well." From the article: "The technology which serves the site is designed to be as simple as possible. The simpler the site, the cheaper it is to run. There are fewer elements which can malfunction on big days; and there are fewer parts which can be compromised by someone trying to gain unauthorised access."
maybe it's just me, but i'm never putting physical addresses on ANY network map with any company i work for, especially maps that will be posted publicly.
Yes i would much rather have companies paying that money to tell me what to buy, or the government paying the newscasters to tell us what to think.
Yeah, you know, I really wish the US government would take our money ($10 BILLION per year) against our will to fund an organization to tell us what to think.
Oh yes, that propaganda machine known as the BBC... Funny how all three political parties say that it's biased. Surely that means that it's as unbiased as you can possibly get in political terms?
I say that it's worth it, we get decent programming, they're actually not allowed to produce a Big-Brother equivalent, ad-free TV and a large array of other services. And the BBC is not run by the government, the BBC collects the licence fee itself.
Well, I look at my licence and see I'm paying some $20 a month for the beeb. Actually, so my kid can watch TV. Radio and web (which I use much more) do not require a licence. Add it up in (let us say) 20M households and you get to about $5 billion a year, I don't know where the 10 comes from - wikipedia quotes 2.6 billion quid in 2003. Anyway, I'd happily pay twice that not to watch Fox
Down with categorical imperatives
At least CBC offers an ogg stream. It's a lot more reliable than the real audio stream that NPR/WBUR gives. Got to give them some credit for that.
I have always used the text site as it loads almost instantly - any interesting story that requires pictures I then head over to the 'graphic' site.
BBC text news
The next step is to get them to report the news unbiasedly (during the last Iraq war, BBC was known here in the UK as the 'Baghdad broadcasting Corp.'); and we all know what their technical expertise is like explaining computer issues.