Squeak of the Week

The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

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Errol Morris provides a history (with commentary) of real-people political ads.

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Forget the “default browser”, Choosy lets you open links in the browser you want. Just set up a few simple options and Choosy will do the right thing, whether that's opening a browser or letting you pick from some or all of the browsers on your system.

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My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors.

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It seems that meaningless (but short) domain names like “meebo” and “cuil” are all the rage. But what if you want to jump on the Web2.0 bandwagon only to find that all the domain names you want are already taken? Well, don’t worry, just use Markov-Chains to generate your own “unique” domain name!

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