Slashdot Mirror
News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic
miller60 writes "Major news sites struggled to remain online yesterday evening as news of Michael Jackson's death triggered huge waves of Internet traffic. TMZ.com broke the news and was quickly overwhelmed, while Twitter turned off features to handle its load. They weren't alone. Keynote Systems reports that ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, and Yahoo! News all experienced performance problems between 6:15 and 9 pm Eastern time, when the average availability of news sites tracked by Keynote dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The cloud computing crowd immediately jumped on the traffic jams to argue their case. 'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong — it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."
Right now the results of the /. poll are showing the majority of votes as him being forgettable. Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world. Perhaps in time they will learn.
I wonder what important developments were kept out of the spotlight yesterday during all the death hoopla. It seems to me that all kinds of tomfoolery goes on when things like this happen and we find out after the fact.
In regards to the traffic issues, MSNBC had an 'auto-start' slideshow going on the homepage in primetime last evening, so it would seem they brought a lot if not all of this on themselves...
Isn't it funny how Slashdot seemed to be waiting for an excuse to put this story on the front page? Now that it's *mildly* I.T. related it's ok though right?
I hate to say this, but things like this (and Anna Nichole Smith) make me weep for humanity.
We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.
Do you think world would have paid as much attention to Stephen Hawking if he died?
I'd doubt it but he's probably made a greater contribution to mankind over the long term compared to MJ.
Secondly, MJ kind of screwed the pooch when it came to financial responsibility. The guy was known to publicly throw tantrums at his personal assistants when they told him to stop buying everything in the store and spent millions on stuff like paintings, statues, and luxuries that none of us could ever afford.
Hell... For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries. The guy is not a hero and we should not look to him for inspiration. Plenty of other people in streets of Iran to look for that.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
What if everyone uses Cloud hosting?
The Cloud works for some customers because they are depending on under-utilization of the available resources. If all the news agenices, Twitter and Facebook all used Amazon then perhaps it would create the same melt down.
This wouldn't have happened if they had my poorly-defined buzzword idea!
Not a typewriter
Cloud computing pundits seem to ramble about instant on access and scalability. Nice fantasy. What they actually want to do is make you buy into a single vendor system that's tightly controlled, which may or may not scale as expected when the time comes and that is plagued by the same outages we see from any service vendor.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc. There you go, my sweet ego...
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
So if all those sites were "in the clouds", they would all demand extra (limited) cloud power. So unless default is to have 3 or 4 datacenters on standby...
But that would, in a way, conflict with the goal of efficient resources.
Privacy is terrorism.
Since when was 44% a majority? (Unless the vote has changed significantly since you posted...)
And they didn't anyway - rather, 44% say they were unaffected by his death. The "forgettable" was just biased blurb added by the poll author, and can't be assumed to be representative of people's views.
I'd say that if 50% of the entire population are affected by your death, that's pretty damn good going.
The news would have been everywhere with minimal bandwidth consumed.
Basically, the webserver concept is broken for really big traffic.
Of course, the problem with usenet is it's too efficient. People can post crap too easily and get others to pay for it.
Deleted
I remember that when I was young, MJ was very much an idol to many people my age. Who says we're looking to him for inspiration - or even as a role-model - in this day and age? No, it's the passing of something from our youth. We mourn what he was, not what he had become.
And yes, if Stephen Hawking passed I'd imagine it would still be a fairly big event as well.
The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site. News sites reporting the death of this one man, this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish, have been swamped with traffic whilst sites reporting the deaths of thousands of innocent people never have any problem coping with traffic: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.
I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It might help when CNN gets pegged. But since it's coming out of a shared common pool of resources, it won't help when CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. etc. etc. all get pegged.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Wow, that's the way I'd like to go...owing about $400 million.
That means you could afford a pretty good life up until then...and when you're gone, what do you care?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That is called a settlement.
One party realizes that irrespective of the truth the damage is too much to contemplate, so they try to settle.
It is funny how you, and other MJ haters, don't question the morals of the parents or guardians of the children that decided to settle. I know there is no amount of money that would keep me quiet if a child of mine had been interfered with, so I think one can also argue that if the parents settled that means they either put money before ethics and morals (in the case MJ actually did something) or were a bunch of scum-bags blackmailing Jackson knowing he had done something that clearly was inappropriate (sleeping in the same bed with children) but not illegal.
So we can play it both ways, which is why it is better to let the legal system play things out and accpet whatever conclussions are reached.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And, to be honest with you, I don't really see the validity of the complaint. I mean, if sound processing is so evil, then you'd better go back and start mouthing off about how the Beatles and the Beach Boys during the mid-60s were doing all kinds of strange things in the studio. Strawberry fields is heavily processed, and includes two takes, one of them which had to heavy modifications to fit with the other. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations was recorded at several studios in pieces and edited together.
Musicians had been using the studio like that for the better part of 20 years when Thriller came out. We wouldn't have Sgt. Pepper or Queen's A Night At The Opera or The Who's Who's Next if it weren't for a considerable amount of sound processing and engineering. I'm not sure what exactly in Thriller, in the respect of the recording and mixing process, the parent is even referring to. This was before digital recording, so it was still recorded on analog tape by analog desks with real live musicians.
I listened to Billie Jean and Thriller last night, and I don't hear anything that sounds insanely produced, no worse than, say, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds or Baba O'Reilly. It's not my kind of music (I'm more the FM Classic Rock type), but I'd have to say that from my limited knowledge of dance music, you're average Abba record probably involved far more sound engineering. Most certainly Queen during their mid-period were literally overdubbing vocals dozens of times to achieve the operatic section of Bohemian Rhapsody, and they weren't the only guys doing that. Pink Floyd probably has some of the most elaborate productions in the pre-digital age with Dark Side of the Moon.
Frankly, I think the parent is just talking out of his ass.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Whether the guy was a molester or not, the fact was that he was a very troubled guy. You read what some of the guys who knew him even during his heyday have to say, and this was a man deeply scarred by a violent, domineering father. And look at his responsibilities. One way or the other, the Jackson 5's success rest mainly on Michael. He, more than his siblings, was the gravy train. It's kind of sad, because between about 1979 and 1987, his heyday when he and Quincy Jones made three incredibly successful records, his eccentricities seemed more like a clever PR ploy (it's pretty much admitted now that he leaked the infamous picture of him in the hyperbaric chamber). But maybe it's true that some psyches just aren't built for fame, and I think the notion that he was some sort of man-boy who never really got past his teenage years is likely true.
People are calling his demise like that of Elvis's, I'm thinking it more resembles Howard Hughes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.